I think people severely, severely underestimate the amount you can make self-publishing.
I blame it on traditional publishing companies and old habits. My mom was a book editor, and the very best authors they published would sell 10,000 books. Their cut was something like $2/book, they'd pull in $20k.
So when I decided to write a book on growth hacking (https://www.secretsaucenow.com), I decided to self-publish. This was more difficult, I had to find an editor and pay them, had to market it myself, etc. Luckily I'm pretty good at the marketing part (hence the book) and I found old contacts of my mom's to edit, but we launched on Kickstarter, so I figured if it flopped I would know in advance.
We sold $66,000 on Kickstarter, then went on to sell another $44,000 on Indiegogo while we finished it up.
Since then we've sold around $20,000 on gumroad. In total it's something like 2,000 copies (though we charge a lot more per copy than most book publishers do, and that keeps us out of Amazon, etc.)
If I had a publishing deal I would make about $5,000 from that. But because I self-published I took home $130,000 minus costs and fees, so we'll conservatively say $100,000.
Now I sit back and check gumroad a couple times a day; I average $800 in sales per day, and almost make more from the book than I do from my (well-paying) full-time job. If I can keep this rate up I will replace my salary (or, rather, double it)
> I think people severely, severely underestimate the amount you can make self-publishing.
I think you really should qualify this for the sake of all of us amateur writers out there. I would've said "people severely, severely overestimate the amount you can make self-publishing."
Most of us don't have a book idea worth writing about or are really bad at writing, or both. It's also really hard for a lot of us to realize which group we're in.
You say "I raked in $TONS for a $40 non-fiction book that helps folks with business development" but I think the rest of us should recognize those details when we see your numbers. If I want to write a book about the subtle great things about unit tests, python, or the great American novel, I should tread with caution. My boring story will probably not make $TONS.
> very best authors they published would sell 10,000 books. Their cut was something like $2/book, they'd pull in $20k.
This is a more interesting part of your post, and worth highlighting. Self-publishing can net you a LOT more than working with a publisher. But for sure you've got to start with an idea that people think is worth buying.
Honestly, for most tech people, the value in either publishing or self-publishing a book is mostly in the resume value. I don't necessarily mean that literally but now your bio includes "published author" and, in my experience, that opens up speaking opportunities and other doors--which open more doors etc.
Most authors won't make a lot of money but, for many types of jobs, published books can support a lot of other things even if they're not some definitive best seller.
You'd think so, but writing a book only impresses recruiters. Other programmers either give you a confused look, try to argue with you, or ask you to write FizzBuzz like this: http://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/
I must admit having made a valiant attempt at writing fizzbuzz in brainfuck as a lark, once upon a whiteboarding session. Ran out of space and/or ink, if I remember correctly.
At a recent job interview, I started answering questions in APL. Didn't quite make it through. In retrospect, it didn't matter as long as I could explain it to the reviewer, because he couldn't read APL anyway.
I'm not a programmer professionally. I basically do technology/developer/etc. evangelism of various sorts. In outbound roles where your reputation is a big part of what you're selling, it definitely makes a difference.
I should update that, but I've been busy improving the content and building better examples and learning how to do better video so I can do justice to the planned upgrades.
What about shopping your book concept around to publishers, validating that there's interest (and that they think you're capable), then if there is, self-publishing?
Do publishers act as a reliable source for validating your idea? or do you rely purely on your audience, if you can validate your audience directly then you'll be able to get a far more accurate prediction of demand for a book than from the opinions of a publisher's agents.
>I think people severely, severely underestimate the amount you can make self-publishing.
You're results are fairly atypical, but I think a lot of it heavily depends on the niche you publish under as well. I have friends that self publish romance books and they sell for ~$3-5. If they make 10k in a year they're happy. People see value in a $40 technical book over a typical novel.
A survey I saw recently had the median income for unagented authors at around $7k/yr for non-technical genres.
I get the sense that different verticals require vastly different strategies. A friend of a friend pulls in ~$10-20k a year on Kindle erotica, but they have to pump out like 2 books a month.
Yup, that is what my friend does. Kindle Unlimited erotica, one new book per month. New releases get ~100k reads during the first month, then another ~50k from all the previous books per month.
Very few people actually "buy" the erotica. Most just consume it through KU.
For anyone wondering (as I was), Kindle Unlimited pays per page based on the size of the fund (number of subscribers total), and the number pf pages read during that month.
>Here are some examples of how it would work if the fund was $10M and 100,000,000 total pages were read in the month:
The author of a 100 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).
The author of a 200 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $2,000 ($10 million multiplied by 20,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).
The author of a 200 page book that was borrowed 100 times but only read halfway through on average would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).
I hear about so many people doing this that I have to wonder how many freaking romance novels people are reading. I consider myself a pretty frequent reader but it usually takes me anywhere from a week to a month to finish a book, depending on how long/dense it is.
I spent a couple summers home from college working the circulation desk at the local library branch near my parents' home. They lent books for 21 days, and the women who were voracious romance novel readers would return and check out an entire tote bag full of paperbacks every time they visited.
There are writers making millions self-publishing romance novels. (Not many make millions, but the number who work full-time and earn more than they would in a day job is not small.)
The Romance Writers of America industry group has always been well ahead of the curve on self-pub - ironically further ahead than the Science Fiction and Fantasy industry group.
The big problem with self-pub is marketing and audience building. (Fifty Shades started as a marketing exercise, written by a professional marketer.)
Most self-pub has similar problems, including tech self-pub.
Publishers used to do the marketing for writers. Now they expect writers to do it. Most writers have worked out that if they're going to do the marketing anyway, giving up more than 80% of the income in return for an initial advance may not be a great deal.
Unfortunately marketing is hard, and not many people are good at it. Especially writers, who tend to think all they have to do is put the book up on Amazon, mention it on Facebook, and wait.
So the intersection of "can write", "can market", and "can finish a book and not just think about writing one" is a tiny percentage of the total aspiring author demographic.
> Fifty Shades started as a marketing exercise, written by a professional marketer.
Really? I thought Fifty Shades started as a porny fanfic of the Sparkly Vampire book(s?), and a variety of sources (via Wikipedia) seem to back that up with references going back to before it was published.
Definitely, but I've talked to a half dozen other authors who self-published and made a grundle.
Especially if you either find a niche technology with bad documentation or a widespread technology with a bad problem, there's a lot of cash in it. I think the Meteor.js authors talked about pulling in $500k
As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote isn't data. I think the point here is that it's very much dependent on the niche and that your and other successful authors are atypical and doing better than most self published authors.
Whether or not that's true, I don't know. Maybe you are completely right. But we won't know from some anecdotes.
I didn't make the claim that every self published author makes a lot. I made the claim that you can make a lot by self publishing. The opportunity is there.
"You may have heard the phrase the plural of anecdote is not data. It turns out that this is a misquote. The original aphorism, by the political scientist Ray Wolfinger, was just the opposite: The plural of anecdote is data."
The problem with anecdotes is that we don't actually know what the cause of the results was. Maybe its the thing in question, but it could be something else either. That's the whole point of control groups (so you have a baseline to compare against and can filter out "contamination") and double blind tests (so you remove bias).
If you have suspect data, throwing more suspect data in the pile doesn't make it less suspect. Anecdotal evidence is just that: unproven possibly suspect data. Having more of these doesn't make it any more reliable.
So regardless of the original quote, I stand by the plural of anecdote not being data.
If you are writing a book, the average result you should expect is $0. (Like doing an startup.)
The GP point is that publishers also cap the upside of the deal. While self publishing, if you win the unicorn lottery, you'll get an unicorn sized reward.
Perhaps, but how many copies of your book Authority have you sold? 50 success stories is a tiny fraction compared to the number who have bought a high-price book targeted at ebook authors.
Then, when you consider the hundreds of thousands or millions of people who tried selling ebooks without buying your book to help them, it's clear that the OP had very atypical results.
This is great advice. The biggest take away for me is that you are able to market it. Without any marketing, the book will most likely flop.
I wrote and published on Leanpub, (https://leanpub.com/successfulunittest). My marketing was not good enough as I am not that good at it. I only managed to sell about 10 books. In my next book, I would build up the audience as mentioned in the linked article.
Just a outsider note, I've never heard about your book before now or like I say `It popped into existence`. I had a look at the url you posted. Although I couldn't find a sample of your book, let alone a couple of pages to judge it's quality or value.
The table of content's was straight forward but lacking any substance. Maybe consider allow downloading a sample number of chapters?
Agreed, and I would suggest that the fact that the title sound is ungrammatical ("Guide to Successful Unit Test"? Not, "Unit Testing"?) and there is at least one typo in the description. That kills it for me.
Granted that I haven't made a fraction of money that you have made, but my self published book from leanpub has sold around 35-40 paid copies. link: https://leanpub.com/antitextbookGo/
I intentionally didn't want to keep the price high, hence the low % of paid purchases, plus the book is FOSS.
That said, I totally agree that self publishing is not held in high regard by most, even on HN I was told that "it's a guide" and not a book and when you mention it on you resume, the interviewer would expect a real book in a real store!
_If_ you hit the right niche, there is a lot of money in self publishing, that's for sure.
I have a friend who's making enough from her self-published young adult fantasy novels that she quit her job as a .Net/Oracle developer. But most of her writer friends don't do near as well.
She says "tell him you have to sell a LOT to be a bestseller. And if you're an indie, you need someone at the NY Times to like you or you'll never make the list no matter how many you sell."
I'm a long ways from the days when I got into programming because I thought I wanted to be a gamedev but I'm buying Game Programming Patterns just based on how impressed your current book is right now. I'm about to start writing myself and was planning to use Sphinx. Not sure if you're actually using Sphinx for your site, but your design is exactly what I would want for mine.
Congrats. Do you pull anything in from Gumroad Discover? I think I've made ~$4k from them in the last year, which is not a huge part of my sales, but of course more than makes up for the $10/month for Gumroad Premium (or whatever they call it).
Just checked my stats. 7 sales for an average of around $60/sale (we've been on gumroad for a little over a week). So definitely more than paying for gumroad (not even factoring the time it saves me in integrating a Stripe account with downloads), though I think if someone buys the book and shares that they did Gumroad counts that as a "Gumroad" sale. Whether it is or not is disputable in my mind.
Interesting story, good for you. Did you initially market the book through your network and by blasting it all over social media or did you pay for advertising?
I definitely have a following, as does my co-author but most of the sales came from giving away (or publishing) chapters and linking back. To this day our number one driver of sales is people who have read our blog posts about how to get press or how to do SEO, because it's actually actionable stuff.
I can attest to this strategy working, albeit on a much smaller scale with my presale right now. Smaller price point, assuming much less traffic on the medium posts.
Hell, I have more revenue in presales in a little over 6 weeks than 18 months of trying to build SaaS apps.
Nah, I just posted on Reddit and Medium as blog posts, that kind of thing. Honestly I have an entire 196-page book of marketing strategies I actively use, so... you know.
In a word: ouch. Kickstarter and Indiegogo send 1099s. Gumroad doesn't, but between this and my stock market gains I'm in a really nasty tax bracket, so I set a bunch of it aside for taxes. Luckily? I usually spend a lot of the money I earn from side projects on funding other failed side projects, but I basically plan on giving up 30-40% of side project earnings for taxes.
There is some fancy stuff you can do that helps, but once you get above a certain income level you just have to pay.
You're not paying 30-40%. Marginal rates are capped at 39.6% and the vast majority of your income is taxed below that unless you're making many hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. Stock market gains are 15% unless you're selling within a year of purchase, and even then they're only taxes as any other income, not penalized in any way. This isn't even taking into account the deductions like home office(s), having your business pay for as many expenses as you can reasonably argue, etc.
You are 100% right, if you're in a state with a progressive state income tax your effective rate can go up pretty quickly. I am spoiled to live in a state with a ~3.2% flat income tax.
I feel your pain. 2016 was my first full year of employment after graduation and I made substantial (short-term) capital gains. I was not thrilled when I filed to say the least.
Writing a book and selling software are similar from a tax perspective; you pay income taxes on the difference between your revenues and expenses.
It might surprise people that authors have material expenses, but it is very, very easy to have them, particularly if one is operating one's business in a disciplined fashion. Authors have an image of being starving artists but lawyers and accountants who work for authors, to pick two examples, are not.
Gumroad doesn't even send 1099's, like Amazon does for Kindle authors. I am not an accountant, but I believe it's just gross receipts on your Schedule C.
If you make over $400 in income from book sales you need to take that income and apply self-employment tax on that income.
In addition you need to make quarterly payments for the estimated tax.
If you haven't done so yet. To fix your situation you can file an amended return. A CPA can do it for you... given your income, you should be able to afford it.
As your income grows so it does the likeliness of being audited.
Thanks! Yeah I mean it's not that different from my freelancing. I've been paying estimated tax and self-employment tax for years. Mostly now it's about selling products (example: I have to deal with New Mexico gross receipts tax, ugh) vs services.
You only need to make quarterly payments if you meet certain criteria, largely if the revenue is above a certain amount and you have a reasonable expectation the revenue will continue.
People severely, severely underestimate the amount you can make doing it yourself versus giving a cut to investors
ftfy
People enamored with the literary arts often don't have a marketable skill that would allow the freedom to pursue a book without an advance and outside capital/support. Good to see Kickstarter has helped change that.
I blame it on traditional publishing companies and old habits. My mom was a book editor, and the very best authors they published would sell 10,000 books. Their cut was something like $2/book, they'd pull in $20k.
So when I decided to write a book on growth hacking (https://www.secretsaucenow.com), I decided to self-publish. This was more difficult, I had to find an editor and pay them, had to market it myself, etc. Luckily I'm pretty good at the marketing part (hence the book) and I found old contacts of my mom's to edit, but we launched on Kickstarter, so I figured if it flopped I would know in advance.
We sold $66,000 on Kickstarter, then went on to sell another $44,000 on Indiegogo while we finished it up.
Since then we've sold around $20,000 on gumroad. In total it's something like 2,000 copies (though we charge a lot more per copy than most book publishers do, and that keeps us out of Amazon, etc.)
If I had a publishing deal I would make about $5,000 from that. But because I self-published I took home $130,000 minus costs and fees, so we'll conservatively say $100,000.
Now I sit back and check gumroad a couple times a day; I average $800 in sales per day, and almost make more from the book than I do from my (well-paying) full-time job. If I can keep this rate up I will replace my salary (or, rather, double it)