When Does Writing Stop Being A Hobby?

How much money do you need to make for your book(s) to stop being a hobby? Well, you have to make a living from it. If you live in Japan, that means making at least half a million yen per month (if you have three kids, which I do). If you live in Thailand, you can get by on the order of 75000 baht per month. To make them comparable, that is 4800 US dollar and 2300 US dollar. Less than half, and you can live comfortably with three kids. And the Internet is good enough, the food is great, the climate is nice, the beaches fantastic.... Maybe I should reconsider living in Japan. Well, Thailand has its drawbacks too, and the Internet is not available on the beaches.

Anyway, that would cover the cost of living. Then, there is the investment in equipment, Internet acess, and the experience I am writing about. Say another 500 dollars per month. So if you live in Thailand, that means on the order of 3000 USD per month. If you make that much in a sustained way, you can say goodbye to your day job. 

So let us turn around, and see how much that means in terms of sales. If you have a margin of 15 dollars per sale, which means that your ebook will cost about 20 dollars on Amazon, since Amazon adds 30 % on top of what the publisher takes. In this case, you are the publisher as well as author. Amazon is the biggest book market on Earth and also dominant for ebooks, so you have to be there. You do not want to sell physical books if you can help it; they kill trees and there is a lot of hassle with delivery. That is another great thing with Amazon, delivery is completely painless. 

20 dollars is cheap but for a book which is unique in its field and full of facts, as well as helping people with a particular problem. Taking home 15 dollars per sale is not bad. But how many books is it? 

200 per month, or 2400 per year. It is not impossible - my physical books were printed in 7000 copies and they sold out. Although they were sold by a professional publisher with established market channels and my take was a lot less than 15 dollars per copy. 

This is the rub. You have to build market channels. You have to get people interested. And if you had to redo it for each book, it would be a huge investment in time. Those 200 books do not all have to be the same title. If I had a catalog of 10 titles each book would only have to sell 20 copies per month. 

Writing 10 different books is not something you do in your coffee break. But the hard part, and what takes time, is the marketing. If you have to split your attention between 10 different audiences it means you can spend half a day per book per week, and you have to write on weekends. More about that later.