How Much Money Do Authors Make?

Are you thinking of writing a nonfiction book and wondering if you're gonna make any money on it? Or maybe you've just resolved yourself to the fact that you'll make nothing stick around. This video is for you. Hey, I'm Julie the book broad, an award winning author and the founder of a fantastic company called Book Launchers. We're your fabulous professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and sell nonfiction books that grow your business and make you money. Authors making money on nonfiction books. This is such a hard topic because the answer is truly, every single book and every single author is different. It depends. It depends on your price point, your distribution, your royalty choices, how you're selling it, what format it's in, and on and on and on. At my last count, which was a little while ago now, my first book, More Than Cash Flow, put money in my pocket only from book sales more than $85,000. But that's since 20, my first year was obviously the biggest and best payouts. I think I had at least one five figure check and a few that were high. Four figure, like around $7,000 per check. So that was super fun. My second book sales, the new brand you are nowhere near as impressive. And at my last count the number was somewhere around $10,000. And that book came out in 2016. But truly that one. Other than about 25 podcast interviews and some email marketing, I did very little to promote it. I respect our clients privacy, so I'm fine telling you my numbers, but. But I can't disclose details about our clients. But I can tell you that of the last 30 book launches, we have three that I estimate will do better than my first book. Most of the books are going to be in the mid range. But again, and this is so important, almost none of my clients are relying on the book revenue for their primary source of income. They wrote the book to support the other things they're doing. They have other goals and reasons for writing the book. But here's an important point for you. In every case where a book is selling high volumes right now, at the start that we've been involved in, the author has a an audience on social media that's hungry and engaged or a newsletter list of people who are ready with credit card in hand to buy the book when it's announced. So if you have an audience and they're engaged, unless you write a book that misses the mark for them completely, you're going to make money on your book. One of our clients had a newsletter list of only 1,000 people, but that was all it took for a pretty big launch with 500 books sold, multiple high rankings on Amazon categories and some great reviews, and momentum that got great bookstore distribution and many big sales months after that. 500 copies sold in a month, by the way, means you're probably getting a single check or single payment into your bank account of $3,000, give or take, depending on pricing and distribution choices. 500 Books is not that hard to sell if you have any sort of audience at all and you follow a few proven steps for actually connecting and communicating with that audience. But you're sitting there thinking, I don't have an audience, so am I up a river without paddle? No. You still have two options. Number one, your book starts slow but builds momentum as you work really hard to get it in front of your ideal readers. And if your book is great and people who do get it, read it and love it, it will pick up steam and grow from there. If this is you, you could set 500 or 1000 books sold in 12 month period as your goal and be trying to increase your book sales every month as you go. The other option is you have a strong network of people who have your ideal reader in their audience and they support you by promoting your book in their newsletters, webinars, social media events and other medium that they have. And if you don't know them, you're working really hard to get in front of other people's audiences. You do this through podcast interviews, speaking engagements, webinars, media attention, live events, live appearances. When you do this, it's hard to know how well you'll do, but the right person endorsing your book can lead to hundreds of book sales. My first book launch that I already told you about, I had a newsletter list of 10,000 people, which easily led to more than a thousand book sales. But my friends Nick and Tom of Rockstar Real Estate helped me sell a a few thousand copies as well by marketing to their audience. That combined with other smaller audiences that promoted my book, helped me sell more than 3,000 print books in my launch week and built on it from there. In all three situations, there's a significant amount of work that the author must do. Your book doesn't just go on up on Amazon and sell. So in the first situation, you have an audience and you've probably worked really hard to build that audience that you have today. In the second situation, you're working hard to get in front of people who, which means you're doing at least one thing every day to grow your book sales. And in number three, you've been either working hard to build relationships or you're working hard now to build those relationships to find those readers. So how much money are you going to make as an author? I have no idea. If you don't have an existing audience and you're not ready to invest time, money, energy into finding your audience, you're probably not going to make very much as an author. In almost every case I've looked at, I can tell you the more time and energy you invest into creating a well positioned, high quality book that focuses on what's in it for the reader, the better you set yourself up for success. But ultimately your success is going to be a direct result of what you've done to build an audience and what you're willing to do to make it happen when your book is out. Being an author is a business. You have to know your market, hire the right team, invest in that business before you get a return. And that means you're taking some risk. And you have to market that product to find buyers. And the authors that really win are doing that and using their book to make money in other ways, like speaking gigs, lead generation, media attracting capital, and on which, by the way, I talked about in this video, which will appear right here in about 15 seconds. Just wait for it. You can make money as an author. Some authors make way more than I've made, that is for sure, but you can also make almost nothing. So I think to answer this question of whether you'll make money as an author, you need to look in the mirror and ask that person how committed they are to writing a book readers want and then telling them about it, because that is going to directly impact whether you make money as a nonfiction author or not. If you like this video, smash that thumbs up button and leave a comment to let me know what you think about authors making money on books. Oh, and check this out, there it is. And for contrast reasons to write a book that aren't about money right here, go ahead and click on one of these videos so we can keep hanging out. I'm already so excited to see you again.