Since 23 Oct 2018 marked my 3 1/2 year anniversary as a
self-published writer of adventure/travel/romance novels set in
imaginary places, it’s time to publish my semi-annual report on my
past six months in the self-publishing business.
Let’s start with
the numbers. Please note; the vast majority of “sales” are free
downloads. These numbers are from Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, B &
N, and Kobo. There are other sites, like Obooko, where my books are
available but do not report downloads to me. For the first six months of the year I had listed my books on
Kobo directly, since that would allow me to see how many were
downloaded in that store, unlike when I was selling them on Kobo via
Smashwords. I found that sales were nothing to shake a stick at, so I
moved them back to Smashwords distribution. In September I was able
to list my books in the Google Play Store, so going forward I will be
including numbers from Google.
A Summer in Amber
(23 April 2015)
Download/sales: as
of:
May 1 2018: 4,915
Nov 1 2018: 6,000
Six month sales:
1,085
Some Day Days
(9 July 2015)
Download/sales as
of:
May 1 2018: 2,050
Nov 1 2018: 2,758
Six month sales: 708
The Bright Black
Sea (17 September 2015)
Download/sales as
of:
May 1 2018: 7,836
Nov 1 2018: 9,012
Six month sales:
1,176
Castaways of the
Lost Star (4 Aug 2016 – withdrawn: 13 July 2017)
Download/sales
total: 2,176
The Lost Star’s
Sea (13 July 2017)
Download/sales as
of:
May 1 2018: 2,078
Nov 1 2018: 3,265
Six month sales:
1,187
Beneath the
Lanterns (13 Sept 2018)
Download/sales as
of:
Nov 1 2018: 565
1 ½ month sales:
565
Total
download/sales as of 1 May 2018: 19,055
Total
download/sales as of 1 Nov 2018: 23,776
Total
download/sales six month sales*: 4,721
Average number of
C. Litka titles download per day: 25.8*
A more realistic average (excluding the 1950 day) is 15 copies a day
A more realistic average (excluding the 1950 day) is 15 copies a day
*The May-Nov
download/sales numbers include a one day sale on Amazon of 1950
copies, spread almost equally between my then four books. I can not
explain this strange jump in one day sales, and treat it with some skepticism. I did, however, call it to the
attention of Amazon, and they assured me that it represented true
sales, so I have included it in my numbers.
Beneath the
Lanterns
I released my 2018 novel, Beneath the Lanterns on 13 September
2018. It is the first non-sequel book I have released since I
released my first three books in 2015. My goal for this year’s
book was to expand my readership by writing something of a fantasy
novel. However, beyond the story being set in an imaginary land, it
had little other fantasy trapping. There is no magic, there are no dragons, elves, and vampires in it. So, like most of my books, it lands in
the cracks between different genres, spanning fantasy, science
fiction, and plain adventure.
As you can see from the figures above, Beneath the Lanterns
has been downloaded 565 times in the last month an a half. This
compares to 582 for Some Day Days, 1331 for The Black
Bright Sea, 867 for Castaways of the Lost Star, and 1071
for The Lost Star’s Sea. I wasn’t keeping records at
first, so I don’t have the corresponding figures for A Summer in
Amber. No doubt there are a number of reasons for this slightly
softer launch, including not being a sequel to my most popular book.
However there may be industry-wide reasons as well. One is likely the growth of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program of free,
unlimited books to read for a single monthly subscription fee –
which can be as low as free. Since this program caters to the most
active readers, the types of books that these avid readers read now dominate Amazon’s best seller charts, since borrowed books
count as sales. The second reason is that advertising is now driving
readership, giving the biggest indie publishers, with a large,
guaranteed readership the ability to outspend, out-advertise, and
outsell the newer, slower, or less business savvy writer. Just as the
textile mills put the weavers in their front rooms out of business, the well financed, entrepreneurial focused indie publishing business is
displacing the writer-focused self-published author. And that is the
way of the world. As an amateur author, money doesn't matter, so I can sleep well at night.
With the publication of Beneath the Lanterns, I now have a
little over one million words in print, the equivalent of twenty 50K
word pulp-sized novels. While I have published these million words in
the last 3 ½ years, they were produced over the course of a
decade since I had most of my first three novels finished by the time
I published A Summer in Amber. My current, one book a year pace, is not from a result of lack of speed – Beneath the Lanterns,
at 126K words, was written in five months – it is a lack of story
ideas that I feel are worth writing. I have to live with a story in
my head for a year, so I want to be able to enjoy imagining and
re-imagining the story and characters over and over again in my
imagination as I build the story and find the words to tell it.
I am hard at work on my 2019 novel, and since I have both a beginning
and an end in hand, I am confident that it will see the light of day.
Stay tuned.
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