I’ve mentioned that I’ve written a few books as a hobby. Fortunately, as you’ll see below, I’m not trying to make a living at it.

I’m pretty good at the writing, editing and formatting part of it (or so my reviews say), but I’m not that great at the sales part. I’m trying to learn the ropes about categories and keywords, covers and descriptions, and, most of all, online promotion, but so far my successes have been very limited, and most of my sales have been from when people who have some reach — through their own social networks — mention or review one of my titles.

This edition of the Krehbiel Report is going to be a little behind-the-scenes look at a recent effort, because I think there are a couple interesting components. I’m going to keep certain things in the dark, to protect the innocent, but there’s still enough detail here to get a look at how this self-publishing business works.

The title in question is available as a kindle e-book and as a paperback. The e-books sells for $2.99, and the paperback for $7.99. The kindle price is the lowest you can go and still get a 70% royalty, and $7.99 is roughly the price I need to get the same royalty in print. In fact, it’s a little high, but who prices their book at $7.44?

I found a blog that has a good readership, and where I thought the readers would be interested in my topic. I mailed the blog owner a copy and he wrote a very nice review.

There was no guarantee here. I simply sent the book to him in hopes he would review it. I have sent copies to three other people. A couple reviewed it, but I didn’t get very significant sales. Generally speaking, I’ve been breaking even on this. This last try actually worked.

I have three sources of royalties on this title: sales of the kindle version, sales of the paperback version, and “kindle unlimited” page views.

If you’re not familiar, kindle unlimited is a program on Amazon where people pay $9.99 a month and have “free” access to millions of kindle titles. It’s like Netflix for books. Authors are paid a royalty based on the amount of money in the Kindle Select Global Fund. Here are some sample calculations. It’s a ridiculously confusing mess with a moving target on how much they actually pay you, but near as I can tell it’s roughly 0.1 cents per page. For today’s calculation I’m going to go with that.

So, here are my potential royalties.

• $2.99 kindle book, 70% or $2.09 per title sold.
• $7.99 paperback book, $2.64 per title sold.
• 0.1 cents per page read.

While I don’t have the ability to be certain about the sources of all my orders (Amazon doesn’t allow source codes, or anything sensible like that), from this one blog post it appears I have sold the following.

• 45 kindle editions = $94.05 in royalties.
• 31 paperbacks = $81.84 in royalties.
• 1149 page views = $1.15 in royalties.

The book is 94 pages long, so I’m getting robbed on the Kindle Unlimited deal. (1194 page views / 94 pages per books is about 12 books, which should be $25.08 in royalties.)

There are a few things to note here.

First, Kindle Unlimited doesn’t do much for me. Maybe it works better for other titles with more pages, or … I don’t know. It’s a complicated mess.

Second, a strong minority were willing to pay more than twice as much to get a paper copy. So while e-books are very popular, print is hardly dead.

Third, despite these sales, a good review on the blog, and an interesting discussion in the comments section (with lots of positive comments), I didn’t get a single review on Amazon.com. That surprised me.

Anyway, there you have it. Self publishing can be fun, but don’t quit your day job.