Lean Publishing Tip of the Day 💡 Your Royalties Wallet and the Concept of the Self-Funding Book

There are a number of costs that come with writing and self-publishing a book.

The most obvious costs are your personal time and effort writing the book.

Then comes the cost of your personal time and effort getting attention for your book, through a combination of direct connections with people, and marketing.

That last part - the marketing - can be done for free in many ways: online posts, podcast appearances, book launch events, TV appearances if you can pull it off, things like that.

But if you have a budget for it, there are all kinds of other powerful marketing opportunities available to you.

The Old Way of Funding Books

Typically in the past, that budget came from a publishing company: in exchange for giving them some rights over your work and the vast majority of the money people spent buying your book, they would pay you an advance if you were lucky or established enough, and they would pay for the marketing.

With self-publishing, however, you need to find your own marketing budget.

One popular substitute for the old way of doing things was essentially the Kickstarter funding model: individual people, not publishers, pay you directly in advance for your work.

The Self-Funding Book

At Leanpub, we've long been developing an idea you might call the "self-funding book".

This is a different idea from "pre-funding", like a book advance or Kickstarter.

A self-funding book is one that people are actually buying, and whose proceeds you use to fund its own production marketing.

By publishing your book in-progress or serially, chapter by chapter, you can start generating funding and getting readers after you've written just your first chapter.

(To be clear, on Leanpub, when someone buys your book, they get all the updates for free! So even though when they buy it, they might only be getting the first chapter, they are actually in effect buying the whole book.)

Now here's the really cool thing: on Leanpub, you can directly use the royalties you've earned from your book, to fund its own marketing and expansion.

By marketing, we mean you can buy advertising spots on the Shelf on Leanpub, right on our homepage, and you can buy sponsored spots in our popular Weekly Sale and Monthly Sale newsletters.

Once your book earns enough royalties, you can use its own proceeds to fund its own future sales growth, so in a sense there's zero cost and risk to you - the project funds itself.

Book Expansion

In addition to straightforward marketing, however, on Leanpub your self-funded book can also pay for its own "expansion".

For example, for $49, you can use your royalties to translate your book into another language.

That means if your book has a $25 Suggested Price, you only need to sell three copies of the translation to start earning a profit: $25 x 80% x 3 = $60.

So if your book generates $49, with the click of a button, you have two books published and for sale. If both books together make another $49, you can find a third book. And so on.

You can also use your royalties to turn your non-fiction book into an online course, and you can even use your royalties to pay Leanpub to get your book into print on Amazon KDP and handle everything for you.

Pay For Your Reading With Your Writing

One very cool thing we've also built: you can use the royalties from sales of your own book to buy other books on Leanpub!

That means that your writing habit can pay for your reading habit!

Your Book Royalties Wallet

If you're looking to use your own royalties to potentially increase your revenue and expand your book project, you can now go to your Royalties Wallet here:

https://leanpub.com/author/royalties/wallet

At the top, you'll see your spendable royalties prominently displayed, with an explanation of how they're calculated.

Scroll down and you'll see the author services your books have self-funded:

Scroll down further and you'll see a selection of recommended books you can buy with royalties now:

You're not limited to buying these recommended books with your royalties; add any book to the store, and when you go to check out, you'll see an option to pay with royalties:

A Boring Note About Sales Taxes

When you buy a book with your royalties, it's a real purchase just like any other, and we may need to apply sales tax.

For that reason, when you go to complete a royalty purchase, you may see a form asking for your address, like this:

We ask for your address so we can handle VAT and sales tax on royalty purchases properly. (Also, if you buy Publish on Amazon or GlobalAuthor we use this address to send you your free books from Amazon, and Amazon needs a phone number for delivery.)

If you want to fill out your address in advance, you can do that on your Profile page here:

https://leanpub.com/account/settings

How Can I Get Started?

If all this sounds exciting to you, you can get started any time writing a book in one of our writing modes:

We recommend starting with our Minimal Editor - it's perfect for writing most fiction and ordinary non-fiction books.

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