SO...YOU THINK YOU WANT TO SELF PUBLISH

This is great news!

Many authors take this route and I am not one of them. I don't have the patience nor do I want to do it.

A lot of people do this because they don't want to
1. Wait for their book to come out
2. They want to keep all of the money. After all you do make a lot more if you do it yourself.


Now, I've already said why I don't want to self-publish. Don't get me wrong, I've done it before and it was WAY too much of my time. I didn't know how to format, I didn't know how to create a nice cover and I didn't want to spend time doing it.

Some of you don't mind all of that.

Now, point number two is real tricky. Yep, you do get to keep all of the money but let's just see how much money you get to keep. Since I did self publish a long time ago; I know what I paid.


I would need to pay at least $400 for editing. Anything less and well let's be honest, it will look like you paid less.
I will then need to pay for a cover. As I said, I'm not a graphic designer and can't do it. So that's  at least $400.
I will then need to pay for proofing. PROOFING and EDITING are NOT the same thing. That's gonna cost me at least $200.
I will then need to pay for formatting. I would spend at least $200 but if I learned it would be FREE
I will then need to order some books for myself. Let's say I want reviews. I need at least 20 copies at $5.00 a piece. That's another $100
Oh, but I forgot about mailing them. So that's another $60-70 because it depends on the distance. (who knew that?)
Now I need books for that book release party. Let's buy 100 because I know I will be able to sell those quickly. That is $500

In total I have spent about $1,660 and this is not counting formatting. But if I didn't learn than I would need to spend an additional $200

Now, if I sell my books at $15 a piece, I'll make a whooping $1,500 yippee...oh wait, no I won't. I'm still negative $160 because you can't count profit until after all of the money you spent is accounted for. Now I need to sell at least 10 more books to break even but to do that, I need to buy more books.

And the cycle begins again.

So for those of you that say, you are self publishing, I applaud you but let's be clear you aren't going to start off making a lot of money initially but if you keep at it, you will.