How Authors Really Make Money

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Jamesaritchie

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There's about as much truth in that article as a recent one I read about the Easter Bunny serving on the Supreme Court. Some of it is just blatant nonsense with no basis in fact at all.
 

kaitie

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Is it bad that my first thought was to wonder if the guy making $5000 a month with an e-book had written about how to get rich selling e-books?
 

amyashley

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Unfortunately, and there are a lot of articles out there on this, even if self publishing becomes more popular, it doesn't mean automatic riches for every author.

If you read this article carefully, even the author states clearly that it's really only a good option for someone with an established reputation.

Not everyone out there writing is meant to be published. Self-publishing isn't going to alter that. readers are more savvy than given credit for. If they end up having to sift through the slush that agents are now sorting through they'll still buy the better books more in the end.

I think some of the aspects of publishing are changing, but this guy doesn't have the right ideas of how. It is interesting to watch, but I'm not banking on anything yet, and I am eager to go a traditional route and take the help of professional marketing and publication it offers.

JMO
 

MumblingSage

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There's about as much truth in that article as a recent one I read about the Easter Bunny serving on the Supreme Court.

Sounds like the kind of article I'd read (bunnies and jurisprudence--my two favorite things!)
 

Sevvy

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Is it bad that my first thought was to wonder if the guy making $5000 a month with an e-book had written about how to get rich selling e-books?


Actually, it looks like that number is 5,000,000, unless I'm just too tired to tell the difference between a comma and a period at the moment. It's entirely possible.

Or we're reading in different spots.

Either way, I laughed at your comment, and at that entire article.
 

Axler

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Well...there are a lot partial truths and subjective interpretations in that article, but nothing that I can point to as an outright falsehood.

However, unless Nielsen Bookscan's monitoring operations have expanded since the last time I looked, they don't track 75 percent of book sales...they don't track sales to supermarket chains or pharmacy chains or K-Mart or Wal-Mart (which I guess can be included in Sam's Club) or independent bookstores or even Mom and Pop newsstands.

And yeah...it does look he's claiming some writer guy is pulling down between five and ten million per month.

That's either a typo, extreme hyperbole or fantasizing to the point of imbecility.

Or all three.
 

V-Man

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While the $5,000,000 a month figure threw me at first, I'd be willing to bet about $2 he's talking about Darren Rowse from problogger.net. And something tells me that's a gross figure as opposed to net, and comes in pretty heavily from affiliate sources (although I did buy a used copy of his book myself).

Not my intention to start an argument or anything, I was really more interested in the self-marketing aspects of Tim's post. After all, one definition of success means getting paid to do what you enjoy doing...
 

Old Hack

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I could take that article and dissect it on my blog; if I did so it would run to five or so separate blog posts, and take up several thousand words.

But I'm not going to. All I'm going to say is that it's hyperbolic nonsense from start to finish and not worth the pixels it's printed in.
 

BenPanced

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Wow. ONE POST actually takes him to task, and he dismisses it as "just your opinion/we'll have to agree to disagree".
 

Bubastes

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Unfortunately, the personal development blogosphere seems to love this guy. I have no clue why.
 

dclary

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I can see how someone might make 5,000,000 a month -- but that would be gross... the costs of getting people to his site, plus the affiliate costs would drive that down tremendously. In my personal experience, the CPM ad-revenue I get from google is far outweighed by the costs of advertising with them.


For my lowly site, I pay up to $10 a day in adwords advertising (that equates to 1 book, so any sale in a day and I break even for advertising costs).

In that same time period, I make anywhere from 10 cents to 2 dollars a day in adsense revenue. This makes sense to me.. My site exists to advertise my book and nothing else. There's like... 3 pages "Hi this is the book" "hi this is the payment page" "hi this is the thank you for buying page" -- so I'm not going to get a lot of page hits per visitor.

With another site, a person could possibly have many, many pages of limited content, all designed to hand out morsels of information, while at the same time pimping the book... I tried this for a bit with a blog, and simply decided the work didn't justify the additional pennies per visitor extra I'd make.

I have very few other costs than that advertising (which can never exceed $300 a month or so). Paypal charges me .50c for the transaction. My webserver costs $50 a month.


So I'm just an author in a very tiny niche market, with a small book that sells for $10 a pop. I sell about 3-10 books a day (more on weekends usually, less in the week) for a good average of 100-150 a month. (In October, my current sales are 37 purchases, 2 returns for 35 units total -- not a bad week).

That's $1500 average (September was a recordsetting month, 200 books sold, for $2000 gross).

Subtract the $300 in advertising, the $50 website costs, and $75 in paypal transaction costs, and I'm making a little more than $1000 a month -- with just one little book, in one tiny niche market. -- If an author found a larger market, and could promote it inexpensively (that's where the affiliate marketing comes in handy), it would not be surprising to me to see that author pull 5K, 10K, or even more a month.

-- Now, what if that author has multiple books? In the same market would be preferred... because his per-book marketing costs go down -- and his adsense revenue goes up (as people have to hit multiple pages to learn about each of the books).

So, having done it, on a tiny microcosm, I can see how others could do this too, on a much grander scale.

Is it possible someone's making 5-million a month? Yeah, it is. How many people could do this? That's hard to tell, but the correct answer is somewhere near "not very many." However I do not think it is out of the realm of possibility for anyone to be able to pull $5K a month or more self-publishing ebooks online if they wanted to devote some time to doing it.
 
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