Cost and Benefit of a Cash Stream

July Workshop Schedule

All July workshops have room. All are limited to five writers max. But at the moment there are very few in any of the workshops. No surprise in this time of great forgetting. This way every year.

Class #1… July 5th … Author Voice
Class #2… July 5th … How to Write Thrillers
Class #3… July 5th … Adding Suspense to Your Writing
Class #4… July 5th … Plotting With Depth
Class #5… July 5th … Character Development
Class #6… July 6th … Depth in Writing
Class #7… July 6th … Advanced Character and Dialog
Class #8… July 6th … Cliffhangers
Class #9… July 6th … Pacing Your Novel
Class #10… July 6th … Teams in Fiction

Classic Workshops and Lectures are also available at any time.

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Topic of the Night: Some Basics on Cost and Benefits

of Getting New Cash Streams 

This post is about the decision to try to add in a new cash stream. And this post is only basics, nothing more. I hope to do a much longer post in the near future on this.

Anyway, a cash stream in publishing is exactly what it sounds in the name. It is something that flows money to you regularly.

Amazon US is a cash stream. Or if you wanted to break it down even more, every title you have licensed for readers through Amazon US is a cash stream.

Every title through Kobo, Amazon international stores, B&N, iBooks, Smashwords, D2D, Overdrive, and so on and so on.

WMG Publishing has over 650 titles now. Each is a cash stream in all the places we have them licensed for sale. See why WMG can afford nine employees?

Each license of copyright generates a stream of income, you hope. And those streams are put together and sent to you monthly (for the most part) from each store.

Paper books are cash streams for each of your titles, especially since paper books are not finite anymore with print runs, but are like electronic books, licensed one-at-a-time for production.

At WMG Publishing some of our products also have subscriptions, which is a cash stream. And we sell to brick and motor stores and sell WMG books through our own store as well. All cash streams.

Our stores are cash streams. Our three ebay shops are cash streams. And on and on and on. You get the idea.

More cash streams flowing, the bigger the river of money.

But it seems that every day almost, there is something new to try to decide about. Some possible new cash stream. And that’s where the cost/benefit analysis comes in.

Let me give an example:

A month or so back I put up on YouTube an entire online workshop that had been retired for a year or more. I had no information about how it would do and I put it up basically to gather more information.

The information I got was this: In the two plus months it has been out there available, a number of people have watched it all the way through, all six weeks. That worked out to be about $28 through AdSense for the ads. (A lot more than I expected, actually.)

It took me about six hours of my time, one hour per week of videos, to get them to YouTube.

Now, if that was where it all ended, I can tell you this, six hours of my time is worth a ton more than $28.00. (grin)

But those videos, it turned out, brought some people into the online workshops. Now I have cut the online workshops back to only five per workshop maximum and they were still not filling by a long ways. In many workshops these days I give private lessons to people.

I don’t mind, but honestly at some point we will get back to my time and income analysis there. At some point. So the YouTube videos introduced a few more people to the online workshops. So the value of my six hours turned out to be worth it.

So the basics of looking at any cash stream are these:

1. Look to see where the work might bring in cash. Realistic.
2. Count the amount of time it will take and value that time.
3. Count the actual money it will take to start the stream.
4. Compare your costs to the possible income and make the decision from the numbers only.

I did an experiment with that old workshop on YouTube. If I had to spend the weeks of time to record a brand new workshop for YouTube, I would never do it. No return on the time and money spent.

But using an already recorded retired workshop cut my time down to about six hours and thus, with the new people finding the workshops from the YouTube videos, it made it worth the time.

I might even put up another of the retired workshops later this summer or this fall. It might be worth doing after the time of great forgetting.

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