On 23 April 2015 I published A Summer in Amber, the first of
three novels I released in 2015. Some Day Days and The
Bright Black Sea followed in July and September. This blog post
marks the end of my fourth year in self-publishing, which means that
it is time for my annual report. My previous reports can be found
here:
Most of my sales are free downloads, though they do include sales on
Amazon’s non-US sites, sales on Amazon.com when Amazon is not
price-matching, plus the odd paperback sale. The numbers include
sales reported by Amazon, Apple, B & N, and Smashwords for the
entire year. Kobo does not report free downloads to Smashwords. In
October 2018 I listed my books with Google and those sales are now
included in my report. My books can also be found on Obooko.com and
many other sites that offer PDF books, for which I have no way of
knowing sales numbers.
Let’s start with the numbers I do have:
A Summer in Amber
(23 April 2015)
Download/sales: as
of:
May 1 2018: 4,915
May 1 2019:
6,399
Sales for the year:
1,484
Some Day Days
(9 July 2015)
Download/sales as
of:
May 1 2018: 2,050
May 1 2019:
3,127
Sales for
the year: 1,077
The Bright Black
Sea (17 September 2015)
Download/sales as
of:
May 1 2018: 7,836
May 1 2019:
9,840
Sales for
the year: 2,004
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Lost Star (4 Aug 2016 – withdrawn: 13 July 2017)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
May 1 2019:
4,021
Sales for
the year: 1,943
Beneath the
Lanterns (13 Sept 2018)
Download/sales as
of:
May 1 2019:
1,154
Sales for
the year: 1,154
Sailing to
Redoubt (15 March 2019)
Download/sales as of:
May 1 2019:
563
Sales for the
year: 563
Total
download/sales as of 1 May 2018: 19,055
Total
download/sales as of 1 May 2019: 27,280
Total
download/sales Year 4: 8,225
Yearly sales:
Year One: 6,537 (3 books released)
Year Two: 6,137 (1 book released)
Year Three: 6,385 (1 book released)
Year Four: 8,225 (2 books released)
Performance over
time for each title:
Downloads/sales per year:
Year: 1 2 3 4*
A Summer in Amber 2,222 1,357 1,336 1,484
Some Day Days 1,139 511 400 1,077
The Bright Black Sea 3,176 2,569 2,092 2,004
Castaways of the Lost Star 2,176 (total)
The Lost Star’s Sea 2,078 1,943
Beneath the Lanterns 1,154 (half year)
Sailing to Redoubt 563 (six weeks)
*Includes a single day sale of 1,950 books, approx 500 per book,
Summer in Amber through The Lost Star’s Sea. See
below.
The Bright Black Sea, a space opera is my most mainstream and
most popular book. Its sequel, The Lost Star’s Sea, is
currently selling about equal to it. A Summer in Amber ticks
along, Some Day Days, with my earliest writing, is my least
popular book, for several reasons, but actually sells pretty well on
Smashwords. Beneath the Lanterns and Sailing to Redoubt
are off to reasonable starts. All, in all, my book sales are holding up
reasonably well, especially because fashionable book sales "fall off a cliff" after three months or less. Having never been in fashion, they are never out of
fashion.
Performance of
retailers:
For the entire year, my sales split between Smashwords distributed
books and Amazon was: Smashwords, (approx.) 36% vs 64% for Amazon,
including that 1,950 sales day. If you discount that strange one
day’s sales, the ratio is Smashwords 47% vs Amazon’s 53%. And
then, considering only my 2019 sales, the ratio actually flips: 62%
of my sales were from Smashwords vs 38% for Amazon. In February and
March my sales on Amazon really dried up until the release of Sailing
to Redoubt. However, Smashwords more than took up the slack –
perhaps a result of their new storefront design. Presently Google
accounts for less than 10% of my total sales. We’ll have to see if
that grows or not. And to complete the comparison between retailers
for the year, my numbers within Smashwords distribution are Smashwords: 76%, Apple: 21%, and B & N: 3%. Kobo does not report
free sales.
Profit and loss:
I actually don’t keep track of this, since the numbers are too
small to matter. Income comes from the rare ebook sale on Amazon’s
non-US sites where it does not price match my free price, and, every
so often, the sale of a paperback book. My only out of the pocket
expenses are the purchase of a number of copies of my paperback books
as proof copies and as gifts to my beta readers plus the postage for
those gift books. I believe my sales for a year more than covers these expenses.
Year four
performance:
This was my best year yet, by the numbers. However, the numbers should
perhaps be taken with a grain of salt. Amazon reported a one day sale
of 1,950 books spread almost equally among my four titles at the
time. I contacted Amazon and was assured it was actual
sales. However, I could find no reason for this big jump, and since it did
affect the sales rank of my books I suspect that it was
perhaps Amazon’s bookkeeping catching up with sales, since other
sellers of free books have experienced similar inexplicable jumps in
sales. Still, to put it in context, this one day sale more than covers my
1,840 sales increase over the previous year. The second and more substantial reason for the increase is that I released both my 2018
and 2019 novels during this period. New releases generate sales for
not only the new book but for all the other books as well. These two
factors, taken together, suggest that my fourth year might not be as
rosy as the numbers suggest. Still, all in all, things are going
well, and I am quite happy with the results.
As I mentioned, I released two books this operational year; my 2018
novel, Beneath the Lanterns, in September 2018 and my 2019
novel, Sailing to Redoubt, in March 2019. I had a lot of fun
writing Sailing to Redoubt and it rolled right along. I
finished the first draft in three months, and the second and third
drafts in a month and a half, which allowed me to get it out to my
beta readers in mid February and release it in the middle of March.
I’d like to think it is my best written novel yet. At the time of
writing this post, I don’t know what, if anything, I will write
next. This is not unusual. Though I had started writing Sailing to
Redoubt right after the release of Beneath the Lanterns, I had
actually finished writing Beneath the Lanterns by the end of
June, so I had time to run through a number of story ideas before
latching on to the Sailing to Redoubt story. Since I have
something like 18 months in which to release my 2020 novel, I am not
in any panic – though I wish I had something to write. Not writing
leave a big hole in my day.
This past year I further define type of stories I write: imaginary
world adventure stories. My books are basically old fashioned
adventure stories – “romances” in the older meaning of the term
– set in the future or on imaginary worlds. Setting the stories in
imaginary worlds gets them slotted into the science fiction genre,
but they land far from the popular mainstreams of science fiction, so
I don’t anticipate vast sales. In addition, both are stand alone
books. Conventional wisdom in commercially orientated indie
publishing is that series book sell much better than stand alone
books, though those books have to be released every two to three
months to keep the attention of their readerships. Clearly I am not
writing for commercial success. But there is a market for my books,
however large or small, and the easiest way to find it, is to let
people try them for free. Having more than 27,000 books in
circulation while essentially putting no effort into promoting them,
suggests my system has a pretty darn efficient effort to result
ratio. I ain’t getting rich, but I’m still in the black. And
still having fun.
Looking ahead, I’m not anticipating a banner fifth year. Selling,
and even giving away books, gets harder and more expensive every
year, at least on Amazon. Amazon has geared its business so as to
require advertising on the product page of competing books to be
visible – and you have to be visible to sell, or even give away,
books. It also weighs books borrowed in its Kindle Unlimited lending
library as sales, moving those books up the best seller charts, so
that to sell on Amazon you have to be all in, and give a significant
portion of one’s royalties back to them, one way or another. I’m
not writing the sort of books that the avid readers who sign on to
Kindle Unlimited want, nor do I write at the sort of pace needed to
keep them satisfied, so I suspect that my visibility, and hence
sales, will continue to decline on Amazon. Hopefully sales on
Smashwords will continue to at its current rate, which to date more
than makes up for the slowing sales on Amazon. Stay tuned.
Thank you!
I would like to thank my wife, Sally, who finds the first six hundred or more
typos in my manuscripts, and to my beta readers, Hannes, Dale, and Walt who find another
hundred or more. They make reading my stories so much better. I would
also like to thank the people who comment on this site, and all the
readers who leave reviews and ratings – everyone is appreciated.
Thanks to all of you, writing and self-publishing my stories has been
great fun. I’m looking forward to another story and another year in
self-publishing.
If you have any questions, I would be glad to answer them. Thanks for
looking in.
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