I get asked all the time “I have a great idea for a book. How do I write and sell a book?” I wrote this post back in 2005 to answer this question. I will put an update at the end as to where we are now. In 2005 we had been working on the book for 8 years (writing and then selling) and in business for 6 years. Tawra

How to self-publish a book.

I get questions all the time about how we self-published the book and how we wrote it in general so I thought I would put our story on here. I also received some questions from someone today so I put my answers in under her questions. Tawra

I self-published first. That means I did all the typesetting, editing, designing the cover etc. on my own. It also means I put up the money to pay for the books. We took out a low interest loan on our credit cards for 3% interest since we had good credit. $9,000 for the 1st printing of 2500 books. (The 3rd printing was 30K for 11,000 books)

It’s been 6 years since it came out and we still haven’t seen any income from it. It pays for it’s self but we haven’t made any money yet. I say all that first so you know what is involved if you self publish. If you are looking to make a quick (less than 4 years) income self publishing probably isn’t the route to go.

I got a publisher to take it over 2 and a half years ago and the new edition just came out last Feb. It was supposed to be out Aug. 2003 but they have been messing around and just not getting it done. The publisher we chose was a really bad move on our part! (more about that later)

Basically if you want a publisher to do it and not self publish you have to send a letter to each publisher and just ask them to look at your idea. You can get a lot of ideas from the books 1001 ways to market your book by John Kramer and How to Jump Start Your book Sales. I think their last name is Ross.

http://www.bookmarket.com/ This is John Kramer’s website and he used to have some good info on finding a publisher. I haven’t been there for a while but I think it’s still on there. If you do get a publisher they pay 10% of they price they sell it for which is 60% off to bookstores. So for the book that will be $20 in the store I will get about $ .80. Also if they get a “special” deal with places like Sams or the school book clubs then you get about .25 for each book. You have to spend the money to get publicity and pay for your plane tickets etc. for TV appearances if that is something you are thinking of doing.

The publisher paid to have our book re-designed. Then they paid for the first trial run of 5,000 books. A very large bookseller, Books Are Fun, wanted to do a trial run of 500. They are a huge company that sells to schools. Books Are Fun just ordered 103,000 copies 2 weeks ago. This sounds like a great deal but…..

Books Are Fun will pay for the printing and give my publisher 70 cents a book which I get 33% or 23 cents for each book. Even though it sounds like a great deal of books by the time we pay off the remaining books in our garage, 10K, and split the remaining money (14K) with my mom, my co-author, then we will have made about 7K or $800 a year for the last 8 years worth of work each. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that I have a re-order form in the back and it is very good advertising so we should get re-orders from this. There is a possibility that Books Are Fun will order more so we could sell a lot more books over the 103,000 they already purchased.

Anyway, I am hoping this will help us turn the corner so we can actually make some money doing this. You will have to be patient. Even having “proven” myself that I can get a lot of media attention the publishers still rejected me so if you really believe in your idea then just keep sending them letters.

It is a lot of work, a full time job. I don’t have the time or the energy (I have 3 kids, CFS and FM) so I can’t sell them like I would like to. (Which is why we haven’t made a profit yet.) I can’t concentrate on it for any time at all at the moment. Unfortunately books just don’t sell themselves. You have to spend a lot of time and money trying to get interviews and sending out free copies to the media. It’s like any other small business it usually takes 3-5 years to start making money at it.

The one piece of advice someone gave me when I asked them what you asked me is “writing the book is easy. It’s selling them that’s the hard part.” That has turned out to be the truth, so I give that advice myself now. I would say writing it is only about 5% of the work. The other 95% is marketing and your book won’t sell without it!

I don’t do all the work myself. My mom helps me write and edit. My husband does all the computer work, editing, proofreading, bookkeeping and my heavy lifter for the post office. My brother draws all the art work. So there is a lot of work that is involved.

More tomorrow! Tawra