The other day, I got an email from Amazon. They were going to be paying me my royalties for my book Laund-O-Mat at the End of The World and Other Fringe Favourites. It was published in 2014 and I was going to receive a whopping $17.95!

Whoo hoo! To be honest, I didn’t think I was going to make any money on it.

Originally, I planned to write the book to coincide with the Hamilton Fringe 2014. One of the plays in the book, Mommy’s Mask, had won the Hamilton Fringe playwriting contest and I thought it would be a good marketing tool to have it available for purchase. But I procrastinated and chickened out, so it wasn’t ready in time for the Festival. Score one for Resistance.

It also took a lot longer to put together than I anticipated.

The one smart thing I did was to poll my family and friends and see who would be interested in buying my book if I did get it written and published. Not everyone was interested and I didn’t hold it against them. I just wanted to know if there was enough interest to warrant the effort.

In the end, about forty lovely people agreed to buy the book and that paid for the publishing and shipping costs.

More importantly, it was the incentive to get it done. Before I knew it, I had written and published a book and I could direct people to Amazon.com to find it. I was a published author. A published writer, who had a day job, thank goodness!

A few weeks ago, my brother suggested that I should make a Kindle or ebook version of Laund-O-Mat. It would be much cheaper to purchase and maybe people that didn’t know me would discover it. It made sense.

That’s why I find the timing of Amazon’s royalty payout so interesting. It’s like the universe is saying: Listen to your brother! You’ve only made this much with the paper version, so try the digital one.

And I’ve been meaning to get the digital version set up, but Resistance is still lurking around. I keep finding reasons not to do it. Or I succumb to distractions. Yep, good old Resistance.

But maybe I should look at it like a test. It doesn’t take much effort to get it setup for a digital version of the book. I just have to set aside some time. And it would be interesting to see if my brother is right and that I can sell more at a cheaper price.

Can I make more money than $17.95 with a digital version?

Time will tell.

© 2019 Peter Gruner