Self Publishing Success Story Steven Aitchison

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Scottish author, Steven Aitchison first started writing his book The Belief Principle in 2014. He had the title of the book, the book cover design completed and even created a website before he’d written a word.

As he started to write, his other business venture, a social media marketing program, started to take off in a big way and he had to abandon his dream of writing and completing the book in 2014.

It wasn’t until 2019 that he finally managed to get some time to do the research and write the first draft of the book.

During the intervening 6 years Steven managed to build up a huge following on Facebook with 3.7 million followers and grew his Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin, Twitter and Youtube accounts at the same time.

Turned Down A Publishing Contract With Wiley

There was some interest from traditional publishers and Steven was hours away from signing a contract with A Wiley Publishers imprint. After looking at the numbers Steven decided that from a financial point of view he would be much better of self publishing, although recognised that the kudos of being published traditionally would have been good.

Steven advised:

It just didn’t make sense to go with Wiley. I was being asked to do most of the marketing myself and I was going to be £0.50p per book with a small advance of £2,500. So I would have to sell 5,000 books in my first year as part of my contract.

With self publishing I would be getting royalties of 70% per ebook and after publishing costs around 40% per paperback book. This is equivalent to around £3.50 per book, a huge 600% more than I was being offered with Wiley and I was doing exactly the same amount of work.

I would have loved to have worked with Traditional publisher at the time but the numbers just didn’t make sense from a business point of view.

Launching At End of April 2020

After 2 rounds of editing the book was finally ready to be published and using the pre-sale option at Amazon KDP, Steven Launched his book.

As with many self publishing stories, Steven had a bit of a blip with the self publishing process as he had uploaded the ebook in PDF format which made it difficult to read and no links had been added. Subsequently the initial first few hundred sales may have been wasted.

He had to un-publish the first book and republish with a new ASIN number which put an abrupt halt to sales.

However, he Steven took this in his stride and advised ‘I’m in this for the long haul with more books planned, so it’s all good.’

As of today June 19th 2020 the book has sold over 500 copies with multiple best selling category accolades.

Where To From Here?

Steven advised he has already started writing the second book in the series and is focusing on promoting his first book and writing his second book.

He had expected to sell a few thousand copies of the book by now, but isn’t too concerned at the low number due to the rave reviews.

He is also writing hist first fiction book which he says is more of a hobby at the moment.

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