Beyond the Ebook: More, Bigger Self-Publishing Profits

By Robert C. Worstell
Copyright © 2016 Midwest Journal Press. All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
Missed Profits Following Conventional Wisdom........1
Why are paperbacks more profitable than ebooks?...2
My studies showed loopholes and potholes.................4
What about Lulu POD?.................................................6
No real competition......................................................8
There is an apparent sweet spot in page count. .........9
What is a typical workflow to achieve Multiple
Eyeballs?......................................................................10

1
Missed Profits Following Conventional Wisdom
Conventional Wisdom (which is usually 95% wrong) says
you should be happy with your ebooks and how they are
selling.
The problem with that logic is that the biggest sellers aren't
doing that.
The biggest sellers make more income from hardcopy sales
than ebooks. Traditional publishers know this, even though
they count on just a handful of authors to cover all their
costs.
The self-publisher can create their own publishing empire if
they do two things:
1) Create a deep backbench of books.
2) Get their book in front of as many eyeballs as
possible.
The first is obvious. All the top-selling authors routinely
bring out new titles and make sure their earlier titles
continue to be available.
The second means book discovery, sure. It also means
having your titles in all possible formats - ebook, paperback,
hardback, audio, even video. Because no two readers read
Get Audio - http://livesensical.com/go/sbo-sell-books/

2
the same way. No two readers prefer the same format. Most
prefer combinations of these formats. Amazon knows this,
and they bought Audible (audiobooks) and CreateSpace
(paperbacks) to take advantage of that exact fact.
My own research pointed this out over 6 months ago. I've
published hundreds of books as tests (and gotten my
financial freedom by doing this.) Of these roughly a quarter
routinely sell as ebooks. I've got a much smaller set of these
which have also been published as paperbacks (and even
fewer as hardbacks.) When I crunched the numbers recently
for 6 months worth of sales, it confirmed what I suspected:
• 12% of my books were producing 25% of my income.
• 92 of my ebooks were producing the income of 34
paperbacks.
Meaning for all the work I put into ebooks, that if I would
take the ebooks which were selling and turn them into
paperbacks, I could possibly triple my income.
Why are paperbacks more profitable than
ebooks?
You have to understand the elephant-in-the-room
explanation first.

3
The vast bulk of the press on self-publishing is devoted to
becoming a successful ebook author. Let's face it, there are
some good reasons for this:
• They are easier to produce.
• They are fast to get published after the writing is
done.
• 70% royalties are easy to understand.
• Paperback publishing has been hard for a number of
reasons:
• It's expensive to print books.
• Traditional publishers want only proven authors
whose books will recoup the investment of big (or
small) print runs.
• Every step of the distribution chain has to be paid,
leaving little to pay authors.
• Hardback publishing is even more expensive and so,
has less rewards.
Traditional publishing used to have the model of building
demand with the expensive hardbacks, then leveraging the
profits by producing the lower-cost paperbacks and ebooks.
Self-publishing, as I covered above, uses the reverse model

4
for the same reasons. People who really like the ebook will
want the paperback, and if they read it often enough, will
want the more durable hardback. (Of course, you better be
writing classics for this to take place...)
My studies showed loopholes and potholes.
I took a couple of days to digest Penguin's 1700 classic books
to get a set of books as a base. I wound up with about 80,
quitting when I started running into their really long tail
which never sell even one per day.
I used CreateSpace's royalty estimator to see if they could be
self-published and be profitable. See:
https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/#content6
(The trick is to set the price a .01 and it will tell you the
estimated costs to produce the book.)
Then I published 8 books on CS to see what would happen.
The first hidden factor I ran into what that there was a gap
between what CS said it would cost and what they actually
charge.
Any book 108 pages or less is said to cost $2.15. It actually
will wind up costing $3.59 Working with these, it wound up
being exactly 1.67 difference between estimated and actual.

5
The second hidden factor was to find that the price minus
the actual cost, plus your royalty left a big amount of change
on the table. In fact, Amazon only gives you 40% of that
possible royalty.
Just the way things are.
Do these steps with a spreadsheet to do your number
crunching:
• Take your page count.
• Find the estimated CS cost.
• Multiply times 1.67
• Pick your royalty and divide by .4
• Add that royalty to your actual costs and you'll see the
price you'll need to charge.
Run through a few scenarios and you may have some
different ideas about what you can make off paperbacks. A
nice introduction to this reality, perhaps.
What you'll find is that your costs will tend to raise
dramatically according page count. What I found in these
books is that they actually cease to become profitable for
self-publishing much above 250 pages if you have to depend
on the prices traditional publishing sets for those page-

6
counts.
This is because longer traditional press runs make bigger
books more profitable, and there POD can't compete.
Smaller books have a bigger expense on binding per book,
for instance. This is probably why any CS POD books at 108
pages or below cost "the same" in order to keep the business
running profitably.
What about Lulu POD?
The biggest problem Lulu has is that they aren't owned by
Amazon. CS is internally integrated and so can produce
more cheaply. Amazon can also change their prices more
easily. Books that are over-priced or under-priced can be
adjusted for the best income for Amazon.
When Lulu prints a book, they have to mark it up by 50 - 55
percent in order to cover their distribution partners - who
insist on being able to discount any book by 40%. Or that's
what I've been able to find out.
When the price/cost of a book goes up $1, Lulu has to raise it
by $1.50 or so in order to stay in the distribution game.
(Lulu also has some fudge-factors in their pricing. I took 10
books I'd published as hardcopy there and ran them through

7
a spreadsheet. Most of their added costs were explained as
above, although there are some small factors - about 1.4% -
that varied according to page count.)
Lulu overall is higher quality than CS, but that doesn't
matter. On Amazon, a CS-published book (same
author/title) will seem to get preference over a book
published outside. Lulu is always higher priced, and has to
be searched for in the "other formats and versions" link.
During the last couple of weeks before Christmas, non-CS
titles will become temporarily "out of stock" even though
there are plenty on hand. The obvious explanation is that
there are lags on getting it from the external publishers
warehouses to Amazons, so their guaranteed delivery
wouldn't be possible. CS is completely integrated with
distributed printing (that apparently matches the Amazon
warehouse locations) so this isn't a problem. Mostly, that
depends on how many units are sold for any given title.
Those which sell less than one a week might do fine with a
single book on Amazon's warehouse shelves.
The trick is when you try to get a CS book into other
independent bookstores. There are a significant
percentage which won't take a CS (read: Amazon) published
book.

8
You'll get sales via Ingram of Lulu books where you won't be
able to get your CS version sold. Tim Ferriss ran into this
when his CS-printed book wasn't accepted by Barnes and
Noble - so he marketed it via BitTorrent. Had he known the
above, he could have had an easier time of it.
Recommended distribution is then to publish on both at the
same time. Use CS for only Amazon-internal editions. Use
Lulu for all your "expanded reach" distribution. Of course,
there are exceptions. And we all could use more studies than
just what I found. These are rough workouts. There are far
greater publishing wonks out there than I.
This article simply gives you some tools to work more
profitably with.
No real competition...
A key point to know is that there really isn't competition.
Amazon knows this with their "also-bought"
recommendations. People who buy one book will probably
buy more like it. You just must be more creative in your
marketing than other authors in your genre.
Be more creative in
• Covers

9
• Descriptions
• Audience Experience
Never try to compete on price. Your titles aren't
commodities. They never have been, never will be.
There is a very funny strategy you can try. I recommend
publishing on Lulu in every format you can.
That said, you also publish to Amazon with CS.
So: set your Lulu book price at what the market will support.
Then: increase your CS royalty so that price is close to your
Lulu book. You'll get higher royalties out of your CS version
and benefit by the "competition" between them.
There is an apparent sweet spot in page count.
Because Lulu has to increase by $1.55 every time the costs go
up a dollar, above a certain page-count that price becomes
hard to support.
I mentioned earlier how the longer print runs affect pricing.
This seems to start kicking in at about a 250 page-count. CS
books tend to return much less royalties for the same title-
author combination. Lulu seems to cut out at under 200
pages. Lulu and CS compare best together at under 100
pages.

10
If you take the standard of 250 words on a page, a 200-page
book is about 50K words, a 100-page book about 25K words.
A 100-page book is also in Kindle Short Reads category.
This means that your investment with National Novel
Writing Month would pay off if you completed one title, sent
it to editing and then started in on your next novelette. Write
five days a week, publish two. You'd end up with 10-12 books
which would sit on the top end of Kindle "short reads" and
also have profitable CS/Lulu paperbacks.
What is a typical workflow to achieve Multiple
Eyeballs?
For publishing itself, you want the fewest possible interfaces.
Every time you have to shift gears, it's a drain on your
resources. So you want to work in batches as you can. Note
the terms below:
• "title" is your particular word-collection, usually
referred to as a "book".
• "version" is the format, such as ebook, paperback,
hardback.
These are the simplest ways to keep everything straight,
since all of these are "books."

11
Again, store all your data in Calibre and keep this
safeguarded. Back everything up.
We assume you have the front cover ready.
Also, a 4000-character description (about 3800, actually)
formatted with Amazon-acceptable HTML. You'll edit this
down for Lulu meta data. Store this in Calibre. (It can even
become your backcover text for the paperback.)
1. Start with Lulu. Figuring that you're publishing original
material, get each title through Lulu on it's own, in every
version. I generate the epub version through Calibre itself,
and then tweak it to fit on Lulu. But you can also upload
your Word doc/LibreOffice .odt file and let them convert it
for you. (Hint: try to keep all images out of it.)
2. Have Lulu distribute your ebook to Kobo and
Nook, not Amazon or iTunes (we'll be back for them later.)
If you have Lulu create your epub, download it and store in
Calibre.
Start now to collect the ISBN's as you publish each version.
Calibre gives you hints how to store these.
3. Generate the PDF in LibreOffice as it's simple,
accurate, and accepted by Lulu and everywhere else. (I
understand Word still doesn't do this natively.)

12
4. Then submit that PDF to Lulu for both trade
paperback and trade hardback versions. Make sure your
PDF is formatted for 6"x9" - use their templates until you
can evolve your own. (LibreOffice has a nice feature where
you can import styles from a document you've used before.)
5. Get the proof into your Lulu shopping cart for the
paperback as required. Wait until you have all your title-
versions published before you finish your order to save on
shipping. (Find their specials by clicking on the Logo on the
home page.) Don't order the hardback proof yet.
6. Download the pdf Lulu creates for your cover and
edit out their isbn in GIMP (or similar.) This is your cover
for CS, unless you want to change it. (Note: you can generate
several versions at the cover stage, or go back and create a
new one. Simply upload new cover art and let them generate
a new PDF you can download right at that point. Perfect
time to send out PDF covers to your fans to see which one
they like the most...)
7. Get all your titles through Lulu first. You'll use the
Calibre and Lulu interfaces for all titles and all their
versions.
8. Then publish your trade paperback versions on
CS. They have a truly lousy cover creator. Simply upload

13
that cover-pdf you set up above - the one from the Lulu trade
paperback - and let them install their ISBN on it. (No, they
won't accept a Lulu isbn. But you can buy your own and use
it.)
CS takes about 12 hours or so to approve each version. Note
that they give you both the full ISBN and also the shorter
IBSN-10. That last one is used for Amazon to create their
links. (http://amazon.com/dp/[isbn10goeshere])
9. Proof your CS version, once it's approved. You'll be
able to do this online unless you have an error in the file.
10. Then submit your titles to Kindle.
11. Then submit your titles to iTunes.
Again, we are using one interface at a time as much as
possible. Calibre is the key interface. And I'd suggest dual
monitors if you can. Much easier.
12. When the paperback proofs come in, approve
them and order the hardback proofs. As above, you
have to decide whether a hardback is even needed on the
market. For each of your top-selling books, it's probably a
good idea. Otherwise, you're probably better off selling them
from your own Lulu storefront, where you can set the
discount (up to 60%). These are great for offering special

14
editions to your list for "just a dollar above cost."
- - - -
Yes, it's that simple to increase your book
publishing income. You no longer have to settle for
smaller income from just ebooks.
Good luck with this!
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and free samples, too...
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