Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. So today I have been working on my eBook and I have actually been dedicating all of my time to it today trying not to get distracted.
I have done a couple of emails and stuff like that but I have been working on my eBook, the 30-day Property Journey.
Now, what I did was I have actually tallied how many words it was before I started and I used a tool called Scrivna to write in and so this was really easy to tally all the words because it tallies it by its chapter. So when I started I had 41,088 words. That is how long my eBook was. That is how many words basically I need to go through and edit. And so you may recall if you listened to one of the previous episodes, I want to track how long is this going to take me to get an eBook out and to do this sort of work.
Basically I had 41,000 words. I have been working on it today. I did one chapter yesterday but the rest I have done today. I have finished chapter 11 so I am onto chapter 12 but I am actually almost halfway through because the first chapters had more words in it and I only have about 23,904 words left to edit. I have written the introduction as well and I wrote the How to Read This Book part and I also need to write the conclusion and just a page about more products that I have and recommending people buy my other eBooks and stuff like that.
In one day, working from about 8:00 or 8:30 AM, it is now 1:30 PM so that is about 5 hours. I have been through about 20,000 words so I am about halfway through. Now before I got into this eBook, this was not a raw transcription that I was going through. I have actually already paid someone to go through the transcriptions and convert them into formatted blog posts. So I think because I have that done, it just made that so much more achievable to go through in such a short space of time.
So basically I am pretty confident that by the end of the week I will have finished my rough draft of this eBook. Today is Tuesday so ideally I would like to be finished by tomorrow. If I can get half done today what is to say I cannot get half-done tomorrow as well.
And I did look into editors and look into how much they cost. And it is going to cost about $5 per 1,000 words to get edited. So my eBook which is 40,000 words, I am looking at about $200 US dollars to get that eBook proofread and edited which I think is a good investment. This is a long term thing for me, a long term play. Basically everything I do is a long term play. I am focusing 3 years down the track. I want to convert some so I am happy to lose a bit of money.
On the upfront, spend a bit of money on it, a couple hundred bucks on editing. I spent $50 on a title page which I got back and which I really did not like actually. I spent $50 (US) or $52.50 on this title page and it is just really corny, really hypie, not really the image that I want to get across. I am thinking that I may need to either design the title page myself which I really do not want to do because I am not a very good designer or I have to pay someone else to do it and give them more direction. It is not this guy’s fault. I did not give him any direction as to what the eBook should look like. It is just a very generic title cover. It is not the feel that I am going for.
It just looks like a used a used car salesman, starved. So I will need to redo that. So that is $50 down the drain. So I guess the tip for the future is spend $5 on Fiverr, get the eBook cover done and then you can always pay to upgrade to get all of the upgrades. That is what I should have done and look if I have to pay $5 and I have a good eBook cover and then I had to pay the $52.50 again, it would have been so worth it because at this stage I have lost that $52.50. So that is very, very frustrating.
So Tuesday today, Wednesday tomorrow. Let us say I get the eBook finished on Thursday and then provide it to the editors on Thursday. The painful thing is I am using Scrivna to edit which is a great tool to edit and compile it into an eBook but these editors need it in Word format so that I can track the edits that they have done and stuff like this. So I am going to have to convert it into Word and then I would have to get out of Word back into eBook format. So that is going to be frustrating. It might not be that much work, it could probably be an hour or so to convert it back from Word into Scrivna and get it into eBook format ready to go up on Amazon.
And before I sign off for the day, I will be working a couple more hours trying to get more of this eBook done, I really want to get more than halfway through so I have another 2 to 3 chapters if I want to get more than halfway through. But I just want to share with you my Kindle direct publishing revenues that I got over the last 3 months from the book that I did put up there. I put up a book called The Essential Guide to Buying Your First Property in Australia, which is an eBook that I wrote.
I have sold a whole bunch of this eBooks on my website. I probably sold maybe a hundred to 200 at $5 each. I have made maybe a thousand dollars from this eBook. I have decided that I will also put it on Kindle and so I did that sometime in May. I did not even know when I put it up but basically in March I made $23.59. In April I made $10.41 and then in May I made $10.41. So all up I have made about $45 selling it on Kindle. It is very niche.
How to Buy Your First Property in Australia, it is a very niche eBook. Maybe the 30-day Property Journey will do better. Maybe it will do worse. Let us see. I am investing $200, maybe $300 into it, US. Let us just round it up to $500 (Australian) that I will invest into this in total including all the editing, all the work that is going into it. So $500 (Australian) I am investing into it. If it makes the same as this which is like $10 a month, it will take me 50 months, so it is like 4 years to earn my money back.
Actually that sounds pretty bad, does it not? But this is a process that I am trying to work out. Well, is this eBook publishing something that I could do? And maybe I will move away from these niche topics, move into something that is going to be more popular and hopefully I can get some books that will make me some more money and some passive income. It is a fun avenue. I am really enjoying it. And I like the fact that I can create content and I am creating in any way but just do it in such a way that it can convert into this product and by the end of the year I could have 10 products or something, 10 products making $20 a month. It is a nice little kicker.
So we will see how it will go.
Alright guys. That was a bit rambly today. A little bit less direction than I would have liked for the episode but that is how I roll. That is my life and I am going to make things up as I go along and if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.
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