Coffee heat rising

Profit & Loss in the Micropublishing Biz

Using the new Word templates that my little micropublishing business contrived to purchase for a modest price (one was under $50 for a permanent, no-holds-barred license!), I now have hard-copy layout for Slave Labor done and in PDF for the printer (I hope). Friday I met with the beloved graphic artist, who thought the result was pretty decent. He’s going to do a wrap-around cover for the desired trim size, accommodating the present cover art and cover-4 copy. Then it’s off to a local print-on-demand outfit.

If your bookoid is low on images, or if you’re willing to print the images in black & white, the cost for print-on-demand services is amazingly low. To put the whole thing together and perfect-bind it will run $3.33/copy for 10 copies. Per-copy price stays the same at print runs of 100 and 1,000.

This is good, because we would all be mightily surprised if Slave Labor sold even ten copies, to say nothing of enough to create an economy of numbers.

Slave Labor, being my sandbox project, is costing something but not much: I traded out the e-book design in exchange for editing the designer’s upcoming book on marketing e-books. So the only cost has to do with the cover design and with the experiment in Wyrd layout — I did have to pay something for the template. But not much.

How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, the diet guide & cookbook, is now in what we might call rough-draft layout. All the content is poured into the template, and now I need to go through and polish all the formatting, write the back-page bio and the cover copy, figure out how to make the table of contents function work, and make one version for e-book emanation and another for print-on-demand.

We might call 30 Pounds the stage-two sandbox. Every time I work on this stuff, I discover something new. No doubt at all that mounting these things in digital and hard-copy print will add up to a marathon learning experience.

So I regard the costs for these two books as tuition for Micropublishing U. Once I’ve done a couple of the things, it should be pretty easy to put the rest of them online.

And I do have a “rest of them”!

As soon as Slave Labor goes off to the printer and 30 Pounds goes to Amazon and to the printer, I’ll start working on packaging the eighteen books that Fire-Rider has lent itself to serializing. These I hope to put online at the rate of one every week or two.

And that will put 23 titles (including the three that have emanated from real publishing houses) on Amazon  under my name. How amazing IS that, anyway?

The people at Romance Writers of America claim you start to make a noticeable income after you’ve posted about eight titles — of any genre, fiction or nonfiction. So they claim. We’ll soon see if that’s true.

I had to stop working on the Boob Book and the Revived First (Awful!) Novel when an exceptionally difficult project came in from a new client. Lordie! It truly is the single worst, MOST difficult editorial project I’ve ever had the misery to work on. And as  usual, Author is a graduate student with no concept of what other people’s time is worth. She wants it back in 10 days. I figured I could get through my part in four or five days by reading 28+ pages a day; then pass it along to The Kid to do the References section.

Well. Each 28-page segment took five or six hours to plow through. By the time I was done, my brain cells were effing FRIED. One of the reasons the formatting has gotten done over the past week or two is that I simply could not do anything that required more than manual fiddling.

Ugh. How do I need to have this enterprise fly? Let me count the ways!

And it doesn’t have to fly very high. Hell, I’d be on Easy Street if it earned $30,000 a year, to say nothing of 30 grand a month.

To replace the teaching income, I’d need to net $1200 a month on book sales. To replace what I’m making on editorial work would require net $833 a month. Two thousand thirty-three bucks a month, about $2440 gross: how hard can this be?

By God. If it requires cranking out 5,000-word Fifty Shades of Gray knock-offs from now until I shuffle into the grave, I’ll do it!