A Window to Self Publishing or the
Wages of Free
One year ago, on 27 April, 2015, I
released my first novel, A Summer In Amber
followed in July by a second, Some Day Days, and a
third, The Bright Black Sea
in September. All were published on Smashwords and
Amazon, all were free on Smashwords and price-matched free on Amazon
within a week of their release.
I'd like to share the results of my
first year in self-publishing in the hope that my readers will find
this window to the world of self-publishing interesting. Fellow
authors may also find these results interesting, since I've
conducted a pretty pure experiment in the potential and limitations
of offering books for free to create or grow readership.
My rational for free was
straightforward. As a new writer, I'd forgo royalties in exchange for
readers. I had written the stories over the course of five years for
the fun of writing with no intention of making money on them – if
only because I wrote them to suit my
own taste, which is not, as far as I can judge, very mainstream. All
three books were
released as science fiction, though none of them fit comfortably in
any particular sub-genre. My space opera is not military s-f,
my post-apocalyptic,
steampunk story has neither
zombies nor
airships, and
my little romance is not a conventional
commercial romance – though I'm
not a reader of popular romances so I can't say that
for certain.
Beyond starting this blog, I lifted not
a finger to promote them. My business plan was to publish them and
let lightning strike. Which is not a business plan. It is, however,
all I cared to do. Anything more would have been work and this is all
about having fun writing stories, and having fun publishing them.
Nothing more. These results can be seen as a test of what pure "free"
can achieve.
The Books and Their Numbers
I should make it clear that the numbers
reported below are for free downloads, not sales. Anyone who
downloads a "sample" gets the whole book. My books have
been on sale at list price on Amazon's foreign sites, and for the
last 6 weeks, The Bright Black Sea has been at full price on
Amazon's US store as well. The total for these actual sales is in the
low double digits.
Books published on Smashwords are also
distributed to Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and Kobo. Kobo does not
report download numbers of free books, so the totals are somewhat
under reported.
Rather than reporting exact numbers for
each store, I'll report the combined downloads. The ratio of Amazon
downloads to the Smashwords versions varies by title, but taken as a
whole, the combined Smashwords downloads were something like double
Amazon's downloads.
I've also listed the number of review
and ratings for each title. Rating and reviews from Amazon (A),
Smashwords (S), iBooks (iBK), Barnes & Noble (B&N), Kobo (K)
and Goodreads (GR).
A Summer in Amber
A
mystery/adventure/romance set in a post-apocalyptic Scotland. A
mirror-image
steampunk story with 19th century tech transposed
to
the late
21st
century after
solar storms lay waste to power grids, satellites and digital
devices.
Released 27 April 2015 (Free on
Smashwords, $.99 on Amazon, price matched in about a week. List price
changed to $2.99 in March. Has been free on Amazon UK for several
months.)
Days on the market: 368
Downloads to 1 May 2016: 2222
Average downloads per day: 6
(April average: 2.7)
Reviews and/or ratings: 33
Downloads per rating/review: 82
A S iBK B&N K
GR Total
5 star 9 0 2 1 0 1 13
4 star 4 4 3 0 3 2 16
3 star 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2 star 1 0 0 0 0 3 4
1 star 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Total 14 4 5 1 3 6 33
Released in Science Fiction Steampunk &
Adventure, changed to Steampunk and post-apocalyptic after Feb 2016. (Amazon rating include 2 at Amazon UK)
Some Day Days
A new adult
romance and exploration of technology set in Oxford & Cambridge
in the not too distant future. Somewhat experimental in style &
structure. A collection of "pieces"
that are the start of a never to be written much longer story.
Released 9 July 2015 (Free on
Smashwords, $.99 on Amazon before price matching. List price changed
to $1.99 1 March 2016 Full price outside of Amazon.com)
Days on the market: 296
Downloads and sales to 1 May 2016: 1139
Average downloads per day: 3.8
(April average: 2 )
Reviews and/or ratings; 5 (including one none starred one)
Downloads per rating/review 570
A S iBK B&N
K GR Total
5 star 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
4 star 0 1 0 0 0 1 2
3 star 0 0 0 0 0 1 1
2 star 0 0 0 0 0 1 1
1 star 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Total 0 1 0 0 0 3 4
Released in Science Fiction romance &
Romance, changed to Literature & New Adult Romance after Feb 2016
The Bright Black Sea
A long, 325,000 word, old-school
inspired space opera/adventure/mystery. Began as a serial,
written in three novel-length parts, and released in a single volume
since there was no financial incentive to stretch it into a
trilogy.
Released 16 Sept 2015 (Free on
Smashwords, $.99 Amazon until price matched. List price changed to
$3.99 1 March 2016. Full price outside of Amazon.com. Amazon dropped
price matching on 9 March so it is now available at list price.)
Days on the market: 227
Downloads & sales to 1 May 2016:
3176
Average downloads per day: 14
(April average [including Amazon sales]: 5 )
Reviews and/or ratings: 80 (The
2 non-starred reviews were positive reviews.)
Downloads per rating/review 45
A S iBK B&N K GR Total
non-starred
2 2
5 star 11 6 30 3 0 9 59
4 star 5 2 3 1 1 0 12
3 star 0 0 4 0 0 0 4
2 star 0 0 0 0 0 1 1
1 star 0 0 2 0 0 0 2
Total 16 10 39 4 1 10 80
Released as Science Fiction Space Opera
& Science Fiction. Since Amazon stopped price matching this
book, it sells a copy or so a week. I'll let it ride at $3.99 for
now while awaiting that lightning strike.
Total downloads and sales reported for the
year: 6,537 copies.
Let's compare this result to the ebook
market as a whole.
The ebook
Marketplace
In traditional publishing, a book that
sells 10,000 copies is considered a successful book. In the past, at
least, it would likely earn the author a contract for a second book.
Thus, by traditional publishing standards, even overlooking the fact
that I was just giving away the books, all failed to make the grade
in a traditional publishing in their release year (to date). However,
that market includes paper books sold in bookstores as well as online, so those books receive far greater exposure (for a month) with traditional
publishing.
So how did my books fare compared to the
online only ebook market, and the self-publishing market in
particular?
I'll use Amazon's ebook sales as
generated by Author Earnings's Feb. 2016 report as my basis for
comparison, since they provide hard numbers and data based estimates.
You can view their report here:
Authors provide sales and ranking data
to AuthorEarnings who then use this data to reverse engineer how
Amazon ranks each book. Once a quarter, on a single day, AuthorEarnings collect the
sales rankings from all the books listed on Amazon's many "100
Best Selling Books" lists and use this data
to estimate sales volume and the actual sales of each book
on those lists on that day. This captures data on 200,000 ebooks.
The information from their Feb 2016
sample is displayed on the graph below. The green and grey dots represent author supplied data.
Note that this is a logarithmic graph.
While it nicely displays their data points, it presents a very
distorted visual view of actual sales. A linear graph of the same
data would look something like this:
Using numbers from these graphs, we can roughly estimate the sales range for ebooks in the various levels of ranking:
Sales Rank number of titles sales per day sales per year at day rate
#1 to #10 10 8000 to 2000 2.92 to 730,000
#11 to #100 90 2000 to 500 730,000 to
182,500
#101 to #1000 900 500 to 100 182,500 to
36,500
#1001 to #10,000 9,000 100 to 12 36,500 to
4,380
#10,001 to #100,000 90,000 12 to 1 4,380 to
365
#100,001 to #200,000 100,000 1 or less 365 or less
(Corrected 11 May 2016 to reflect sales-to-hold curve)
These 200,000 titles represent about 5%
of the 4+ million ebooks Amazon currently offers in the Kindle Store
and about 6% to 7% of the ebook authors. To put it in better perspective, 95% of all the ebooks
Amazon offers likely sell fewer than 365 copies in a year.
These figures include the ebooks of
traditionally published authors as well as self-published ones.
Self-published books and single author publishers make up 39% of the
top 5% of Amazon bestsellers. Their books account for 47% of the
daily sales volume, but only 27% of the sales in dollars, reflecting
their generally lower price.
As for the market mix of genres, 77% of
Smashwords' top 200 selling fiction titles are Romance (including YA
Romance) with YA coming in second at about 11%. Detective stories and
Fantasy are around 4% each and science fiction clocks in a 1%. Other
categories are less popular. Most of these titles are self-published
or small press. I've seen other figures that likely cover a broader
sample of books and publishers that put science fiction at about 7%
of the ebook market, placing it in 6th place, after Romance (16%)
Paranormal (15%), Thriller (12%), Mystery (12%) and Fantasy (8%).
Science fiction is a player in the ebook market, but far from a
leader.
Amazon offers just under 300,000
science fiction ebooks in the Kindle store with almost 8,000 being
released each month. About 4,500 science fiction books are offered
for free.
The Money
Author Earnings
found that 2.8% of Amazon authors or some 5,643 authors with books in
the top 100 lists are making more than $10,000/year from their Amazon
ebook sales alone. They estimate that there are "many" more
authors earning this much who were not captured with their methods
because their books were not in any top 100 list. More than half of
the authors captured in this category were traditionally published
authors. Less than 800 self-published authors were earning more than
$25K per year, and a little more than 400 were earning $50K or more
per year. It should be noted, this is gross royalties, not profit.
Many self-publishing authors invest significant money producing their
books. (More on this in a moment.)
To see how my books fared in this
market, I will treat my downloads as "sales". A fantasy, and yet, a book in hand, is a book in hand no matter how it
got there. And if building a readership is your primary goal, then
distribution matter more than sales.
First, assuming all my books were
"sold" exclusively on Amazon, how would they rank overall? (Using rank to hold curve)
A Summer in Amber sales/day 6 -- approximate sales rank #11,000
Some Day Days sales/day 4 -- approximate sales rank #30,000
The Bright Black Sea sales/day 14 -- approximate sales rank #9,000
Using only books actually downloaded on
Amazon we get these approximate sales rankings:
A Summer in Amber
sales rank -- #50,000
Some Day Days sales
rank -- #150,000
The Bright Black Sea
sales rank -- #27,000
Now lets put a money value to these
"sales". I'll use Amazon's royalty rates for simplicity.
For my total "sales" of 6537 copies I'd have earned
for the year:
@ $.99 x .35 $2,288
@ $1.99 x .35 $4,553
@ $2.99 x .70 $13,682
@ $3.99 x .70 $18,258
@ $4.99 x .70 $22,834
@ $5.99 x .70 $27,410
The real numbers would likely have been
far, far less. Smashwords' data suggests that about 41 copies of a
free book are downloaded for every one sold. Dividing my total
"sales" by 41, gives us a more realistic royalty figure in
the range of $55 to $668 with the low figure being the more likely one.
Clearly I left very little money on the
table by giving my books away. In return, I achieved a circulation
level in the upper 2.5% of all ebooks. If my free downloaded books
been sold at $2.99, I would've been one of the elite self-published
authors making more than $10,000 a year in ebooks – in, mind you,
my first year of publishing, starting from a readership of zero.
Outside of romance, how likely would one achieve results like these,
and at what financial cost?
Which brings us to the flip side to
sales – the expenses involved in publishing professional quality ebooks. A lot
of money can be spent on preparing a book to be published. There are
all sorts of editors, book coaches, proofreaders, cover artists, and
book designers offering services to authors. There are also a great
variety of advertising and promotional services available to get a book
noticed. Authors travel to book fairs and conventions at their
expense to meet readers and promote their book. And they can pay to attend
seminars or take classes to improve their skills. Most experts
suggests that authors avail themselves of at least some of these
services to increase their chance of success.
I did everything in house so my
expenses were $0.00, and considering that I actually, sold some
books, I made a profit in my first year of
self-publishing.
But let's say I followed the experts
suggestions and hired professional help. I'll keep it to a minimum,
“hiring” only a professional proofreader and a professional cover
artist. Professional proof readers charge $.02- $.03 a word.
Professional artists, $300 to $500 for a cover.
Proofreading Art Totals
A Summer in Amber 115K $2,312/$3,468 $300/$500 $2,600/$3,968
Some Day Days 79K $1,530/$2,285 $300/$500 $1,830/$2,785
The Bright Black Sea 326K $6,500/$9,780 $300/$500 $6,800/$10,280
Grand
Total: $11,230 to $17,033
Had I hired these professionals, I would had to have sold, at the $.99 price point between
32,000 to 48,700 copies to cover my initial expenses. Or between
5,373 to 8,149 copies at the far more unlikely $2.99 price – to
make as much money as I made going it alone and for free. Most likely I
would have lost between $11,000 and $17,000 dollars, and since sales
tend to fade, future sales would not likely do much cover these
losses. Whether additional spending on promotional services would
have narrowed the gap any is questionable, especially in the science
fiction market.
Risking money on this scale for
lightning-strike sales results, is not, in my opinion, a wise
business decision. There is, of course, a price to be paid for
foregoing these expenses in terms of reviews complaining of typos.
However, I believe that with the lessons I've learned and new
procedures I've put in place, I'll be able to produce future books with far
fewer typos right from the start. But there will likely still be
typos. They are the price of free.
Final Thoughts
Clearly, releasing initial books for free, especially without any
sort of financial investment or marketing, has definite limitations.
It takes you only so far. Still, the results, in
terms of distribution, are significant.
Update 12 May 2016: The Bright Black Sea has now been on sale at Amazon for $3.99 I think I have a long enough period to compare sales to free. I've sold 11 copies in two months (plus several days), several of those copies must have been sold on Amazon UK since it's current sales rank there is around #62,000 compared to #1.2 million on Amazon US. While the price is a bit on the high side for a largely unknown author, its 4 1/2 star average rating on 16 reviews, should, I think compensate for that. I think this illustrated the fact that unless an author actively promotes their work, its unlikely to sell. Giving away 100-200 copies free each month seems to be an easy and effective way to "sell" if not the book, its author -- which is more important in the long run. And it "cost" just a few dollars of sales.
From
my perspective, I think the results are very positive. I
made a profit. Without even trying. I
did what was necessary, but avoided all the aspects of
self-publishing that I wouldn't care to touch with a barge pole while
still placing
my books into circulation at a level equal to the top 2.5%
of Amazon ebook titles. By publishing my books in all available
markets, I tripled my sales over going exclusively with
Amazon. Those
million plus self-published titles
tied up in Amazon's
Kindle
Unlimited Program
may
have soaked
up a lot of excess inventory from other ebook stores, making
discovery a little easier outside of Amazon.
I've
seen it said that
free books are less likely
to be read
than purchased ones.
I've also
read
that one can expect a review on
Amazon for
every 100 to 200 books purchased, with 1
in 150 mentioned
several times. Using
this measure and only Amazon downloads and reviews,
A Summer in Amber
was
reviewed once for every 67 downloads and
The Bright Black
Sea 1 in 63
downloads, suggesting to me that
they were read
just as often as purchased
books. Circulation
is circulation.
The path I've chosen suits me. I'm
happy that my work has been generally well received. That's a great
relief, since there was no guarantee readers would like my stories. I
hear of first time authors who can count the sales of their book on the
fingers of two hands, and give almost every buyer a name as well, so
that my 6,500+ books and 110+ ratings is not a bad beginning.
Now, I've no intention of getting into the business of self-publishing –
this is just a hobby for me – so that turning the corner to start
actually selling books is not a concern of mine. I would think,
however, that I'd be looking at downloads over 10,000 copies before
I'd make the move. And that may well take several years and half a dozen
free books to achieve, if all goes well.
So this, then, is my first annual
report. Next year's report should be interesting as well, since I
don't have plans to release a new book in 2016. We'll be able to see
how sustainable free is over time. (This, by the way, is also not a
good business plan, but I like writing long books, and rather than break
them up, I'd rather publish them as complete novels, so the next
300K+ novel won't be out until sometime in 2017.)
So, success or failure? Smart or
stupid? Any ideas or suggestions? Let me know in the comments below
or via email.
