Eight Years as an Author/publisher -- a Report

 

It was a very good year.

My eighth year as an author/publisher was my best ever. And there's no mystery why. However, let’s start with a glance at the sales numbers for each book. Audiobook sales in parentheses, total sales in bold. And then we'll talk about the whys.

Sales for the year from May 2022 to April 2023

Book Title / Release Date	Year 7 Sales	Year 8 Sales	Total Sale To Date
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	407	452      (488)  940	9,163
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	371	468      (598) 1,066	5,677
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	979	1,360   (895) 2,255	17,050
Castaways of the Lost Star 4 Aug 2016	Withdrawn	Withdrawn	2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	947	783      (780) 1,563	9,479
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	754	431      (672) 1,103	4,649
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	858	625     (543) 1,168	4,358
Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	728	581      (678) 1,259	2,864
Lines in the Lawn 8 June 2020	30	32	145
Keiree 18 Sept 2020	611	637      (583) 1,220	2,414
The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon 19 Nov. 2020	1,056	782      (634) 1,416	3,572
The Secrets of Valsummer House 18 March 2021	858	894      (692) 1,586	2,709
Shadows of an Iron Kingdom 15 July 2021	1,231	751    (1,299) 2,050	3,281
The Aerie of a Pirate Prince* 29 Sept 2022		737      (291) 1,028	1,028
The Girl on the Kerb* 30 March 2023		2,745     (45) 2,790	2,790
A Night on Isvalar (Amazon exclusive – all $ sales only)	23 sold	18 sold	41
Total Year Sales * New releases.	8,853 Year 7 Total: 51,902	19,524  of which were 8,198 audio	71,396

Revenue: Amazon: $128.24  Overdrive: $2.67    Total $130.91    Expenses: $90 (approx.)

For Comparison, Past Yearly 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)

19,396 Year Eight 2022/23 (1 short novel, 1 novel)

The Complete Yearly Reports

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

Sales % by Venue

Comparing the sales split between Amazon, Google, and Smashwords (including Apple and B & N)

                     Year 5 (2019/20) Year 6 (2020/21) Year 7 (2021/22) Year 8 (2022/23)

Amazon                40%                     35%                    21.5%                 24%

Smashwords         40%                     39%                    18%                     9%

Google                  20%                     26%                    60.5%                 67%

My Publishing Business

As always, I should note that I am an amateur writer. I write for the pleasure of it. I am, however, a professional publisher. As a publisher my focus is readership, rather than revenue. Nevertheless, I have shown a profit every year. To avoid the expense, risk, work and bother of advertising, I price my ebooks and audiobooks at cost,($0) whenever possible, and rely on Amazon's non-U.S. markets for my profit. The results of this approach speak for themselves.

This Year's Highlights

Google continues to be my dominate sales channel and would have been even without adding audiobooks last April to the mix. I'm very glad I jumped in when I did, even though at the time Google suggested that the tech was best suited to non-fiction. Google has since added the option of having different characters speak in different voices, a feature clearly aimed at fiction, so their auto-narration tech has likely improved in the past year. In any event, I’m happy to report that the ratings for all my auto-narrated audiobooks are every bit as good as their ebook version. 

Besides adding audiobooks, I think Google dominates my sales as a result of my world-wide affordable price and the fact that many people read ebooks and listen to audiobooks on their phones. The Google Play Store is the app, game, ebook, and audiobook store built into several billion Android phones, and it's likely the first stop for many ebook and audiobook readers using Android phones.

The surprising success of my 2023 novel, The Girl on the Kerb was the icing  on the cake this year. It had been sitting around for nine months while on submission to Gollancz, a U.K. SF publisher. When they passed on it I released myself it in late March and early April. It did fine, but nothing special on Smashwords and Google, but after selling 16 copies at $3.99 on Amazon, Amazon price-matched the free price in its U.S. store, a mere 5 days after it was released. With that price cut, its sales started to take off, selling something like 240 copies in the following week, a rate I haven't seen in years. I have no explanation for this, save that I released as a thriller-espionage and a thriller-adventure novel rather than as SF novel. It seems to have sold well enough for Amazon’s legendary algorithms to kick in and they began to promote it on Amazon in some manner all on their own, the result of which was two or three years worth of sales in a month. Without The Girl on the Kerb, Amazon sales would have closely matched Smashwords sales as they have for most years. Ideally I hope the success of the book will bring in some new readers for all my books, but I don’t expect it to fundamentally alter my business.

This year's other release, in September 2022, was The Aerie of a Pirate Prince, the fourth book in the Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure series. It is doing just fine. That series has been selling well for me, with Shadows of an Iron Kingdom doing strangely well in Japan for a time. With it and The Girl on the Kerb, I released two books within a year, making it a very good year on that front as well.

As I mentioned in last year’s report, I had entered a book in the Self Publishing Science Fiction Contest. It yielded one nice review and no appreciable sales. I will not be continuing that venture, though, having missed the deadline for thefar  more popular fantasy version of this contest last year, I will try again to get Beneath the Lanterns entered into it next week.

All thoughts of getting traditionally published are gone. I had fun exploring the experience, but it simply confirmed that I like publishing - and owning - my own work too much to sell anything down the river, like you must in traditional publishing.

I've also abandoned any idea of getting my books into bookshops, as I realized that I would likely have to become a warehouse/distributor of my books if I wanted to go that route. I don’t see any profit for the expense and bother that would involve.

Looking Ahead to Year Nine

On 1 May I released the first of four omnibus versions, this one featuring the four novels of my Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventures into one ebook to be sold exclusively on Amazon. I am targeted these omnibus versions primarily at the non-U.S. market where Amazon does not price match my free prices. It is a way of offering more affordable books for the foreign market without altering the list price of the standalone books. The initial release price will be $.99 and in the following months settle at $2.99.  Over the next year I plan to bundle and release all my books in a total of five omnibus versions. I'm not expecting a ton of sales, but in the spirit of leaving no stone un-turned, I'll give it a try. 

As for new projects, I am working on the third and final book in the Tropic Sea Stories series, A Passage to Jarpara. It's slow going, but I'm maybe half way done with the first draft. I have it tentatively scheduled as my 2024 novel. I am also toying around with an idea for a portal fantasy novella. I don’t know if that will go anywhere. It hasn't so far. I've nothing else on the creative back burner. I find that story ideas and new plots are hard to come by these days.

I expect to post a new blog post every Friday as has become my custom.

Dave, at http://artifacslibros.vzpla.net/index.html?i=1 has offered to translate into Spanish The Bright Black Sea, The Lost Star Sea and the Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventures. If all goes well, they will likely be available on his website in late Summer 2023. Having my work available in Spanish is rather exciting.

Since this was clearly an exceptional year. I don’t expect my ninth year to come close to equaling it. Sales will certainly fade. They always do. In any event, I expect audiobooks will make up close to half of my sales, whatever it is. But this assessment is nothing new. Rereading my seven other reports, it seems that every year ahead looks grim for one reason or another, but we continue to plug along. I expect to do that for my ninth year in the business as well. In short, stay the course.