Spiderwize's Self Publishing Blog

This self publishing game is okay, some of you – especially newcomers to the field – may be thinking, but can I actually earn any money at it?  After all, unless it’s a real personal project where the author only wants a few copies to show his family and friends and for his own personal pleasure, the great majority of writers would like to see something for their efforts – something such as decent money, mainly.

Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule for how much you can earn as a self published author.  Book authors do not get a salary – how much they earn depends on how many of their books they can sell and what royalties they then receive from those sales.  Some self published authors have been successful enough to earn something like 100,000 US dollars inside of six months.  Others would be lucky if they earned that much in a lifetime.  Some self published authors, of course, can end up selling not so much as one copy of their book, so you can probably guess how much they’re earning.

The truth is that the success of a book is something like 20 per cent writing, 80 per cent marketing, so to be a success as a self published writer, being a good writer simply isn’t enough – you need to be a good, if not great, marketer as well.

p.s. Quality writing and canny marketing skills are the only ways to make good profit as a self published author.

Recently I mentioned that working as a writer of forewords for other writer’s books can be quite a lucrative little sideline and promised to follow up on this train of thought. Since I am nothing but a man of my word, I thought I might as well just jump right to it today.

The first thing to know of course is exactly how to write a foreword, since they do have a format and a rhythm all of their own. Forewords generally last for at least one and rarely more than two pages (it’s not your book, after all) and like a story, has a beginning, middle, and end. The opening of the foreword should include a little personal touch or two, usually indicating how the foreword writer knows the author of the book. This gives both foreword and book a feeling of legitimacy, rather than making the reader think the writer of the foreword has done so solely for the cash (which may well be the case, but you don’t want them to think that!).

Anecdotes relating to the author and the theme of the book are advisable for inclusion in the middle section of the foreword, giving the reader a sense that the book is written by someone who knows what they’re talking about. Feel free to mention some of the book’s strong points too (without giving anything away of course). Then conclude by stating why you wanted to write the foreword (again, don’t say “for the cash”) and sign off with your name, credentials and location.

p.s. Don’t be backwards when writing a foreword.