4 1/2 Years in Self Publishing Sales Report

Time flies, and once again it is time for my biannual sales report, covering the period, May 2019 through October 2019. 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 which does not report free sales to Smashwords, plus on many other sites that offer free books.

Let’s start by looking at the numbers:

Book Title / Release Date	1H 2019 Sales	Total Sale To date
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	458	6,856
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	511	3,638
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	1,214	11,053
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	1,101	5,122
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	669	1,822
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	638	1,199
Total Six Month Sales	4,590	31,866 w/ Castaways’ 2,176 sales

Now, back in May I had written that I did not expect a banner year, for several reasons. While this will probably still be true for the entire year, this first half of the year has been much better than expected. I sold almost as many books in this period as I did last year, which included a strange one day sales on Amazon of 1950 copy in August 2018. If one excludes that inexplicable spike, my sales were actually up 1,819 for the last six months compared to the same period last year. I won’t complain about that.

I have several observations about these last six months. 

First is that despite the fact that Amazon is the market leader, by far in ebooks, I sold more ebooks on Smashwords than I did on Amazon. Here is the breakdown of my sales by stores:

     

                   

  Smashwords 52%  (Smashwords 83%, Apple 15%, B&N 2%)  Amazon 39%    Google 9% 

I think that there are several reasons for this result. On the Amazon side, I think that they have fine tuned their sales algorithms to maximize the sales of their best selling titles and authors who appeal to the avid reading Kindle Unlimited subscribers. These are the authors who can move the most copies and who will return the most money to Amazon via their spending on advertising on Amazon's platform. I have no complaints about this, it is just capitalism at work.  I'm happy with whatever sales I can get from Amazon. And since I see an occasional unexplained jump in my sales on Amazon, (though not 1950 in a day) I assume they are doing a little promotional work for me for free. I can't complain.

A second factor may be a result of  Smashwords redesigning their store front at the beginning of 2019. While my sales were up as a result of the release of Beneath the Lanterns in September, the slow decline reversed itself in January, and continued to rise, especially after the release of Sailing to Redoubt in March. After March I was routinely selling in the mid-400 copy range – until this past month, Oct 2019 when, for no apparent reason, sales crashed to 195 copies. Seeing that I don’t do promotions, it is hard to explain such a sudden fall. Perhaps my books had reached most of their audience. Or perhaps they had somehow become less visible in the Smashwords store. (Though I don't see how.)  We’ll see what happens going forward, but without a new book in the next six months, I don’t expect sales to improve.

And that brings us to the Google Play Store sales. While it constituted only 9% of my sales for the first half of my year, as you can see from the chart below, sales have begun to take off.  In October, with the decline of Smashwords, my Google sales constituted about 22% of my month's sales.

Now, I don't know how high sales will go, or for how long they will continue at the October level, but there seems to be a general trend here, at least for now. And with more sales and more ratings, I believe Google is coming into its own, far outpacing B&N and from the days when I distributed my books to Kobo on my own and saw the sales results, I can say that Google is likely far outpacing Kobo as well.

Looking Ahead

I expect sales to fall over the course of the next six months, as these sales still benefited from the March release of Sailing to Redoubt. I don't expect to release a new book until next summer or early fall. While I am at work on that book, the going is slow, with many false starts, so I am far from certain if and when my 2020 novel will appear. My hope has been to sell 300 books a month. Now, with six books available, I expect to be able to meet that between the three stores. Even with Smashwords' crash, I sold over 500 books in October, so I think it is do-able. But three of those books are now more than four years old, so it will depend on how those hold up. So far, so good. But.

However, when all is said and done, I'm still having fun doing this. And that is what matters. That, and that you, dear readers, are having fun as well.