Profiting by the Numbers

You can certainly write a book for your friends and family, but you will not like the cost of doing that. Publishing profits by the numbers. To do that, you have to ask some questions or do some “market research”. You can do that by printing part of your book and stapling it in the corner! Give copies to several of your trusted friends and family and ask what they think. (You could also post on social media if you like.) Did they enjoy reading that piece of your book? Would they like to read more? Would they spend money on a book like that – you know, the kinds of questions you can ask trusted friends. You need to know the truth. Ask for feed-back. What would make it better? How many people do you think would buy such a book? As in – a lot, or not many? If you learn that maybe your book has a narrow audience, there may be ways to make it better so it would interest more people. If you all agree that many people would want to read your book, then you may be on the right track. When you print a large quantity of books, the cost of each book is less, making your profit more. That’s the kind of thing that profitable publishing depends on. If you don’t ask any of these questions for yourself and you try to make it cost less by only printing a few books, you may be paying more money than you want to for a book that may not sell many copies. On the other hand, if you research well and produce a book of good quality, you may be surprised at the profit you can make! (I must note here that there is no guarantee of sales, so matter who publishes.) The press in this picture is the way it looks when you are on the right track with publishing. You don’t have to go overboard, but print yourself a stock of books. It takes a while to get the word out and your momentum up and it hurts your progress in the middle of that to run out of books. Happy Publishing!