The Side Hustle Report #1 – writing for money

The first thing to define is the amount of time spent on this side-hustle. I have a full time job and while I enjoy writing, it’s not all I want to do with my free time.

Still, if I want this to work out, I know that I have to be consistent with my writing. I need to devote at least a part of each day to it or else I’ll get lazy and stop writing. That’s what happened in 2013 and I don’t want that to happen again in 2017.

I’m pretty lazy and if I can avoid work then I will. My goal for all of 2017 is to write every day without fail. If I miss a day then I have to make up the time missed the following day.

I decided that around one hour is a reasonable amount of time to devote to writing each day. I don’t want this to cut into my personal life and other hobbies too much. This hour can include writing and/or editing a story to get it all set to be published.

To help with this goal, I downloaded a pomodoro app on my phone. That’s designed to help me manage my time and keep me focused on the writing process. If you’re not familiar with the pomodoro technique, it’s a time management technique that breaks down work into intervals followed by a short break. You can either use an app on a phone or a physical timer you can buy online.

Here’s a break down of how it works from Wikipedia.

I first tried self-publishing towards the end of 2013. I published wide initially then switched to Amazon once KDP Select came out. At the time, people raved about the money to be made there.

KDP select is a program through Amazon. As a writer, you give them exclusivity(you can’t publish on other websites) to be included in the Kindle Unlimited program. Using KU, people can borrow your books after they pay a 9.99 fee.

You get more exposure since people don’t have to pay each time they want to read something by you and you get paid for every borrow.

It was great at first but then the program changed from a pay per borrow structure to a pay for each page read structure. This was a necessary change. However, it was mainly a benefit for those who write longer pieces and hurt those who deal primarily in short stories and novellas.

I was in the latter but at that point I was already done with writing and didn’t really care. I kept my stories exclusive to Amazon. There were a handful of borrows and sales here and there which gave me my small monthly payment from Amazon.

Now that I’m back and writing things that are on the shorter end of the scale, I’m trying out going wide again with my entire catalog versus keeping it all on Amazon in the KDP select program.

Wide in this case means I’m publishing across the entire self-publishing spectrum instead of just on Amazon. That means including B&N, Smashwords, Apple, Kobo, etc.

I’m not sure if this is the best strategy but I want to get as many eyeballs as possible on my work right now. Since I’m writing mainly shorter pieces, the per page payout that KDP select uses now doesn’t benefit me as much as it would if I were writing longer pieces.

Amazon is still a key site to publish on since it’s the biggest of the bunch. However, choosing not to enroll in KDP select gives me the option to publish everything. The plan is to start with a wide strategy and see how it goes. Then based on my success elsewhere; decide if I want to go back to Amazon only and rejoin KDP select.

If my earnings from non Amazon websites are negligible then there’s little to lose by staying in KDP select.

I removed all my stories that were eligible to be removed from KDP select and published them wide in December. I have to wait until mid-late/February to remove the rest as there’s a 90 day enrollment period for KDP select.

After that all of my stories will be wide and all the stories I publish going forward will be published everywhere.

There are benefits to both strategies but I want to get some data on how well my stuff sells outside of Amazon. Then I’ll see if I want to  commit to an Amazon only strategy. In order to do that I have to pass on KDP select and publish everywhere for a while and see how it goes.

This is going to be the primary meat of these reports going forward. I don’t have to say anything that I’ve said above again. These posts will mainly deal with how many stories I published, how many words I wrote, how many stories I sold at each outlet and how much money I made.

I do have expenses here. There are licensed stock photos to buy for my covers. Also, I pay someone on Fiverr a few bucks a pop to design my covers as I have no Photoshop skills.

I did buy a one month subscription to one of the big stock photo sites back in 2013. That means I still have a lot of photos to use. As such, my expenses will be mostly limited to cover design fees for now. There might be a time in the future(when one of the stock photo sites has a sale) that I’ll spend some more money to get some additional stock photos to work with.

 Let’s take a look at how much I produced this month. This report also sets a baseline for how many works I have live from my short stint with self-publishing in 2013.

I lost money in December! I thought I was writing for money here, not to lose money!

This is going to be common in the first few months. The long term goal is to make money each month. However, in meantime the losses aren’t anything substantial so it’s no big deal.

The starting costs for self-publishing are relatively low and that’s a good thing. You can use free stock photos and do your own work on the covers if you want your expenses to be $0 but I’d rather spend a bit more and get a higher quality cover.

The first order of business was to go wide where I could. That worked well since I sold 3 copies outside of Amazon. BIG MONEY!

I published nothing this month which means all these earnings were from stories I wrote in 2013. That’s not too bad. This shows that there’s a little bit of a shelf life on these. Adding more to the total of 15 I have will only help to improve my future passive income even if I stop writing.

$10.56 isn’t a lot but it’s better than 0. I get a lot out of the whole process by practicing my hobby and learning more about the business of self-publishing. There’s a ton of genres out there to write in too. This process will allow me to not only play around with a bunch of them but also gauge which ones sell and which ones don’t. The long term goal is to improve as a writer as well. It certainly won’t hurt to try to earn a bit of money on the side.

I won’t lie but I also get pretty excited each time I get a sale. Not only because it means a few bucks in my pocket but also because it means someone is reading something I put work into and hopefully enjoying it.

The 55k+ words I published in December went a long way to setting up January’s slate of published titles.

I’m really bad at Photoshop. A professional looking cover goes a long way to selling a self-published work. That’s why I see the $5-$6/cover I spend on fiverr.com as a good investment to spur future earnings.

I’m well into January now so I know the results for the most part and I can say that sales growth in this business is relatively slow :).

I’m not expecting to blow it out of the water in 2017 but it’ll be fun to track all this stuff, see how much I’m actually writing and how it all translates to earnings going forward.

One of the reasons I failed to stick with this in 2013 was lack of consistency. I look back at the $100+ I was getting a few months in back then and wonder what could have been if I stuck with it.

I’ve missed 1 day so far, this last Saturday due to various events and I made that up by doing double the work yesterday so I’m happy with the consistency I’ve achieved. I find that doing something becomes second nature if you commit to doing it every day and actually stick with it. I’m a different person now than I was back then and think I should be able to stick with it via self-motivation and the tracking within this blog. I’ve learned through my portfolio that I’m a lot more likely to keep track of everything if I have to document it on this blog and I hope that will be the case with my self-publishing experiment.

I’ll be back again next month with #2 which will include the January update; where I’ll actually have new titles published. Maybe this time I’ll actually be in the green!

Thanks for reading. I’ve got the January dividend update coming up next as well as my 2017 financial goals.