My Year as a Publisher 2024 Edition.

My prediction and my sales numbers

Last year in this post I predicted: "Unless my Apple audiobooks do a lot better than I expect, I don't think 2024 will come close to 2023 in terms of sales. Book sales always decline over time." My 2023 sales were a record 18,928, thanks to the unexpected, and inexplicable, success of The Girl on the Kerb on Amazon, and thus, would be hard to beat. For comparison, the year before, in 2022, sales were 13,779, a sales record at that time as well. So how did I do in 2024?

Drum roll.

14,970 books. Though down by more than 4,000 copies from last year, I'm still  very pleasantly surprised with that number. Better than I expected, though there were some reasons. See below.

The details

This was the year I went almost all in on using Draft2Digital as my distributer. I moved all my books over on the 1st of January, from Smashwords - except those on Smashwords itself - and submitted my books to Apple to be converted to audiobooks. The conversion stretched out over the year, with three books still not converted, for some reason. In July I unpublished my books on Smashwords and had then republished them on the Smashwords store via D2D. And in October I unpublished my books in the Kobo store via D2D and submitted them myself to Kobo. I've talked about all of these moves in previous posts, so I won't repeat the reasons and results of all these moves here, except to say that for the most part, all of the moves had positive repercussions.

My sales on Smashwords thru July 2024, when I switched to D2D were 131 ebooks

My total sales on D2D ended up being approx. 3,321 (I don't quite have the final total when writing this.)

Apple ebooks accounted for 1,160  of those sales, edging out Amazon as my second largest ebook sales outlet. For reverence, I sold 775 books on Apple in 2023 via Smashwords.

2D2 Audiobooks on Apple accounted for 1,175 in sales. Well, as it turned out they did pretty well, once they became available. As you can see, adding Apple audiobooks basically doubled my sales on Apple.

Smashwords sales (via 2D2) were 664 ebooks 

Barnes & Noble sold 239 ebooks

Various other D2D outlets accounted for 83 ebooks

Kobo I've been distributing to Kobo directly since October 2024, my sales in the last three mounts amount to 91 ebooks. Comparable to B&B so far.

In order to get all my work on Amazon as audiobooks, I broke up my two massive books, The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea into a six book series since they were too long for Amazon's auto-narrated audiobook program. I also sell them that way on Kobo as well. I have also priced the first books in my three series at $.99. 

My total sales  on Amazon were, 1,012

Ebooks, 976, most were the 2 free books,

Paper books 22

Audiobooks 14 

I earned $356.13 on my Amazon sales in 2024 I spent less than $100 on books and mailing for my beta readers, my only expense.

Last, but far, far from least, my sales on Google. It was steady as you go, for Google.  

Total Google sales amounted to 10,415 books

Ebooks sold, 5,055

Audiobooks sold, 5,360

Just as with Apple, audiobooks slightly outsold ebooks, providing half of my overall sales.

All in all, 2024 proved to be a solid year, performing better than I expected, though not a record year. I should note, however, that I did release two novels in this year and new books always drive sales.

All that said, my sales, now including audiobooks, are not much more than twice my sales of my first year, (via Amazon and Smashwords only) with only three books released, compared to a catalog of some 20 books these days. Take away Google and audiobooks and my ebook sales would've been half of my first year ebook sales. Yikes! As I have mentioned in the past, it is getting increasingly harder to sell books outside of the mainstream. I owe my continued success to several factors,

1. My competitive pricing.

2. Having built up a modest readership starting in 2015 back when it was far easier to do so.

3. Having written and published twenty books over the last almost ten years. I can't explain how I did that. I also published two new books this year. All these books mean that I have a good sized back catalog to offer any new reader who happens upon one of my books and likes it to explore.

4. Having explored new markets, including adding Google early on, and jumping on audiobooks when they became financially feasible. 

 Well, looking ahead, if I recall right, 27 April 2025 will mark my 10th anniversary as a publisher. I enjoy what I'm doing now, but maybe after ten years I should shake things up and try something different. I'll be considering what, if anything, in the next couple of months. If I do nothing stupid, I would expect to see similar results to this year, as I do hope to publish at least one novel in 2025 - my "Project 2026" book a little early. We'll see. Stay tuned.

I would like to thank all my readers for making this year another good year for me. I hope that in my own little way, I made 2024 a little better for you as well.

AND I HOPE ALL OF YOU HAVE A GREAT 2025! GOOD LUCK!