Looking at the percentage of authors making more than $500 a year is misleading. It's never been easier to publish a book, so the pool of marginal books will grow. This doesn't necessarily reflect the prospects for serious authors.
I'm a self published author. I make around $10,000 a year from print sales. My books started as experiments. I already had e-books. I decided to turn two manuscripts into print books.
I spent about $500 and two weeks on formatting and design. I didn't copy-edit beyond what I had done myself. And I waited to see if it sold.
It did, so I turned more e-books into print books, and made new books aimed at print.
But if the books hadn't sold, I would be classed as one of the poor authors making less than $500 a year. But that would be a misleading data point, because my initial foray was rather tentative.
> This doesn't necessarily reflect the prospects for serious authors.
This is a good point. My father, who self-publishes a book about his childhood for his grandchildren, does not expect to make a living from it. This is vanity publishing, but without any sneering implied. (I have no idea what percentage of authors fall in this category, but I suspect that many authors in self-publishing do not expect to sell to the wider world.)
Educators often publish books tailored for there classes which may represent minimal sales but also minimal effort. If you make 500$ from something that takes 20 hours to put together and or saves you time managing handouts that's hardly failure IMO.
Could you say more about your approach to print? I'm reasonably far along with a manuscript, and now I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. LeanPub seemed nice and easy, but they don't do print.
Start with the eBook and see how that goes: they're really cheap to produce. If it's going decently, reinvest some of the profits into making a print on demand book. Print and eBooks are very different, so what you invest in one won't translate to the other.
Aaron Shepard's books give a pretty good overview of how to publish on amazon.
Createspace is pretty easy to use. If you already have a pdf you sell online, you just have to format it for print, and put a cover on it. I found a designer on elance to help me with both.
Last time I looked LeanPub had an option to produce a print-ready PDF that you could then throw at something like Lulu. Info is somewhere in the author FAQ.
(Note: not done it myself - so don't know how well it works.)
I'm a self published author. I make around $10,000 a year from print sales. My books started as experiments. I already had e-books. I decided to turn two manuscripts into print books.
I spent about $500 and two weeks on formatting and design. I didn't copy-edit beyond what I had done myself. And I waited to see if it sold.
It did, so I turned more e-books into print books, and made new books aimed at print.
But if the books hadn't sold, I would be classed as one of the poor authors making less than $500 a year. But that would be a misleading data point, because my initial foray was rather tentative.