| For a niche book, self publishing and distributing it yourself seems to yield the better return. Combined with a higher price point, you can "earn back" any money you invested much faster. - I have sold about 50 books at a $100 price point.
- My cost to drop-ship print and ship, transacation fees, sales tax, etc. cost about $25
- This leaves $75 gross profit / book, or a 75% gross margin
- Gross profit over 1.5 years has been about $3750
- I have spent about $2000 for someone to help with generating the PDF, Shopify Fees, ConvertKit e-mail sub-scription, etc.
- This leaves me about $1750 so far in profit. The amount is trivial, but here are the other potential benefits, both from a monetary and non-monetary perspective - It was a lot of fun to write the book. Writing a daily newsletter for marketing purposes is also fun
- There is still a decent amount of financial potential. I can see a path to selling 10 books a month in the near future, and maybe 50 books a month in the medium term. A few thousand per month in side income would be cool!
- It's fun talking to readers
- I could see this turning the book into an online course or something
- I'm learning some new skills (next task is to tinker with LinkedIn advertising)
- Very rewarding to get positive feedback Overall selling a book online feels much more rewarding than billing another hour to my clients, even though I'd have to sell like 2 books an hour to match the money. But, I'd also caution I probably wouldn't have written the book if I didn't get a sense that I could make a significant amount of money. Writing into the void is the most frustrating thing for a writer. So I also mitigated the risk by writing a guest post on a few relevant websites and asked people to e-mail me if they were interested in an "upcoming book" on the topic. I got about 20 or so e-mails before I decided to write it. Small number, but enough to make the time investment. In case you're interested, book link below: https://1099fedhub.com/ Going 1099: How to become a solo federal sub-contractor and gain control of your working life, earn more money, and unlock more free time |