As mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m attempting to publish 52 chapbooks throughout 2022. You can read a little more about it here. Today, let’s talk a little about the first cab off the rank:

Available in ebook from all great bookstores right now and in print next week, but you can get it as a patron bonus if you sign up for my Eclectic Projects Patreon.

Now, for those who like such things, a peek behind the scenes.

Stress Testing An Idea

Following up on yesterday’s thoughts on “Just In Case” publishing, I thought it might be useful to peek below the surface and look at what monetising a project like this really looks like (while also stress testing some of the assumptions in Dean Wesley Smith’s challenge, which provoked this challenge)

From my perspective, there’s three core costs associated with a publishing project:

• The cost of actually writing and editing the work.
• The cost of getting the book to market.
• The cost of keeping the book for sale and marketing it to readers.

WRITING AND EDITING COSTS

My writing and editing cost are pretty much negligible, since this is a reprint of an existing story I produced back in 2010 and it’s already gone through editorial three times — once for the original release, once when it was reprinted in The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror that year, and once again when it went into The Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales. 

I included a fairly meaty author’s note to the end of the story — something more substantial than the brief note you’d get in the Collection — but that was a relatively quick addition I could produce inside of a half-hour.

Unlike a traditional publisher, I don’t have to pay an advance for this book, so my writing and editing coss (assuming the $50 an hour rate I’d normally hire myself out as for freelance work) is basically $25. It may not be perfect, but the cost of getting it perfect isn’t really justified for this particular project.

(I should probably note here that all costs are listed in Australian dollars, so it will look slightly different if you’re working in another country)

PRODUCTION COSTS

My core philosophy with indie publishing, right from the beginning, has revolved around keeping costs down. If I can find a cheaper way to do things, from cover design to layout, I’m perfectly happy to invest in a high-cost tool so long as it saves me time and defrays the long-term expenses over the length of it’s use.

All of which means that producing a chapbook like this is relatively inexpensive. 

My two hard coss are ISBNS and Cover Art, which adds up to $9.60 (two ISBNS from a pack of 100) and $4 (two pieces of stock art used in design, acquired as part of a year-long subscription).

Everything else is something of a soft cost, especially compared to traditional publishing.

For example, I use Vellum for ebook and print layouts, which comes with a hefty upfront price tag ($359 Aus), but streamlines the layout process immensely. It’s also a cost that’s defrayed with every additional release—Briar Day is about the 40th book I’ve used Vellum for, which puts the actual cost around $8.95 per book (and getting cheaper-per-book with every release).

My actual math when I weighed up purchasing the software (and a Mac to use it) worked on the theory I’d use Vellum for about 200 books over the length of my license. So lets call it $3 for the sake of argument.

I have an Adobe subscription for cover designs, which is probably my major expense. My plans about $45 a month, but like Vellum it’s defrayed because I use it for so many projects (and, now, my day job and freelance gigs). Most of the layout work for this was done in December, where I used Adobe for four projects this month, so let’s call it $11.25 (Truthfully, the utility of the subscription is greater than that, but I don’t want to mess around with the math)

The other major expense is time, so lets call it an hour for layout (would have been faster, but I was picking the format for the entire series) and another two hours to do the cover (ebook is fast, print cover is slow). 

So that’s another $150 that needs to be made up to break even, and brings my total production expenses to $164.25 (And I could, conceivably, get that down further if I were pressed to do so).

DISTRIBUTION AND MARKETING COSTS

Most distributors who deal in ebooks will work on a royalty-scare arrangement, which means they’ll let you set up and offer a book for nothing. This is the big shift compare to traditional publishing, where you’re in competition for sparse resources, and your book can’t be found unless it’s physically on shelves.

But I’m doing a print edition, which does come with some set-up costs ($50 through Ingram Spark, the POD service attached to Ingram Distribution). Fortunately, I got that fee waived because I’m a member of an organisation that gets free set-up, and a member of another organisation that gets free alterations to the book after set-up (ordinarily a $25 fee). 

I’m a member of both these orgs primarily for these benefits, and they cost me about $160 bucks (but together they shave the cost off approximately 120 set-ups or revisions a month, which makes membership a steal). So let’s call my distribution fees about $3, which is what it normally works out as.

The only other cost is ordering print books I might want to have on hand for sale, and to supply folks who have signed up to Patreon at the “I like print books” level. So let’s call that 10 copies at this stage, which will cost me about $5.50 a piece.

Which brings my total production cost to $58, plus whatever I spend marketing this book, which will likely consist of “making the occasional blog post” and “putting it into the occasional newsletter promo.”

Lets call that another $20, to account for the books’ share of the fees I pay to my ebook delivery partner I use at Brian Jar and for my newsletter.

BREAKING EVEN

So my total costs including time, marketing, and production is about $267.25. That’s a mere fraction of the thousands I’d be investing to do a similar project through a trad pub system, but still a daunting break-even point for an ebook.

Returns on an ebook sale will vary depend on where it’s sold, which distributor sells it, and what international exchange rates are doing at the time, but my rules of thumb run something like this: 

• A short story ebook sold at .99 cents will earn about .40 cents Australian, which means I’d need to sell 669 copies of this story to break even.
• A short story ebook sold at $3.99 Australian (Brain Jar’s standard chapbook price) will earn about $2.50 Australian, which means I’d need to sell  107 copes to break even.
• A print copy selling at $14.99 through Ingram or Amazon will earn about $2.80, which means I need to sell about 95 copies to break even.
• Any ebook I sell direct through my website will earn around $3.50, so I’d only need to sell 76 to break even.
• But any print copy I sell direct earns around $5, which means I’d only need to sell 54 books to break even (when I’ve talked about direct sales of print being a big game changer, this is why, and it’s a reminder I really need to set up a store for direct sales of these).

Am I going to sell any of these quantities on the day of release? Almost certainly not. I’ve been tracking short story sales for a few years now, and for an author with my platform I figure I’ll sell about 10 to 20 in the first year, then settle into a nice rhythm of selling 3 to 5 copies of a stand-alone story per year in various formats. 

These sale quantities remains relatively consistent whether I price at 99 cents or 3.99, but the higher price point gives me the option of doing short-term sales, which help generate leads down the line, so I default to the $2.99 US/$3.99 AUS price point for shorts because the break-even point is just shy 1/6th of the sales.

Truthfully, the book will likely sale in a whole range of different sales points, so I’m going to assume the break even point is somewhere between 120 and 150 copies. That may still seem daunting, but you’ve got to remember my perspective on all this is shaped by being involved in digital publishing for over a decade…and my RPG releases from 2005 still sell despite being aimed at people playing a version of D&D that’s about to become four editions out of date. 

I’m 45 in 2022, and if we assume that I keep writing for another twenty years and my profile doesn’t really change, this release will almost certainly hit the break-even point and start making a profit right as I hit retirement age. But here’s the thing: profiles change, and one of the big changes is how many leads you’re generating for your work. 

Every short story in your backlist serves as a potential lead generator, and it can do it in multiple different ways. It’s a product you can run a sale on, and draw people to a particular site. It’s a book you can give away as a lead magnet and get people onto your newsletter list. It’s a book people might stumble over while searching for a particular topic, and if they read it…well, you may note the subtle ways it points people towards one of my collections or my Patreon if they’d like to see more tales.

The other thing to keep in mind: value accretes over time and through connection. Even something as simple as blogging the process of doing 52 chapbooks changes the way they’re valued, just as seeing a row of them all lined up together will make them more attractive. I’ve made a note to visit my sales assumptions for the year again at the end of the year, to see how they’ve changed as a result of the challenge.

(which makes this a good time to remind folks: Briar Day is available in ebook from all great bookstores right now, or via the Eclectic Projects store using the details below).

Of course, there’s also value to doing this that’s beyond the monetary returns, but that’s a conversation for a different release 🙂