Self-publishing is now more accessible than ever thanks to e-books. In the 1990s, self-publishing required paying to print thousands of physical books; a 1999 CNNMoney article estimated the price to be between $12,000 and $30,000.
You can self-publish for much less now that most books are sold electronically, or even for nothing. But does that mean your chances of making money on that independently published book are now better than they were when costs were higher?
Everything depends on your approach and level of luck. Let’s dissect the procedure.
What to publish where
Amazon’s Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook Store, and Apple’s iBookstore are the three primary online retailers for ebooks. A few books are also sold on other websites, including GooglePlay Books and the US Kobo bookstore. On their own websites, authors can also sell their books directly to customers.
Since Amazon sells 74% of all ebooks, it’s frequently the first or only place that new authors consider putting their work up for sale. And selling on Amazon has a lot of advantages. The purchasing and publishing processes for Kindle books are simple. On the other hand, there are so many books available on Amazon that it can be challenging to stand out from the crowd, including books written by unpublished new authors like you. If you want to take advantage of many benefits like the Kindle Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited, Amazon requires that you exclusively sell your book through them. The biggest drawback for many is that they simply don’t like the way Amazon treats its authors (remember that Amazon pays authors when people check out their books; one ebook author said the Lending Library accounted for 10% of his revenue).
market share
for Apple’s iBookstore is increasing, and as you might anticipate from Apple, books published on this platform look stunning. But readers can only access iBooks on an Apple device like an iPad or an iPhone, which restricts the market since Kindle books can be downloaded to almost any device.
The big two ebook retailers seem to be pushing out Nook, so it should probably only be used as a backup location for publications. The fact that you might sell more books on Amazon doesn’t necessarily convince all authors to publish there, though.
Author Giacomo Giammatteo claims, “I may not sell as many books with Apple — yet — but it’s a whole lot more fun working with them.
If you sell your ebook for $2.99, which is a common price point, you stand to make about $2 per book, regardless of the platform you select.
How to Write
You’re not done making decisions once you’ve chosen where to sell your ebook. Either self-publish your ebook yourself or hire an e-publishing service or distributor to do it for you, you must choose whether to do both. BookBaby, Smashwords, and IngramSpark are among the best services. These services can format your book and upload it to numerous ebook stores for fees of $149 or more. Value-added services like editing, cover design, and even print-on-demand paper books can be purchased for a higher price.
For these services, you can also independently contract with editors and designers.
What to Write
Your goals will determine the subject of your ebook. There are ways to identify the subjects that are most likely to result in book sales if your goal is purely financial gain. I find books that are selling well, check out their tables of contents, and look at the negative reviews to see what they missed, according to an anonymous author who claims to be making tens of thousands of dollars a month publishing brief ebooks (about 20 pages) for The Hustle.
The book’s content is the least crucial aspect of the process, according to this successful entrepreneur, which may be demoralizing for a dedicated writer to hear. Sales are primarily influenced by the book’s cover and its summary.
You should still do your research before you sit down to write if your goal is to share a great idea or story with the world rather than just cranking out any title that will sell. If you have a blog, ask your readers which subjects they would like to see covered in more detail in a book. Study the best-selling, highly regarded ebooks in your book’s genre or niche, such as cookbooks, to see what you could add that hasn’t been done successfully already. In order to avoid writing books that have been written to death and to learn what kinds of novels are popular right now, fiction authors can also benefit from looking at previously published books in their genre.
How to Increase Sales
Previously, authors would simply submit their manuscripts to publishers, leaving the company to handle the advertising and promotion. However, even authors with book deals today find themselves handling their own promotion and advertising. Before you release your book, think about the cost of hiring a publicist to inform the media about it. Write about your upcoming book on your blog if you’re doing the promotion yourself, and enlist the help of other bloggers to do the same. To increase traffic to your book, you can also start a brand-new blog that is dedicated to discussing the new book or its subject.
Remember the power of traditional advertising. According to Forbes, Mark Dawson, who claims to earn six figures from the sale of his books through Kindle Direct, spends $370 per day to promote them on Facebook. Also, designing the best covers for your books.
Will You Become Wealthy?
According to the website Author Earnings, only about 5,000 authors—less than 3%—of the roughly 200,000 authors selling ebooks on Amazon consistently make $10,000 or more annually. Traditional authors make up more than half of those. Therefore, only about 1% of those who self-publish ebooks are making a sizable profit from it.
That does not mean you cannot. Keeping your investment low will allow you to still make a profit even if sales are modest, which is one strategy for having more money in your pocket overall. Since people are just as likely to pay for a 20-page book or short story as they are for a full-length novel, some ebook authors advise keeping books brief to avoid investing too much time. Others reduce their time commitment by outsourcing the content or even the cover art (this guy gets all of his covers designed on Fiverr).
