Since April 23rd
marked my third year as a self-published writer of
adventure/travel/romance novels set in imaginary places, it’s time
to publish my annual report on my past year in the self-publishing
business.
Let’s start with
the numbers. Please note; the vast majority of “sales” are free
downloads.
Sales and ratings
of 1 May 2018:
A Summer in Amber
(23 April 2015)
Download/sales:
Year 1: 2,359
Year 2: 1,220
Year 3: 1,336 w/
2 print sales
Total to Date: 4,915
Ratings: (#
of ratings) star average
Amazon (20)
4.4
Amazon UK (4) 4
Smashwords (6)
4.17
iBooks
(13) 4.5
B & N
(2) 5
Goodreads (26)
3.73
Some Day Days
(9 July 2015)
Download/sales:
Year 1: 1,141
Year 2: 509
Year 3: 400
Total to Date: 2050
Ratings: (#
of ratings) star average
Amazon (2)
3
Smashwords (1) 4
iBooks (6)
4
B & N
(0)
Goodreads (4)
3
The Bright Black
Sea (17 September 2015)
Download/sales:
Year 1: 3,178
Year 2: 2,567
Year 3: 2,091
w/1 print sale
Total to date: 7,836
Ratings: (#
of ratings) star average
Amazon (36)
4.4
Smashwords (12)
4.75
iBooks
(60) 4.5
B & N
(6) 4.8
Goodreads (42)
4.02
Castaways of the
Lost Star (4 Aug 2016 – 13 July 2017)
Download/sales:
Year 2: 1,700
Year 3: 476
Ratings: (# of
ratings) star average
Smashwords (5) 5
Goodreads (14)
4.57
Rest unavailable
since being withdrawn
Final Total: 2,176
The Lost Star’s
Sea (13 July 2017)
Download/sales:
Year 3: 2,078
w/1 print sales
Total to date: 2,078
Ratings: (#
of ratings) star average
Amazon (9)
3.8
Smashwords (2) 5
iBooks (8)
5
B & N
(1) 5
Goodreads (10)
4.2
Combined
Download/sales:
Year 1: 6,537
Year 2: 6,137
Year 3: 6,381
w/ 4 print sales
Total to Date:
19,055
Steady As She
Goes.
My business plan is simple. Like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos I’m forgoing
immediate (and tiny) profits in favor of building my readership for
the long run. I am also following his aggressive pricing policy.
Since I can produce my ebooks and paperback at no monetary cost, I’m
selling them for free and not losing money by doing so. Indeed, with
my Amazon foreign, non-price matched sales, I’m showing a slight
profit.
I am not actively promoting my books beyond pricing them as
friction-less impulse buys. My books do not fit the contemporary high
volume mainstream markets in their genre, so I doubt that actively
promoting them would prove worthwhile. The truth, however, is that I
don’t want to bother with self-promoting. I’m writing for fun,
not profit, and I’ll only willing to do what I enjoy. And for that
luxury, I’ll gladly accept my modest, but steady growth.
Highlights of
this year in publishing
On 13 July 2017 I released the complete companion volume in the Lost
Star Stories series, The Lost Star’s Sea. It
replaced my 2016 stop-gap book, Castaways of the Lost Star.
This short novel was intended to be the opening episode of The
Lost Star’s Sea and it
took its proper place in the
complete release. This
volume concludes the adventures of Wil Litang. Though only two
volumes long, it contains more than 650K words. The series could have
been stretched into six volumes, but with no monetary incentive to do
so, I wanted to make reading the complete story as friction-less as
possible, so I condensed it down to two free “Buy” clicks.
As with Castaways, I had the help of a number of volunteer beta readers who pointed out errors and provided me with valuable feedback. I would like to thank them, once again, for their time and effort in making this a better book than what I could do on my own.
I do believe, however, that writing this companion volume at this
time was a business mistake. While it is gospel in the indie
publishing world to write series books – and write the first three
books before releasing the first one, this is, I think, “A Trap!”
for the beginning writer. If the first book succeeds, then the
sequels pay off. But if it doesn’t, then one has three non-sellers
instead of just one. Why gamble early? Besides, there is always a
natural attrition between volumes as readers who did not like the
first book will not go on to the second book, and some of the readers
on the fence after each book will fall away as well. And while the
releases of sequels may spark interest in the first book of the
series, a new, unrelated book will likely do this just as well, plus
offering a chance of selling more books than the previously published
book. I suppose if one has sold a large number of the first book in
the series, one can afford the inevitable attrition as the series
continues, but unless you have a large pool of readers, I don’t
think a sequel makes business sense.
That being the case, the current sales of The Bright Black Sea
does not, I think, justify a sequel from a business prospective,
especially since I spent the better part of two years writing it.
Those two years could’ve been better spent writing two different
books, each of which would have offered the prospect of attracting a
wider readership beyond that of The Bright Black Sea’s. This
is not to say that I don’t like or I’m not proud of The Lost
Star’s Sea, nor indeed, regret writing it. Rather that I
recognize that from a purely business standpoint, I shouldn’t have
done it. I won’t make that mistake again. Until I write my
break-out novel, all my future books will different types of stand
alone books.
Work on the 2018
Book
Which brings me to my 2018 book. At this point of time I’m 95K
words into its first draft. I expect to finish this draft by the end
of the month (May 2018). Knock on wood. I then plan to spend the
summer polishing it, before having it proofread for a release in the
October-November 2018 time frame. The working title is The Fourth
Daughter. However, since there is already a book by that title,
I’ll have to come up with a different final title. As for the story
itself, it is my standard adventure/travel/romance novel, set in an
imaginary land. This time around, I’m taking aim at the fantasy
market so the technology is mostly at the horse and sword level. It
doesn’t, however, have many (any?) fantasy tropes, and so, like my
other books, it rather falls into the cracks between genres and
sub-genres. Still, I think it presents the chance of attracting new
readers to all my books.
Paperback Editions
Since I
wasn’t writing in October
2017,
I had
time on my hands. I decided
to spend some of it producing
print on demand trade
paperback versions of my
books.
I planned
to use them
as thank
you gifts for
the people who have helped
and encouraged me in my writing efforts. I
have
no commercial illusions,
especially since
the ebook versions are
free. As a matter of fact,
I’ve
sold four paper books to date,
which is four more than
I ever expected to sell.
I started
creating the paper books
using Amazon’s
program to produce paper books,
but
switched to (Amazon owned) Create Space to
finish the job. Unlike Amazon
at that time, Create Space would provide
proof copies for me
to inspect before actually
publishing them.
Amazon not only did not provide this
service, but I’d have to
publish and then buy my
own
books –
at retail price to boot.
The process
was a learning experience. Though
not especially difficult,
it was time
consuming and frustrating at times. The
books could be produced
in LibreOffice and
Gimp, so the process was
within my expertise. Most
of the
problems I experienced arose,
I think, from the
fact that my older books
were originally written
in old versions of OpenOffice on
a Mac, and those files
refused to cooperate with my
current version of LibreOffice on
Windows. The main issue was
setting
up non-numbered
“title pages.” The old OpenOffice version allowed only one title
page before it began to count
pages, while in LibreOffice,
you can set any number of
pages before it starts numbering them.
Amazon requires Chapter One to
start on page 1, so all the pages before Chapter One cannot be part
of the numbering.
I spent many an
hour trying
workarounds to
get this to happen in my
oldest
works.
Once I
had the printed proof copies in hand, it
seemed that (hopefully –
but unlikely – all) the
remaining mistakes
and awkward sentences that I had overlooked on my many previous
readings popped
out at me. So, with paper
books in hand, I spent
several
weeks reading each book again
in print to
correct and slightly revise
the books, hopefully making
both the ebooks and paper books better for it.
My
First and Last Promotional
Effort
In December 2018 I decided to try a
simple free
promotion. I ran a
Goodreads
drawing for one
paper copy of The Bright Black Sea.
My drawing ran the whole month of December and I had a rather
disappointing 572 entrants. I had also promoted my free ebooks in the
contest blurb hoping the
contest would spur my ebooks
sales. As
far as I can see, it did no such thing. All in all, my first, and
likely
last, promotional effort was
largely a bust, though
an inexpensive one; merely
the wholesale price of the
book, and the cost of
shipping to
the winner.
Selling
Directly on Kobo
In
January 2018 I decided that since Kobo does
not report free sales to Smashwords, but does to the
authors who list their books directly with them, I would switch to
directly listing my books with Kobo. I
wanted to see what sort of
sales I was missing. In the process I lost the 4 ratings my books had
on Kobo – no great loss – and I have
discovered
how many books I was moving
on Kobo – 33 in 4 months. Now
I know.
New
List Prices on Amazon
Also
in
January 2018
Amazon
stopped
price matching
The Bright Black Sea
so
it reverted to its
list
$.99
price.
Perhaps
taking my Smashwords distributed books out of Kobo for
a few days before listing them
my own triggered this action.
In any event, since
this
was my best selling book, and the first book of my two book series, I
was not happy. The last time Amazon
did this, I had it priced at
$3.99. It
stayed
at that price for 6 months until
the release of Castaways
of the Lost Star.
I think I sold around
a dozen copies. This
time around,
I
did nothing in January, to gauge
how well the book would sell at $.99. I sold some, but not enough to
make me think it was worth keeping
it
at
$.99.
So, when February rolled around, I changed
the
list prices
of
all my books.
From past
experience,
I thought that this might
trigger an automated reevaluation on the part of Amazon and probably
would reset
all
the
prices back to free. It
did.
Given
that my Amazon list prices matter only in the foreign Amazon stores,
and that in 2017 I earned
enough royalties from
foreign sales to
order out a pizza, I decided to forgo that pizza and instead use my
prices to reflect the size and quality of my products. So in February
I changed my list prices to:
A
Summer in Amber $8.50 ebook $12.50 paperback
Some
Day Days $5.50 ebook $9.00 paperback
The
Bright Black Sea $12.50 ebook $25.00
paperback
The
Lost Star’s Sea $12.50
ebook $25.00
paperback
I
decided to align my books
with traditionally published books rather than with indie published
books. Now pricing is a business decision, not a self-awarded seal of
excellence. However,
people do
equate
price with quality. I decided that it was worth giving up the trickle
of income from foreign sales to suggest to people who look on ebook
prices
as an indicator of reading
quality, that my books are
the equals of
traditionally published books, since
I
believe they are.
Much
to my surprise, I have sold
several
ebooks
at these new prices, and, together with my paperback sales,
it’s looking to
be
a banner year for record profits! Profits
are already into double digits, and it is only May! I’m
rich, rich, rich!
Conclusion
And
that, in a nut shell, was my third year of self-publishing. After
finishing The Lost
Star’s Sea
I
tried
out
several new story
ideas,
but nothing
quite clicked.
I’ve
posted those starts on this blog if you are curious. In the end, I
took a
couple of
months off from writing to
develop
a new story that I thought was original and interesting enough to
devote a year’s worth of daydreaming and work to
it.
I
want
to make each book not
only better
than the last one,
but
as
different
from the
rest as
I
can,
if only for my sake.
I don’t want to do the same old thing day in and day out –
without getting
a
paycheck every two weeks.
And
with that, we’ll
see what my fourth year brings. Stay
tuned.
Comments
and questions are always welcomed.
