But Is It Worth It?

My goal, since I was a wee bairn, has been to publish at least one book. If I ever manage to finish any of my work, I was thinking of self publishing because I don't see how I'd ever get a proper publisher's attention.

But when so many books I buy on my Kindle are 99p, or around the £3/4 mark, is it even worth it?

How much does it cost the author to self publish on Kindle, and what are the returns (£) like?

 

Paging @big soft moose, our resident UK Kindle authority.

 

Not trying to be a dick, but I'm fairly sure I've seen threads in here that have discussed this to death already. This may be one of those subjects where it would pay to do a search first.

 

I'm a little naff at searching through old posts on new (to me) forums. But I am trying. I also find it easier on my crud brain to discuss stuff. And I hate resurrecting dead threads, zombies are a pain sometimes.

It's taken me so long to make myself join up to a site like this one, because I have so many questions.

I do apologise in advance if it takes me a while to settle in and not exasperate the regulars, I don't mean to be a total law unto myself

A friend of mine recently published a book, I think she self funded having it printed up etc. I've read some pretty dire books in my time, and wondered how they got published. But mostly I find lots of hidden gems on my Kindle, the first book is 99p but all sequels are normally priced. It hooks me in, and I buy all of the sequels because I love prolonging my time spent in whatever world the book provides me.

I don't plan on making any of my work follow on like that, I just don't see myself coping with that level of awesomeness.

I'm appallingly at selling myself, or selling anything full stop. Which is part of the reason I wondered about bypassing publishers and going straight to Kindle. I would most likely design the cover myself, and I have some contacts who might be willing to proofread for me (I've proofread for friends before too) but the formatting thing sounds ominous.

 

That. Anything worth doing is worth doing well. You don't have time/money to do it properly, but you do have time/money to do it over? Think again. Don't cut corners.

Yes, there are books that have been self published and made lots of money, but these are rare. Particularly if the author doesn't advertise and take pains to promote his/her book. Face it, there are so many books out there that it'd be a very lucky streak if one book gets by word of mouth alone to the bestseller lists. Worth it in terms of money? The chances are stacked heavily against you. You'd be better advised to buy lottery tickets

But what about the other kind of 'worth it'? Decide what you want to get out of writing a book and be aware that it can be 'worth it' in an entirely different sense.

 

I think the biggest problem with self publishing is when would-be authors think it's the next best thing to finding an agent and an actual publisher. I think it's more of a different path. Self publishing isn't going to make your book any better.

 

I've at least broken even on every book I've self-published. But I've rarely spent more then $2 to do so.

Most who spend $2k-10k on their first self-published novel are not going to make anywhere near that from the book. For a first novel, I'd find other writers to trade editing with and a decent pre-made cover for $20-50, then let it sink or swim. Maybe do a bit of advertising on Amazon if you can find a way to do it that isn't extortionately expensive (last I looked, I was going to be paying $1+ per click for a $3.99 book because I'm competing against people with long series and six-figure advertising budgets).

I think I've got six or eight novels out there and a few dozen short stories, and I'd say I'm finally at the point where it may be worth spending some money on the next ones. But until a writer reaches that point it's just lipstick on a pig. You need a good story that people want to read that's competently told, and most first novels aren't.

 

Ebook formatting is not very hard. Just use styles and don't do anything particularly complex, and Amazon will convert it all fairly painlessly.

Print formatting is harder, but it's basically what-you-see-is-what-you-get; create a PDF that looks the way you want the book to look, and Amazon will print it that way. There'll only be problems if you have incorrect margins or forget to embed fonts or something like that.

 

What is a click, and why does it cost a dollar?

Even if I'm not close to being a best seller ever, knowing I wrote and published a book would make me feel happy. My brother was in a few bands years ago and recorded songs which can be bought on iTunes - it's that sense of achievement and knowing you put something out there. My life is incredibly meaningless and empty.

Print per buy sounds interesting. I will look up the Ingram people and see what it entails.

My friend trades editing with friends, I would be asking her and a few others to proof read for me. I'm always happy to proof read if it can be done on my Kindle or if someone's made a rough binding. I'll just leave that there, if anyone feels like getting to know me and borrowing me.

Does a publisher have editors and people to work on people's books before they're published? I would love to work for a publishers. I've got some gnarly qualifications.

I love the expression, 'lipstick on a pig'. Thank you for putting a smile on my face. I was starting to worry my face had gotten stuck in this frown not a happy bunny at the moment.

 

And either way, make sure you're licensed to use the fonts you are using. A lot of the ones that come with your OS or programs are cool use for personal use, but could cause problems if the wrong person noticed you were using them for commercial purposes. Actually, any assets you didn't make yourself should be scrutinized for terms of use. A small bit of effort before that can avoid large problems later, and finding free versions aren't terribly difficult, either.

 

You see all those 'sponsored' products on Amazon?

They're ads, and when someone clicks on the ad, the advertiser pays Amazon for the click. The amount varies widely depending on what they're advertising and where they're advertising it, but there are so many book farms out there now with big advertising budgets that they've pushed up the price of clicks to a dollar or more for popular categories. You can't easily make money selling a $3.99 book and paying $1 per click, but you can make money selling two dozen $3.99 farmed books in a series and paying $1 per click to one of those books; readers who buy one and like it will buy others, and you make the profit that way.

 

Ah I see now, thanks for explaining that.

There's so much more to this than I thought. No wonder my friend was so stressed about the last book. I think she's currently late getting the current book to her publisher and I can understand now. She has a publisher, but she's also self published on Kindle. I'm not sure what the deal is with her publisher. I should probably ask her.

I didn't know that fonts were under copywrite. I assumed the regular ones you get in Word etc were for anything. That's a bit of a shock.

 

Yeah, that's why so many categories of Amazon ads are monopolized by book farmers. I looked up the obvious ones for my most recent book and they were all charging around $1.

 

True, the actual price for a particular ad is going to depend on a lot of things.

 

Is it worth it for money? No. Even if you're one of the lucky ones and make a bit of profit, you could make more money by spending the time on basically anything else.

But IMO it shouldn't be about money. I self-published. I'm currently a couple of hundred quid down on the project (though admittedly virtually everything I spent was related to the print rather than digital version). It was absolutely 100% worth it. I love the fact that my book is out there, I love the fact it's owned by people I've never even met - even if not that many of them. One of my best friends from back when I was a teenager, who I'd lost touch with for over 15 years, got in contact again after finding it.

All that's worth quite a lot to me. I didn't lose a couple of hundred quid doing it, I spent it. I know exactly where it went, and I'd spend it all over again.

 

I'm currently losing money advertising my art for sale.

I do most things because they make me feel good. But I'm also wanting to at least make some "pin money" because I'm very miserable, and poor. Other half has a pretty good job but we've just bought a place together and the mortgage is as much as renting, and we had to put quite a bit of stuff on the credit card while we are working out our finances and blah.

I've had a couple of acquaintances try to talk down to me about my only doing it for the money, but if that was the case I'd probably have worked harder and not had kids and saved more and I wouldn't produce my artwork and I certainly wouldn't bother writing.

But art and writing are two things I'm actually able to do. When my hands don't curl up into unusable blobs on the ends of my arms (fms).

I wrote my intro earlier. I need some information to put the correct name of the right boat into it, and I will most likely rewrote some of it eventually. But that's a bit over 254 words.

Incidentally, do any of you clever clogs know what kinds of yachts would be most suited to trafficking/ smuggling people between the UK south coast and the French coast? Would need to be big enough to hold a couple of families of average size plus two crew, safe enough for the crossing and to move along our coast, but not too obvious. My boating experience is too old and I can't remember the names.

 

I had wondered about that. I was worried a yacht would be too big and noticeable.

But I also can't get the image of that poor drowned toddler out of my head when I think of little boats like this one.

How much artistic license is acceptable? I have more than one place of interest along the British fast, including Cornwall. Would people be disappointed if I went all out and had people sailing the Mary Rose with it's hundred sails or another galley type ship? What about submarines..... Though in the climate of my book it wouldn't be possible to keep pumping them full of whatever makes them go (I have no idea if they need fuel other than the original nuclear goo)

 

Maybe all the RHIBs were confiscated. That would mean it could be acceptable to use something else and pose as something if customs caught them

 

"nuclear goo"...... And I consider myself a bloomin writer..... I'm rolling my eyes at myself