The math of publishing an ebook

     So some of my facebook and twitter friends know that I have thought about writing an ebook.  I have probably anywhere from four to ten ideas rolling around in my head at any one time.  So some of you may ask why haven't I written one yet, well that's a good question.  It comes down to motivation.  I've mentioned to several people about writing, and usually get that look of "Yeah right you write a book."  So because of that I usually drop the idea, but lately the ideas just keep popping into my head, so I figured I would do some research and look at the math of epublishing,

     The most recent numbers I can find are for 2012, I'm sure by now someone has done the numbers for 2013, but I have yet to find them.  Anyway in 2012 there were 19.9 million ereaders sold.  So this got me thinking, if I wrote an ebook, and only 10% of the people who bought ereaders in 2012 saw the book, that would mean 1.99 million people would see the book.  Now consider if only 10% of those people actually purchased the book.  This would mean 199,000 buying the book.   That's only 1% of the people who purchased ereaders in 2012, which isn't that far of a reach. 

     Now that we've established a number of people to buy an ebook, you have to think about what that means money wise.  There are various commission rates from all the different epublishers, so I figured I would go with the lowest commission with selling the book at the lowest price possible.  This would mean I would sell the book for .99 and only get a 30% commission, or .297 per copy sold.   So now we take this and multiply it by the 1% of people calculated above, and it give you an amount of $59103.  That's a pretty good amount to take some spare time to write a book.

     One of the things though that I have been asked is, "How would you get that 1% of people to buy your book?"  Well that comes from getting the book out there.  And how do you do that?  Well one way to start would be to blog about it, which if I publish an ebook I would do here.  Another way is to put it out on social media such as facebook and twitter. 

     Just by using social media you could reach a lot of people quite quickly with your friends help.  If you put links to the ebook out on your social media sites, and if only 100 of your friends and family help you out, that would be 100 more times your link to the ebook would be shared.  So now if even only ten people from each of those friends and family share it you would be up to 1000 times that your ebook was out there.  You can see how the link would grow exponentially. 

    So all these shares would also help you out in another way.  The more the link is out there, the more likely it is to show up in a basic search.  So that is yet another way someone could find your ebook, with a basic google search.  based on some research I did about 2% of people who buy ebooks say they got one of their books through a link that came up during a search.  Of course you could also get your book out there in other ways too.  You could do up ads to and pass them out, or take up ads on google or facebook, so something like that.

     So based on the math writing an ebook could be a good second job.  Now to just get the motivation to get all the ideas in my head out onto "paper".  After that submitting the book and epublishing it is the easy part.  But once all that has been done, it is up to the help of friends and family to get the ebook out there, and make money.  So while I motivate myself to write the book, I ask can you motivate yourself to help spread the word of the book.