How much money will I make from self-publishing?

[magic dragon]

I have been reading about people who make a lot of money self-publishing their own stories via e-book or selling them via an online publisher. Has anyone done this and how much money can you make eg: for a short story, novella, novel?

thanks

[agreeablehoney932]

It's hard to say. Nine times out of ten you won't make anything at all. People who strike it rick (well, relatively) are usually the result of blind luck, as is with most fads.

[cathrl69]

On average you will make a loss. Only a tiny number of people who self-publish ever sell a single copy of their story to someone who isn't a personal friend or family member who has been begged to buy it.

[Steph]

If you're selling the book in ebook form, you stand to make a bit more money than someone trying to self-publish with physical copies. The chances of actually making "a lot of money" from this, though, are pretty slim. There are a few exceptions. There are always exceptions.

With self-publishing, your marketing is going to directly affect your sales. Self-published books do not get the same amount of hype and exposure as commercially published books do, so they are not going to have as wide an audience. The more money you put into publicity, the more money you'll make from the book (to an extent), but be aware that you may never get enough sales to cover the cost of the marketing.

If you upload your ebook to a site like Amazon, you may make a little bit of extra money from it. The only problem is that there are thousands of books available on the site. Unless someone is specifically searching for your book, they're not very likely to find it.

If you have somehting that you believe will sell, try commercial publishing fist. Use self-publishing as a second option. Good luck!

[Roxanne Warner]

Probably none. Self publishing costs a lot and selling self published books is nearly impossible. These people who "got rich" are very rare.

[Steven J Pemberton]

With a few notable exceptions (mainly the ones who are raking it in), authors are reluctant to discuss actual numbers. (And let's face it - would you tell a stranger what your income was?) But unless you're very good and/or very lucky, you're not going to make enough to quit your day job. You're especially not going to make enough to quit your day job from one story. The people who are making a living from it have, as a minimum, several books on sale.

If you self-publish in print, you're unlikely to sell enough copies to turn a profit. It's more likely if you publish them as ebooks, because you can price them to undercut the traditional publishers and take most of the money as your royalty.

You'll have to budget for a good cover designer and a good editor if you don't have the skills or the time necessary to do those things yourself. (I don't use an editor, but I do have two excellent critique partners, who find most of what an editor would find, in return for my doing the same for them.)

You'll also have to worry about marketing, but we're still figuring out what works and what doesn't. For my first book, Death & Magic, I found a list of bloggers who review self-published books and started submitting it to them. I slogged my way through to, I think, G in the alphabet, before deciding it wasn't working. I got two reviews (both 5 stars), but I didn't see any noticeable bump in sales after each of them went live. For my most recent book, Escape Velocity, I enrolled it in Kindle Select, which allows you to give the book away 5 days out of every 90. I did one giveaway a fortnight ago, and since then, Escape Velocity has sold more copies than Death & Magic sold in its first six months. I think the reason this works is because, even though it's free, Amazon still count it as a sale, so it starts showing up under "people who bought this also bought that" for other books.

Now, giving your book away is no good if nobody knows it's there. I'm in two Facebook groups for self-published authors, which have about 1000 members between them, and I have about 300 followers on Twitter. (Don't ask me how I got them - I have no idea.) So I told all of those people before the giveaway was due to start, and at least some of them told their friends and followers.

[Reperages]

You have more chances to have your book published in a digital format than published and distributed in a bookstore.

I suggest the Kindle on Amazon: https://kindle.amazon.com.

There are of course a lot of competition but you can make sales. It depends on your topic and the competition in that topic. You have also to optimize your description and search term in the Kindle account to beat the competition. (There are courses, ebooks that explain this)

Even, not so good books are selling when the listing is optimized. You can make you a reputation and make good sales overtime.

I hope this helps,

Michel