I’ve had a little success with two books collecting some of my blog posts
Presumably, people you didn’t already know buying them ;-) What level is “a little success” on Lulu?
The Beach Boys one strikes me as having serious breakthrough potential. Though I have no idea what the market for physical books on music is like these days (it was not bad in the ’80s and ’90s).
I’m making about fifty pounds a month from the two books’ combined sales on Lulu—most of that from sales of ebooks, actually (I’ve been hampered by Lulu having poor ePub processing software, so I can’t get the ePub of Sci-Ence! uploaded as yet, but am selling a surprising number of PDFs). I also got my books uploaded as Kindle books last month, and have made about fifty pounds so far from those (averaging one sale a day when I have them at $5, and three sales per day when I have them at $1).
So assuming sales stay more-or-less level that means I can average £50 per month per book without any kind of promotion other than my blog. However, I’m hoping that by increasing the number of books I have available (and by having them in niche markets—both my books have topped the Kindle charts for their respective categories, despite low sales) I’ll get some kind of name recognition. It only needs one breakout success and I can make a significant amount of money. (There are people selling hundreds of thousands of self-published books a month, but they’re primarily writing pseudo-Twilight ‘dark fantasy’, and I have too much sense of shame to do that ;) ).
I hope the Beach Boys one might be successful, especially since I have some name recognition within the BB-fan community (I was very active in online fandom in the late 90s and early 2000s).
(I slightly miswrote earlier, BTW—there is one career-retrospective look at the Beach Boys’ music. Mine is significantly more in-depth.)
Presumably, people you didn’t already know buying them ;-) What level is “a little success” on Lulu?
The Beach Boys one strikes me as having serious breakthrough potential. Though I have no idea what the market for physical books on music is like these days (it was not bad in the ’80s and ’90s).
I’m making about fifty pounds a month from the two books’ combined sales on Lulu—most of that from sales of ebooks, actually (I’ve been hampered by Lulu having poor ePub processing software, so I can’t get the ePub of Sci-Ence! uploaded as yet, but am selling a surprising number of PDFs). I also got my books uploaded as Kindle books last month, and have made about fifty pounds so far from those (averaging one sale a day when I have them at $5, and three sales per day when I have them at $1).
So assuming sales stay more-or-less level that means I can average £50 per month per book without any kind of promotion other than my blog. However, I’m hoping that by increasing the number of books I have available (and by having them in niche markets—both my books have topped the Kindle charts for their respective categories, despite low sales) I’ll get some kind of name recognition. It only needs one breakout success and I can make a significant amount of money. (There are people selling hundreds of thousands of self-published books a month, but they’re primarily writing pseudo-Twilight ‘dark fantasy’, and I have too much sense of shame to do that ;) ).
I hope the Beach Boys one might be successful, especially since I have some name recognition within the BB-fan community (I was very active in online fandom in the late 90s and early 2000s).
(I slightly miswrote earlier, BTW—there is one career-retrospective look at the Beach Boys’ music. Mine is significantly more in-depth.)