How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing

I have written and self-published a couple of books [1] - one which is effectively a practical textbook for the course I teach (A level music technology in the UK, for 16-18 year olds), and one which sprung out of a course I taught locally for a number of schools, using Sibelius 7, where the user interface changed in a similar way to the change to Word 2007's "ribbon" interface.

The A-level textbook took me about a year of all my spare time to get it together. It's the best part of 500 pages long, and covers practical and music theory elements to a level that will allow anyone to be competent enough to complete the coursework to a good standard, and more importantly to give them a good, broad grounding in the subject. It was my passion for the year it took to create it, and I learned loads (including how to use Indesign, which I bought to allow me to do a good job on the layout of the book). But the biggest thing I learned was that writing the book wasn't the most important thing, it was getting it in front of the right people. I hadn't even thought about this until I completed the book, and then found that to get it to the right people it would cost me far more than I'd reasonably expect to earn from what is a fairly niche publication (I was quoted £2000 to mail-shot all the heads of music at schools that teach music technology).

I have updated the book twice (to version 7 and 8 of the software), each taking the equivalent of over a week of full time work to update screenshots, workflow and procedures, plus add in new information as appropriate.

It was only the chance connection with the education department of the software house who makes the main software I used in the book (Cubase) that led to any significant increase in the number of sales, but it's still nowhere near what the author of this article is making; I have had one really good month in September (start of the year, and it was promoted in a newsletter), which has outdone the figure above, but usually I'll sell maybe 1 or 2 books. This is all done via Lulu, with printed versions of the book, and I've elected not to do it as an e-book as I feel the cat will be out of the bag and it'd be torrented everywhere (particularly as I set the price at £24.95, feeling that it was worth an hour's private tuition cost for such a large amount of info).

While it's nice to have a small income from this each month, it's certainly not something that works out well at an hourly rate - it would have to sell in the high hundreds to achieve this.

By contrast, the book on Sibelius has sold much better as I've sold it via Amazon as well as via Lulu. The reasoning for this was simple, really - I did it as a test to see how different sales would be via Amazon, and they've been much larger (about 7:1). But this is countered by the payments; I actually put the price of the book up before selling it because otherwise I would have seen almost nothing from an Amazon sale. At the moment the book is £7.95, and I see just over £1. For the other book, if I sold it via Amazon, I would see £3 from the £24.95 sale price (compared with about £12 via a Lulu sale). I'm not sure if I would get 4x as many sales from the Cubase book if sold via Amazon (particuarly as I think most of the sales are driven via recommendation rather than browsing), but as I said before, this is not an area I even gave a moment's thought to until I completed the book.

[1] - http://musictechtuition.com/books/

I was the editor and publisher of this tome of a shitpost:

https://www.amazon.com/Hypersphere/dp/132978152X

http://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/hypersphere/paperback/product-22517627.html

The 4chan /lit/ board wrote Hypersphere as a collaborative writing project but someone needed to actually publish it, something I undertook as a project, I must have spent something like 20 hours editing it (plus way more helping to write it). It has so far sold 650 copies, most of which I sold with a profit of less than a dollar in profit per book since it didn't feel right selling it for a profit to the people that helped write it.

I've since bumped the price and I'm getting something like ~$2.5 a book, and it's currently selling 5-10 copies a month. The Amazon price is far higher than the Lulu one (which was the publishing platform of choice) since they obviously want a cut.

The biggest pro of the project was that it helped me understand how to self-publish: I've given my partner two physical poetry collections about her since: something that was pretty appreciated.

Mark my words this won't last.

It has happened to Itunes, Play Store, Steam, New Grounds and basically every website that let's users upload content for sale / ad money. I call it the fundamental problem of user generated content.

At the current expected payoff, soon every schmuck will be uploading his book. Quality won't matter. Eventually the torrent of content for consumers will be more than consumers can hope to consume, and the expected passive income for a given creative person will go to zero.

The thing all these sites have in common is that they promised to be a meritocracy for creative types. You simply make your work and then reviews come in and its judged fairly. Better content gets more money. No need to revert to tricks like paying a PR firm to market it. The reality is that when there is money to be made, people will rush in until there is no longer money to be made. Our mechanisms to separate the wheat from the chaff don't scale nearly as well as the economics of digital content distribution networks.

Don't believe me? Go to Steam Greenlight. Tell me how many games look interesting. Tell me how many uploads are happening per day. Can you keep up with it? Go to the app store. How much stuff is in the new section? How much looks good.

But 1-on-1 advising doesn’t scale.

In the right market, it doesn't have to scale. I know some wealthy people (in NYC) who have dropped a lot of money to get their kids into Ivy League schools. It is a must for those people and I've seen them drop high dollar for application advice and prep. With any kind of success, the same people get referred over and over again in the same circles.

As an aside, I loosely know someone who went to prison for a white collar crime. He too hired a high dollar consultant (former prison officer, IIRC) to advise him on how to prepare for, adjust to and survive in prison.

Of course consulting to wealthy people isn't passive, but the return on effort is hard to beat, once you're in the right referral circle.

Self-publishing over publishing, sure, but this is very based on the content of the book. As someone who actually interacts with College Confidential and the like, an educated book on the subject making money doesn't surprise me in the slightest, but it takes knowledge and time to write. You can't just write whatever you want - the author was lucky enough to know about a subject in a favorable market - parents and kids who are Ivy-obsessed will easily pay for a book on the subject given how many small in's and out's there are in the process.

Edit Note: More info on why the market is favorable for the subject