I've crunched the numbers before. To self-publish + make a decent living from it, $ to invest in your first book & hit good rankings is roughly $2000, mostly for daily ads. I can do a detailed explanation if people are interested.

Why do you think i chose to trad pub instead lol

Ok, a brief #RinWrites for this, I guess. The biggest question most ask is: why $2000?

Because self-publishing is an oversaturated market. There are good books there, but a LOT of terrible ones. Most readers do not have the patience to sift through 100 coals to get 1 diamond.

The $2000 is investment for readers to find your book easier rather than sift through all that. If they see it on ads and they like how your book looks / they like the genre, it's easier to click. Plus there's an assumption where if they see more PR for books = better quality

So, the basics:
book cover: $250
**formatting: $500
editing: $5-7 per page
ads promo: $1000

**can be waived if you only choose to use free ebook formatting on programs like Kindle. If it's your 1st book, focusing on Kindle alone is good

Amazon and BookBub ads tend to be the main focus for ebooks. You need to be very good at scheduling these ads so that they go online AS SOON AS you publish your ebook. Initial sales will be the most important part - this boosts up your Amazon rankings and make your book visible.

This is where most of the hiccups happen. You need to have the ads approved BEFORE your book comes out. Ad companies might need to approve your ad first (may take a day or so), and if there are any problems with it they'll reject it & that's bad news if you already hit 'publish'.

Other things:
1. Research first! Look at the best performing books in your genre and study their keywords and book covers.
2. Do not skimp on spending on book covers, people do judge by it
3. Romance/erotica tend to be easier sells
4. Novels/novellas do better than short stories

5. Publish as many books as you can per year. In an oversaturated market, IDEALLY you should have a new book ready just as the previous one loses substantial rankings.
6. More books = name recognition, fans will actively look for you
7. Expected ROI per book is *hopefully* $7k

8. If you want to write a different genre, use a different pen name (and yes, you might have to start all over again with name branding. A specific pen name per genre is so people come to associate the name with that genre & know what to expect)

Also note that the more saturated the market is, the more $$ you need to spend. At this point $2k is already on the lower end. You can't look at past bestsellers back when the market was more manageable and think you can still do the same as them.

Annnnd that's it!

One last thing I forgot! If you have a good number of published books already, it's good marketing to set the first book in one of your more popular series as a freebie and then charge the rest for $2.99 (usually the standard price for ebooks) and THEN do more ads to promote it.

and and AND I swear it's the final thing! *Niche* genres are good ways to hit rankings faster. Why did you think all those Bigfoot erotica suddenly gained traction, no one else was doing that until they decided to