In this day and age of self-employment and working from home, it is safe to say we would all love to make a living as a creative. I feel like so many of us would dream of getting by only our art, but it simply isn’t that simple. Trust me, if it were, I would not be sitting here writing you an article outlining exactly how I personally make money.
For the first article in this series, we will be going over how to make money through book sales.
When I say book sales, you likely think of book sales in a bookstore. Odds are, those books are traditionally published. Of course there are exceptions, which we can get into later, but for the most part, these bookstores, especially chain ones, only carry books published through a publishing house. This is, from my understanding, the most lucrative way to get published, but it is also the most difficult one to get into. Usually you need to land yourself an agent, which is hard enough on its own, and then you need to pay your agent to pitch your work to editors and publishers, negotiate deals for you, and work as your go between to the rest of the publishing world. Personally, I have not yet broken into that world, so I will not be writing about it now. Should I ever manage to land a contract, then I will write about it, but for now, we can focus on what I personally do.
The other big way that we think of, at least for those who want to make physical books, is to self- publish. As I am sure you can imagine, this has both its upsides and downsides. On one hand, anyone can do it. On the other hand, anyone can do it. This, to me at least, means that anyone can get their books in front of a reader, which is fantastic for anyone just starting out and just really wants their books in the world, but also means that there is no guarantee of quality. That means that it is trickier for a reader to tell if the book is even worth picking up. The market is also heavily oversaturated, which makes it even harder to tell if a book is worth a reader’s time. The responsibility falls on you to make a reader believe that your work is, indeed, worth picking up.
However, despite all these setbacks, there are still options for you! I chose the self-publishing route myself, so I can help you out when it comes to getting started. This can be a way to make some decent money, so don’t let my cynicism discourage!
As anyone can imagine, there are plenty of companies that exist that want thousands of dollars to format, publish, and print your work for you. I know that I saw more than enough of these ‘indie’ publishing houses. I am sure that there are some decent ones out there; I simply did not do the digging into it.
No, I chose the ‘do everything yourself’ option. For this, there are a number of options. The most popular one by far is Amazon, or KDP, (Kindle Direct Publishing.) I did my own research for this before I sat down to choose one. I would highly recommend doing your own research for this as well. I chose Amazon for the distribution mostly. As a Canadian, I have a difficult time breaking into American marketplaces. According to the research I have done for this particular article, there are a few other options nowadays that seem to be decent for writers. My next step, personally, is to try breaking into the Barnes and Noble Press, since it is now available for out of the US citizens.
Once again, once I try that out I will write on that for you, but from what I have heard, it is a way to get into Barnes and Noble physical stores. Once again, if you are not American, then this may not have all that much appeal for you, but will see.
Now, shall we discuss the one thing I actually DO have some experience in? Let’s talk about KDP.
This, for someone absolutely new, is basically just a way to produce your book. It does not do any marketing or the like, but it does have some tools that I still utilize. The biggest, or at least the handiest one I’ve found, is the reformatting process. They offer you a zip file download with all of the common book sizes with the margins and a few common fonts ready to go. For myself, I simply copy and pasted my chapters from where I was working on them in my word doc or the like, and copied it into the template, and filled in the chapter titles and such as I went. My one word of caution would be that it is done thru Microsoft Word, so those who use Apple devices may have a bit of a restriction there.
Another thing they have, another blessing or curse depending on the perspective, is the cover creation process. I find it loads slowly, but once it is open, it is so simple! I think it has a tutorial component as well, but I skipped it because I found it so straightforward. The major downside that I found is that it limits creative options if you do not already have a cover prepared for your work. I had an image prepared and simply slapped text onto, but I also have a friend who had an entire cover and uploaded it as is. Others have used stock photos and the built in tool and it turns out fine, that all comes down to your personal skill. This is also where it becomes handy to know a visual artist or two.
So, let’s jump to the part where you have your book completed. Say it’s uploaded, and live and all that. Now, here is the tricky part. You need to market your work. I am sure that you can simply get it into the hands of family members and, MAYBE, a few close friends, but beyond that? It takes some work.
So many articles I read while trying to sort this out for myself talked about the importance of finding your audience and demographic. I don’t know about you, but I found it incredibly difficult to find my demographic until, well, I started making some sales. For this reason, I ended up branching out to all sorts of social media.
The first one I tried was Twitter. I do not recommend this one. I found that the writing community on Twitter is a bunch of authors all sitting around saying ‘buy my book!’ and I became another voice, unheard. If you already have a decent Twitter presence, then it could work for you, but I never had any luck.
The second one I tried was, of course, Facebook. I found a surprisingly large overlap with my audience and the type of people that are on Facebook, which is to say, middle aged moms. (Sorry to my mum if you’re reading this…) For this, I made a Facebook page, and sent an invite out into basically everyone on my list. I don’t really delete people off there solely because I don’t use Facebook much, but it turned into an incredibly fast growing, incredibly easily. Naturally, those who cared about my books and what I wrote would share my work, and others in their circles saw and shared it. On there, I only really post ‘new book on x date!’ and some other sorts of ‘book is out now!’ as well as some promotional posts when my book reached a bookstore. It sounds like a lot, but truth be told, it is only loud around book releases and shortly after. These posts also ended up on my usually quiet personal Facebook story, and due to the way FB sends notifications if someone posted for the first time in a long time, it drew even more traffic to my works.
My last, and easily most time consuming marketing tool, is Instagram. I also had found there is an overlap between readers and cat lovers because, well, think about it! What I usually did was post a pic of my cat every few days, then casually would have my books in the background, as well as linked in my bio. Then, whenever I had something like a new book coming out, or a cover release, or the like, I would utilize the build in tools like countdowns, and would promote the works constantly, then go back to my usual sort of content for a while.
Depending on who you talk to, things like newsletters and mailing lists are also common. I do not know how effective they are. I tried doing that very briefly, but simply did not find much interest in it. That ended up being just fine for me- it became one less thing to need to write! I imagine if one had a different demographic of readers it may go differently, this is just how it went for me.
One last thing I briefly tried was a website. Every article that I read around the time talked all about how important it is, but for me, it simply did not draw all that much attention. The Facebook page ended up acting more or less like a website for me.
This is about all I have to say about novel publishing and writing for now! See you in part 2- Non- novel forms of publishing.
-Bailey
Bailey Mikkelson has written numerous novels, streams on Twitch, and has a lovely Instagram feed!