A Self-Published Writer's Life

Some of you may be aware that I write and self-publish the occasional book.

I do not write books to make a profit, which is a good thing, because it is extremely hard to make a living from writing books. UNESCO estimates that over 2 million books are published every year, so there is a lot of competition in the publishing industry for the attention of readers.

Some of you may well ask, so why do you do it?

Here are my three main reasons, in order of importance:

• Something compels me to write. I can't help myself - every now and again I just have to sit down and produce a book. I believe this is a common writer's affliction, in that the only thing more painful to a writer than writing is ... not writing.
• Having a book to your name acts as the world's best business card. If you are active in a particular industry or tech space, there is nothing better than being a published author to give you some gravitas and authority.
• In my personal experience, nothing produces clarity of thought more effectively than trying to put your ideas down on paper in a substantive body of work.

Enough about psychology though, how about the economics of book writing?

Finding out information on the expected returns from self-publishing is difficult, because although there are plenty of articles about the process and the proceeds from doing so, they frequently contradict each other. One will say that the average self-published book sells about ten copies, and another will claim that the figure is fifty.

Instead, in a spirit of full disclosure, I am going to provide the full facts and figures from my own personal journey into the world of a self-published author, looking at the three books I have out there.

That's right, I actually reveal how many copies I sold and how much money I made in this article!

I have not seen any other author be this transparent about the financials of their writing.

How To Build A Personal Brand On LinkedIn

I wrote Personal Brand (that's my clever code name for the book) in a couple of weeks, after thinking about it while driving my family around Latvia and Lithuania on a one week holiday in the summer of 2019. At 15 thousand words, or about 75 pages, it is short and simple. It involved about 30 hours of writing, 20 hours of editing, and another 20 hours were spent designing the cover and tinkering with formatting and publishing issues.

I used it as a practice run for my intention to write a book on blockchain, and in the process learned how to lay-out a book, to use the Kindle Desktop Publishing software, and got to experiment with marketing and pricing. If you are doing everything yourself you need to find out about things such as front matter, ISBNs, copyright, and what readers expect from a book that makes it look at least semi-professional. Then there's learning about the art of designing a compelling cover (mine isn't), how to convert a word processor document to an eBook, and finding out how difficult recording an audio book is (hint: that one is so time-consuming that I don't bother).

There are lots of useful articles out there on all of these topics, so the one I will examine further here is on pricing.

I have "sold" a total of 4099 copies of Personal Brand to date. In the first month I only moved about twenty copies, which I chalk up to two things: the price was too low, at a couple of dollars for the paperback and a dollar for the eBook, and I only posted a promotional piece about it twice.

Here's the paradox of pricing:

set the price too high and people decide that they can't afford your book, but set it too low, and they conclude that it probably isn't any good.

Once I upped the price to $4.50 for the eBook and $7.50 for the paperback, sales doubled, and after I posted about it on a bi-weekly basis on LinkedIn they doubled again, and so I sold a total of 150 copies in a year.

By 2021 the book had faded into obscurity and I had all but forgotten about it, but then saw an article about using Amazon book promotions. So I decided to give it away for free in the spring. This resulted in 3800 downloads over a week, and the book made it into the top five of the rather strangely named "Amazon Best Sellers: Top 100 Free".

So, the big question is, what did I make in royalties from Personal Brand? From the 300 copies that were sold for profit rather than given away I made:

Using a ballpark figure of 80 hours work in total, including writing promotional posts for the book on LinkedIn, my hourly "wage" for the book is less than €2.50 and hour.

Move Over Brokers Here Comes The Blockchain

Throughout 2020 I worked on my m?a?g?n?i?f?i?c?e?n?t? ?o?c?t?o?p?u?s magnus opus, a book aimed at making blockchain understandable to the layperson without trivializing or over-simplifying the topic. This turned out to be less easy than I expected, and I hit a serious three month period of writer's block in the summer. I estimate about 250 hours of writing, 50 hours of editing, and about 50 hours of staring out of the window wondering if I would ever be able to write another sentence again.

Move Over (yes, another clever code name) is 83 thousand words long, or about 320 pages, so it is a substantive work.

If I include copies sold on Lulu.com the sales figures for Move Over are over 1000 units, which in the self-publishing world qualifies it as a roaring success. A publishing house with its marketing clout could have shifted at least ten times that number, and would probably consider retaining me for a second book.

For the pricing of this book I took the unusual approach of running a poll on LinkedIn, and settled on the average of the proposed prices - $28 for the paperback, and $10 for the eBook. This felt rather high at the time, but in hindsight I think it falls in the sweet-spot for the book and my audience.

I also posted promotional material on LinkedIn a couple of times every month, which felt embarrassing, but worked. This resulted in three times the sales of Personal Brand.

The most effective marketing tool, however, was down to people posting reviews and pictures of the book on social media. Again, an embarrassing thing to ask for, but it really works.

Move Over has resulted in over 7.5 thousand euro of profit to me, which I think clearly reveals the importance of pricing. Incidentally, royalties from Amazon are 60%, ten times what the publishing industry pays out to their authors. That is why, as a self-published author, a thousand copies is a success, and as a signed writer it is a flop.

Given the profits and the time spent, my wage for Move Over comes in at about €20 an hour, which seems respectable.

Scansatevi Brokers Arriva La Blockchain

Somehow I convinced myself into producing an Italian translation of Move Over (code name Scansatevi) by a connection on LinkedIn. I have no idea how much time Christian Ferranti spent on his translation work, or how much time my Italian former au-pair spent proof-reading it, but my work involvement was about a hundred hours.

Translating a book is not easy. I image it often takes about the same time as writing the book in the first place.

Fortunately I paid Christian in Finnish chocolate and canned mushrooms.

The sales figures for Scansatevi are, at first sight, disappointing:

What needs to be considered here is that there are about 85 million native Italian speakers, compared to 400 million native English speakers, and 1 billion more who have it as a second language. The market for English books is thus nearly 20 times that for Italian books.

So by total addressable market, the Italian version is three times more successful than the English version.

And here are the resulting royalties from publishing in la lingua di Dante. If only Christian had been Spanish.

Evil Tokenomics

My most recent book, Evil Tokenomics (no code name), took exactly a week to write, edit, and produce, for a total of 40 hours of work, of which 25 were writing, 10 were editing, and 5 on cover design and other formatting.

It is about the same length as Personal Brand, and checks in at 19 thousand words and 80 pages. I credit the dramatic increase in my writing speed to three things:

• Reading some articles on how to increase your writing speed
• Extensive familiarity with the material and therefore not needing to conduct much research
• Noticing that I was "in the zone" and taking full advantage of that by dropping all other work

In two months Evil Tokenomics has sold almost as many copies as Scansatevi did in a year. Let's not waste any more time on chit-chat and move on to the royalty statement:

Not bad. I'm already at €11 per hour of effort: approximately the minimum wage in the state of Texas. If sales continue for Evil Tokenomics the way they did for Move Over, I should be looking at a final return of around €30 per hour of effort over the lifetime of the book's sales.

Conclusion

Adding all the above facts and figures together, we end up with these final results for two years of moonlighting as an author:

5500 units shipped, €10,000 in royalties, for 550 hours of work. This does not include subsequent time spent on promoting and marketing the book.

To finish off, what advice would I give to an aspiring self-publishing author?

• Don't do it for the money.
• Price your book aggressively: pick a number you are comfortable with, and then up it by at least 33%
• Become your own marketing agent: talk about the book publicly, in posts, tweets, on podcasts, at conferences - everywhere. If you don't feel ashamed about how much you are going on about your book, you aren't doing enough.

And yes, this article is yet another marketing attempt to promote my writing, and yes, it has made me feel uncomfortable.

So it goes.

Coda

The following links should take you to your local Amazon site, where you can pick up some or even all of the books mentioned above:

• Move Over Brokers Here Comes The Blockchain
• Scansatevi Brokers Arriva La Blockchain
• Evil Tokenomics
• How To Build A Personal Brand On LinkedIn