The 30,000

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Before I became my own book publisher, I was an owner and publisher of two weekly newspapers.

In the 15 years that I owned and published newspapers, I realized a lifelong dream of being a businessman. I experienced firsthand what it was like to meet deadlines and payrolls, pay health insurance premiums for my family and those of my employees, pay taxes and wonder way too often if we were going to make it through another month.

I’d like to report that our situation always looked good, but it didn’t. Worse, after a patch of bad times, even the good times felt fleeting. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Still, if I were to compare those times with the ones I’ve spent employed for someone else, I wouldn’t trade them at all. The worries were always outweighed by the financial gains and the freedom of being my own man. I’d just choose another vehicle, one that I had more passion for, and one that was more sustainable.

I’m hoping publishing my own books turns out to be that business.

While I came at the newspaper business from a love of writing and information gathering, the business side of it sparked in me a greater interest in calculating and projecting revenue. I love to sit down with a spreadsheet and determine how much money can be made off of any business idea that pops into my head. It’s fun to see yourself becoming an instant millionaire on paper, even if it doesn’t happen in real life.

I’d encourage anyone to go through the exercise. It’s eye opening, at the very least, even if you don’t derive any pleasure in it.

Since I’ve been through it a few times now, I’ve decided to share this process with you, without getting to bogged down in the numbers.

I wrote an earlier post about what I thought I would do with $1 million dollars. Here, I’m going to go with a much smaller amount, one that I feel would be the baseline for measuring my success and sustainability as an author. Meaning, I would be able to provide for my family through just my writing.

Knowing that my annual household expenses are roughly $40,000 a year, and that taxes would need to be factored in on top of that, I’ve set $60,000 as the amount I would need in order to meet all of my financial obligations. With luck, that might leave some discretionary spending, but for right now, we’re talking making ends meet.

Picking Amazon as the main distribution platform (it’s the largest and by far the most successful), and setting $2.99 as the price for my novels (that seems to be about average for self-published books), I net $2.02 with each sale.

So, in order to reach my annual minimum goal of $60,000, I would need to sell nearly 30,000 books a year.

Does that seem like a lot? Based on what I’ve done to date, yes it does. Based on what I believe I should be doing, no it’s not. It all depends on which perspective you decide to take.

Let’s break it down. Rarely does it work this way, but let’s just say I want to know how many books, on average, I would need to sell each day to make it to 30,000. Simple enough. 30,000 divided by 365 roughs out to 82 books a day. Every five or so days I’d need to sell 83 if we wanted to be more precise.

This would break down even further to not quite 3.5 books an hour.

That just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to me, and totally doable.

Not so much, maybe, if I were just planning to write a book or two. I’d have to be growing the reader base every year without any new offerings, which is the hardest way I know to go about it.

Fortunately, I figured out early that each succeeding book actually works as an advertising vehicle for each preceding book, as well as the next in line, so it behooves an author to write more than just one.

In my case, that meant having a series of books in mind. Just from the Age of Restoration series, I can see a total of eight books coming through it.

In addition, I have at least four other book ideas which have popped into my head, one of them within the last week. That’s the thing about writing. As you clear your head of one, others take their place.

Realistically, my wife and I have another 40 years to go on this earth before we’re called home. That would mean publishing at least 38 more books to get us through, if the readership never grew beyond 30,000, and I was unable to parlay the novels into any other income, such as movies, merchandising, speaking engagements or book signings.

Can you see why I like doing this? It just seems totally and completely possible when you look at it over the long haul.

Okay, so there’s another way I would say we should look at things in determining if something is possible. That would be the total number of consumers, or in my case, readers.

I’ve looked at different starting points, but the one I like best is the total membership over at Goodreads. One, because it’s known—as of late July, that number was 20 million. Two, because people who sign up on Goodreads are more than casual readers. They’re looking for new, good books on a regular basis.

Now, I know for a fact that a good number of those Goodreads members are authors. I also know that authors read a lot, too, so I can’t completely discount them, but from my experience, authors are more concerned with writing and promoting their own books than they are with reading everyone else’s works. If my books were Romances or traditional thrillers, I might hedge a little, but they’re not in those genres.

Now, I don’t know how many Goodreads members are not authors, which means I’ll need to make a guess. I’m just going to say that half are straight out readers. 10 million.

Okay. So, I want 30,000 of those 10 million Goodreads members to buy one of my books each year. That means I need 0.3% of the Goodreads readers to get hooked on my books.

Said another way, 99.7% of those readers don’t even need to give me the time of day.

Considering that companies feel that 2-3% penetration for a product within their demographic is needed to be viable, I’m feeling pretty good about my chances.

So, you see, crunching numbers helps me stay positive. Yes, it does have it’s opposite effect sometimes, when I see the numbers I’m actually doing and know that I’m not even doing what should be doable. That’s tough. But knowing my expectations are not high at all, and believing in the domino effect as I do, it’s only a matter of time.

Of course, if 30,000 of you just want to pop up over night, I won’t turn you away.