3 Key Tips to Self-Publishing a Book on Health and Wellness

Health and wellness professionals often want to write and publish books, and it makes sense—having a published book can build your credibility as an expert and broaden your impact on the world.

If your book is successful, it can even become a useful passive income stream.While some authors prefer to work with publishing companies, self-publishing a self-help or wellness book can be a great way to bring your project to market.

To be clear, I love all models of publishing. Traditional publishers have their advantages, and you should follow the path that aligns best with your goals for the book you’re working on.

Below, we’ll lay out some ways to determine what those goals are.

What You Need to Know About Self-Publishing

If you’re considering going the self-publishing route, here are some important things to know about the economics of self-publishing.

1. Self-publishing is faster than traditional publishing

Since you’ll be publishing on your own, you don’t need to find a literary agent and develop a book pitch. That said, some elements of a book pitch, such as determining your target market and assessing competing titles, are a good idea even for books you plan to self-publish.

However, you don’t need to develop a full pitch package.

You also won’t be going through rounds of publisher edits or other delays in production. When you say your book is ready, it’s ready—so if speed is a consideration for your book process, self-publishing may be the way to go.

2. You shouldn’t go at it alone

As much as I support and have thrived in the self-publishing model, I also recognize that “self-publishing” is something of a misnomer. It doesn’t mean you’re expected to (or should) do every part of the process by yourself. I’m a big believer in paying for expertise. 

Hire an editor—they’ll catch mistakes that you would miss. If you don’t have great design skills, hire a book designer, or at least pay for cover design. As the author of a well-received book with a terrible cover, I know firsthand the negative impact of cutting corners at this stage.

You might also find it helpful to hire a marketer or a PR firm to help with your book launch.

In short, don’t try to be a one-person show. Working with people who have specific skills that you lack can increase the chances that your book will reach more of the people who could benefit from it.

Hiring outside help will inevitably increase the budget needed for your book, but it can also help your book reach more people and sell more copies in the long-run.

3. Self-publishing can be profitable, but isn’t always

Self-publishing produces great passive income for some, and frustrations for others. Before you get too far into your book project, make a budget for it.

Yes, even if your book is fundamentally a labor of love—plan how much money that labor of love will cost.

Be realistic about your writing process and how long it’s likely to take you to write each chapter. How many hours of total work will you need to have a finished draft? Then double that estimate (yes, really) to account for edits and revisions you’ll want to make after that initial draft is complete. 

Multiply the total hours by a reasonable hourly rate, especially if you’re taking time away from client care to work on your book. Then add in expenses for the expertise you’ll be paying for as described above. You now have a total estimate of the initial investment you’ll be making in bringing your book to life.

Now think about how much you’d like to make in royalties per book sold. (We’ll get to pricing in a moment.) Divide that estimate of total expenses by the royalties per book, and you can see how many books you’ll need to sell for your book to make a profit. 

For many authors in this space, profit is not their main concern. Some write books for impact, others to build their resume.

Still others simply enjoy the creative process, and see book writing as a core part of their clinical practice.

Those are all great reasons! Be sure to keep in mind that if you want to achieve profitability and passive income from a self-published book, it does take a fair amount of up-front investment of both time and money.

Figuring out Pricing and Profit

How much you’ll actually make per book depends on a lot of factors, including the book’s size, page count, and format. Some self-publishing companies have calculators that allow you to start from how much you would like to make, and then work backwards to how much you’ll need to charge for the book.

If you choose to go with the publishing services offered through Amazon, you can earn up to 70% on ebook purchases priced from $2.99 to $9.99 (bearing in mind there are a number of specific conditions to earn the full 70% royalty), and 35% on ebook purchases priced at $10 and above.

For print books, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing offers this calculator to estimate your royalties. A 200-page black-and-white book priced at $20 is estimated to earn a royalty of $8.75, just under 45% of the retail price. But if that same book is 300 pages, the estimated royalty dips to $7.55, or 37% of retail. Compare that with the 8-10% royalty typically earned by authors signed to major publishers.

Some authors prefer not to work with Amazon, in which case they have many other options, including BookBaby, Blurb, Lulu, and others.

These companies can help with all aspects of project development, including design, manufacturing, distribution, and marketing. In some cases, they can make your product available for purchase on Amazon, without needing to use Amazon as the publisher.

The specific services and fees vary by company, and can be an important part of developing a budget for your project. Make sure you have a clear sense of what specific services you need, how much you’ll be paying for them, and how much that impacts what you’ll make on each sale.

How to Self-Publish Your Book

With physical books, authors who choose to self-publish can go through either of two routes for printing and distribution. Several companies offer a “print on demand” model, which eliminates the need for warehousing unsold books. In this model, your books are printed one at a time, as orders come in.

The other option is a more traditional manufacturing and warehousing model. In this model, you might order hundreds of copies of your books to be printed at once, and then those books are warehoused at a fulfillment center. (Or at your home or office, if you intend to fulfill orders yourself. As someone who has done this, I urge you—don’t do this.) They are shipped individually as orders come in.

While the print-on-demand model is more hands-off and offers more predictable costs (the Kindle Direct Publishing calculator linked above is for printing on demand), it also can be more expensive per manufactured book than a traditional manufacturing and warehousing model.

At the same time, warehousing can quickly become the more expensive path if you have boxes full of unsold books sitting at a fulfillment center. So it’s worth looking closely at costs to figure out which path is best for you. Managing a supply chain can increase your profit per book, but it also requires a level of active, ongoing attention to that supply chain.

“Passive” Income From Self-Publishing Is Not Actually All That Passive

In my own experience with self-publishing, I’ve had to recalibrate my expectations for what it would look like to be a writer.

While some writers are skilled enough to have one or two works provide them with income streams for years, I’m not that good. But I’m willing to work hard, and I’ve found that self-publishing has provided me with a great deal of freedom and creative control that I appreciate.

The tradeoff has been that I had to start thinking of my self-publishing income as active income, and not truly passive. 

My books require regular updates and ongoing promotional efforts. Yours may also. It’s likely not in your interest or your audience’s interest for you to take a “finish it and forget it” approach, where you essentially abandon your project once it’s publicly available. You’ll want to keep nurturing it, and keep spreading the word about it. After all, your book can’t help the people who don’t know about it. So once your book is available, your work may get easier, but it isn’t done. 

Ultimately, your book can become a powerful differentiator for you and your practice.

But first, you have to write it. And then you can offer it to the world.

Self-publishing is a great avenue to get your book out there—however, it may call on experience and expertise you haven’t developed yet.

As I see it, self-publishing is one more opportunity to sharpen your entrepreneurial skill set, and to offer your knowledge and expertise to readers who can benefit from it.