I went and updated my profit-and-loss statements over the weekend, and noticed that I brought in as much from my RPG publishing books as I did the more recent Brain Jar Press releases. It’s tracking to do the same this financial year, although I’ll be doing my damnedest to keep that from being the case in the first half of 2019.
All this means, in essence, the work I did over a decade ago is paying off more than than the more recent fiction work, simply because the sum total of effort I put in was checking the sales report. All the hard work was done in 2006, when those books came out, while the Brain Jar books required writing, layout, upload, etc.
I’m making a note of this because I’m revisiting my business plan for Brain Jar over the next month, figuring out how I’d like to adjust things based upon the last twelve months.
There’s a bunch of challenges associated with indie publishing these days, but one of the biggest when you’re starting out is this: it’s easy to get sucked into someone’s business model without realising that it’s a business model.
You see someone’s approach to making it–rapid release, advertising, going wide, going exclusive–and it seems like that’s what you need to do in order to succeed as a indie publisher. There’s a lot of terms and ideas that get thrown around: rapid release; exclusive versus wide; read-through and the ROI from advertising on AMS or Facebook; finding yourself a hungry market and writing to the reader expectations.
In isolation, none of those things are right, and none of them are wrong. People have built successful business models based upon what’s important to them and what they want out of self-publishing. The trick is learning to look at what they’re doing and extrapolating outwards–what can I learn and apply to my own business model, instead of how can I replicate this exactly, under the assumption that one size fits all.
The thing that I keep coming back to, when I think about how I’m going to earn money through Brain Jar Press, is that profit I’m still earning from RPG publishing even though I left that particular chapter of my writing life in a messy state.
