Six Years in Self-Publishing

 

This has a couple of books published in the future.

Well, well, here we are, six years after I self-published my first novel, A Summer in Amber. So where in the blazes are we? We're not in Kansas anymore. And it ain’t 2015 anymore either. Looking around, self-publishing is very different industry from the one I started out in 2015. 

In 2015,  self-publishing was in the final stages of its gold rush era. I released three very different books for free, and without any effort or money spent promoting them, I gave away more than 6,000 of them between Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. Customers of those stores were still happening upon one's books back then. 

Fast forward to 2021. Those days are long gone. Big entrepreneur/writer/publishers, some who even employ ghost writers to write the actual stories, now dominate Amazon. Today they need to spend thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars on ads and crank out books every couple of months just to maintain their readership. Beyond Amazon, Smashwords has changed their format to one that seems to favor best sellers. B & N's ebook store has faded, as have my sales on Apple. Kobo -- who knows? They don't report free sales. The bright spot these last two years is that readers are finding my books on Google Play Books -- somehow I sold more  books on Google than I did on Smashwords/Apple by a long shot, this past month. 

Long story short, I'm quite certain that if I did today, what I did six years ago, I'd count myself lucky if I did 10% of the business I did back in 2015.

Luckily, over the past six years I've managed to built a modest readership, one that I'm quite happy and thankful for. To be honest, I don’t think I’d enjoy being wildly successful – what with all the demands on your time that comes with the territory. I have just the sort of readership that I’m comfortable with. A good readership. I like’em.

Year Six Results 

So how did I do in my sixth year as a self-published author? The numbers are below, so you can judge for yourself. 

Year five was my best year ever, though I didn't expect it to continue, given the way the ebook market was evolving. This year my four to six year old books did half the business they did last year, though my space opera, The Bright Black Sea remained my bestseller.. However, I released two novels and a novella this year, and while none were breakout hits, they shored up my sales, so that year six turned out to be better than I had anticipated.

The three new books this year  were my Mars novella, Keiree, and two Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventures, The Secret of the Tzarista Moon, and the Secrets of Valsummer House, plus one children's short story, that I had laying about for a decade: Lines in the Lawn, (on Smashwords only). I’m writing shorter stories these days, as I find them much easier to dream up and write down.

I also revamped my covers this year. I never see any difference, but it keeps me amused.

And, as usual, my odd, mostly foreign Amazon store sales pretty much cover my expenses (paper books for my beta readers) so that if I'm in the red, it's pocket change. Being a self-published author is an inexpensive hobby for me.

Year Seven Expectations

Next year? I’m going to go out on a limb and say, it will be pretty much like this year -- and almost every other of the last six years. It will depend on how many stories I can write and release. I'm currently within a day or two of finishing the first draft of my next and last Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure book for this set of books. I should release it in early July 2021, at the latest. 

My next project will be to try writing a 30-35K word novella in 60 short episodes for a new venture by Amazon called Vella. Vella will be an iOS only Amazon app designed specifically for serial stories in the 600-5,000 word per episode range to be read primarily on iPhones. My idea is to use this format as a vehicle for reaching readers who never bother searching beyond their Kindle Unlimited selection, which my books are not enrolled in. It remains to be seen if I like writing in this format and whether or not I pursue it beyond experimenting with it. Other than that, I've not settled on any definite next story. After producing four books in twelve months, I think that I can take the summer off to come up with some new story ideas. We'll see.

Six Year Numbers.

As usual, "sales" are mostly free downloads. Numbers are approximate, likely due to quantum fluctuations. i.e. I'm 11 books off from last year's total.

Book Title / Release Date	Year Six Sales (#) Year five Sales	Total Sale To date
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	598 (818)	7.816
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	358 (726)	4,211
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	1,320 (2,656)	13,816
Castaways of the Lost Star	--	2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	986 (1,962)	6,969
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	551 (1,087)	2,792
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	728 (1,043)	2,332
The Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	632 (244)	877
Lines in the Lawn 1 July 2020	83	83
Keiree 17 Sept 2020	853	853
Secret of the Tzarista Moon 19 November 2020	1,110	1,110
Secrets of Valsummer House 18 March 2021	265	265
Total 6th Year Sales	7,484	43,300

Yearly Sales History:

Year One, 2015/16: 6,537 (3 novels released)

Year Two, 2016/17: 6,137 (1 novel released)

Year Three, 2017/18: 6,385 (1 novel released)

Year Four, 2018/19: 8,225* (2 novels released) * includes a strange 1950 book one day sale on Amazon that they say is correct. (6,275 w/o)

Year Five, 2019/20: 8,530 (1 novel released)

Year Six, 2020/21: 7,484 (2 novels released, 1 novella, 1 children's short story)

Past Yearly reports can be found here:

Year 1: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-window-to-self-publishing.html

Year 2: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2017/05/two-years-of-free-books.html

Year 3: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2018/05/3-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 4: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2019/05/four-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 5: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2020/05/five-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year Six Sales by Outlets 

Over the last year my sales by digital storefronts were: 40% from Amazon, 40% from Smashwords (+ Apple & B&N) and 20% from Google. 

Note: Kobo does not report free sales to Smashwords. Barnes & Noble's numbers no longer appear on my daily sales record. However elsewhere I find that I sold 128 books in 2020, and 40 in 2021 to date on B & N. 

The trend here is that  both Smashwords and Amazon are fading, while Google is stepping up to fill in. Amazon is up and down. I've had a good couple of months in 2021 on Amazon. In March, not only did I have a new release, but The Bright Black Sea received a nice writeup on the blog of Nathan Lowell, a popular SF author, which together produced a near record month for free books, and a record month for actual money sales of some 120 copies. That trend faded a bit in April, but it was still a solid month. The other bright spot in 2021 are my sales on the Google Play Store. They have been rising all year. In March they essentially matched my Smaswords sales, and in April 2021  they almost doubled my Smashwords sales. This increase in Google sales has helped keep my yearly sales in my usual range.

Summing Up Six Years of Self-publishing

I've done exactly what I wanted to do. Write. I've gotten to know some of my readers, some of whom have kindly volunteered to be my beta readers. And they have made a appreciable difference in the quality of my books. I have made an effort to write better in little ways, and I'd like to think that I've had some success. Covers have become a pain to paint, but other than that, I've got the whole process of self-publishing down pat. And I'm still having fun doing it all. I'm looking forward to my seventh year report.

The Gods of Amazon...

...Are fickle beings. They’re as unpredictable as they are mysterious. While I'll be reporting my sales for my sixth year in self publishing next month, I thought I might share my results for March 2021. It was a weird month.

My base line is that I write the story, paint the cover, format the paperback book. And after my wife and my generous beta readers proofread the story, I publish it via Smashwords, Google Play, and Amazon. It then sinks or swims on its merits and word of mouth.

Each month I move between 300 and 1,000 copies. The highest numbers are for the month of and just after the release of a new book. The numbers then fall into the 500 to 300 copies per month range. Of all those copies, I actually sell at retail price between 5 to 10 copies on Amazon around the world, with maybe 20 during the month of a new release. I made $70 in royalties in 2020.

March 2021, as I mentioned, has proven to be a very strange month. First off, I moved 1,041 books, which puts it as my second highest sales month in my six years of self-publishing. The Secrets of Valsummer House was released on the 18^th, which explains some of those sales. I moved 195 copies on the Google Play store, a venue that I’ve only been using for the last two years or so, and has proven to rival Smashwords (including Apple , though B & N and Kobo don’t report free sales to Smashwords, so I don’t know the full total of my sales via Smashwords.) But there’s more to this strange month than a new release and increased sales on Google.

Every once in a while The Bright Black Sea will rise into the Top 100 Free Space Opera Best Seller List. For no discernible reason. I can only guess that somewhere on Amazon they 're promoting it in some way. In any event, it rose to at least #29 on that chart this month, and I moved 223 free copies, plus, and this is strange, 21 paid copies mostly from British and Australian sales.

What is even more weird is that this month I sold at $.99 a total of 112 copies of my various books, including 35 copies of The Lost Star's Sea (when it wasn’t free) and 41 copies of The Secrets of Valsummer House. I think I earned $49.50 in royalties this month. In all of 2020 I made around $70. I can’t explain this jump in sales. I don’t expect it to last. I believe it to be a result of some sort of quantum fluctuation of Amazon’s algorithms. Still, it makes life interesting.

I’ll have my full six-year report in self-publishing next month. It looks to be a typical year again, with sales somewhat north of 6,000 copies, which is pretty much what it is every year. The only difference is that it now takes 10 books to deliver that level of sales, compared to three when I began in 2015. But more of that next month.

..

Five and One Half Years in Self Publishing

 

Time flies, and so, once again, it’s time to report my May 2020 through October 2020 results.

I release two new stories in the last six months. The first was Lines in the Lawn, an illustrated children’s short story via Smashwords only. It was something I had laying around for a decade and I decided to get it out. The second new release was a novella, Keiree. Currently it is a stand alone story, but I hope to build on it, to eventually roll it into a novel.

Sales Numbers

As usual, almost all of the sales are free ebooks sold through Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, B & N, and Google. My books are also available on Kobo but they do not report free sales to Smashwords, plus some are also listed on other sites that offer free books as well.

Book Title / Release Date	1H 2020 Sales	Total Sale To date
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	371	7,589
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	163	4,016
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	542	13,036
Castaways of the Lost Star 4 Aug 2016	Withdrawn	2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	440	6,423
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	253	2,493
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	221	1,825
Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	240	485
Lines in the Lawn* 8 June 2020	55	55
Keiree* 18 Sept 2020	174	174
Total Six Month Sales * New releases.	2,219	38,275

For comparison sake, for the same time period last year I sold 4,590 books, without the last three books on this chart. So last year I sold a little over twice as many books last year as I did this year. Last year, however, was unexpectedly, my best year ever.

For this time period my sales split between Amazon, Google, and Smashwords (including sales on Apple and B & N) works out like this:

Amazon 35%

Smashwords (Apple & B & N) 39%

Google 26%

Last year, 1 Nov 2019 the breakdown was,

Amazon 39%

Smashwords 52%

Google 9%

If we look at sales this past month, October 2020, the split looks like this:

Amazon (15%)

Smashwords (54%)

Google (31%)

The numbers show that my Amazon sales are fading. Smashwords is, more or less holding steady (though half of what it was in 2019), but Google has come through to pick up some of the slack. My goal is to sell at least 300 books a month, as so far I’m clearing that bar, though it takes more books in my catalog to do so.

Back in May, in my 5^th annual report, I wrote that I did not expect 2020 to be a banner year. Indeed, I had not expected 2019 to be a banner year either, but it turned out to be one. However, this time around, it’s looking like I’ll be right. The first half hasn’t been terrible, but it is definitely off last year’s pace.

Headwinds

As I see it, there are two things outside of my control that are weighing on my sales. The first is that it seems that Amazon no longer feels the need to match prices. While my older books are still free, my newer books are not. I’ve made the usual efforts to get them to match the free price of the other ebook stores, but even if successful, that only lasts for a couple of weeks before they’re back to full price.

Now, $.99 is a cheap price, and I do sell some at that price, but free sells much better. Unfortunately, Amazon accounts for something like 70% or more of the ebook market, so this new policy bites into my sales.

The second drag on my sales is the way that the ebook market has evolved. Five years ago, ebook advocates were talking about how ebooks would come to dominate the market for books, making paper books extinct. This is clearly not the case now, nor will it be for the foreseeable future. Ebooks have evolved to dominate some types of genre fiction, like romance, and SFF, which were formally served by pulp magazines, mass market paperbacks, and libraries. And in those categories they cater to to a very special type of reader, the avid reader. These readers want and expect books to reliably deliver what they expect them to deliver, like the fans of Big Macs, which are expected to taste the same no matter where you consume it. Ebooks are, in short, have become the fast food of books.

This is, of course, a legitimate market. And nice work, if you can get it. But it takes more than books to get in it. These days it takes thousands of dollars of advertising, and a large, established readership that an indie-publisher can bet those thousands of dollars of advertising on. Pay to play, as they say. Just as with Etsy, where the local handmade goods market evolved into handmade goods from the sweatshops of China, the author self-publisher has evolved in a similar way. Today, the best selling books are produced by the entrepreneur publisher who either works 16 hours a day to write, manage advertising on a daily basis, hire editors, cover artists, and manage the business in general. Or they may simply be publishers who hire others to do all these tasks, including writing, in order to produce a dependable stream of, good-enough Big Mac type books to feed their customers in the Kindle Unlimited all-you-can-read buffet.

I have no desire to be on that treadmill. Better them than me, is pretty much my attitude. But the downside of this evolution is that unless a writer is producing and spending big money promoting their Big Mac books, the market is for ebooks is deceptively shallow these days. I’m lucky to have gotten into self publishing when I did, as I doubt that I’d be able to give away 38,000 books in five and half years on a zero advertising budget if I was starting today. My initial experiment was to see if I could use free books to build an audience and a presence large enough that I could some day, if I cared to, charge money for my books. I have to say that, given the way the market has evolved, the answer seems to be no. Fortunately for me, it was an academic experiment, so I can’t, and am not complaining.

Looking Ahead

I will be releasing my next novel, a cozy SF mystery/adventure, The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon, either this month or in early December. I’m planning on starting a second cozy SF mystery/adventure with the same characters this month, with a target release date of late February or early March. I may decide to release Lines in the Lawn on Amazon. And I have another small project of short-short stories and cartoons dealing with robots that I might work on at some point as well in the next six months. I’ve got nothing better to do these days than write, so as long as I have ideas, I’ll be writing, if not selling a ton of books.

The Pirates of Amazon

As I noted in the previous post, a week or so ago at this posting, I discovered that someone had decided to try to make money with two of my books on Amazon (good luck with that!) in a very strange and silly way. Here is that story in full. I hope.

I would have never known about this person’s piracy except that for some reason that I can’t explain, they kept my name and title on the two books, A Summer in Amber and The Lost Star’s Sea. Because they did, on 22 Feb. they appeared alongside my legitimate books on my Author Page on Amazon. Going to the pirated books product pages, I found that they had been uploaded to Amazon on 19 Feb.

The pirates, however, had put on new, and bad, covers on the books, which annoyed me greatly. Using the “look inside” feature on the product page, one could see that this new cover was simply added on over the original cover, so that there were now two covers, and everything else about my book was the same, including the copyright info that identified the book as the Obooko (a free book site) version of the book. They even used my Amazon blurb for their own listing. I contacted Amazon, who, the next day, directed me to a special page for copyright violations.I filed my complaint.

I waited patiently for action or a response. At some point during the week, the pirated A Summer in Amber version disappeared from Amazon, whether by the actions of Amazon or by the pirates, I can't say. Perhaps the first person I had contacted at Amazon had acted without informing me of it, though that sounds unlikely. During this week, The Lost Star’s Sea price varied – it had no sales – and then went to free.

The affair came to a head on Friday, 28 Feb. Friday morning, The Lost Star’s Sea now had another new cover, a new title The Lost Star, and a new “author.” However, if you used the “look inside” feature, this new cover was just added on to the two covers it had before, making it a third cover, and nothing else on the inside was changed. Nothing, except the blurb, which was now just a random section of the story cut and pasted onto the blurb section of the listing. The Lost Star was still on the inside, The Lost Star’s Sea by C. Litka. One really has to wonder just what they were thinking.

Later Friday morning Amazon contacted me again for more information, which I provided. But when I looked again at the now The Lost Star, I found that the pirates had finally eliminated all but the new cover, and all the identifying information, adding only some nonsense page about legal limitations or some such thing – the same page they had added to a second, nonfiction business book that they had apparently pirated as well. I updated this information to Amazon.

I received two emails from Amazon on Friday afternoon. The first said that I would need to supply them with examples of the offending text, and that they would supply my email address to the pirates in order for them to respond, which annoyed me greatly, since what was going on was obvious – at least up to the final alteration which eliminated the clearly identifying information. However a second email had been sent, luckily before I read both, which said that the offending version had been pulled from the store, which was, indeed, the case. They did not, however, remove the other book these pirates had listed. Crime seems to go unpunished on Amazon. 

I should add that Goodreads, which is owned by Amazon picked up both of these pirate versions and listed with my legitimate books. I am trying to get them removed. We’ll see.

My take away from this affair is that anything goes on Amazon. The fact that the pirates could put up such a half-ass product with two covers, an ill formatted book – it showed hard page breaks from the likely PDF version of the book they used – of a book and blurb that was word for word what was already on sale on Amazon is pretty telling. If these pirates had simply uploaded their final version first – the one with a different title and author – I would never have known that they had done so. The fact is that if one posts a digital version of anything on the web, it will be pirated, and you might as well not lose any sleep over it. However, Amazon is not the web, it is a store owned by one of the richest people on the planet, and he’s seems to be simply unwilling to spend the money to keep his store clean. 

There could be dozens of pirates trying to make money off of my work, and, as I said, good luck with that. But what really annoyed me about this affair is that these pirates were putting out an inferior version of my product that had my name on it. I might loose sleep over that.

Hopefully the affair is at an end.