The Unfeeling Thousandaire

I’m writing a new mini book, partly thanks to writer and goal-setting buddy, Désirée Zamorano. This is the preliminary cover.

I don’t know if I should say $10K or “Five Figures” in the subtitle. I think $10K is more eye-catching but more braggy as well. I’m not interested in bragging, just sharing information. Any thoughts?

And just for fun, here’s the intro to the book:

The Unfeeling Thousandaire:

How I Made $10,000 Indie Publishing and You Can, Too!

Bob Meyer sells 2000 ebooks per day. Joe Konrath pulls in $100,000 per month. But just like most of us aren’t going to pull a Bill Gates, ever, most of us are not going to make a serious killing on indie publishing—or anything else.

But we can dare to try. We can write and publish our own work, then pocket the earnings as both the author and the publisher. (That’s how I define independent publishing, which people also call self-publishing, but I’m not going to bother arguing about the difference.) We can have real, live people connect with our stories and write fan mail. And we can make a little money. Wouldn’t it be nice to pay the rent using the money you made from your own imagination? Author David Dalglish said on the Kindle Boards that not only can he pay the rent, he has enough left over for a sexy party.

Me, too. So I’m not a billionaire, or a millionaire. But I’m a thousandaire. I made $10,000 in my first year of indie publishing. But I started off making zero dollars. In this short book, I will share my numbers and whatever knowledge I’ve earned. Because if I can do it, so can you.

The Urban Dictionary defines a thousandaire as someone with a net worth between $1,000 and $999,999.99. If you are willing to put the time and effort in, you can become an indie thousandaire, too. It may well take more than a year. Heck, it may take a lifetime. But you can do it.

When my book, The Most Unfeeling Doctor in the World and Other True Tales From the Emergency Room, cracked the top 1500 of Kindle bestsellers on Amazon in September 2011, I’m not pretending I made the top 100. But as my husband, the engineer, pointed out, it meant that of over 750,000 items for sale on the Kindle, I’d leaped into the top 0.25 percent. I was #1 for Regional Canadian Memoirs, #2 for Kindle Medical Memoirs, and #7 for Medical Memoirs in any book form, about 2.5 months after release. Then I got within sniffing distance of the top 1000. In hard numbers, that meant I sold 1269 copies of the Unfeeling Doctor, and together with my other books, made about $2600 in my best month.

Still not impressed? Then this book isn’t for you.

Like my friend Becky said about motherhood, it’s easier if you have low expectations. And you have to work hard. There must be some way to just lie on the beach, getting lap dances, while raking in six figures a month, but that’s beyond my ken. (Also, I think I would get bored by the second lap dance. But that’s just me.)

By the way, I have nothing against the traditional publishing world, which has also made me a thousandaire. But there are gazillions of articles about how to publish conventionally. I’m telling you how to make money now, on your own terms.

If my teaspoon of success makes you hate me, then again, please just walk away. Hate is unproductive. Much better for both of us to turn our energy to other things.

So. Enough chit chat. On to the “secrets”!

(And there I cruelly leave you hanging.)