7 Years in Self Publishing -- A Report

 

I have been a self-published author for seven years now. In the past dozen years, and without a day job, I have written and published ten novels and two novellas. I write for the fun, so I do only what I enjoy doing, which is to say writing and producing e and paperbacks. I do hardly anything to promote my work and nor do I spend any more money than I make from the occasional sales of a book on Amazon. For the last seven years I have let my free price for ebooks do my promotion for me. Since I can produce my books with the help of kindly volunteer beta readers for free, I can give away my books, when possible, without losing money in doing so.

This approach worked well for the first four years or so. However, over the last couple of years, I sense that the focus of most dedicated ebook readers has narrowed to very specific genres and sub-genres. These genres are now served by prolific writers producing three, four, or more books a year who spend thousands of dollars on advertising just to keep on these readers’ radar, so vast is the pool of books and authors these readers can pick from.

As a result of this gradual shift in the focus of ebook reading, my sales have declined in my traditional venues, which is to say, Smashwords including Apple, Kobo & B & N, and Amazon. Luckily for me, my sales on Google not only grew enough to replace these declines, but made this year, my best yet for both sales numbers, and for my very modest income form books sold on Amazon stores around the world. So let’s take a look at those numbers.

My Sales Numbers

As usual, almost all of the sales are free ebooks sold through Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, and Google. Amazon does sell my books at list price in its non-US stores as well as some of my most recent books in its US store. I don’t bother to separate them out in this report. My books are also available on Kobo, but they do not report free sales to Smashwords. Barnes & Noble does report sales, but they don’t show up on my daily sales charts, so I don’t record those sales by the books – they’re just a rounding error anyway, i.e. you can add 36 books to the total below for 2022) In addition some books are also listed on other sites that offer free books. I don’t know how many, if any, are downloaded from those sites.

Below is the chart comparing sales May 2021 to April 2022 to my year 6 sales.

Book Title / Release Date	Year 6 Sales	Year 7 Sales	Total Sale To date
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	598	407	8,223
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	358	371	4,611
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	1,320	979	14,795
Castaways of the Lost Star 4 Aug 2016	Withdrawn	Withdrawn	2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	986	947	7,916
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	551	754	3,546
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	728	858	3,190
Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	632	728	1,605
Lines in the Lawn 8 June 2020	83	30	113
Keiree 18 Sept 2020	853	611	1.194
The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon 11 Nov 2020	1,110	1,056	2,156
The Secrets of Valsummer House  18 March 2021	265	858	1,123
Shadows of an Iron Kingdom 16 July 2021	n/a	1,231	1,231
A Night on Isvalar 16 July 2021 (Amazon only – all $ sales only)	n/a	23 sold	23 plus a modest # of page views
Total Year Sales	7,484	8,853	51,902

Past Results

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 books sold in one day 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)

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

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

Sales by Venue

Comparing the sales split between Amazon, Google, and Smashwords (including sales on Apple and B & N) for the last thee years:

Year 5 – 2019/20

Amazon 40%

Smashwords 40%

Google 20%

Year 6 – 2020/29

Amazon 35%

Smashwords 39%

Google 26%

Year 7 – 2021/22

Amazon 21.5%

Smashwords 18%

Google 60.5%

The Takeaway

As you can see from the figures above, Google Play Store accounted for well over half of my sales this past year. Sales on Smashword’s site have declined drastically, so that my more or less stable Apple sales probably account for more than half of my sales reported on Smashwords. Amazon sales have also declined, in part because several of my newer books are not free on Amazon.com, which negatively affect my sales numbers.

The the monthly sales numbers on Google have declined by more than half from their peak. We will have to see if they continue to decline and where they level off. The wild card for Google is that I have just released audiobook versions of all of my books on Google. I have no idea how that will affect sales, if at all.

Looking Forward

In my 6 ½ year report in Nov 2021 I said that I expected to release a new Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure story in February or March, 2022. After that, I hoped to work on a more ambitious project. As it turned out, I shelved the Nine Star story in December and started writing the more ambitious novel in January. I hope to have the first draft of that project, currently entitled EuraEast, completed by early summer, 2022. However, I am planning to shop this story around to agents and traditional publishers for at least six months, and that, only after I complete the final draft have it proofread and reviewed by beta readers. Should I fail to find a publisher for it – the likely outcome – I would probably be releasing it as a self published novel around this time next year. So it could be a full year without a new novel. However, it is possible that once I’ve finished my work on EuraEast, I will return and finish the Nine Star novel releasing it late in 2022 or early in 2023, but that is pure speculation now..

There are, however, several wild cards in all this.

First is. as I have mentioned, that I have released all of my books as audiobooks in the Google Play Store. These are AI narrated books, so that they are not up to the quality of a good, human read book, but I think they might just be good enough – since, unlike commercial works at $20-$30, I’ve released them for free. It may be a little too early to release fiction read by an algorithm, but Google says that it will automatically make improvements to the books as the technology evolves, so that I think it’s worth getting in on the ground floor – especially since this beta program to convert ebooks to audiobooks is currently free. We’ll have to see how they fare. Any feedback is welcome, so if you give them a try, let me know what you think of them.

The next wild card is contests. Last year I entered A Summer in Amber in the Self Published Science Fiction Contest. It did not get out of the initial round, nor was it reviewed at all, so that contest did not generate any appreciable sales. This year I plan to enter Beneath the Lanterns in the Fantasy version of that contest, and Sailing to Redoubt in the science fiction version. We’ll see if either fairs better in those contests and if any sales results can be attributed to them.

And the last wild card is I am considering redoing my paperback books in a slightly smaller form factor using a print on demand service offered by Draft2Digital, a company that has now purchased Smashwords. In addition, I am thinking about of actually spending money promoting these paperback books. I am toying with the idea of offering selected SF bookshops around the country a chance to order, let’s say a $100 worth of my paperback books to sell in their shops at no cost to them, with the option of ordering more at my cost. This is more about creating a modest legacy than making money. I would like some of my novels in paper floating around on the shelves somewhere, long after I’m gone. Still, if I could sell paper books, it would be nice, even if I did it at cost.

So to sum things up, it was a good year, with an interesting year ahead. Stay tuned.