Matthew Wayne Selznick

Let’s take a look at the state of Matt in 2006, moneywise, eh?

2006 was the first year I swapped a full-time “day job” and part-time creative endeavors for full-time creative endeavors and a minimum-wage part-time job. How’d that work out for me, you might be wondering?

Even if you’re not wondering, I still think it’s important to be fairly transparent about my doings… some of you donated to my travel fund to get to various conventions, purchased copies of my first book “Brave Men Run - A Novel of the Sovereign Era” or donated to the Podiobooks.com version… some of you hired me for consulting and / or editing services, and some of you utilize my web hosting services. Since it’s you’re money at work, I think I should share how things went.

I made about $4,440 in 2006 from various sources. Of that, 42% was from consulting and editing, 25% came from web hosting, and 15% came from income related to “Brave Men Run - A Novel of the Sovereign Era.” The other 18% was thanks to Ebay income, PayPal dividends, convention travel donations, and small miscellaneous income and payments from various sources.

In terms of expenses, I paid out a little over $4,000. Most of this went to travel, lodging, and registration expenses for the three conventions I attended, WorldCon, the Podcast and Portable Media Expo, and PodCamp West. 12% of expenses went to hosting costs for my websites and podcasts. Nearly 8% paid for domain name registration and renewals. I had to replace my problematic desktop computer this year, and monthly payments for that accounted for almost 11%.

When all is said and done, I netted about $400.00. Obviously, if not for the 20-hour-a-week wage slave job in the morning and the fact that my wife still has her 50 - 60 hour per week job (and the fact that she’s gracious enough to take the majority of the financial burdens these days), I would not be able to live on this. That’s a given, though — I know I’m far from replacing the income I made when I was a career guy for Borders. That’s not the point, really — I’m actually excited that I grossed forty four hundred bucks doing creative stuff.

What is educational to me, though, is where that money came from.

My web hosting service is the classic example of passive income — it requires only occasional attention from me, and provides a valuable and inexpensive service for fifty or so people — some of whom have been with MWS Media for more than two years.

In 2006, I had eight consulting clients — five I provided with podcasting and website consulting, three, fiction and non-fiction book manuscript editing. While far from the amount of work I need to sustain myself, this is more than I’ve ever had before, and that’s encouraging. In fact, income in January (some of which was for work done in 2006) is already a quarter of what I made in this area in all of 2006! In 2007, I’m looking forward to doing more work for existing clients, as well as building relationships with new ones.

Many of you are aspiring authors and podcasters with a professional interest in the success of “Brave Men Run - A Novel of the Sovereign Era.” Let’s break down the numbers for the book’s income in 2006:

• Donations from subscribers to the Podiobooks.com podcast edition (2,633 new subscribers in 2006): $272.99; about 43%; about $0.10 per subscriber
• Royalties for the print edition (111 copies sold): $180.25; about 28%; about $1.62 per book
• Royalties for the e-book edition (37 copies sold): $163.25; about 26%; about $4.41 per e-book
• Royalties for the MP3 CD edition (3 copies sold): $20.37; about 3%; about $6.79 per CD

It’s challenging to accurately interpret Podiobooks.com subscribers as if they were book buyers, since not every subscriber completed listening (hard to believe, I know!) So we’ll leave that out of this next figure:

Average income per copy sold: $2.41.

So there’s a snapshot of how a moderately successful, independently published, multi-format book can do in its first full year of existence. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

There it is… an approximation of my financial year for 2006. Note that these figures aren’t precise — the exact, to-the-penny numbers go to the IRS…! But it does give you a pretty good idea of how things went for me.

I would be a lousy self-promoter if I didn’t mention this:

If you’d like to make 2007 more lucrative for me than 2006, you are encouraged to visit…

• MWS Media — services and support for the independent creative endeavors of individuals and small businesses. Podcast and website consultation, fiction and non-fiction editing, inexpensive web hosting, and more!
• “Brave Men Run - A Novel of the Sovereign Era” — a critically acclaimed, Parsec Award nominated coming-of-age story that mixes alternate history and comic book sensibilities with an eighties movie feel!