One year later, “Light Keeper Chronicle,” the price of self-publishing and measuring success
It’s kind of hard to believe, but it’s been a full year since I’ve release Light Keeper Chronicle: The Unspoken Prophecy.
Hard to believe, yes, because time is flying — but mostly hard to believe because there was a brief period where I thought I’d have a full draft of the sequel novel in the can by now. (It’s slow going, but I’m working on it.)
Since it has been exactly 365 days since publication, now seemed like a good time to reflect a bit on my self-publishing experience. A couple months ago, I did go through a beat-by-beat over view of the years leading to my decision to self-publish (again), but I thought I might talk a little bit about the financial side of it.
Like all great capitalist endeavors, it all began with the dream of a child.
When I was a kid, imagining myself as a published author, I believed that if you wrote a book, of course thousands of people were going to buy it. I mean, what were total strangers going to do? Not buy a book from a person who is a total stranger to them?
By the time I got to high school, I realized that I — and, in fact, most people — do not immediately buy a book simply because they encounter it in the wild. Point being, books (especially self-published books) are can only really be sold to the people who:
Know that a specific book exists
Have the money to buy the book
Are interested enough in the thing to buy that book
Considering I’m hoping to get another book under my belt before I try any sort of publicity push beyond what I’ve already done, my own book has so far sold about as well as I expected. (Slightly better actually.)
Let me roughly break down the cost numbers for the book:
Editing: $1,675
Cover Art: $160 (plus-tip)
ISBN Purchase: $125
Printer Service Fee: $95
That’s not every single price point, but it’s most of the big ones (other than website upkeep which is about $16 per month that I just earmark as a regular expense from day-job money).
So, just creating the book cost upwards of $2,000. That’s without trying to be too ambitious — I don’t have an audiobook and I handled the ebook formatting myself. (And, of course, I spent 10 years writing and rewriting and editing and going through it over and over and over and sometimes when I close my eyes I still see the chapter titles on the inside of my eyelids.)
I sell the physical book for $19.99 through the website of the bookstore that printed it. For each copy I sell, I get about $4 profit (I think $3.64 is the exact figure). So far I’ve probably sold about 60 physical copies (though that’s probably still rounding up) so I’ve made about $218 on that front.
Digital copies I started off selling at $9.99, but quickly discovered that wasn’t an enticing price point for an self-published, indie book. So I sold a handful of copies at that price before bumping it down to $5.99 on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and everything else.
Though I keep the price the same on all these platforms, I get 60% of the sale’s price from most of these digital platforms (having uploaded through Smashwords) and I get 70% of the price from Kindle books.
So far, I’ve made about $56.85 through Kindle (that’s 11 copies) and a combined $19.20 through all other ebook platforms (that’s 5 copies sold).
Grand total, I’ve probably gotten about $294 back from my self-publishing endeavor so far.
Now, the mathematically inclined among you may have figured that — at best — that means I haven’t even made 15% of my investment back. While that is correct, what I have now that I didn’t have before is insight into what it takes to sell a fairly polished, self published book.
It also means that (though it may not be in high demand) I have a product that is already created and ready to go. So, if someone reads this and decides they want to purchase a copy of the book, BOOM, the number of copies sold gets a little bit higher.
I will say that the thing that’s surprised me most about self-publishing is how many physical copies I’ve sold.
Going into this, I’d assumed most of my money would be made through the ebooks. They’re less expensive and they don’t take up physical space. (So they won’t haunt you the way a purchased but unread physical book will.)
However, yeah, if I’ve sold 76 books, at least 75% of the sales have been physical copies. On top of that — by my best estimation — something like 33% of those physical copies were books I sold because I was talking to someone in person, either at an event or just mentioning my book.
I do want to say that the way I’ve self-published is NOT generally advisable (which I knew from the beginning). The printer I’m using makes a physical product I’m really happy with, but it’s trickier to get the book into physical bookstores. On top of that, the fact that I haven’t gone more out of my way to market it are all things I’d, generally, advise others looking to self-publish to at least consider doing differently.
Like I said, I’ve actually been surprised how well the book has done in spite of less-than-optimal decision making on my part. So, if you have purchased the book, I need to thank you for helping me get this far! And even if you haven’t purchase or read the book, thanks for reading 1,000 words of this blog post; I hopes it was either helpful or entertaining!
Anyway, if you happen to have read the book since it came out a year ago, I’d be appreciative of whatever your review/rating is on Goodreads or Storygraph or Amazon or wherever you like reviewing books. (Seriously, I’m in the hole $1,700 — if you’re worried about giving my book a low or middling review, I have nothing to loose from it.)
Here’s to another year and whatever wiles or wisdom it brings!