I freely admit I do books primarily as an identity/ego thing so I have a sense of a record of the shitposting adding up to something. 🤣
But it is *very* important for me that the books make decent money and make business sense, so I can feel like it’s not vanity publishing.
Conversation
This is also why I’m reluctant to pursue traditional publishing or crossover mainstream success. Either I’d have to con a publisher into making a losing bet or change what/how I write so it is a better mainstream bet. But at indie scale, I can be profitable without doing either.
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Weirdly I am vain enough I don’t want biz partners to lose money betting on me, but not care because J. K. Rowling is subsidizing the rest of their catalog. That’s basically taking $ indirectly from Harry Potter fans while my own remaindered copies get recycled into toilet paper.
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I hope I’m not dissuading others from getting into writing (it can’t be called a career for most who do it). You should do it, and even do it for the money, but don’t lie to yourself about how the money works. Scoring a big advance while the publisher loses money is not a win.
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Shoot for the right thing — your words should make money for every person who touches them on the way to the market, and kill the fewest trees (and ideally no unread dead trees) on the way to being read by the most people who actually want to read them, and won’t regret buying.
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I prioritize ebooks primarily for production ease, but also for environmental reasons.
In general, regret minimization is a good frame. Minimize the number of people who might regret buying (especially if a tree must due for them to try your book).
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This is the first time I’ve actually run the numbers and realized how conservative on costs I’ve been with this much margin room. My sense is, gross margins in books should be ~50% not 90%. I ran this way too lean. I should have spent perhaps 30k on production/marketing.
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But then again, this thread is 100% hindsight. In the moment, I had no idea how well or poorly the books would do. It wasn’t obvious that this could absorb more capital for more return. And cash flow from consulting wasn’t reliable enough to blow on potentially vanity publishing.
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Btw the numbers I’ve shared are net of distribution and printing. I make 70% of cover price on ebooks and 75% in print. I’ve done almost no price optimization. Mostly just kept things as cheap as possible for maximal affordability.
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As far as I can tell, my books behave normally on the supply-demand front. Price goes up, unit sales go down. These ain’t Veblen goods.
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I find it most comfortable to treat book publishing like stock market investing not work. I price the labor of writing itself at zero since I do it for fun anyway and it mostly pays off in other ways. So the ROI is lifetime return on initial marginal production investment.
That’s a slightly depressing thought. Investing in publishing my own work easily beat the S&P but not my best investments.
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