My 2025 Cealanda House Publishing Report

 

2025 was a good year for Cealanda House Publishing. Sales volume was up - indeed, it proved to be a record calendar year. Revenue, however, was down from 2024, so I'm lucky that I don't have any stockholders to bamboozle. My business results can be explained by five factors. Let's breakdown them down. 

The first is the frequency of publication. My goal is to release one book a year. This year I released three books, likely a record. I'm working ahead... They were:

Glencrow Summer (a novel) in on 20 February. It has sold 1,972 copies in 11 months. It has proven to be a very good seller. Indeed sales have picked up since June.

The Darval-Mers Dossier (a novel) on 27 May. It has sold 1,336 copies in 8 months. Another very good seller. I consider a 1,000 copies in the first year to be one of my "best sellers".

The Founders' Tribunal (a novella) on 6 November. It has sold 590 copies in 2 months. It is doing just fine as well. As I said, it's been a good year.

New books bring new sales across the catalog. 

Releasing three books in one year is perhaps the key driving force behind my success as a publisher this year. Not only do new releases sell well, but they tend to bump up the sales of back catalog books as well, since new releases are promoted on most platforms. Every new release increase the chances of introducing your books to new readers, some of whom then go on to buy more of your books. Since the early days of self-publishing, releasing books rapidly has been the bog standard way to sell lots of books. 

Over time I've adopted a willingness to write and release shorter novels and novellas. I like writing shorter works with less elaborate plots. And since they take less time to write, I can get them to market sooner. That said, I write books as long as I have a story to tell, not to a given length. 

The second key factor in this year's success is the size of my back catalog of books.

I have 23 books for sale on Amazon and Kobe where I sell The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea as a six book series rather than as a two volume omnibus. On all other platforms I offer 19 books for sale. The more books you have to offer, the more sales you can potentially make. The fact that I have been able to write and publish 16 novels and 3 novellas over the last fifteen years is paying off in sales, if not in revenue. But who cares about revenue?

The third key factor was my willingness to embrace auto-narrated audiobooks as soon as I was offered the opportunity to do so. 

This year 40% of my sales have come from audiobooks. This percentage is down from 44% last year. Recently ebooks have been outselling audiobooks by a good margin some months, but audiobooks have, over the years, taken up the slack as ebook sales have been harder and harder to come by.

The fourth, and on paper the driving force in my business, was getting my books into the Google Play store. I don't know why it works there, but as you will see below. It does, at least for me. Big time.

The fifth is price. I sell my books in a less competitive market; the free book market. Plus, it's a hard price to beat. And there is no friction for readers to give my books a try.

Right, so on to the numbers.

According to my vendors, I sold 22,269 copies in 2025. This is up from 14,970 in 2024 and handily beats my former record year of 2023, when I sold 18,198 copies.

Google:  9,965 Ebooks  7,704 Audiobooks  for a total of 17,669  79% of my sales

D2D: 2,635 Ebooks  1,146 Audiobooks  for a total of 3,781         17% of my sales

Amazon: 657 Ebooks  13 Audiobooks  19 Paper  for a total of      4% of my sales

Kobo: 162  Ebooks                                                                   a rounding error

Gross revenue however, was down about $50 from 2024 coming in at $307.13, all from sales on Amazon. I spend less that $100 for books and postage for my beta readers, so Cealanda House is still making a profit as a publisher; about $.01 a book thanks to doing nearly everything in house, with the help of some generous volunteer beta readers. A penny a book is razor thin margin, but we're still in the black and still in business after ten years, plus!

The bottom line is that this level of sales is due to releasing books frequently, having a substantial catalog, and selling my books competitively in all the market and formats available, and on Google.

However, these numbers should be viewed in their historical perspective. Ten years ago, in 2015 and for several years afterwards I was selling, on average, around 2,000 books per title per a year, on just Amazon and venues distributed by Smashwords - without audiobooks. In 2025 I am selling books at about half that rate, about 1,000 copies a book per year, but those sales include audiobooks that account for 40% of sales, and in additional stores. And I'd be selling 80% less books than I am, if it wasn't for the addition of Google as a vendor.

It's tough market.

The ebook market, especially on Amazon, has matured and consolidated. The casual ebook readers have likely returned to paper books as the newness of ebooks wore off. What remains are the very avid readers who read books of a specific genre or subgenre, and specific authors. I suspect that these readers account for the vast majority of ebook fiction sold/read. If your books fall outside of those mainstreams, and you don't spend money advertising, and hours a day on social media promoting yourself one way or another, the pickings are few, as my sales on Amazon clearly suggest.

The other factor to note is my dependence on Google for my sales. One would like to see a wider distribution of sales. Like many Amazon only authors, I have most of my eggs in one basket. But unlike most of Amazon only authors, who have no alternative market, I've taken every opportunity to reach every market. It just falls out that Google is my best choice, by far.

All that said, the bottom line is that these are just numbers. What I value is you, dear reader. Yes, the more the better, but in the end, I sincerely hope that I am entertaining readers like you, while at the same time, I am entertaining myself writing these stories. There'd be no numbers without you, and it wouldn't half as much fun. Thank you for making my day!

Developmental Editors and Indie-Publishing

I'm going to say it up front. Publishing is a business. A very risky business. So if you're not certain that the revenue from the book you're publishing is likely to pay for a developmental editor, you should not hire one. A developmental editor's value, at least in indie-publishing, is minuscule. Developmental editors are the ones who go through stories and "suggest" what needs to be fixed to make it a "better" story.  Which may be helpful, but considering that they'll likely charge anywhere from $1,000 to more than $3,000 for their work, unless you already have a large established readership, you'll likely never see any return on that investment. This makes spending this sort of money on developmental and/or line editing without a booming self-publishing business, a very poor business decision. In my opinion. As I said, publishing is a very risky business, and investments in it need a thoughtful consideration of facts, not dreams. Any money spent, should be spent very prudently at the scale of expected sales.

Writing, unlike publishing, is an art. Stories are a work of art, created by their author(s). This work of art can be, and almost always is, turned into a product in the hope that it will sell. The job of the editors is use their expertise to re-shape a work of art into the most commercially appealing product possible. In traditional publishing a team of editors work on the cream of the manuscript crop, i.e. manuscripts culled from the thousands submitted to agents, vetted by the agents, and then selected by acquiring editors. Still, they only manage to produce one profitable product out of every three books they work on. And how much of that success might well be attributed to the book's promotional budget is an open question. This is not to say that editors are completely incompetent, it is simply very hard, even for professionals, to know what readers will like. Your own-edited, self-published book is as likely to succeed commercially as a professionally edited self-published book, i.e. statically very unlikely.

A "well edited" book is like a tree that falls in a forest. No one will ever know it is well edited, unless they somehow discover and read it. For this to happen,  thousands of impressions are needed just to get a potential reader to click on the cover, read the blurb, and perhaps, read a sample before buying it. Only if, or when, they get to the sample pages will editing ever have a chance to play a role in making a sale. Thus, money spent on getting the book seen is a far more effective way of making sales than thousands of dollars spent on editors.

Given how late in the sales process any effects of editing might have on influencing sales, there is no compelling case that it is needed at all. Your work, your vision, is just as likely to succeed as an editor's. You just never know what will click with whom.

These days, in traditional publishing, authors usually get only one chance to prove to their publisher that they're potentially a bestselling author. This is not the case in indie-publishing.

The beauty of indie-publishing is that, unlike traditional publishing, you have as many chances as you care to take in chasing commercial success. There's a very simple reason for this; on average, only several dozen to a hundred readers will ever buy and read most indie-published books, be they good or bad. A hundred readers out of a million potential readers gives you a lot of headroom to make mistakes and many chances to get better over time, without coming close to exhausting your potential readership. And the best way to get better is to write, publish, write and publish, again, and again, learning from your mistakes and any feedback you might get along the way. And then, when you reach the point where you can look back and find yourself embarrassed by your first book, you can unpublish it. In the meanwhile, you've been building a back catalog for readers to explore and buy, when the day arrives when your newest book sells more than a hundred copies. When you've made it.

Thus, it's indie-publishing's very long odds of commercial success that allows an author the freedom to write their story the way they want to write it, without compromises to conform to some "professional" editor's opinion. I strongly believe you shouldn't give up that artistic freedom. Who's to say that being different is any less effective than being a copy of last year's successful books? Fashion moves on.

Advocates of using editors often try to make authors feel that they are betraying readers and their fellow indie-authors if they don't get a "professional" editor to polish up their story. Never mind that anyone can set up shop as a "professional freelance editor." There are no bar exams for editors needed to pass in order to put out a professional editor shingle on the internet. Who knows what your "professional editor" knows about editing.

Advocates of professional editors will also point to popular authors who, they say, grew too big for editors and their books suffered for it. Authors like Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson are examples of whom they say produced bloated work as a result. What they don't mention is that while some readers might find this to be the case, there are likely as many or more readers who think those "bloated"  stories are wonderful just as they are. You can never please every reader, and shouldn't try. 

So don't be afraid. It's okay, indeed, desirable, to create your story, your way, no matter how quirky it might be. Remember the abysmal success rate of agents and editors in the traditional space. You really can't do worse by doing it your way. 

Now, by all means produce the best book you can. Get all the feedback on your story that you can from spouses, family, friends, critique partners, and beta readers if you have any doubts about your story. Produce as clean a copy as you can, using the built in spelling and grammar checks, as well as free, or paid (for a month) grammar checkers like Grammarly. But, whatever you do, keep your book uniquely yours. That's its greatest value. Don't let its uniqueness be eroded by someone's idea of making it more marketable. The numbers tell the story; editors have no magic to make a book better and there's no proof they make it more salable. Plus, when it comes to indie-publishing, it's a very different market, with different readers and reader priorities than traditionally published books. Thus,  hiring traditional publishing editors, and mimicking traditional publishing standards is almost certainly a recipe for missing the mark in indie-publishing.

I believe that authors should keep the "self" and "indie" in self-publishing and indie-publishing.

The inspiration for this post came from watching a small publisher/author's YouTube video several weeks ago. In his list of "lies authors tell themselves that will destroy their careers," he listed not hiring a professional developmental editor as one of them. It seems that we're too close to our work to see it's trash. Then last week, he posted another video, where he made the case even stronger - despite the fact that he doesn't feel the need for a developmental himself. (Is he telling himself a lie like the rest of us?) In any event, his advice seems to be a do as I say, not as I do. He then went on to say that cost of editing should be no excuse. Save up for years, if need be. No mention of the steep odds facing success in indie-publishing. And in this video he freely admitted that he was acting as a gatekeeper to keep the riffraff, the "bad" books out of the market - something a holy mission for him. He also admitted that he sees himself and his small press a traditional publisher, so his mission seems to be keeping indie writers out of publishing, or to bankrupt them as quickly as possible, should they take his advice and hire expensive editors. All of which struck me as pretty self-serving. I don't think it is in the best interest of aspiring indie authors to follow his advice, since he never addresses the sad truth of indie-publishing; that tens of thousand books are released every month and only a tiny fraction of them will sell a hundred copies or more. Most will lose most of the money the authors spend on publishing their books.

Auto-narrated Audiobooks; "Garbage?"

I recently watched an YouTube video by an angry self-published author/small press publisher, John G Hartness, on the current controversy concerning Amazon's new audiobook royalty plan. Long story short; it will lead to less money for authors. It's a convoluted plan that I'm not going to get into it here. However, in this video he called auto-narrated books "garbage" after trying one that he didn't like; it had wrong pauses and emphases. Plus, he apparently considers it generative AI, which he hates. He went on to paint a picture of AI generated books with auto-narration flooding the audiobook market.

I was tempted to comment, but decided against it, since he said he would delete comments defending generative AI. And well, it's his platform. This, however, is mine, so I'll post what would have said here, though in greater detail.

First, this fear of a flood of AI-written fiction is the "Yellow Peril" or "Red Scare" of book publishing is silly, in my opinion. Publishing a book is easy compared to promoting it. Getting a book seen by the thousands of readers needed to sell even a few copies is a very time consuming, social media focused, and expensive undertaking these days, which only works if the book is laser-focused on a popular sub-genre. How likely is it that people who churn out AI written books will turn around and spend their time and money doing what is necessary to sell those, theoretical, mass-produced books? Few people are likely ever to come across these books, if my brief experience with Kindle Unlimited is a guide, even with four million books the algorism serves up a few hundred, at most.

Though I recently came across a video where someone did review several AI generated books, so apparently some people do find them in the wild. And a few like them. So maybe I'm wrong...

... In any event, whether there are 4 million or 8 million books, it won't make any practical difference to either a reader or an author. If an author has the product, the skills, and the established audience to make money in the current market, that exposure and those skills will serve them just as well, no matter how large the pool of competing books is.

Second, is auto-narrated narration "generative AI?" I don't consider it so. Text-to-speech tech has been available for like four decades, long before generative AI was a thing. It just reads the words it is provided with, generating nothing on its own. I don't know about Amazon and Apple, but the people used for the voices on Google were hired and paid for their work. The fact that the technology has advanced to the point where it can create the impression of a human reading the text rather than a robot, is not a result of stealing anyone's work. No one owns language. It's merely a product of long research and development over decades.

As for the issue of quality, it's clearly subjective. Though I am not an audiobook "reader", I recently sampled the newly released audiobook version of the first Emma M Lion book. I found the sample all wrong. The narrator's voice did not match the one in my head, nor did her tempo, pauses and emphasis match the way I read the passage. These are the same complaints Hartness had with the auto-narrated book he sampled. In the case of the Lion book, Beth Brower, auditioned 70 people for the role of Emma. It is her Emma, and she is completely happy with the choice she made, and in the reviews I looked at, everyone else's is as well. (My daughter, however, agrees with me.) My point being that appreciating narration is every bit as subjective as appreciating a book. People love books that other people hate. I understand that many audiobook listeners speed up the narration by a factor of 1.2X to 1.8X, so it seems that many listeners don't mind Alvin the Chipmunk as a narrator. They value the story over the delivery of it.

Now this author and everyone else is welcome to their opinions. But is it "garbage"? I don't listen to audiobooks, so all i can say what is good enough, though Amazon, Apple and Google apparently feel it is.

While I don't have an opinion on the quality of auto-narrated books, I do have data. My data suggests that for my books, my readership, and my business model it is more than good enough. Over the last three years, I've sold more than 25,000 auto-narrated audiobooks. No one has complained about the quality of the narration. All of my auto-narrated audiobooks' ratings match or are higher their ebook versions. Moreover, on Audible, three of my books have ratings, which are split between the story and the "performance", i.e. the narration. They earned a 5, 4,& a 3, star performance rating, for a 4 star average. A small sample, but still, these are not free books; people paid a modest amount of money for them. A 4-star average performance is not objectively garbage.

But there was one other aspect of this video that actually angered me. In a comment, Hartness said that he wanted to "shame" writers into not using auto-narration for their books. Now, if you happen to be a cynic, heaven forbid, this sounds, well, a little self-serving. It is an example of what I'm calling "shadow gatekeeping" in the indie space these days. It's not just the hucksters, but successful authors, who are telling aspiring self-publishing authors that they really need to spend between $3,000 and $10,000 to publish their book the "right way". They need to hire editors, artists, designers, formaters, and human narrators, to insure a professional quality book. They tell them that they owe it to the readers and well, indie-publishers as whole, to put their best foot forward, otherwise they're letting down the side. Of course, if you're already successful self-publishing author, you're likely doing this already, and if you're rich enough to have that much cash on hand, which you can afford to lose, sure, go ahead, self-publish your book. Chances are you won't be around long... And don't let the gate hit your ass on the way out.

Oh, they might mention that there are cheaper ways to do this, but you don't really want to be one of the unwashed riff-raff of self-publishing, do you? As I said, this sounds very self-serving to me; the message is pretty clear; only the successful authors and the rich should release their proper books and audiobooks.

In my view the advice misses on two main points; books are sold by promoting them, all the editing, covers, etc. does nothing to address this. And second, the ebook market is not the traditional publishing market; it is the pulp fiction market, with different priorities. Story, not grammar rules the pulp market.

Of course, I'm sure that all their advice is good and well meaning. Don't let the cynic in you say otherwise.

A footnote; one comment on the post that original blog, was from a person who makes audiobooks. Amazon offered them a chance to try a beta program that would clone their voice. Presumably an audiobook could be produced with a press of a button in their own "human" voice. And then, I suppose, the human narrator could go through it to edit it to their liking, a process that I would guess would be a lot less time consuming for the narrator, who can spend 5 to 6 hours to produce one hour of narration. With this technology available, we will likely hear a lot more "human" narrators that have been at least partially produced by computers, just as we now have a lot of "human" cover artists who use generative AI as a tool to produce elements of their work and speed up production. Time is money, no matter what you do. A fellow's got'a eat. Art is a very poor career choice. 

It seems that in the 21st century, anything can be real. And anything can be unreal. You have options.

My Tenth Year in Publishing - The Numbers

 

The mission of Celanda House is to publish the fiction of C. Litka as widely as possible - without having to work at doing so. Celanda House has no mandate to make money - It just can't lose money. To accomplish its stated mission within the assigned parameters, Celanda House, whenever possible, prices ebooks and audiobooks at cost. In most instances this is free. 

After ten years in business, how successful has Celanda House been in its mission of getting the works of C. Litka into the hands of the eager reading public? Below are the numbers.

This year I have simplified the chart, combining all sales per book into one number. I have broken out the ebook to audiobook ratio per store.

Book Title/ Release Date	Year 10 Sales	Total to Date
SALES PERIOD May 2024 – April 2025	Ebooks, Audiobooks & Paperback combined	Ebooks, Audiobooks & Paperback combined
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	926	11,029
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	692	7,267
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	1,861	20,092
Castaways of the Lost Star (Initial Release -withdrawn) 4 Aug 2016		2,176(one year)
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	1,009	11,651
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	717	6,139
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	838	5,824
Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	701	4,436
Lines in the Lawn (short story) 8 June 2020 Widthdrawn		174
Keiree 18 Sept 2020	709	4,032
The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon 11 Nov 2020	1.036	5,519
The Secrets of Valsummer House 18 March 2021	984	4,623
Shadows of an Iron Kingdom 15 July 2021	1.502	5,837
The Aerie of a Pirate Prince 29 Sept 2022	950	3,018
The Girl on the Kerb 6 April 2023	1,296	7,000
A Night on Isvalar 15 July 2021	824	917
Passage to Jarpara 16 March 2024	795	972
Chateau Clare 17 Oct 2024	1,257	1,257
Glencrow Summer Feb 21 2025	704	704
The Lost Star six book Series Aug-Sep 2024	149	149
Omnibus Editions (withdrawn)		30
TOTALS THIS PERIOD	16,950  Year Ten	102,835 Grand Total

Sales by Store ( ebook/audiobook, store sales, and store % of total sales)

Draft2Digital*   2,257 ebooks   1,403 Audio books (38%)   3,660 Total   21.5%

Kobo                   82 ebooks              n/a                                82 Total       .5%

Amazon              780 ebooks   26 Audiobooks  (3%) 21 Paper   827 Total     5%

Google            5,393 ebooks     6,954 Audiobooks (56%)     12,347 Total   73%

* D2D includes sales via Smashwords, B & N, Apple, & a few European stores. Audiobook sales from Apple.

(Note: the totals between the chart and these listings differ by 34, well within my margin of error.)

Revenue: $379.21  

Expenses: Books & Postage for Beta Readers $80 (est.)

A Table of Yearly Sales Results

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

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

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

8,225* Year Four, 2018/19: (2 novels released) * includes a strange 1950 books sold in one day on Amazon that they say is correct. It would be 6,275 without that strange day's sales.

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

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

8,853 Year Seven 2021/22 (1 novel, 1 novella)

19,524 Year Eight 2022/23 (1 short novel, 1 novel  Audiobooks)

14,468 Year Nine 2023/24 (1 sequel novel, 1 novella release wide in late April)

16,950 Year Ten 2024/2025 (2 novels)

The Complete Yearly Reports on this Blog

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 6:https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2021/05/six-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 7: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2022/05/7-years-in-self-publishing-report.html

Year 8: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2023/05/eight-years-as-authorpublisher-report.html

Year 9: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2024/05/nine-years-as-authorpublisher-part-2.html

My Thoughts On the Data 

Surprisingly my tenth year proved to be my second best in sales. In last year's yearly report I said that I hoped this year would be like last year, and, as it turned out, my sales exceeded last year by almost 2,500 copies. Revenue up $200 as well. It was a very good year. There is likely no secret reason for this; new releases, like the tide, raise the sale of all books. So with two new novels released this year both of which sold well, likely explains the better than expected sales.

The most important reading of the data above is that across all of my books, my back catalog books continue to sell at roughly the same rate as my newest titles. This would seem to suggest that I am attracting new readers every year, who then go on to read the stories I published before they discovered my books. Also it is interesting how relatively close in numbers most books are, with my space opera continuing to be my best seller, followed by its direct sequel and the four adventure/mysteries set in that same locale. Why the third book in the series, Shadows of an Iron Kingdom outsells all the other titles in that series is a mystery. There is a role playing game by the name of Iron Kingdoms which might explain it. Or readers simply like Gothic themed stories.

As I said in an earlier post, I think these sales are earned by the number of words I've written and number of books I've published. As well as the frequency of releases. More books, more often, more sales. Econ. 101. 

Audiobooks accounted for 49.5% of my sales this year. I suspect that audio books account for close to half of my Apple sales as well, since that 38% includes Smashwords, B & N et. al. Clearly, by adopting audiobooks, even auto-narrated ones, I have doubled my sales. Best publishing decision I made. And it was a no-brainer.

Google continues to dominate my sales. I think the reason is simple; young people use their smart phones as their computer, social media platform, and entertainment center. Offering my entertainment on phones via the Play Store, Apple Books, or on the Kindle App, as both text and voice is a doorway to the younger readers. As is making my work affordable to anyone who has a smart phone, i.e. just about everyone.

Looking Ahead

My next novel, The Darval-Mers Dossier, a 53K word mystery novel set in the same world as Chateau Clare and Glencrow Summer, is set to be released on 5 June 2025. Ideally I would like to release a second novel early in 2026, even though my stated goal is one novel a year. We'll see.

Earlier this year, I had toyed with the idea of making big changes after reaching the 100,000 sales mark and my 10th year. I considered going all in on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited for a year or two, just to see what I could do to capture the paying market. However, I sobered up and decided not to pursue that avenue. First, the sales of my books on Amazon and Kobe have inspired little confidence that I could sell enough books to justify spending the money I'd have to spend to get them in front of enough readers to have a chance of success. Together with the likelihood of losing most of that money, since my books are out of the mainstream of bestsellers I sighed and thought, no. And perhaps more importantly, I feel good about simply sharing my stories with readers. It just seems to feel right. I lose nothing by doing so and gain a pleasant felling of satisfaction by doing it. Plus, I like looking at my sales figures each month. Why turn fun into work? 

So, going forward, there may be new sales venues opening up this summer. I've seen reports suggesting that bookstore.org will be adding self-published books to their offering, somehow, which, if true would bear looking into. And I believe Kobo is in the early stages of some sort of audiobook move as well. Currently invite only. Otherwise, I'm staying the course. We'll see what the next year brings. Fingers crossed, something good.

Stay tuned for it's other than Amazon release day!