How To Self-Publish A Children's Book and How Much You Can Expect To Make
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I self-published a children’s book about clinical trials called “If You Give A Mouse Metformin”. You can buy it on Amazon here.
A peek behind the curtain of self-publishing if anyone is curious. I was actually surprised by how easy this was, and Amazon now makes it even easier
I had the idea in January 2020, wrote all the lines + description of scenes of each page over the course of a few weeks. Then I turned to Upwork to find an illustrator that could actually bring it to life.
Finding an illustrator was super hard! Pro-tip, if you're going to look for a contractor on a platform be VERY specific about skill level, budget, etc. I had to go through 200+ profiles that applied before I saw one I really liked.
I finally found my illustrator and she was awesome - you can check out her other stuff here and highly recommend her. The cost was about $1300 to do watercolor for a 20 page book.
From rough sketch, to full colored pages, to copy editing took about 3 month. From there you can choose which self-publishing platform to go to.
The main considerations are:
- Hardcover or softcover
- Print on-demand or bulk inventory
- Quality of paper
- Fulfillment + shipping
Amazon was the best route IMO because even though you can only do soft cover, the print on-demand + fulfillment was critical. I didn't want to buy 1000 copies of the book in advance before knowing how many I could sell.
Economics are: (Sale price - printing cost) and then 60% of that go to me which comes out to about ~$6. This means I have to sell about 200 of these to break even. As of 5/16/2021 the sale numbers have been 739, not bad!
This is not a good plan to actually make me money, BUT it's a good strategy for marketing my other stuff. I actually send copies of the book to a bunch of biotech venture studios to try and convince them to get it for their portfolio companies, but it hasn’t quite worked out yet lol.
The hardest part of self-publishing is distribution. You have to go do it yourself, and it helped that I've built on audience on twitter, etc. plus have enough friends I can force to guilt buy it (just kidding obvi, but if you don't I'm never hanging out with you again)
Anyway - I learned a lot about self-publishing through this and understand how easy it is. You can literally upload a word doc to amazon and they'll publish it as a book lmao, so any self-published book should be taken with a grain of salt.
Hope you all enjoy! If you do buy it, definitely tweet me a picture of your kids looking at it because that really makes my day.
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INTERLUDE - FEW COURSES STARTING VERY SOON!!
See All Courses →A reminder that there’s a few courses STARTING VERY SOON!! And it’s the final run for all of them (except healthcare 101).
LLMs in healthcare (starts 9/8) - We break down the basics of Large Language Models like chatGPT, talk about what they can and can’t do in healthcare, and go through some real-world examples + prototyping exercises.
Healthcare 101 (starts 9/22) - I’ll teach you and your team how healthcare works. How everyone makes money, the big laws to know, trends affecting payers/pharma/etc.
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We’ll do group rates, custom workshops, etc. - email sales@outofpocket.health and we’ll send you details.
INTERLUDE - FEW COURSES STARTING VERY SOON!!
See All Courses →A reminder that there’s a few courses STARTING VERY SOON!! And it’s the final run for all of them (except healthcare 101).
LLMs in healthcare (starts 9/8) - We break down the basics of Large Language Models like chatGPT, talk about what they can and can’t do in healthcare, and go through some real-world examples + prototyping exercises.
Healthcare 101 (starts 9/22) - I’ll teach you and your team how healthcare works. How everyone makes money, the big laws to know, trends affecting payers/pharma/etc.
How to contract with Payers (starts 9/22) - We’ll teach you how to get in-network with payers, how to negotiate your rates, figure out your market, etc.
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