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

As someone who actually likes books, this makes me sad. Leanpub and Gumrroad are already full of quite mediocre content, to the point that I avoid them altogether--which is a shame, since there are some serious self-published authors that would benefit from a good platform. These cheap ebooks (e-brochures?) also made their way into Amazon, which really annoys me.

I think it is a real shame that this effect hasn't been quantified and documented yet. Apple, Google, Steam and other platform owners have all the numbers, but they strategically keep their mouths shut. In fact they do the opposite by pretending there is good money to be made. In my opinion it is very close to fraud. And look how many people are victimized by it... Time for the government to step in to demand transparency.

There's also hundreds if not thousands of blog posts on certain topics that have dozens if not hundreds of books/video courses made for it.

People tend to buy paid learning material not only for the learning experience, but how it's written which is very unique to the individual who is publishing.

It doesn't matter if 5,000 other people have books on the same subject. Once I get to know an author, if his style clicks with me then I'm going to buy his book. If his style resonates with a lot of people he'll quickly rise to the top for that subject.

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/

1. Active, not passive: This is income made by actively promoting the book upon its release as stated in the post.

2. Past, not future: This is historical revenue based on active marketing. It is unlikely that it will bring the same income in the future without marketing.

3. Revenue, not profit: The nice cover design is something others would need to pay for if this is to serve as reference, but this cost isn't taken into account.

TLDR: He isn't making $400 ($360) in passive monthly income and it is unlikely he will in the future.