The 20 Book Theory

As I have been doing more research into the logistics of self publishing. I have seen this phrase in some variation come up in several different places 'you don't start making money until your 20th book'.

According to Kindleprenuer the rough average to publish a book is $3,000. If you do that 20 times that is $60,000 dollars. I can see why so many writers are discouraged when their books don't do well enough to even net zero.

It seems that getting started out most books are priced anywhere from $0.00-$2.99. You have to have your booked priced at a minimum at $2.99 to get the 70% royalties on Amazon but they subtract delivery fees from that so it isn't a true 70%.

To help myself figure out how many books I would need to sell to hit the $3,000 mark at each price point with the 35% royalty I made the below chart.

List Price $0.99 $1.99 $2.99

Royalty $0.35 $0.70 $1.05

Amt Req 8,572 4,286 2,858

Substack put out this article saying that most self publish books on average sell 250 copies but the average isn't the norm so if you get 250 sells you should be proud. If is does really take 20 books to start making money and I sell 250 copies of each of those books then I will have a total of 5,000 books sales under my belt.

Assuming I price my books at $1.99 the 20 book theory tracks.

Comments

Worried for Nothing?

Recently I was struggling worried, Am I Cut Out to be an Indie Author? Last week I started writing a new story since I was really struggling with the last concept that I had. In my first week of writing I wrote 20,000 words! That is insane, I didn't even know I was capable of putting up those types of numbers. I doubt this pace is maintainable but maybe I can get my number of books released per year up to four after all and cut the time to get to 20 books down from 10 year to 5 years. I am going to keep pushing through and try not to stress too much. I still think waiting until I have a few books ready to release before putting anything out is a good idea. That way I get into the habit and mindset of written without an expectation of return on investment.

Dreams on Hold

They say there is a time and place for everything. Sadly no just isn't the right time to chase this dream. Hopefully the economy will get better and I will be able to have the free time again to work on my writing. Right now I need to pick up a second job on top of everything I am already doing to help cover expenses. Ideally this only last for about six months, but I don't know for sure. The dream is there. It isn't dead it is just on hold once again.

Ups and Downs to word count

The first seven days of writing my new story I put down 23,000 words. Then a lot of life happened and I had four straight days of 0 words. Thankfully I had been crushing it that first week and am still where I need to be a with the stretched goal pass of 1,500 words a day. Before I was excited by just how much I was able to get done and was even think that I may be able to finish faster than the 54 day stretch goal. That was always a miracle goal though. My reasonable deadline for myself is 90 days. This way I can write three books a year and use the remaining days on editing and marketing. I am learning to be patient with myself and that my production isn't always going to be linear.

Suburban Indie Writer

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