Pen & profit: Your (my) guide from first draft to best seller
My practical thoughts on how to turn passion into pages, and pages into profit
📝 1,300 words. ⏳ Estimated reading time: a bit more than 9 minutes.Hello, fellow writer!
Welcome to the second newsletter of your The Clueless Writer Chronicle.
First, a personal note.
You might be uninterested in it, but I've to say it to someone who’s not my husband, my dad or a couple of close friends!
So, the personal note is that I've completed writing the first version of my first crime novel.
According to the book’s structure I have on my Notion (more about it in the future), there are 18 chapters to go. That means, that I’m already at 10% of my journey.
And I must tell you, I'm pretty proud of myself!
End of my note for today, my promise!
As you might have read in the “opening” newsletter of this publication, I could sit tight on my current job (I run my businesses, and I'm professionally satisfied by them.)
This is to say that I’m here cultivating my passion for writing. And that’s it!
I don’t want to become rich by doing so (at least for now!)
However, given my background, it’s stronger than me: figures matter!
In this sense, because I’m sure I'll self-publish my novel (whenever it’s ready) on Amazon, I asked myself:
What’s the cover price I've to sell the book at?
How much will I earn from it?
I’m happy to share with you the outcome of my thinking!
Question #1: What’s the cover price I've to sell the book at?
The first answer I gave myself is, that the cover price will not reflect the “value” I give to each copy of the book.
It must be based on the average market price of similar books.
Why?
Well, because I could consider €40 (or $40, or £40, it doesn't matter) the actual “value” of the book. But there are just a few chances that I’ll ever sell a decent amount of copies at that price! In other words, no one will ever buy it (if not my closest relatives!)
Because I’m pretty much convinced of it, I looked at Amazon’s listings. And, based on a quick look (well, not so quick...) I understood that usually books written by authors with a 1-book-only bibliography on Amazon in the “Mystery, Thriller & Suspense books” category are priced at around 10-15 euros.
It’s always a good idea to double-check everything.
That’s why I asked Perplexity1 “What’s the average cover price of a crime novel published by a writer at his first self-publishing book on Amazon KDP?”.
Perplexity told me that:
So, something between 10 and 20 euros (depending on a pretty long series of variables.)
At that point, I considered myself satisfied: the price would have to be somewhere between 10 and 20 euros.
Time to move to my second question.
Question #2: How much will I earn from it?
I started from the assumption that Amazon:
would pay me a royalty and, at the same time,
would charge me for printing the book.
I decided, at this stage, not to take into consideration other investments still necessary (editing, formatting, cover creation, ...)
For my solo brainstorming, I found this calculator (kindly offered by Amazon itself.)
After setting all the requested parameters, the calculator gives you an estimate of your royalty for each Amazon marketplace you decide to sell your book in:
At that point, I had all the data I needed.
I started to put the figures in order and, at first, I calculated the estimated royalty based on four alternative cover prices: $9.99, $14.99, $19.99 and $24.99. This is what I got:
Taking a look at the table, I realised that, for example, if the cover price of my first crime novel would be $14.99, for each copy I would earn $4.40.
“Not so much at all,” I thought. “With that amount, I could buy just a couple of apples and a small bag of vegetables.”
That brought me to a third (unexpected) question.
Question #3: How many books do I have to sell to get X per month?
$4.40 per book isn't a great amount of money, is it?
My brilliant mind (as I wrote somewhere else, I don't like to take myself too seriously) elaborated a little bit and came out with a new question. Much more important than the previous two (even if the answers to them were preparatory to the third), the question was:
How many books do I have to sell to get, let's say, 500 dollars per month?
In this sense, a new table for you2:
What does this calculation tell us?
If the book is sold for $14.99, I would need to sell 114 copies per month. This would mean 27 copies per week or, even better, more or less 4 books per day.
Ok, it was time to wrap up all my thoughts.
Before rounding off, if you want to do the math and play with the figures applicable to your book, you can download from here the super-easy spreadsheet I used to do mine.
Wrapping up
First conclusion: the market sets the cover price of your book much more than you!
Second conclusion: on each copy you sell, your earnings are something around 30% of the cover price (at least given my description of the book's characteristics.)
Third conclusion: to get something like $500 per month, I have to sell, let’s say, 4 books per day on Amazon.
But there’s more!
There's something more I want to share with you (drumroll, please!)
Up small goals, down big goals
First, a piece of advice I give myself in many circumstances:
always break down big goals into smaller ones.
This is why I “translated” a monthly goal (114 books per month) into a daily target (4 books per day.)
There are many reasons behind it.
It makes goals less overwhelming. Big goals can seem unachievable. That’s why they’re quite frequently leading to procrastination and lack of motivation. If you divide them into smaller steps, they’ll be less intimidating.
It accumulates over time. The first day you reach your daily goal will provide you with momentum and motivation.
It allows you to celebrate more wins. Checking off a small win makes you feel accomplished.
Marketing is the thing
The second final thought is that your book might be enchanting and masterful (and I’m sure it is) but
no one will benefit from it unless the book is properly marketed.
Marketing books isn’t my cup of tea, but it’s very clear to me (and it should be to you too!) that a wonderful book will not sell itself.
I know that here on Substack there are plenty of newsletters that can help you clear the fog around the critical aspect of marketing your masterpiece. Among the others, I found some newsletters particularly interesting, so far. In this sense, you might be interested in following
, and , for example.So, if I can, take a look around here because your next breakthrough might be just one e-mail away.
Before I say goodbye
The bottom line of all of this is, that whatever the reasons why you’re writing your book, you might become wealthy by publishing it.
This requires more than just putting pen to paper.
I’m sure that success in this world involves a combination of 4 factors:
Quality writing
Effective marketing
Strategic planning
A bit of luck!
All right, I think I’ve rambled on enough for today!
Catch you soon, and happy writing!
–Simon
If you never used Perplexity, I strongly recommend you to take a look at it–it's much better than any other search engine, in my opinion.
For these calculations, I considered an average month as 4,22 weeks and 30,22 days.
Thx for the shout