Hey, guys.
Mona, will you stop?
dun, dun, duh, duh, da, da, da, da, dah!
Today's the day.
My book is out!
[BLEEP] I'm so excited.
I can't believe we did it, guys.
We did it.
Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
We did it.
My book is out.
Doo, doo, we did it.
We did it.
OK, my book, my debut novel, A Perfect Vintage.
The book of the summer some are saying
is officially out and ready for purchase
wherever you like to buy books.
I'm linking that all in the description where
you can buy it, as well as information about the many city
book tours that I'm going to be going on this summer.
I'll also be doing digital events
for those of you who aren't in one of the cities
that I'm visiting, or for which the city has already sold out.
But, yes, it is here.
The day has arrived.
My book is officially in the world.
And I wanted to do what I promised I would do,
which is a total financial breakdown of this process
because it has been one of the biggest financial investments
I've ever made in my life outside of buying my home.
It's a much more substantial investment
than I actually made in TFD in terms of the dollar amount,
although, because I wasn't earning income
for the first year and a half with TFD, technically,
it's probably actually more of an investment in TFD.
But just in terms of cash I put into it,
publishing this book on my own, starting my own imprint into it
myself, and to retain creative control and all
of the IP, which I am not going to bore you guys again with,
it is in the description below.
I did an announcement video that talks
about a summary of the book, which you can also just see
here if you want to pause.
It's a romance novel.
Takes place in the Loire Valley in France.
A woman falls for a younger man.
I'm not going to go into more detail than that.
I already did a video about it.
That's linked.
But I want to talk about the logistics and the nitty gritty
of it.
So I'm going to talk about overall numbers
to date, which as we all kind of, I would assume, know
will change and increase as the year goes on slightly,
although, I'm at the I'm toward the end of the spending,
and now I'm getting into the earning
part of making this investment.
But-- so these numbers are to date.
The only thing that is not included in this breakdown
is the audio book, which I am doing separately.
I'll actually-- if you guys want to hear a quick clip
of the audio book, I actually hired--
hold on to your hats, folks-- a man to read the audiobook.
He's a very popular voice actor, creator on the internet,
who has never done an audio book before.
So this is his first.
And I think he's doing an amazing job.
And for those of you who want a teaser of the audio book,
I'm going to put that at the end of the video in case
you guys want to hear it, but that is an investment that
is pretty separate from the book because it's like a totally
different process.
In total, I'm probably going to be putting between $6,000
and $7,000 up front, plus a revenue share with my voice
actor and producer.
But, again, that's pretty separate from just the paper
and e-book version of the book that I wanted to break down.
So as of filming, on the book, everything outside
of the audio book, I have spent a total of $34,303.49.
I'm looking at my QuickBooks right now.
So of that, the expense categories,
$11,738.51 of that went to editing, which I'll break down.
$7,585.62 of that has gone into advertising.
$6,214.30 of that has gone into production and logistics,
and $6,765.06 are everything else.
So just to kind of break that down for anyone
who is thinking of indie publishing, the editing
as you can see, is currently the biggest chunk,
although, I think marketing will slightly overtake that.
In the long run, I expect to spend close to $40,000 in total
with a huge amount of that being marketing.
So the editing, first and foremost, so I
worked with a structural editor, who
is an editor primarily working in the romance genre
at a big five publishing house, who really liked the book.
And I paid her a flat fee of $10,000 to edit the book.
And she's actually the only person
on my team for the most part, who is not on a rev share, who
wanted all flat fee just because she not only has
a full-time job, she's really not supposed to be doing this.
So long-term being tied up with the book
is just probably more risk than reward for her professionally,
which I totally understand.
But we talk.
She's, obviously, very supportive of the book.
Although, she must remain anonymous.
Her fingerprints are all over it as I
say in the acknowledgments.
And then in terms of line editing,
which is a separate editor, who I've
worked with on many different projects over the years,
and we will be doing a revenue share.
Basically, everyone else that I've
worked with on the book, the painter that did the cover
art, my designer, my marketing partner, everyone
is on some kind of a rev share where
they get a certain percentage of the profits.
And that is from first book sold.
It's not after I recoup my investment.
So it will take me slightly longer
to earn back my investment because I am doing that rev
share up front, but I think it's only fair because everyone
put in that work from day one.
So they should be seeing the benefit
on the back end from day one.
In terms of marketing and advertising, a lot of that
is creating all of the mailers I did, like you can see here,
and sending them out to a bunch of people.
Like just postage alone has been extremely expensive.
Luckily, in the US, if you're shipping a book domestically,
it's media mail, which means it's a lot less
expensive than normal shipping.
It's $4.35 every time I shipped one of the books.
Plus, I actually had to buy the book, the note card,
the ribbon, the one sheeter that I folded up
into it, the envelope, everything else.
So all in, domestically, it costs me about $10,
$12-ish to send an individual mailer, and then,
internationally, if I was shipping to Canada, it was $25.
If I was shipping to Europe, it was $30 plus.
So that added up pretty quickly.
The events that I'm doing-- as I mentioned,
I'm doing a book tour.
Most of the events I'm breaking even
on because I sell them as ticketed events,
but even then, I have to get myself to them.
I have to actually bring the books,
unless it's in a bookstore where the bookstore buys it.
Like, if it's in a restaurant or hotel,
I have to provide the books.
So, like, I'm going to be taking a little bit of a loss
on the tour overall, but to me, I actually
am totally fine with that because I
look at the book tour as a really, really
powerful marketing tool because each event,
50 to 100 people go to the event.
Then they take pictures of the book.
They read the book.
They tell their friends about the book.
They get kind of involved with it.
And, yes, there are still tickets
available for some cities.
That is in the link at the description.
The book website has everything you'll need.
The book production, which is something that is definitely
the most distinct part of doing indie publishing
is you ahve to figure all of this out yourself.
Which was, I'm not going to lie, the most annoying part
of the process by far.
However, now that it's been done once,
I'm very confident about doing it again
because all of that work has been figured out already.
And that means things like testing different cover specs,
the thickness of the pages, the darkness of the ink,
different fonts, different bindings,
like, whether the cover is matte or glossy, like,
all of these little things you had to figure out,
and whether you're going to do offset printing, which
is where you print quantities of the book
and store them and ship them, or you're
going to do print on demand, which I ultimately ended up
doing because, although it is more expensive per unit,
it's just a lot easier and a lot more accessible,
and you just don't have to worry about the whole, like, shipping
and distribution part of it, which third parties--
there are a lot of third parties out there
that will take care of those things for you.
But because they take a cut, it basically
erases all of the savings that you
would have earned by doing batch printing,
rather than print on demand.
So I went through all of those calculations.
I have spreadsheets that have all of the different variables,
but doing the actual printing and production
was a very big time and energy suck.
My assistant worked on a lot of that stuff.
And so a lot of the spending that I did
was just man hours and woman hours.
In terms of recouping my investment,
so I will need to sell around 7,000 copies in order
to break even.
I, obviously, don't know the exact amount
until I have a total final number of what
I've invested in the book, which I won't have until I'm done
with the tour more or less.
Like all summer is going to be promo mode to some extent.
So that number will creep up, and, therefore,
the number of books that I need to sell to recoup my investment
will continue to creep up as well.
The one thing that has been really frustrating in this
process is that, basically, I don't have access to all
of my data on any kind of remotely real-time basis from,
essentially, the--
how should I say this?
The facilitator, the portal, where booksellers buy books.
It's a portal called Ingram.
It's the system that, basically, all books use,
and that is where my books are coming from.
They do not release up to date numbers very frequently.
It's been drips and drabs.
I can access like my Kindle numbers pretty easily,
but, like, Ingram will not update for days on end,
and then I'll get an update randomly
that I sold 400 books yesterday because some blogger posted it
or whatever.
So, basically, I don't know how many copies I've sold yet,
and I probably won't know until about a week after publication
it seems like.
However, I have a lot of context clues.
For context, the majority of books
sell under 2,000 copies total in their lifetime.
My goal, overall, is to sell about 100,000 copies
of the book total in its lifetime, which
is an ambitious goal.
It would make it one of the better selling
books in a given year if it were to sell that much.
But I'm feeling pretty confidently the response has
been very good so far.
It's gotten a lot of organic word of mouth,
a lot of organic energy.
So I'm definitely feeling very confidently
that I will recoup my investment.
It's just a question of when, and then it's
just a question of how much on top of that I will earn,
which brings me to the other financial aspect here.
So one thing that I think really needs
to change in the publishing industry
is that genre fiction, which romance is, but it's also
mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, et cetera,
these are generally considered genre fiction where
most of the titles get released initially
as paperbacks, usually trade paperbacks, which
has a lot of implications for the author,
but, notably, the paperback royalties hover
around 7.5% of profits, as compared
to hardcover royalties, which are about 15% of profits.
7.5 is inexcusable, especially when
you consider that genre fiction, like, keeps the publishing
industry afloat.
Like, those books are the books that the majority of people
buy.
People buy trade paperbacks that you buy at a drugstore,
or in the genre section at a bookstore, or on Amazon,
or what have you.
But those genres are pretty disrespected.
The authors are not given very good advances.
They're locked into not great deals.
And on the back end, if they earn out their advance,
which the majority of books do not,
if they earn out their advance they
stand to earn 7.5% of the profits of all copies sold
after that on average, which is extremely low.
For context, my profit margins on each of these copies sold
is between 40% and 70% of the list price.
It will be different for audiobook
because as some of you might know,
Amazon has created a monopoly on that market
that I'm not even sure how it doesn't violate antitrust laws.
But suffice to say, margins on audiobooks,
if you go Amazon exclusive, hover at around 40%
of list price.
And fun fact about audiobooks, if I can just
complain about that for a second,
you don't decide the price of your audio book on Amazon.
They decide it for you.
They use a pretty consistent set of factors,
so you pretty much know what it will be priced at,
but, still, you're not allowed to set that price yourself.
So once again, like with the budget,
audiobook is totally aside.
It's a completely separate entity.
But the good news about audiobooks
is they, obviously, scale infinitely
because rather than being a physical product,
they're just a file.
And like I said, I will be playing
a clip of the audiobook at the end of the video
if you would like to give that a listen.
So because the profits that I make on each copy of the book
are so much higher than they would
be if I were with a traditional publisher, that means that once
I earn out the investment that I've made,
it really just kind of scales infinitely from there.
So I'm feeling very, very good about this.
Looking back, I wish that I would
have taken a sabbatical from TFD because it's just
been a lot of work.
I don't really have much of a life anymore.
I don't cook.
I don't see friends very often.
I don't-- I just don't vibe anymore ever.
I know that it's temporary, so it's fine.
But it's like every day I wake up,
and there's just like an endless list of things
to do for the book and then for my actual job.
And that sucks.
I don't like it.
I miss having free time.
I miss not thinking about work and being anxious
and thinking about all of the stuff
that I have to do constantly.
That has been not a mood, not something I would recommend.
But other than that, it's been really good.
One thing that I've been kind of surprised by
is that when I made my original video,
it was so new in the world.
No one outside of my friends had really read it.
And your friends are always nice to you.
So there was that worry about are people going to it?
Overall, yes, People are really enjoying it.
So that's been exciting.
But one thing that I have been really heartened by
is that there are certain people that don't vibe with it.
It's just not their favorite book, and I thought--
I was really worried that would really upset me,
and I actually--
I have found it doesn't deter how I feel about the book
at all.
And I sort of-- especially depending
on the type of critical feedback it
is, I feel a feeling of like, yeah, well, it wasn't for them.
Different strokes.
It takes all kinds.
And that, I think has been a really good exercise
in learning how to process feedback in a way that is,
like--
I mean, it's probably amongst the most vulnerable things
you can do in terms of exposing yourself
to other people's opinions.
And I think, overall, that has given me--
like, exposing myself to it and processing it
and not letting it dissuade how I feel both about the project
editorially, but also about the act of doing it,
has been a really important and valuable thing in life
because, again, while the response has
been overwhelmingly positive, I think
it's very common for creatives to feel extremely
sensitive to the limited number of voices who maybe
don't like it quite as much.
And I think that, A, that be, obviously,
very bad for mental health because criticism
is inevitable.
But I think also, B, it is often what keeps people
from trying anything at all.
It keeps people from publishing that book,
or releasing that song, or sharing that painting.
And to me, that is always the real tragedy in any person's
story is all of the things that they never
allow themselves to do because they're afraid of how someone
might receive it.
And so I think if anything, like,
this process has really changed my life, first and foremost,
in the sense of confidence that it gives me.
Like I was saying to my husband the other day,
sometimes I feel like I'm playing a video game in life
because once you sort of lose that fear of rejection
or failure, once you kind of make a commitment to I'm
going to try this thing, if I want to do it
I'm going to give it a try.
I'm going to go for it.
I'm going to see how it works.
Like everything opens itself up to you.
You realize there's so little to be afraid of.
You realize that the worst case scenario is actually not
that bad, and you realize that there's just
a boundless amount of potential in life for all of the things
that you can do and try and become,
and, usually, the vast majority of what stands between people
and doing those things is this preemptive fear
of putting themselves out there in a way that
makes them vulnerable.
So if you're not afraid of being vulnerable,
life is your [BLEEP] oyster, man.
Like, it's awesome.
I feel like I'm playing The Sims and I entered the Rosebud cheat
code, and I'm just--
I'm just making my dream mansion all the time
with four hot tubs in one room.
Anyway, it's been a really great experience.
It's been stressful.
It's been a lot of work.
It's, obviously, been a fair amount of money.
But I can say without a shadow of a doubt, it is all worth it.
I love hearing people's feedback.
I love seeing people post pictures with it.
I love the joy that it has brought to people,
and just the experience of getting
to explore this side of my work persona
has been beyond thrilling.
So as I said in the announcement video,
it would mean the world to me if you would pre-order-- well,
I guess, actually, just order a copy now
because it's available, or come to one of my events
that I'll be doing this summer.
But if not, just thank you for watching,
and most importantly, whatever that thing
is that you're thinking of doing or trying
and you're a little nervous about,
let me tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt,
like, giving yourself permission to do the thing
is the greatest gift you can give yourself.
And life is infinitely more beautiful
when you take those risks.
So go forth, prosper, put yourself out there.
And as I mentioned, without further ado, here's
a little sneak peek of the audio book to send us out.
Dinner consisted of small tartlets
of all kinds of local vegetables,
a creative creamy take on gazpacho,
French style paella with clams and mussels,
lacquered duck with citrus roast potatoes,
and a blind test of wine for pairing
with each course, led by an increasingly tipsy Danielle.
Small sounds of gastronomic pleasure
rose from the table, along with easy laughter, facilitated
by the romantic, universally flattering candlelit
atmosphere.
From further down the table, Theo
was holding court with some of the Chateau staff
about a family of deer he'd seen on the outskirts
of the property that morning while gallantly making
sure everyone was served before he filled
his own plate with each course.
And when he did finally eat, she noticed
it was with a kind of joyous abandon,
closing his eyes to save her flavors
and remarking loudly on what he loved,
and heaping his plate high with the things he loved the most.
It was like the rest of him--
unapologetic, full of life, and not at all Leah, herself,
lived.
All right, guys, I'll see you next week.