Money Spent… Making Money? A Few CreateSpace Points

This is a sort of thing which can make everyone go a bit nuts, but the questions I am dealing with are in a way a bit complex:  Would you spend money on buying a number of your own books so that you have them in order to either hand them out or to hand sell them?

I would say if you plan it right, then yes you should buy some of your own books at a discounted rate.  When I was looking up some of the prices on CreateSpace for my book, it was interesting to see a few numbers.

CreateSpace does offer you a discount, but you have to fill in all the blanks, for example if what you have written is a 5.5″ by 8″ book, and it is 300 pages, and you have the pro plan (which is $39.00 US) you will be saving more.

Of course what most of us writers seem not to look at is the shipping costs.  That is another form you have fill out.  So I played around a bit.

I wrote down some numbers and added the shipping, and before long I found that after a certain number of books, you are probably not going to be making money, but rater trying to make ends meet.  I added up the total costs and that was enlightening.  So here’s an example.

Let’s say you’ve written your book, had it editing by a professional ($300) and then bought the prop plan and some marketing items ($100) and then you bought say 300 books (total with shipping to Canada: $900) then you will need to make about $1300 to make what you spent.  How much is your book worth to you?

That means making a lot of money.

This means that your writing must be really good, and others will need to buy it from amazon.com a n other sources.  They will also have to buy your books.  You will also need to have people go to your blog and buy said book.

So now you have an idea how much money you spent… do you know how to be making money– after your expenses?