"Sales of Hobby Books." Topic

I am working on a book about painting WW2 miniatures. There is a thread about it in the WW2 Painting Guides section.

According to the contract from a publisher, I can expect to earn about £1.00 GBP per copy sold (slightly less for PDF sales). However, I have to provide the text and 250 photos or illustrations. I also have to prove I have copyright permission for the pictures.

If I want to use historical pictures, I have to pay royalties to the picture agency. Similarly, if I want to use a picture of a uniform from the Imperial War Museum, I need a licence for every picture. This becomes very expensive very quickly.

I was expecting say 2,000 copies over the first few years so there is no way I can use agency or IWM pictures.

Do any of you have an idea how many copies of hobby books are sold? This will help me judge the amount I can invest.

Thanks

Mick

I doubt you would sell 2000 of them unfortunately. You may want to look into self publishing and/or going directly to Kindle on Amazon. If the goal is to have a printed copy you may want to look into print on demand type publishers.

There are many folks on here (or at least there used to be) who are involved in hobby related book publishing. I'm sure they will be a wealth of information. Or reach out directly to those you know?

Inquire at Wargames Vault.

You can always do what the other painting books do and show photos of the painted miniatures.

Do not expect to make any money from this.

You will sell about 20.

You will also be deluged with people who want a free copy and who will promise to praise it to the stars for you on Facefartbook,Lunketylunklunk, Twaddle and other social media.

If you give it to them you will guarantee one thing you will never hear from them again.

Thank-you for your comments. This has confirmed what I thought. I will keep my costs within the advance from the publisher. I do not mind putting my time in for free but I will not invest a large amount of cash.

Extremely vague I know, but FWIW, a guy I met had written an excellent book about a British infantry unit in WW2 and in passing we discussed sales and suchlike. From memory he expected to sell several hundred or maybe over 1,000 quite quickly and then 100-200 a year for a while. His book is around 430,000 on the Amazon best sellers list a couple of years later (ranking on the books individual page).

I've not bought one, but Mig Jimenez' book on Wafffen SS camouflage ranks 970,000 on Amazon, and I'd think he is pretty well known in the hobby. Neither Amazon figure includes direct sales from the publisher, so I guess this is just a long winded way of saying unfortunately I don't think you'd sell an awful lot – though I await your book eagerly after going back to your various online painting guides so often.
Rob

Thank-you Rob