How many books to print if self-publishing?
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So, my son-in-law is a business person and is super interested in helping me self-publish some of my ideas since I am interested in being both author and illustrator. My son-in-law has a lot of business connections (he owns a resort with a book store, for example) and can get my book published for relatively cheap through his company connections.
I was originally going to do a kickstarter but he thinks I can be more successful doing it myself.-
list item What is an optimistic yet semi-realistic number of books to publish if I sell them myself? ( I am pretty well connected with the potential local market.)
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list item Are any of you self-published? How was your experience?
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@chrisaakins I've been a part of 1 book and personally know about 10 people that have self published books. The most successful one was a good friend of mine that had a pretty big personal network and also utilized a friend that has something like 90,000 IG followers to push the book, and he still moved a little less than 500 books total over a years time. I think in total he made about $2,000 in profit. With your connections you might be able to squeak out more profit. I think he was buying the book for about $4 printed and selling it for $12.
I don't know if I'd count Kickstarter out - why couldn't it just be a part of the overall strategy? I feel like it's good to know what kind of demand you can even generate. And local people can support the KS as well.
There's a big initial push of activity then not much after that, so I think you want to load both barrels so to speak and get as much bang as you possibly can so you can build momentum.
Sounds exciting! I think at the very least doing it the way you're thinking would at least result in a profit even if it was a small one.
