Would 40 handbell choirs nationwide buy "Be Still My Soul" (Arr. Matthew Prins) next year?

The more I think about handbell arranging as a career, the more I like the idea. I am not terribly unhappy with my full-time job -- I wouldn't have been there close to five years if I had been -- but it's by far the least interesting part of who I am (compare/contrast "I work in membership marketing for a small nonprofit healthcare consortium" to "I am a film critic" or "I am an independent filmmaker" or "I am a composer" or "I am an a cartoonist, kinda, maybe"), and it's 40 hours a week that, while I'm doing something, I'm not usually doing something interesting. So while being a full-time composer and arranger would not be number one on my most-wanted-jobs list -- "guy given $20 million to make whatever kind of film he wants" would be first -- it's certainly in the top ten, and it's leagues above what I'm doing right now (which, to be very fair, is leagues above many, many, many other jobs I could be doing). Further, as Kim and I discussed yesterday at The World's Priciest Arby's¹ (not to be confused with The World's Best Arby's or The World's Biggest Arby's, both also in the Richmond metro area), it'd be far easier to make money as a handbell arranger/composer than, say, as a film critic, simply because of supply and demand: Despite similar demands, many, many more people want to write film reviews than compose and arrange handbell music, and my talent for each is probably relatively similar. (It's hard to compare, obviously -- apples and oranges and such.)

All that said, I believe that if I were writing handbell music full-time, I could compose or arrange 30 high-quality pieces in a year -- two every three weeks, with seven weeks of vacation/catch-up time. I don't think that's unreasonable: I've already written or arranged about 30 pieces of (low-to-middling-quality) handbell music, but more importantly, there's a dude in the article that got me started on all this who did 100 pieces last year, and if he can do 100, I can do 30. (As another example: Cynthia Dobrinski has about 200 in print, and given that [supposedly] most music goes out-of-print in about seven years, that's about 30 per year.)

Of course, even if I got close to all 30 pieces published -- which I think is reasonably likely, actually -- how many people would buy them? I have no clue. I'm going to throw out a number, because I think it sounds good, and that number is 40 choirs in the first year, decreasing by 25 percent each year until the 7th year, after which zip. So over seven years, I'd guess each piece would be sold to about 40+30+23+17+13+10+8 choirs, which we'll round to 150. (Obviously, if any of my pieces were played at a festival, add another 15 or 20 to that number.) Including the conductor's piece, I'm guess each choir might purchase, oh, let's say eight sheets, which means that over the life of each piece of music I get published, I might see sales of 1200. From what I can gather, sheet music royalties generally run about 15% to the "author," and as handbell music is running almost $4.00 on average, I'd get about $.60 on each piece of music I'd sell, or $720 over the life of the piece. Recalling the 30 pieces of music per year, I might be able to make $21,600 ($720x30) in a year of writing handbell music (although some of that money would, of course, be deferred). That's pretty unfar from what I make in a year right now, and that's not even including where the big handbell composers make a large portion of their money: writing commissioned works ($500-$1000+ each, on top of any royalties) and directing (since most, if certainly not all, composers have three or four bell choirs they direct on the side).

So what I am saying is of the wack ideas I have for making money in a funnish manner, this is the most reasonable. The plan, then: Before the end of this month, I will finish "Be Still My Soul" and send it out to a publisher. In April, I will pick another song, arrange it, and send it out, probably to a different publisher. May, June, July, August: The same. At that point, I think I will have a much better idea how reasonable it is for me to try to make a living on composition.

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1 Our meal, which was comped by TWPA in a welcome-to-our-neighbourhood letter, would have cost $19.60. For two people. Without dessert.