I've written a book about a ___domain I know about - Music Technology - and self-published it about 5 years ago , using lulu.com. It sells for £24.95 [1], and I get about half of that in a lulu sale. This is a 650 page text book which has a LOT of content - it would take hundreds of hours to go through it all for a beginner.
If it sold on Amazon, I would get about £4. I guess I should have gone via Amazon direct? (given that the author mentions 40%?)
Lulu makes about £4-5 on a sale (going on the printing costs that I pay, and me factoring in a bit that I would pay even on a copy that I'm buying myself), whereas Amazon would be taking more like £12-13 going on those numbers.
So, that's why my book isn't available on Amazon - I'd have to sell 3 times as many to make the same money, and that seems unlikely to me. If it was more even, I would sell it on Amazon as well as Lulu as I'm sure I'd get -some- more sales, but not drastically more.
The book is a reasonable seller and a useful source of side income for me, but it's certainly not an 'earner' - I've spend about 3 weeks of very full time work updating it for the latest version, and that will be in print for a year before the next x.5 version comes out (and usually this means changing a large amount of content as lots of little things change). Dividing the year's earnings over the time taken to update it means I get a reasonable rate for that time, but certainly not a good one.
I've thought about writing another book (going into more depth on the same subject, and being a Cubase 'expert'), but I remember that it took about a year of spare time to write the first one, and while it's been a reasonable proposition over that time, it was only because it got picked up by the software company's education rep that it went anywhere and reached any kind of 'critical mass' - for about a year it sat and literally sold only copies to students I was teaching (which was the initial reason for writing the book as there was no text book of worth available). Just to be clear, I didn't enforce purchase by the students, I'd say under 10% of them bought the book.
If it sold on Amazon, I would get about £4. I guess I should have gone via Amazon direct? (given that the author mentions 40%?)
Lulu makes about £4-5 on a sale (going on the printing costs that I pay, and me factoring in a bit that I would pay even on a copy that I'm buying myself), whereas Amazon would be taking more like £12-13 going on those numbers.
So, that's why my book isn't available on Amazon - I'd have to sell 3 times as many to make the same money, and that seems unlikely to me. If it was more even, I would sell it on Amazon as well as Lulu as I'm sure I'd get -some- more sales, but not drastically more.
The book is a reasonable seller and a useful source of side income for me, but it's certainly not an 'earner' - I've spend about 3 weeks of very full time work updating it for the latest version, and that will be in print for a year before the next x.5 version comes out (and usually this means changing a large amount of content as lots of little things change). Dividing the year's earnings over the time taken to update it means I get a reasonable rate for that time, but certainly not a good one.
I've thought about writing another book (going into more depth on the same subject, and being a Cubase 'expert'), but I remember that it took about a year of spare time to write the first one, and while it's been a reasonable proposition over that time, it was only because it got picked up by the software company's education rep that it went anywhere and reached any kind of 'critical mass' - for about a year it sat and literally sold only copies to students I was teaching (which was the initial reason for writing the book as there was no text book of worth available). Just to be clear, I didn't enforce purchase by the students, I'd say under 10% of them bought the book.
[1] - http://www.lulu.com/shop/darren-jones/the-complete-guide-to-... (latest version of the book, until Cubase 10 gets released, then it will be superseded)