Indie Writer Income: How Many Books do I Need to Sell to Make $100,000

This is an answer to an 'Answer the Public' question. I was curious. I did the math.

It's not pretty.

I have 3 physical books: 1 gift book and 2 paperbacks

My books and their royalties

Let's talk indie writer income. I have 7 books available through Amazon:

4 e-novellas that cost $0.99 each. My royalties for each of these books are $0.32

A gift book called The Perfect Gift, which costs $15.39 and gives me a royalty of $1.97

and 2 paperbacks:

The Silver Sheep, which costs $21.99 with a royalty of $3.22 per book, and

The Silver Shepherd, which is $23.99 with a royalty of $3.34 per book

Both of these are available as $3.99 ebooks with a royalty of $1.40 & $2.49

Making $100,000 from selling ONE BOOK only & online only

Okay, so to earn $100,000, I would need to sell:

• 312,500 copies of my 99-cent ebooks (ouch), or

• 50,761 copies of The Perfect Gift, or

• 31,056 copies of The Silver Sheep paperback, or

• 29,940 copies of The Silver Shepherd

Making $100,000 from read-through

Hrmm, okay. So, say I have a 50% read-through rate, which means that half of the people who buy Book 1, The Silver Sheep, decide to go on and read Book 2, The Silver Shepherd. I would then need around 20,500 people to read book one, then have 10,250 of those people go on to read book 2 to earn my $100,000.

Buy my books. On Amazon, not here. This cafe closed down. Wahh.

Making $100,000 from face-to-face selling

Now, if I took these books to market or sold them face-to-face, the costs would change. I couldn't sell my ebooks at market, but I could take my gift book and 2 paperbacks.

The Perfect Gift would cost me $6.42 to print and I could sell it for $10, which gives me a royalty of $3.58

The Silver Sheep would cost $8.78 to print, and if I sold it for $15, it would give me a royalty of $6.22

The Silver Shepherd would cost me $9.75 to print, and if I sold it for $15, it would give me a royalty of $5.25

That being said, there are overheads that need to be considered, such as market stall fees and insurance, fuel, time, marketing materials etc. It is also highly likely that I would run specials, like $15 each or $25 for both, or buy 3 copies of The Perfect Gift for $25. These things alter the answer, but I'm going to ignore this stuff for now because they are so highly variable.

To earn my $100,000 at market/face-to-face, I would need to sell:

• 27,933 copies of The Perfect Gift, or

• 15,106 copies of The Silver Sheep, or

• 19,048 copies of The Silver Sheep

Although this sounds more reasonable, that would be a lot of work. So let's pick a number in the middle, say 23,000 copies of a book. Say I sell 20 books each market (which would be a brilliant result week after week), this would take me 1,150 markets, which is ya know, like 23 years worth of a hefty load of markets lol. So, this option takes a lot of time and effort. I would imagine that once you account for the costs involved in doing 1,150 markets, it would eat up a lot of the profit.

Woo!

Making the $100,000 over 23 years

When someone asked the question: How many books do I need to sell to make $100,000, I assume that they mean $100k total and not $100k per annum, which would only be possible for the big guns and not lil' old me. If I spread the figures out and consider that the $100k can be made over time, I can go back to my earlier figures of selling 31,056 copies of The Silver Sheep paperback (through Amazon) and spread that out over the next 23 years (like the markets but without the time and effort);

31,056 divided by 23 = around 1,350 copies per year.

Break that down even further, and it works out to be around 26 copies of The Silver Sheep per week. That sounds fairly reasonable, right?

If I sell 26 copies of The Silver Sheep each week for the next 23 years, then I could expect to make around $100,000.00

Variables and other stuff to consider

I do need to point out here that there are still overheads no matter how I decide to sell my books: Cover design, editing, proofreading, marketing, website, domain name, email, etc etc. The list goes on. These figures are variable, and I'm not going to include them and get into these nitty-gritties in here (if you want me to go into more detail about the costs involved in self-publishing a book, then let me know in the comments).

The other thing I want to say is that 26 book sales each week sounds reasonable, and it is, but is also not easy. Honestly, I get nowhere near that, like, ever. To get those kinds of sales, I would probably need to pay to advertise (or hope that I go viral one day lol).

Of course, it would be possible (and advisable) to sell books both online and face-to-face rather than one or the other.

And, the more books you write, the more books you have to sell, and the more books you are likely to sell thanks to bundling, word-of-mouth, and read-through.

Other indie authors' figures will probably be hugely different to mine. All of our costs differ, from printing costs, list prices, and royalties, to overheads and variables.

Do I think that I will earn $100,000 from my books? Heck yeah! But I think it will likely take me until I'm 95 to do so; That's giving myself another 54 years. That sounds reasonable.

Show me the money!

Much love,

Marley x