How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing
medium.com
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2. Past, not future: This is historical revenue based on active marketing. It is unlikely that it will bring the same income in the future without marketing.
3. Revenue, not profit: The nice cover design is something others would need to pay for if this is to serve as reference, but this cost isn't taken into account.
TLDR: He isn't making $400 ($360) in passive monthly income and it is unlikely he will in the future.
It has happened to Itunes, Play Store, Steam, New Grounds and basically every website that let's users upload content for sale / ad money. I call it the fundamental problem of user generated content.
At the current expected payoff, soon every schmuck will be uploading his book. Quality won't matter. Eventually the torrent of content for consumers will be more than consumers can hope to consume, and the expected passive income for a given creative person will go to zero.
The thing all these sites have in common is that they promised to be a meritocracy for creative types. You simply make your work and then reviews come in and its judged fairly. Better content gets more money. No need to revert to tricks like paying a PR firm to market it. The reality is that when there is money to be made, people will rush in until there is no longer money to be made. Our mechanisms to separate the wheat from the chaff don't scale nearly as well as the economics of digital content distribution networks.
Don't believe me? Go to Steam Greenlight. Tell me how many games look interesting. Tell me how many uploads are happening per day. Can you keep up with it? Go to the app store. How much stuff is in the new section? How much looks good.
You'll still probably be able to make some money, but not enough to merit continued publishing.
People tend to buy paid learning material not only for the learning experience, but how it's written which is very unique to the individual who is publishing.
It doesn't matter if 5,000 other people have books on the same subject. Once I get to know an author, if his style clicks with me then I'm going to buy his book. If his style resonates with a lot of people he'll quickly rise to the top for that subject.
I disagree.
There is no a priori "expected passive income for a given creative person". Some creators might have such expectations of course, but they are make believe unless they are validated by actual sales.
There's only what the consumers actually deem appropriate to spend on one's works.
Besides, everybody believes they are the ones that have the merit in a meritocracy. Even when they produce objectively crap, or maybe good stuff that's not to the tastes of the general public.
>The thing all these sites have in common is that they promised to be a meritocracy for creative types.
Well, here's the main issue. Meritocracy in the book market, whether Amazon or physical books, is not based on the merit of quality (which can be subjective anyway), but on the sole merit of "consumer preference".
Which is also the reason why most of the people would first buy a "Star Wars" box-set rather than, say, a Kurosawa one, or buy Robert Ludlum over Graham Green.
>Go to the app store. How much stuff is in the new section? How much looks good.
More of it looks good than what I can follow/download, or even have a use for (because not everybody has the same use cases). E.g. for mobile painting there are at least 5 excellent apps. I don't have a use for another 100, even if they do exist.
https://www.amazon.com/Hypersphere/dp/132978152X
http://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/hypersphere/paperback/pro...
The 4chan /lit/ board wrote Hypersphere as a collaborative writing project but someone needed to actually publish it, something I undertook as a project, I must have spent something like 20 hours editing it (plus way more helping to write it). It has so far sold 650 copies, most of which I sold with a profit of less than a dollar in profit per book since it didn't feel right selling it for a profit to the people that helped write it.
I've since bumped the price and I'm getting something like ~$2.5 a book, and it's currently selling 5-10 copies a month. The Amazon price is far higher than the Lulu one (which was the publishing platform of choice) since they obviously want a cut.
The biggest pro of the project was that it helped me understand how to self-publish: I've given my partner two physical poetry collections about her since: something that was pretty appreciated.
Edit Note: More info on why the market is favorable for the subject
I collect about $35 a month from it without spending any additional time marketing. Not very much but such a small niche it really surprised me.
Oddly enough the main reason for writing the book was to deflect all the emails I used to get about the subject. Not only did it achieve this aim it supplies beer money for me every month.
If you had to take a picture of the most interesting / telling page of the book (to try to sell the rest of it) which page would it be? And do you mind doing it.
http://www.boyter.org/decoding-captchas/
That's the link that generates 99% of sales. It gives you a fair idea of what is contained. Email me via my profile if you need more information.
With a book you can always pull out excerpts for SEO value too.
I would image if you could churn reasonable content for a low price this might be a sustainable business model, assuming you can pick the right topics.
>churn
I see what you did there.
In what way does the first claim follow from the example?
It might be possible to make a lot of money from self-publishing books, but $35/month, whether with or without additional marketing, is hardly a proof for that.
If anything, it's a proof of loss, as the book took you time to write. If you value those hours at the minimal wage rate, it would take ages to recoup those costs...
You don't need the apostrophe to indicate a plural, even with acronyms (or backronyms). "CAPTCHAs" is fine. I wouldn't normally comment but it is the title of your book.
> "Specifically, a lot of the traditional guys price e-books at $20–30, often times more than the paperback/hardcover, which is so stupid."
It catches my eye when people get stuck on an e-book version costing more than a hard copy. It's funny that a Kindle version can be more valuable (instant delivery, easier to carry around, and a more enjoyable reading experience) to somebody, but still seem like it should cost less. Personally, I'll gladly pay an extra dollar to get an e-book version for anything I'm only expecting to read once or twice.
If I'm willimg to pay $5/$20/$50 for an ebook, it should be irrelevant how much it costs to distribute it.
It has information in it and if I want this information I will give author the money.
He may have determined his price by considering the distribution costs, or how much he wants to make per hour, or based on how much he thinks people will buy it for, or he may have simply pulled it out of his butt.
If I'm handing him $50, and am not disappointed after reading the book, it is not a rip-off.
Your examples of "how to price" are all focused on what the author wants (or what he can get away with). The way to justify a higher price is to focus on what the READER wants, and the value they will get out of the book.
An ebook about learning React, for instance, might be worth $39 because it will save the reader HOURS of reading through random blog posts. How much is their time worth? (source: I wrote and sell an ebook about this. People actually buy it :)
That's a bizarro reasoning.
Obviously it's not about the value added because of extra functionality, it's about the new technology having lower marginal costs (and all that functionality comes basically for free), and publishers still charging as if they still incur the full physical production and distribution costs.
When commercial music records first came out in the late 19th century, they cost quite a lot -- but that was justifiable because it was a new technology, with big costs to manufacture, carry, etc.
Would you justify paying the same amount for an mp3 today, just because it's more convenient and it sounds way better than those disks?
Is that really how supply and demand works though? If people are willing to pay more for the extra functionality, why would you not sell it at that higher price?
Also, your reasoning for selling a book at a higher price is not correlated to supply vs. demand. What you are talking about is a pricing strategy. There is a near unlimited supply of an ebook, so it's not supply vs. demand, it's a pricing strategy that's setting the price. A pricing strategy could also be used to sell the ebook at a cost below production costs to drive sales. Again, the ebook supply remains constant.
That's not what I'm talking about though. I'm talking about this: if you set the price of ebooks at some small margin above the price to produce plus the price to license the content, you sell at price $X. If you set the price where people are willing to buy it due to increased convenience for them, you sell at price $Y. If $Y > $X, why not sell at $Y?
Of course, this isn't a direct relationship, since different people have different $Y prices, but there's a price curve there, and one ought to sell their ebooks on the curve to maximize the (number of sales) * $Y.
> Also, your reasoning for selling a book at a higher price is not correlated to supply vs. demand.
Maybe supply vs demand was the wrong choice of words, but that shouldn't detract from the point.
People are not willing, they are forced to, if they want the book, because books have an artificial monopoly based on copyright.
That is, I can't offer the same book for cheaper unless I have the copyright to the content.
In many cases people have a choice of ebook vs physical copy, which is what we're discussing here.
Well, then it's still no free competition, between those are two entirely different technologies, and the sole owner of the copyright sets the price of both.
To put it in another way, the prices of ebooks that are in public domain (e.g. 19th century books) are way lower (e.g. $1 per book for some publishers), whereas printed editions of said books are as high as they ever were.
I haven't worked out the numbers to figure out whether there's really parity here, but the physical production and distribution costs are now borne by computing and network infrastructure.
Sure, but you won't be able to pass that book on to someone else and that is a major feature that paper books have that e-books should have (and maybe even better than paper ones) that they don't due to DRM.
In the right market, it doesn't have to scale. I know some wealthy people (in NYC) who have dropped a lot of money to get their kids into Ivy League schools. It is a must for those people and I've seen them drop high dollar for application advice and prep. With any kind of success, the same people get referred over and over again in the same circles.
As an aside, I loosely know someone who went to prison for a white collar crime. He too hired a high dollar consultant (former prison officer, IIRC) to advise him on how to prepare for, adjust to and survive in prison.
Of course consulting to wealthy people isn't passive, but the return on effort is hard to beat, once you're in the right referral circle.
It's interesting that the paperback copies sold the best -- I would guess it's because these books are given as gifts (and bought by parents). If anyone has data on this behavior for fiction I'd be interested to hear it (I publish an online science fiction magazine, compellingsciencefiction.com).
The A-level textbook took me about a year of all my spare time to get it together. It's the best part of 500 pages long, and covers practical and music theory elements to a level that will allow anyone to be competent enough to complete the coursework to a good standard, and more importantly to give them a good, broad grounding in the subject. It was my passion for the year it took to create it, and I learned loads (including how to use Indesign, which I bought to allow me to do a good job on the layout of the book). But the biggest thing I learned was that writing the book wasn't the most important thing, it was getting it in front of the right people. I hadn't even thought about this until I completed the book, and then found that to get it to the right people it would cost me far more than I'd reasonably expect to earn from what is a fairly niche publication (I was quoted £2000 to mail-shot all the heads of music at schools that teach music technology).
I have updated the book twice (to version 7 and 8 of the software), each taking the equivalent of over a week of full time work to update screenshots, workflow and procedures, plus add in new information as appropriate.
It was only the chance connection with the education department of the software house who makes the main software I used in the book (Cubase) that led to any significant increase in the number of sales, but it's still nowhere near what the author of this article is making; I have had one really good month in September (start of the year, and it was promoted in a newsletter), which has outdone the figure above, but usually I'll sell maybe 1 or 2 books. This is all done via Lulu, with printed versions of the book, and I've elected not to do it as an e-book as I feel the cat will be out of the bag and it'd be torrented everywhere (particularly as I set the price at £24.95, feeling that it was worth an hour's private tuition cost for such a large amount of info).
While it's nice to have a small income from this each month, it's certainly not something that works out well at an hourly rate - it would have to sell in the high hundreds to achieve this.
By contrast, the book on Sibelius has sold much better as I've sold it via Amazon as well as via Lulu. The reasoning for this was simple, really - I did it as a test to see how different sales would be via Amazon, and they've been much larger (about 7:1). But this is countered by the payments; I actually put the price of the book up before selling it because otherwise I would have seen almost nothing from an Amazon sale. At the moment the book is £7.95, and I see just over £1. For the other book, if I sold it via Amazon, I would see £3 from the £24.95 sale price (compared with about £12 via a Lulu sale). I'm not sure if I would get 4x as many sales from the Cubase book if sold via Amazon (particuarly as I think most of the sales are driven via recommendation rather than browsing), but as I said before, this is not an area I even gave a moment's thought to until I completed the book.