Let’s begin our last day of Carving Our Own Destiny with something EVERYONE wants to know, but is sometimes afraid to ask. That’s right. I did it. I asked about MONEY. And the amazing Michelle Leighton stepped up and not only answered honestly, but with humor!
Michelle is also one of the authors offering a FREE Ebook up for grabs, a copy of BLOOD LIKE POISON, which will be spotlighted here shortly. In a word, this book is HOT! You want to enter for a chance at this. Check this post for details how to do it!
Here is Michelle’s author page over at Amazon listing all five of her books. Remember, each ‘like’ on each book gets you a point in the contest!
See ya in a few hours!
The financial aspects of self-publishing your novel or, as it’s been so fondly dubbed, “going Indie”—wow! What a loaded topic. I can only speak from my personal experience, the research that I’ve done and the things I’ve heard from a few other authors, straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak. Not that I’m calling any other authors horses, mind you. All that I’ve met are lovely, delicate flowers 🙂
Anyway, I digress. So, you want to know about the dough, huh? Show me the money! Is that it? Of course it is! A little bit anyway. I doubt any of us really want to do this for free. But in order to get the money, you are inevitably going to have to spend some of your own in the process. You’ve heard the expression, “you have to spend money to make money”, right? Well, that’s true in 99.9% of cases, and it’s no different with publishing your brain child for the reading pleasure of the entire world.
For this post, let’s start from the beginning. I’ll tell you stops along the way that have the potential to cost you money and I’ll tell you how I’ve done it so that, in most cases, it’s either free or extremely low cost. How ‘bout that?
Ok, so you have this novel. Let’s acknowledge for a moment that there’s no way to calculate the man hours (or woman hours) that you’ve put in, the time away from your family, the sleep you’ve lost, the elbow grease that you’ve applied to get this tome written. We’ll just call all that sweat equity. That’s part of the investment you hope to get back in the end via a little thing called “sales.”
Let’s talk about EDITING. You’ve go this novel that’s well-written, it talks about something interesting, something other people want to read about, it’s been through beta readers and critique groups and now it’s polished to a mirror-like shine. At this point, some people will go with hiring a professional editor to review their work, someone who’s experienced at kicking out plot snafus and reworking a sentence to make it flawless. That can be costly, but it’s your decision. If you’re like me, you have a trusted group of beta readers who give you such great feedback that you feel you can do without an editor until the moula starts rolling in.
Either way you go, in the end, you’ve got a perfect piece of work, or at least as perfect as it’s likely to get at the present time. Now, it’s ready to go.
Next, you must COPYRIGHT it. To have your work protected by law, it will cost you $35 to have it filed at the U.S. Copyright Office. Not a bad price for making sure that no one can steal all that you’ve stressed and emoted over, right? It’s tax deductible, too, so be sure to write it in the ledger that you’ve surely already gotten (unless you hired an accountant). This entire process takes place online and the great thing about that is that as soon as you have confirmation that your file is uploaded, you are good to go. You don’t have to wait for that nifty little piece of paper to arrive in the snail mail. Ah, the beauty of technology!
Now, by this time, you’re feeling all secure that your work is officially tucked away with the government, all safe and sound. But before you can put it out for the world to see, you have to give it some pizzazz. You know, a nice cover, maybe a book trailer, a website where people can read all about it. And depending on how you go about it, those things can cost money, in some cases lots and lots of money. I’m going to tell you how I did it and I did it at virtually no cost. Now, granted, those who paid big bucks might have a sparklier product, but mine are doing pretty well I think. Success is relative, so you might think differently. Either way, only you can decide how much money you have on hand to sink into this thing that has such great potential to earn you money. But bear in mind that the market is a fickle, fickle lady and this thing also has the potential to fall flat on its face. There’s no such thing as a “sure thing.” A “sure thing” is a “fictional thing” or publishers would only invest in those, never having to risk their money on something questionable. Wouldn’t you agree?
Here we are at COVER ART. I personally know of someone who ended up spending $300 for the front cover. It looks great by the way, but only time will tell if that investment was worth it. With most Indie books starting out at $0.99 and the author only receiving between 35 and 40% of that profit, it takes a while to make back any investment. The money appears to be in the sequels, which I will hopefully be experiencing firsthand in June. That’s when it’s more expected that your book is priced at $2.99 and your royalty shoots up to 70%. YAY!
Anyway, I went onto a site called Free Digital Photos. It costs nothing but a little credit in the front of your book to use their photos. I did my first two covers from there. If you can’t find what you’re looking for with a totally free photo, but you still don’t want to hire a professional, there are resources like iStockPhoto and Shutterstock that have a ton more pictures and they will only cost you around $10-50 per photo. They have package deals if you know that you are going to continue to write. That’s what I did during my third month. It cost me $50 for 12 photos. At that point, I used 2 of the 12 photos to go back and change the covers of my first 2 books.
Once you have your picture picked out, you can download free fonts at Urban Fonts so that you have some nice spiffy writing to announce the clever name you’ve come up with for your novel.
Now, you’re ready for PUBLISHING to digital sites like Amazon, Smashwords and Barnes and Noble. There is no cost, just a little more nail-biting, hair loss and general aggravation. A word of advice: format your book very simply and very cleanly from the very beginning and save yourself a lot of heartache. Pretty little chapter thingees and gorgeous scene breaks will only cause you trouble. Make it simple. Make it clean. Keep it Times New Roman 12 font. Save yourself an aneurysm.
Once that’s done, you may want to publish to print. In that case, you can go another totally free route with Create Space. Now, it can be a pain if your cover art picture quality isn’t just right, but it’s not so bad. And here again, if you have the discretionary funds to pay them to do it, they’ll whip the book into shape for a fee of $299. Of course, I went the free route, though I have yet to actually put them out in print. I didn’t want to price the book at more than $8.99, but CreateSpace/Amazon assures me that the price will have to be higher just to cover the cost of producing it, so I’m holding off for a bit. I don’t want to rob my readers after all.
Now that your book is available everywhere you can make it available, you need to shout it out from the rooftops so that the world can hear and can buy. What rooftops, you ask? Virtual ones. That’s where your WEB SITE comes into play.
Here again, you can pay for something like www.Godaddy.com, which will run you anywhere from $1.99 to $39.99 depending on what you get. They help you to set it up, too. But there’s also the free method, which I took of course. I set up a blog at Blogger and did it all myself, which was super easy and kinda fun. And, most importantly, it was free.
You can MARKET from your blog or website and also by setting up an Amazon Author Central account (which is free) and accounts on sites like Goodreads, Twitter and Facebook, also free. But here again, if you have money to spend, you can pay someone to market your book (prices are extremely variable) or you can pay for ads at such places like Facebook, Goodreads and Kindle Nation. Almost everywhere that you can advertise has a variety of different packages. Personally, I did a 5-day run on FB, using Pay Per Impression and got ZERO sales from it. It cost me $25 and that is the only money, to date, that I’ve put into marketing or advertising. You can also pay for advertising on some book blogger sites. Just a few minutes of internet research will give you more information on that sort of thing than you’ll ever, ever be able to use. But it’s good to know just in case…
Lastly, there is the BOOK TRAILER. Some swear by it, some not so much. I’ve done 2 and I did them myself with the software that came on my computer. I used free songs, though I will caution you here to make sure to either get the rights to use the material or stick with ROYALTY free music, not just FREE free music. YouTube also has a list of music that’s copyright infringement-free and it just happens to also be FREE free.
My videos aren’t flashy or professional and I don’t see where they’ve brought me many, if any, sales, so these are up to you. I think they’re a pain to do, but in a way, they’re fun, too. It’s the beauty and satisfaction of creation that pleased me. I made something, actually made it, and it was pretty cool. I felt like an MTV video producer or something (I’m obviously delusional). To this day, I still watch them here on my computer, where my viewing won’t affect the official view numbers on YouTube. In the end, you might be able to get more sales and stuff if you pay someone to do it for you. I know an author who paid around $400 to have one done. Still don’t know if it’s going to pay off in sales for her.
All in all, I know one author who spent around $700 on her book, start to finish, though she still might pay for more marketing. She paid for some things, did others herself. We’ll have to wait and see if any of these authors feel like their investments paid off. In this business, only time will tell. Every day, it’s hurry up and wait with the obsessive checking of numbers in the interim. Trust me when I tell you, it’s not for the faint of heart. But, then again, if we were faint of heart, we wouldn’t be doing this to start with, right? We’re path-cutters, trend-setters, word warriors. We willingly expose our souls, our hopes, our dreams, our failures for the world to see. That, my lovelies, is anything but faint hearted. And in the end, however you choose to go with your publishing experience, it will be worth it to have your work out there, to be able to share that for which you have worked so hard with those who wish to read it. That alone is more gratifying than I can explain.
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