Still waiting for my proof copy!

I have had an email from Lulu to say it’s been dispatched, so it’s gotta get here now….. I paid for the quickest form of shipping but I’m guessing it won’t be here till monday…. I mean couriers delivering on a saturday? Unless it arrives later today…

Meantime, I wanted to post a bit about the outlay and other financial stuff involved in self-publishing, particularly with the POD business (print on demand) for any one interested or considering such a mad venture themselves.

The retail price direct from Lulu will be £17.50 for the paperback book (the PDF is £10, but will focus on book sales for now) Most of that cost is either for printing, Lulu’s commission or PayPal fees. I get just over a quarter of that sum, which might sound nice as it is, but isn’t really much compared to the actual cost, or how long it’s taken to put this altogether.

So, a breakdown of the budget and costs goes a bit like this:-

Materials (yarn, software etc) – £150
Compensation fees (wages and equivalents to everyone involved, including their copy of the book (being as there are no freebies in the POD game)) – £850
Marketing (current cost of advertising, purchase of additional books to send for reviews) – £120

Giving a sub-total of £1120

That sum doesn’t include my time… now it’s difficult to gauge exactly how many hours I’ve put into this, being as the designing, pattern charting, knitting, layout, graphics, organisation etc etc have all been done by me. But we’ve gotta be looking at big bucks, really.

Rumour has it that publishers pay a minimum of £100 per design, and there are 24 of those in the book, and additional 2 or 3 gone out to submissions (which counts as marketing). So let’s call the first part £2700.

For the all the knitting? Jeez…. toughie…. so lets’ call it £30 a Hat, which would be the average price if I sold each one. So that’s an additional £810.

Then there’s planning, writing and photographing the tutorials. Think we can say that’s 2 weeks work, roughly £500??

As for all the checking, layout, graphics, photoshopping etc etc….. think that comes to around a months’ work in comparism to the tutorials, at least. Let’s be generous realistic and call it 6 weeks work, which adds an additional £1500 to the sum.

So, rough man hours comes to a cost of £5510. That sounds awfully cheap for a whole book, nearly a years work, doesn’t it? Well, let’s stick with that figure for now.

So our new subtotal is….
Materials + labour = £1120 + £5510 = £6630

Finally, there’s the cost of this new laptop. Fair enough, it was probably gonna die fairly soon, but if I hadn’t have been doing this work and playing with huge files it would have lived much longer. Besides, I’ve borrowed the money to pay for it and it’s got to be paid back! So that’s another £500.

So, to recap….
Materials:-£1200
Labour:- £5510
Additional expenses incurred:-£500

So, all in all costs come to a whopping £7130. Minimum.

So, in relation to book sales and profit (approximately) it looks like this….
Materials:- 240 books
Labour:- 1102 books
Additional expenses incurred:- 100 books

In total, I’d need to sell…..
340 books to cover my own financial outlay
1102 books to cover my time
1442 books in total.

I don’t think that’s as easy as it sounds, being as this book won’t be available from Amazon or other book stores & LYS… it’s only being sold on Lulu so it’s up to me to pimp myself stupid. To be honest, I’d be chuffed to see my financial outlay covered and take everything from there as a bonus.

All the photos and nearly all the details of each pattern are now up on Ravelry, with the book having it’s own page (I’m dead proud of this 😉 The level of interest has surprised me – I only started putting the photos up when I did so that it would all be in place when it was ready for sale, and folk could see what they were buying. Yet each time I log into Ravelry there’s another message asking when it will be ready of why can’t they buy it yet! The amount of times the Hats have been favourited or added to queues is steadily growing, so the possibility of covering my basic costs looks promising.

Tom’s taking bets as to how long it will take to sell the first 100 copies. I reckon a month, Tom thinks a week. (bless!)