YouTube Channel: @RyanDanielMoran

How much money do you think best selling authors make?

$1 million. I just got word that my book 12 months to 1 million crossed, 50,000 copies sold in its first year, which is really, really good in the book world. So I've always wondered how much money gets made when somebody sells a lot of books. So in this video I'm going to answer that question for you by telling you exactly how much money I've made and, and some of the other hidden costs you might not see and benefits that come from having a bestselling book. So let me get right down to the bottom line number to start this video off. The total amount of money that I've made from selling 50,000 copies of my bestselling book is.

$0.

I just broke even on my expenses that I incurred from getting this book done. I spent 18 months writing the book, editing the book, perfecting the book, getting ready to promote the book. I had hard costs in that and I just broke even on my investment. Now those numbers will improve over time, but what most people don't see is that the book world is a really old strange industry that is about 10 years behind the rest of the world. So when I get paid my royalties from my downloads and from my books sold, they're six months behind. I'm getting royalty checks from sales that happened six months ago. I'm not getting a check from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, I'm getting checks from the publisher. And so I just got enough checks to be able to pay for my time. And if you think about that, that means that it took me two and a half years to break even. Makes you wonder, why does anybody even write a book? Because after all, unless you're Tim Ferriss or you're James Clear and you sell 5 million copies of a book within your first two years, the numbers on books just don't make sense. And it definitely doesn't make sense to spend that amount of blood, sweat and tears on a project that isn't gonna make you a ton of money. That's what most people think anyway. But if you look behind the curtain a little bit, there's more to the story. After all, what most people think writing a book is about is getting credibility or doing just enough to get a bestseller status so that you get speaking gigs and you can tell people, bestselling offer, taking the stage, right? It's just a bunch of ways to improve your status. Now the people who do that end up failing because they think that this little bump in status is going to increase their speaking fee. People are smarter than that now. People realize that you can game the best seller list. People realize that you can write a crappy thing, throw it up on Amazon and put it in some obscure category, hit number one for five minutes and call yourself a best selling author. Nobody believes that anymore. What most people don't want to face in business or publishing or podcasting is that most things take a tremendous amount of work up front and you don't see dividends for that for many years to come. So right now my book is selling about 5,000 copies a month. Sales are actually higher now than they were when we launched because we have like 2000 reviews over Audible and Amazon. I'm very proud of that. Thank you to all those of you who read and reviewed the book. It means the absolute world to me. It's starting to rank in Audible and we're getting word of mouth and people are starting to talk about it. So sales are going up, up. And since it's now pacing 5,000 sales a month or so, I've now cleared all of my expenses and my royalties are higher now because of the contract that I have with my publisher. So what most people have is they get a lot of money up front with their publisher and then they get a very, very small amount forever. And I mean like 5 or 6% of the book. I did the opposite. I took no money upfront and I fronted the costs to have this done. And I get a larger percentage of the sales on the back end and it goes up the more that I sell because I knew that I was willing to commit several years to this project. Several years of going on podcasts, several years of going and making videos about it. I knew this book would be relevant for many years. I knew that I wanted to write the book that could change lives for a decade. So I took that risk of taking no money up front, but taking a larger share of the profits in the back end. So my profits are actually higher per book now than they were in the first year. Now, I don't know the exact numbers of how much money I make per book because there's agent fee and publishing fee and Amazon takes their cut. And like, I don't know how it breaks down, but up until now it's been about a dollar per book that I got paid. I think that over the next year it goes up to two or $3 a book. No one is getting rich making a dollar or two per book. But if the book sustains doing 5,000 sales per month and I'm making three bucks a book. $15,000 a month is pretty good for a book that I hope to be relevant for the next 10 years. Most people, again, are simply not willing to do the two and a half years of grunt work that it takes in order to get it to that point. And by the way, my grunt work isn't over. Like, we just hit the one year mark and I'm like, all right, let's do an anniversary push. Let me go on every podcast and talk about the book. Let me, like, what new marketing campaign can we come up with to be able to run ads to the book? What can we do to keep this fresh and on people's minds? Those are the kinds of things that I'm thinking about. To have something that is going to sell for a very long time. And that is the mindset that helps you win with business or building a YouTube channel or investing when you can say, look, I know I'm not going to see returns from this for the next two years, but I know that over two years this is gonna compound. That's when you win. Let me give you another example.

So this is a product that I developed with my team. It's a product called On Switch. This is a nootropic that we haven't even officially launched this yet. We just started taking like pre sales and getting feedback from potential customers. We started developing this like six months ago. It took six months of development with our supplier and then pre sales and we've made no money. We haven't even paid for our costs yet. The thing is, is there's a chance that we really nail this and it becomes a perennial seller and we put a thousand people on auto ship at 100 bucks a month and now we have $100,000 a month of business recurring and that's a million dollar business. Plus Amazon sales and wholesale and all that other stuff. But I know that it's going to take two to two and a half years of, you know, I don't know if that's going to work out in order to have a shot of having something that is really successful. Which is why it's so important to only choose the projects that you genuinely have an affinity for you genuinely have a desire to do. This was a win for me when I wrote it. I loved writing this book. I wanted to claw my eyes out sometimes, but I loved the process of writing this book. I love every time somebody posts a picture of them holding this book on social media. I screenshot and share the negative reviews on my Instagram. I love this process. I love making YouTube videos. Some of my favorite things to do. I loved the process of making this. I love my students inside of the capitalism incubator. And you know, there are plenty of businesses that I could start that I wouldn't enjoy. However, I will give a disclosure that I had ulterior motives to writing the book and I knew that it would be successful whether or not I ever made any money from selling the book, and that was that. I wanted the book to open up other opportunities for me. Specifically, one of my favorite things is being interviewed on other people's podcasts and speaking on other people's stages. And I knew that if I wrote a great book that I would get more speaking opportunities. And I knew that I would get invited on more podcasts. And I knew that I could start a new podcast called the road to 1 million where I'm literally documenting the stories of people who read the book and are starting businesses and I'm mentoring them through it. Like that stuff is fun for me and that makes it a win. Regardless of what happens with the book. That's the business model behind most best selling campaigns. I have experience in the past being really busy doing things that I don't want to do so that I can have a result that then will give me freedom. That's a fool's errand. The reality is by you doing what you want to do with your time now, you're able to give the effort that success requires. And when you do that, then everything that you touch can be successful. And if it's not, you don't beat yourself up over it because you had fun in the process. I'm already thinking about my next book. Even though this book hasn't been financially profitable yet, it's it will be. And I'm seeing a lot of feedback and results that have made it worth it regardless. But if you think writing books is the way to making passive income and wealth, that's not the case. There has to be some other reason for giving this the effort that it requires. Because I am not getting rich making two bucks a sale. And by the way, most people don't ever cross 50,000 sales of a book. So I'm already fortunate. More fortunate than most people with that amount of sales, making no money, making no profit, and yet I'm already thinking about writing my second because I enjoyed it so much. However, my next book will probably be self published. I went the traditional publishing route because I wanted the exposure in Barnes and Noble and airports and all that stuff, but I published it in May 2020, right when quarantine was happening and the entire publishing world went on pause. And so I saw all the momentum that I got without having the distribution to Barnes and Noble and airports and those other retail stores. So I'll probably go self publish for the next one because I would immediately go from $1 per sale to more like $10 per sale. And I know that I can have the same success from the first book because I marketed it so hard and did the tour and put my heart into this to make it worth people's $18. So that's the truth behind having a best selling book. There's not that much money in it. You have to have some other long term vision for what that will lead to. However, if you have that, you also put yourself in a position to in the long tail over three years it being profitable enough for it to be really meaningful. At least that's been my experience because I was willing to spend 18 months writing a book that I knew would change tens of thousands of lives. I gave it the attention that it deserved to make it a bestseller and to ensure that two years after publication it would be profitable. It would make tens of thousands of dollars a month. But I would have never been able to do that if I was just hell bent on on selling more books. I hope you found this video valuable because this is the mindset that it requires to build a successful business. If you have that kind of mindset and you want some help building a business that you can sell using the same model we talk about in this book, the grind, the growth and the gold. Getting clear on your vision, launching profitably and then using resources to help you get to seven figures and build a business that can be sold for a lot of money. That's what we help people do inside of our program called the Capitalism Incubator. And that's where my team and I work along entrepreneurs to help them get clear on that idea. Launch profitably and then introduce them to opportunities and to people who can help ensure that they have the foundation for that seven figure business they can sell. If you want more about that, you can find it at capitalism.com inc. That's capitalism.com inc. We'd love to work with you on getting your seven figure vision into reality. It's going to take you a full year and you're going to want to quit and you're going to wonder when your payday is coming. And the longer you can see that vision into the future, the higher the chances of your success. Just like writing a book. By the way, if you're watching this video and you're like, what is this book about anyway? You can download the Cliff Notes for it for free over@capitalism.com 12 the number 12. You can get the Cliff Notes and some case studies from this book and then decide if you want to actually go out, get the book and spend a few hours to read it. But so you can get those cliff notes@capitalism.com 12. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.