I’ve had a little success with two books collecting some of my blog posts so now I’m trying actively to turn my blog writing into longer-form work suitable for book publication. I’m currently working on three series of blog posts simultaneously, all of which I hope to turn into books.
The first, How We Know What We Know is on a lot of the things people talk about on here, trying to explain Bayes’ theorem, Kolmogrov Complexity and the scientific method to a lay audience. I’m doing this because a lot of my blog readers, especially those who enjoyed my book “Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!” (which tackled the same things more obliquely, examining comics and Doctor Who to make complementary points), are interested in this material but don’t have any idea where to start.
The second, Cerebus reviewed part zero and part one, is a discussion of the 300-issue comic-book series Cerebus. I’m doing this because I consider Cerebus a great work of art, but one overshadowed by its creator’s serious mental illness.
And the third, and most advanced, is a track-by-track review of every legitimately available Beach Boys song (top five results on that page). I’m doing this because there’s no book available that covers the Beach Boys’ whole career from a musical, rather than biographical, point of view, odd as that may sound.
I’m also writing a novel, but that’s not online.
My goal with these generically is to try to earn enough money from the writing I would be doing anyway (these are all the kind of things I would be posting to my blog anyway, just organised better) to be able to quit my job and work primarily as a writer, with some time over for research, programming and music.
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.)
I’ve had a little success with two books collecting some of my blog posts so now I’m trying actively to turn my blog writing into longer-form work suitable for book publication. I’m currently working on three series of blog posts simultaneously, all of which I hope to turn into books.
The first, How We Know What We Know is on a lot of the things people talk about on here, trying to explain Bayes’ theorem, Kolmogrov Complexity and the scientific method to a lay audience. I’m doing this because a lot of my blog readers, especially those who enjoyed my book “Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!” (which tackled the same things more obliquely, examining comics and Doctor Who to make complementary points), are interested in this material but don’t have any idea where to start.
The second, Cerebus reviewed part zero and part one, is a discussion of the 300-issue comic-book series Cerebus. I’m doing this because I consider Cerebus a great work of art, but one overshadowed by its creator’s serious mental illness.
And the third, and most advanced, is a track-by-track review of every legitimately available Beach Boys song (top five results on that page). I’m doing this because there’s no book available that covers the Beach Boys’ whole career from a musical, rather than biographical, point of view, odd as that may sound.
I’m also writing a novel, but that’s not online.
My goal with these generically is to try to earn enough money from the writing I would be doing anyway (these are all the kind of things I would be posting to my blog anyway, just organised better) to be able to quit my job and work primarily as a writer, with some time over for research, programming and music.
Forgot to add—am also working on improving my Perl skills by trying to solve all the Project Euler problems.
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.)