In this interview I talk with the host of the MyKitaab Podcast and self-published Indian Author Amar Vyas about self-publishing in India.
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Author Income : How Many Books Do You Need to Sell to Make Money?
In my first solo show for a while I use the information I learnt from my interview with Emmanuel Nataf about how much self-publishing costs to create a spreadsheet to work out exactly how many eBooks you’ll need to sell to cover these costs, get these costs plus a minimum wage and to a comfortable “average” income from an individual book.
Self-Publishing for Profit
One distinct trend is that there seem to be distinct themes in terms of self-publishing books, self-publishing for profit and self-publishing for quality.
While these two aims aren’t mutually exclusive, there are definitely two schools of thought regarding self-publishing, those people who want to self-publish books to make money and those who want to self-publish to create a really fantastic product. This is subtly different from the distinction between business and a hobby. To achieve complete success on either path then you will need to run your self-publishing exercise like a business, but to begin with the hobbyist path provides an opportunity to try things out and achieve initial success.
In this episode I consider what I’ve learned in terms of self-publishing for profit, that is the objective of making money from self-publishing books.
As any half-decent business person knows, you make a profit by earning more money than you pay in costs (in strictly accounting terms this is actually cashflow, but in layman terms this is correct). So to self-publish for profit we need to ensure we pay as low costs as possible and make as much money as possible.
How NOT to Launch A Book
In this episode I tell you about my recent (very soft launch) of Magpies and Magic 2 : The Great Escape and the fact that not for the first time I’ve done so many things wrong.
Creating a CreateSpace Paperback-Ready Word Document from Scrivener
In this episode I take you through a process I have recently worked out to almost be able to create a CreateSpace paperback-ready word document from Scrivener using it’s compile settings. If it wasn’t almost then I would be creating a PDF directly from Scrivener and not using Word at all. However at least on the Windows version of Scrivener (which has less features than the Mac version) it doesn’t seem possible to create the file directly from Scrivener. That said I quite like the fact that I have a final document which I can compile and amend as I need.
The Dark Side of Assisted Publishing with Chrissie Parker
In this show I talk to (eventually) successful author Chrissie Parker about her experiences using the Author House assisted publishing service in 2008-2009, which in the end turned out to be something she found profoundly unsatisfying.