How and Why to Watch the Sales Numbers for Your Books

By Gamal Hennessy

Watching the sales numbers for your book is a normal part of the publishing process. Any publisher, independent or traditional, wants to know how their product is performing in the market. If you just threw your book onto Amazon and then never checked to see if it made money, you might exist at the height of artistic freedom. But you would be ignoring the corporate manager and salesman functions of the independent publisher, (See What is the Difference between Self-Publishing and Independent Publishing?).

At the same time, obsessing your sales numbers can be an emotional rollercoaster that does little to improve your craft or your business. While I am often guilty of paying too much attention to the numbers, I think there is a benefit to looking at them the right way. I'll try to explore both the right way and the wrong way here.

Why We Look at the Numbers

JP Morgan once said “A man has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and a real reason.” That has direct application for independent sales numbers. The good reason we check the sales page for our books is for financial feedback. High sales are the most basic indicator of the positive performance of our product.  Reaching the top of the bestseller list is an indirect comparison between our work and that of our peers. Good sales indicate a successful marketing campaign, and possibly, a positive revenue stream (See Profit and Loss Statements for Independents).

But the real reason I look my sales numbers has little to do with business related issues. My primary motivation is ego gratification. I see high sales as a validation of my work. I equate open emails and FB likes as social proof and recognition. I react to reviews of my books and comments on my articles as people giving me attention and support. It might be narcissistic. It might not have anything to do with sales really, but I would be lying if I didn't admit to the emotional component of watching my sales charts. This reality creates a potential problem, but the first step in solving a problem is to admit that it exists.

How to Look at Your Sales Numbers

Whether your sales are high or low, the second most important benefit to looking at them (after seeing how much money you made) comes from viewing them in relation to the other metrics of your book.

If you have an e-mail list, social media activity, an advertising campaign or some other marketing vehicle, you can look at the relationships between those activities and your sales. As you develop your brand over time, you can try to manipulate the other metrics to try and increase sales. Do you get a bump in sales when you have a blog tour? Is the bump higher when you run an ad campaign? Which one offers a better return on investment? Looking at sales in comparison to your other efforts is an aspect of social experimentation that is a fundamental part of independent publishing. (See What is the Difference between Self-Publishing and Independent Publishing?).

When we look at sales numbers in this context, we only need to look at them periodically, such as when we are trying to measure the impact of a particular activity. When we're trying to track our sales over time, a monthly review of sales makes perfect sense. If we are using our sales numbers as a financial feedback system, we're doing our jobs.

How Not to Look at Sales Numbers

Whether your sales are high or low, they should not affect your writing schedule or your outlook on writing in general. Looking at your sales numbers as you sit down for a writing session can be counterproductive no matter how many books you sold. Checking your sales numbers several times a day for a book that you just released is not a good use of your time. Comparing your sales to another author in the abstract can be self-destructive. Any rumination about sales that keep you from writing should be avoided at all costs. I feel all of these statements are accurate because I have been guilty of each and every one of them in multiple occasions.

Keep Writing

Sales are an important indication of your commercial success as an independent. But it is not the only measure of success (See How Do You Define a Successful Writer?). Even celebrated authors have not achieved the financial success that frees them from their daily routine (See Do You Really Need to Quit Your Day Job?). Writers, like all artists, are driven at least in part by ego. It is a natural expression of the ego to seek validation in things like sales numbers. As long as the hunger for validation doesn't eat the desire to create, obsessing over sales numbers isn't a big problem. Just remember to write in those moments between refreshing the screen to see how many more copies you sold in the last ten minutes.

Have fun.

Gamal

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Profit and Loss Statements for Independent Publishers

by Gamal Hennessy

When I hear self-published authors talk about the success of their book in the marketplace, the discussion often begins and ends with the number of copies they’ve sold. A few of them might boil things down to an actual dollar amount a book makes each month, but these board measurements don't capture the whole story.

A book that makes $1,000 but costs $3,000 to launch isn't as financially successful as a book that makes $1,000 but cost $700 to launch. At the same time, a book sold through one outlet will bring in less money than the same book at the same price sold on a different website. To help independents get a better handle on the financial performance of their catalog, I suggest using a simple profit and loss statement or P&L.

A Little Background
My experience with P&Ls comes from the time I spent in the media industry. Every time we released a graphic novel, DVD or other product, the business affairs department had to generate a P&L to predict and measure that product’s potential success.

A lot of companies use P&L's to plan and evaluate their business. The banks that I deal with now have P&Ls that would make your eyes bleed. I've kept my version simple because independent publishing has a fairly straightforward business model and because I'm not that smart.

Determining Losses
The first element to a profit and loss statement is calculating your loss. In publishing, this is the amount of money you have to pay to get your words out into the world. It is often referred to as the cost of goods sold. I've found that there are several costs that make up this number when releasing a book:

• Editing
• Cover Design
• Formatting
• Marketing
• Registration (ISBN, copyright, etc.)
• Advertising (if any)

You might have other costs associated with the marketing or production of your books, but this list covers the basics. (See Just How Much Does It Costs to Publish a Book Anyway?). In this case, your total cost is the sum of everything you have to pay to produce one book. That's the bad news.  

The good news is that digital distribution has reduced the subsequent costs to almost zero. You pay one price for the first book, but don't have to pay anything extra books whether it’s two more or two million more. That means the price you paid for that first book decreases with every additional book sold. You might have additional initial costs when you launch a new product (bundle, audiobook, graphic novel, etc) but then you also have an additional revenue stream.

All Profit Is Not Created Equal
Independents face a choice when it comes to distribution of their work. They can go with a low to generate volume sales or a high price to give each individual sale a higher impact. They can test the benefits of exclusivity with one distributor (Amazon's KDP program), or they can give up those benefits to post their books on several smaller online stores for higher incremental revenue.

There are vocal supporters on all sides of this debate. You'll have to make your own choices for each book you release. The one thing that should not change is keeping track of how many books you sell and how much you make for each book.

Profit in independent publishing is based on the royalty you collect for each book sold. For example, if your novel is $2.99 on Amazon, you collect 70% of the sales price or about $2.10. If that is the only place where your book is available, then it's fairly easy to determine how profitable your book is overall when you look at it relative to its loss.

Breaking Even
In the simplest economic terms, a book succeeds to the extent that the profits exceed the losses. The threshold between success and failure is the break even number. If your book sells at a level less than break even, you lost money on that book. If the book sells more than break even, it is technically profitable.  You might not be able to quit your job to write, but you're making more than you're spending. Congratulations, a lot of people never get to that point.

Using our example above, let's say your $2.99 book costs you $1,000 to release. If you make $2.10 per book, then you'd have to sell about 477 to break even.

In terms of a profit and loss sheet, it is helpful to determine the break even number and how much you make from each website at each price point. This will not only show you which websites are better for your book, but which prices make you the most money. Does it make sense to sell 50 books at a $2.10 royalty or 500 books at a $.35 royalty? Should you sell on one site and sell 200 copies or spread out to five sites and sell 40 copies each? If you compare the numbers in your P&L the answers should come to you.

Beware the Miser
A P&L has a larger benefit besides just telling you if you broke even or made money. It can help you manage the business side of publishing. It seems to me that there are only two ways to increase the profitability of a book; increase sales or decrease costs. Increased sales are the long term play. Because out books don't go "out of print" we can continue to count on long term sales if we continue to publish new material. Each new book stimulates interest in the overall catalog, making your new book the best advertising for your old book.

Decreasing costs is the short term play. If an author can make $500 in sales on a $250 production cost, he'll always be profitable. But it’s short sighted to reduce the quality of the product in an attempt to reduce the losses to zero. A low quality book will chase readers away to the point where both your costs and your profits are zero. (See Are Self-Published Books Inherently Inferior?). The smarter choice is to produce quality products within a budget you can handle.  They'll serve you better in the long run and you'll be proud of them.

Follow the Muse
It is also a mistake to use the P&L as an indicator or what to write. Let's say you're trying to choose between writing a YA werewolf story, a historical romance, and a sci-fi epic. According to your P&L, your last historical romance was profitable.  Your YA book fell flat and you don't have any previous sci-fi to make a comparison.

Which book should you write?

You write the book you are inspired to write most. The P&L is a helpful business tool, but it isn't a creative tool. Your artistic muse is in control when you sit down and write, not an Excel spreadsheet. You might get creative with costs and pricing when the book is done, but save most of your creativity for the book. Don't let the numbers get in the way.

Have fun.
G

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What's Your Publishing Plan?

by Gamal Hennessy

The end of the year is a good time to look back on the progress you've made in your craft as a writer. It's also a good time to set goals for the New Year. For those of us who are predisposed to planning, the end of the year is the best time to set up a publishing plan. I'm going to try and show why this kind of plan is useful, what it is, how you can create one and what its limitations are.

Why Have a Publishing Plan?
The main benefit to a publishing plan is that it can help you manage your two most important resources; time and money. Few of us have unlimited hours to develop our craft (See Do You Really Need to Quit Your Day Job?) and while independent publishing is affordable, it's not cheap (See So How Much Does it Cost to Self-Publish?). Creating a plan can help you allocate enough time to reach your publishing goals in terms of output (See Why Do We Word Count?) and ensure that your costs for publishing don't interfere with any non-publishing expenses you'll have to deal with in your life.

What is a Publishing Plan?
The publishing plan is basically a projection of all your creative and writing business projects for a given period. It could be based on any goal you decide to set, and it can be broken down into any time period you like.

For example, my publishing plan for 2014 is to release two books that I wrote in 2013 and write two books that I'll release in 2015. Some people can break it down into quarterly, monthly or even weekly goals, but I prefer to work on an annual basis and have the goals from one year linked to the previous and subsequent years to maintain a steady output.

How Do You Create a Publishing Plan?
Creating a publishing plan is a three step process:

1. Set your goal for your desired time period. Keep in mind that we're talking about publishing goals, not necessarily income goals. A publishing plan can help if your goal is 'publish one novel per year'. It is less helpful if your goal is 'sell a million copies'. I don’t have a plan for that yet.
2. Breakdown your publishing efforts according to the four stages (See The Four Stages of Novel Development) so you give each project time for each stage it requires.
3. Layout your activities based on your timing and goals. It helps to schedule extra time for each stage, since life has a way of disrupting plans.

Examples of a Publishing Plan
As I stated earlier, my goal for 2014 is to release two books that are already written (A Taste of Honey and Dark End of the Street) and write two more (A Touch of Honey and Smoke and Shadow). Based on that goal, my monthly plan gets broken down into a creative goal and a business goal and looks something like this:

• Jan: Pre-launch Taste of Honey/ Production of Touch of Honey
• Feb: Launch Taste Book 1/ Touch Production
• March: Launch Taste Book 2/ Touch Completion
• April: Launch Taste Book 3/ Begin Production of Smoke and Shadow
• May: Launch Full Taste Novel/ Touch Post Production
• June: Production of Smoke/ Touch Post Production
• July: Vacation
• August Production Smoke/ Post Production Dark End of the Street
• Sept: Pre-Launch Dark/ Production Smoke
• Oct: Launch Dark/ Smoke Completion
• Nov: Catch Up
• Dec: Catch Up

It helps to keep a few things in mind when looking at this plan. First, I’m planning to release A Taste of Honey in Four stages to test a marketing theory I discussed a few weeks ago (See The Case for Episodic Novels). Second, I give myself six months to write a book based on the fact that the plots are already done (See Building a Better Novel). I also build in two months to play catch up just in case life gets in the way. If everything goes according to plan (and it never does), I can use those two "extra" months to get a head start on the publishing projects for 2015.

What Can't a Publishing Plan Do?
For all the possible benefits of a publishing plan, there are some things it isn't good for:

• You can't schedule pre-production creativity. Inspiration and ideas come when they come and no plan can force the creative mind to find its muse.
• You can't anticipate non-writing emergencies. Things like illness, layoffs, family issues and other unplanned events can completely derail a publishing plan which can force you to start all over again.
• You can't control third party responses. If you hire editors, cover designers and other professionals, you can influence but not control how fast they work. If you're looking for an agent or a traditional publisher there is no telling how long you might wait.
• The plan can't make you stick to it. If plans are antithetical to your nature or if you have a PhD in procrastination, a publishing plan might be more trouble than it's worth. If you don't have any concrete goals and just write for the love of the craft, a publishing plan might be beside the point. This is primarily a business tool. It shouldn't interfere with your creativity.

So what are your publishing plans for 2014? Please let me know in the comments.

Have fun.
Gamal

Sign Up Now for the Independent Publisher Newsletter!

Response to the new Independent Publishing Page (See Welcome to the Independent Publishing Page) has inspired me to expand the concept. Starting next week, I'll be posting a companion newsletter called the Independent Publisher.

 If you'd like to sign up, just add your e-mail address here

What You Can Expect: The Independent Publisher will cover the business, craft and lifestyle of modern writing. It will include my own perspectives on the industry and well as links to news, blogs and podcasts that I feel will help you with your own writing. There will also be announcements about books on sale from my company, but that won't be the bulk of the coverage.

What You Wont Get: I have no intention of using the Independent Publisher for third party ads, book promotion or spam. I want this to be a resource and a forum where independent writers and publishers can share ideas. It might not the the Algonquin Roundtable, but most of us can't meet to discuss writing over a three martini lunch. (Wouldn't that be great, though?)

I hope you sign up for the newsletter. If there are any topics you'd like us to tackle or resources you think we should use, please let me know.

Have fun.
Gamal

Welcome to the Independent Publishing Page

In the spirit of full disclosure, this isn't a new website. 

I've just decided to focus this blog on the topics that have interested people most over the past year. We're going to talk about independent publishing from the perspectives of the business, the craft and the overall life that we as writers have to navigate. I'll try to share what happens to me as I build my publishing empire and I hope that some of it can be helpful and interesting to you.

As an introduction to the reimagined site, I've put together a list of past articles broken down by subject. Today's list includes the business articles. I'll try and post the craft and life articles later this week.

Keep in mind, I don't claim to be an expert in this industry. I'm just a guy going through the process, creating and learning as I go and sharing what I experience. If anyone has a different idea or opinion about the subjects I cover, please let me know. I'm willing to steal a good idea from anybody.

I've listed the most recent articles first and taken out all my shameless promotions. If there is a topic I've missed or that you'd like to see, please post a comment.

Independent Publishing Business Articles
Overnight Success in Ten Novels or Less
Marketing the Independent Novel
Judging a Book by Its Cover

How Much Does it Cost to Publish a Novel Anyway?
How to Find an Editor Without Going Insane
The Future of Independent Publishing
The Modern Marketing Audience
Should E-Books Have Ads?
Selling Books Like a Drug Dealer
Is the Self Published Book Inherently Inferior to Traditionally Published Books?
Life, Death and Sock Puppets

Thanks for reading...and writing.

Have fun.
Gamal

Overnight Success in Ten Novels or Less

"Life's not a track meet. It's a marathon." Ice Cube

Recently I wrote a piece about marketing my first novel (See Marketing the Independent Novel). Many of the comments on that article fell into three camps; some thanked me for sharing my experience, others pointed out the vague and confusing path to marketing success and many encouraged me to just keep writing. I appreciated all the feedback, but it's the last concept that was the most important to me, because it reinforces a basic concept in independent publishing; success often comes from building your bibliography and your craft, rather than from a single bestseller

The Road to Mastery

Supporters of independent publishing stress the benefits of releasing several titles over time:

• Barry Eisler and J.A. Kornath talk about the cumulative effect of a growing library in their self-publishing discussion Be the Monkey
• Hugh Howey highlights the impact of treating publishing as a long term business and not a one of shot in the dark in his Salon article
• Stephen King refers to paying your dues through both publishing and being rejected in his book On Writing

These specific ideas about long-term, constant improvement go beyond publishing to almost every human occupation or skills set.

• Malcolm Gladwell said in his book Outliers that it takes about 10,000 hours to perfect a skill.
• Robert Greene echoes this time frame in his book Mastery, claiming that competence takes about seven to ten years of diligent practice to achieve.

Measuring the Process

One of the problems with the multiple book/ mastery concept is measurement. Just how many books does one need to write? How do you count 10,000 hours of "publishing practice"? The answer is subjective, but I try to look at it by dividing the hours into books.

The basic question is 'How many hours does it take to imagine, plot, write, edit, format, market and release a novel including the website and social media content'? I haven't timed it, but 1,000 hours is about 42 full days. I wouldn't be surprised if publishing a book from first inspiration to marketing online took at least 2,000 hours. At that rate, you could reach 10,000 hours in five or six books. Because my calculations are broad generalizations and because I normally take twice as long to get anything done, I'm thinking that after my tenth book my writing and my publishing skills will be strong enough for me to be an overnight success.

The point is, whether you look at the phenomenon from the number of books or the time it takes to become a great publisher (and not just a great writer) there is very little support for the idea that you can release one book and achieve all of your creative and financial goals.

The Hidden Struggle

One difference between independent publishing and the traditional route is the public nature of your growth. If you spend years submitting work to agents and then more time struggling to secure a publisher, improving your craft all the while in relative obscurity, when you succeed it might appear as if you burst on the scene and took the world by storm. That might have even been the story that is used to market the book. But that's not how it happens for most people. Writers like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling and Anne Rice could have easily spent their 10,000 hours under the radar, but their success involved just as much work as it will take for you and me. We just didn't get to see it.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that everyone who releases ten books and spends 10,000 hours becoming an independent publisher will have success. There are a lot of writers with more skill than me who have put in their time and not seen the results they wanted. All I'm suggesting is that success after several releases is more viable and realistic than striking gold with your first book. It is also more fun and less stressful. Why fret over the sale of one book when you can take the long view of your publishing empire?

Have fun.
Gamal

Judging a Book by Its Cover: The Mystery of Cover Design

I was very ambivalent about getting a cover for my new book. I know the cover has nothing to do with the quality of the writing, but I also know that a bad cover is a one way ticket to a very bad first impression. I wanted a cover that I would be proud of when I saw it on my shelf, but I couldn't afford to pay a small fortune for professional graphic design (See How Much Does It Cost to Publish a Book Anyway?). In the end, I tried two methods of creating a cover, but only one of them created the look I wanted at a price I could handle.

The Basics
The popular wisdom floating around about e-book cover design involve three concepts:

• The cover, especially the title and the author's name, should be clearly understandable as a thumbnail, so potential buyers can see it in a list of books on Amazon, Smashwords or GoodReads.
• The cover should catch the eye of the potential reader.
• The cover should give the reader some clue as to the subject matter and tone of the book.

I thought. 'OK, what's so hard about that?' Then I dove in head first.

 

Worth a Thousand Words
Smooth Operator is a novel of crime and espionage that includes a lot of drinking, violence and sexual themes. I wanted the cover image to suggest all those qualities as well as project an overall sense of cool. Based on these ideas, I set out to look for an image for my cover. 

istockphoto.com is my site of choice for pictures. It has a lot of amazing royalty-free images on its site for $20 or less, and you don't have to pay anything extra to use the image until you sell 499,999 copies. (That's not a problem, because if I ever sell that many copies, I will be happy to pay for an exclusive license, right after I buy my new condo.) It took a few hours and a couple cocktails worth of searching, but in the end I came up with this image.

The gun hints at the violence. The martini covers the alcohol consumption. The suit and the passport represent cool. There isn't an overly sexual about the image and it's not as dark as I would like, but until a publisher can pay for his own photo shoot, they have to go with the next best option. Armed with the image in medium sized resolution, I poured another drink and tried to make my cover.

Leave It to the Professionals
My best attempt to make a cover turned out like this:

Can it be seen as a thumbnail? Sure. Does it convey the right tone? I think so. The image handles most of that. Does it catch the eye of the potential reader? Probably not. If anything it might scream self-published novel, which is a death blow for some buyers (See Are Self-Published Books Inherently Inferior?). I wasn't completely happy with it, and other authors I respect stressed the need for a professional looking cover (special thanks to Lance Charnes for finally pushing me over the edge) so I set out in search of an affordable alternative.  

That's when I stumbled onto fiverr.com. It appears that the world of graphic design is going through economic competition that is just as bad, if not worse than independent publishing. That is a win for independent publishers because artists that once might have charged hundreds of dollars to design a cover are now doing gigs for $5 per cover. It's a little more for a paperback cover or quick delivery, but no cover is more than $30-$40.

I chose Angie, one of the top rated designers, submitted my payment (you have to pay first, but it's only $5) and my request along with the mock up I did. The cover at the top of this essay is what I got back:

Is this better?  That is a subjective question based on your aesthetics. Does it scream self-published? I don't think so. Considering what I paid for it, I think it is money well spent. Of course, I can't exactly articulate why the second cover is better, but then I'm not a graphic designer. I can say that I plan to use this artist for A Taste of Honey and the three other novels I have planned between now and 2016. At this point, I feel the cover design is the second most successful marketing project I've done so far.

So what process do you use to design your covers? Do you think this process makes sense for what you're trying to do? Let me know in the comments and as always. ..

Have fun.
Gamal

Just How Much Does It Cost to Publish a Book Anyway?

One of the growing clichés in independent publishing is that getting a book to market is cheap and easy. The reality can often be quite different, although it is certainly cheaper to go out on your own than it was five or ten years ago. The problem is I haven't seen many stories that define exactly what "cheap" means. Many of the comments on my last essay (See How to Find an Editor Without Going Insane) revolved around the cost of my editor. Since there might be a shortage of independent publishing economics out there, it makes sense for me to expand my costs beyond editing to the entire publishing process for my upcoming book Smooth Operator.

Disclaimer: Prices may vary. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Prices do not include tag, title or taxes. Check with your local dealer for details.

The Elements of Book Publishing
When I was in house counsel for an anime and manga company, the price we paid to sell comics and video (what real business people refer to as the cost of goods sold) were divided into five parts; acquisitions, production, advertising, sales and finance. I decided to break my costs down the same way.

Acquisition in this context means the creation of the manuscript. I set this cost at $0, even though there is a significant number of man hours put into the process (See Building the Better Novel series of posts). In addition there is an associated opportunity cost for lost wages that I could have made doing something else. I'm not smart enough to figure what that cost is, so I set it at zero to keep things simple.

Production has four costs:

• Editing: $1,200 from Create Space (See How to Find an Editor). Other editors charged per word or per page for a 75,000 word manuscript and most of the prices were in this range.
• Cover Design: $10 I do my cover design in house for the most part (because it's cheaper and kind of fun to do), but I get royalty free images from istockphoto.com and $10 covers the licensing cost of a decent sized image.
• Formatting: $40 from a program I called Jutoh that can create e-books in most major formats. Because I plan to use this program for all my books, I could amortize the cost across all titles, but for the sake of this exercise, I'll count the entire cost here.
• Printing: $250 Create Space offers printing on demand, but there is an initial set up fee for this service (Note: if you only release an e-book, this cost is zero. I'm only adding it in because vanity compels me to put my books on my shelf.)

Production Subtotal: $1,490

Advertising has two costs: 

• Online Advertising: $50. This will be split between Google and FB ads for a week after the launch of my book to specific demographic groups that are interested in my genre (See the Secret Struggle for the Magic It)
• Press Release: $60 through pr.com on the day the book launches. Again this will be a targeted release that will improve the SEO of the book as well as notify the relevant journalists and bloggers.

Advertising Subtotal: $110

Sales: $0 When people say independent publishing is cheap, this is what they mean. I'm planning to use Kindle Direct Press for at least one cycle, but even if you use Smashwords, Kobo or Nook, there are no upfront costs for registration, distribution, shipping, storage, returns, or all the other little costs that publishers normally deal with. Of course, online book outlets take a significant percentage the revenue from each sale, but everybody has to eat somehow.

Finance: $0 I have a separate account for my publishing company and there are fees associated with maintaining that, but I don't factor that in here because I'd be paying those fees either way and this is complicated enough already.

Total Cost to publish Smooth Operator: $1,600

Of course, each of these costs could be boiled down to almost zero or expanded to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the writer. The key is to find a cost that fits within your budget and helps you create the best book possible.

Profit, Loss and Breakeven
Once I know how much my book costs, I can figure out how many books I need to sell for it to be financially successful. A book breaks even when the number of books sold equals the cost of making the book. When I was at Marvel, they had a complicated spreadsheet (called a P&L or Profit and Loss statement) that laid this out in great detail. My method is similar, but not as fancy because again, my brain capacity is limited.

The formula is simple: Breakeven number of books = Revenue per book/ $1,600

If my book sells for $2.99 and my share of each Amazon sale is 70%, I make about $2 per book. If that's true, then I need to sell 800 books to breakeven. Every book sold after that is pure profit that I can horde in my basement and swim around in like Scrooge McDuck from Duck Tales. It also follows that the more I can reduce my costs the fewer books I need to sell to break even. A higher per book price also reduces that number, but you don't want to set the price so high that readers won't take a chance on you.

Business vs. Pleasure
Now, I don't have a basement. And I won't be swimming in a pool of money from the sale of Smooth Operator. In fact, the chances that the book will breakeven are quite small. But that's OK. By definition, independent publishing is not a cash cow. If I just wanted to make money, I'd invest in the defense industry or start a meth lab. There are many other reasons to publish besides money (See The Other Benefits of Independent Publishing), but that doesn't mean the profits and losses don't matter. Understanding the financial aspects of independent publishing are just as useful as learning to build web pages or understand social media. Publishing can become a vehicle for broad types of learning, even if you can't make a swimming pool out of the profits.

As always, please let me know what you think of my random rambling.

Have fun.
Gamal