How To Self-Publish A Children's Book and How Much You Can Expect To Make

spoiler: you will make very little lol

Jul 10, 2020

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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.

Quick Interlude - Announcing Build @ Deerfield, powered by Out-Of-Pocket

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One of the goals of Out-Of-Pocket is to make it easier for people to start healthcare companies. For the last few months, we have been working behind the scenes to cook up something awesome for people who want to start something.

We’re excited to announce Build @ Deerfield, powered by Out-Of-Pocket. This is a five-week hackathon for early-stage healthcare teams with $250K+ of non-dilutive capital in grants and prizes.

You can see more details here, but in general Deerfield and Out-Of-Pocket are joining forces to do something big for the New York healthcare community. We’ll select 12-15 teams that will:

Receive cash to start building
Access to mentors during the program
Get a chance to present what they’ve built to the broader New York healthcare community at a showcase and reception on January 20-21 at Cure in NYC.
Judges will select a handful of teams for additional non-dilutive grants and prizes.

If you have an idea you’ve been meaning to build, or your team has just started out, this is your sign. We had such an awesome time doing this last year, you can see some of the projects here.

Now we’re doing it bigger and better.

Participants at a previous Out-Of-Pocket hackathon

Apply by November 19, 2026, there’s nothing to lose and a ton to gain. You can find more details and apply here: https://www.outofpocket.health/build-at-deerfield

This is going to be a lot of fun and we’re really excited to be doing this. A personal joy of mine is seeing someone take the plunge just before they build something great, and we’re happy to be a small part of that journey.

Email back if you have any questions. But look at the FAQ first cause we know half of you are about to ask “am I a good fit” or “what are you looking for in an application”.