Nine Years as an Author/Publisher Part 1

 

In last year's Eight Year in Publishing post I predicted - "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." So How did Year Nine turn out?

Well, it was a good year. Not as good as Year Eight, as I predicted, but I can't complain. However, since this is going up on 1 May and I don't have the final sales figures yet, I will post all the numbers next week. This week I'll just talk about my publishing experience in the my last fiscal year - May 2023-April 2024.

I released one novel this year, Passage to Jarpara, on the 21st of March, the third and final sequel to Sailing to Redoubt and The Prisoner of Cimlye.  I am happy that it seems to have been well received, as it was a story that need not have been written, since The Prisoner of Cimlye was a natural conclusion to Sailing to Redoubt. It was, however, a story I wanted to write, and a story that I had more or less in mind, when I didn't have another story in mind, which is to say, it was a bird in the hand at the time. Thankfully, readers of that series seem to like it, but then again, I am preaching to the choir with the book - appealing only to readers who have read and enjoyed the proceeding stories. It will sell mostly to that pool of readers, which pretty much precludes a breakout hit like the stand alone success of The Girl on the Kerb. The very nature of sequels limit them, but I knew that going in. It was just a book that I had started back in 2022, and wanted it finished. 

I entered Beneath the Lanterns into the Self Published Blog Off 9 last May. I earned a nice review, but that was about all. I do enjoy discovering what people think of my books, especially ones who likely wouldn't have found and/or picked it up. Last year the contest was first come, first serve, but this year it will be a lottery, so that while I am considering entering Sailing to Redoubt, I likely would only have a one in three chance of getting it in. And I doubt it is the type of story that will greatly appeal to many hard-core readers of fantasy. We'll see what I feel like in two weeks.

I also conducted some experiments this year as a publisher without any outstanding successes.

The first experiment I tried was making boxed sets of my books, or omnibus versions as I called them, since I didn't want to fool around making an image of a boxed set. Eventually, I offered omnibus versions of most of my books. The idea was to make them affordable to non-US customers who did not have access to the free versions on Amazon.com. They did not really reach these customers in any great numbers, sales were under 25 for the year combined. And then, in January, Amazon stopped price-matching the free price in other stores for all but two of my books so the rest reverted to retail price. Now these omnibuses would've made them great deals in the US as well, but even so sales did not pick up. That being the case, I decided that there was no point in offering my books at a bargain price without it leading to an increase in sales volume to make it worthwhile to do so, I have withdrawn them as of today, 1 May 2024. 

I made one other minor change to my catalog. On the 27 April, I withdrew the one book I had in the Kindle Unlimited program the stand alone novella, A Night on Isvalar. I had that story in that program as a "signpost" to my other free books not in that program. However, with less than 50 copies sold in three years, I decided it too wasn't doing the job I had hoped it might, so I've now  pulled it from Kindle Unlimited and released wide and free like all my other books with a new cover. With any luck, it will act like a new release, and give me a second bump in sales this coming year, coming quickly on the heels of Passage to Jarpara.

A second experiment I tried this year, was getting my books converted to audiobooks for the Apple Book Store. At least trying to. This is done through Draft2Digital, and since I had to move my books from Smashwords to 2D2 to do this for Apple, I went ahead and moved all of them to D2D distribution as well. I didn't see this as a big deal, since D2D acquired Smashwords several years ago. However, this switch cost me all my reviews and ratings on Apple and Kobo, even though D2D was listed as the publisher on Apple. That sucked. It will, however, give me a chance to quantify how much reviews and ratings matter, since I made the move on 1 January, and I will be able to compare sales before and after, Apple to apple so to speak -reviews vs no reviews this coming January, using yearly sales totals for Apple on Smashwords. Early results suggest that the lack of reviews may not be significant, since ebook sales in the March and April averaged about 73 books vs a 2023 Apple sales total of 775. Of course, this is a small sample, but that figure doesn't include audiobooks, and early audiobook sales suggest that they will more than make up any sales drop.

However, what sucks even more, has been my the experience in converting my ebooks on D2D into auto-narrated audiobooks for Apple. While the process is simple - too simple, in fact - it has been a very poor experience. First of all, Apple offers no ability to choose narrators, to hear how the narration sounds and adjust how words are pronounced, unlike every other such program. And, while both Amazon and Google will produce an audiobook ready for sale in hours, it has been five months since I submitted my twelve books and five of them have still not been converted to audiobooks, with no explanation why this is so. The other seven were converted randomly over the course of four months. There is ready no explanation for this. If there were problems with the books, I should've been notified so that they could be fixed. It certainly can't be any technological hurdle that has Apple stumped, since other tech companies can do in hours and with more options. It seems to me that Apple is just being Apple - a company known for less than ideal treatment of its developers and suppliers. Moreover, unlike Google where audiobooks immediately exploded, my sales of audiobooks on Apple have been modest so far, though perhaps it is fairer to say, they've been in line with my level of ebook sales on Apple. Figures next week.

My third experiment was another audiobook opportunity, this time taking Amazon up on their offer to create virtual voice audiobooks for free, just as Google and Apple have done. In this case the process was just as simple as that with D2D, but you're given more options. You have a choice of 3 male and 4 female voices, with the promise of more and better voices coming down the pike this summer, including different narrators for different chapters - and the ability to change narrators when we care to. We can listen to our audiobooks before publishing them unlike Apple, and alter the pronunciation of words, as well as the speed how the word is spoken, and how the narrator treats dashes, unlike Apple. While this fall short of what can be done for audiobooks on Google, it is far better than what D2D/ Apple offers. One big plus for this program is that the audiobooks will appear in the Audible catalog, the largest audiobooks store.

There are, however, several limits to this program. It's an invite only beta program. Audiobooks in this program are limited to 27 hours run time - about 240K words, which means that my two most popular books, The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea are too long to be converted into audiobooks. The second requirement is that the ebooks have a table of content. That was a problem for me until I downloaded their Kindle Create app, and uploaded my books using that app. It automatically creates a table of contents. Having done that, all my books but those two long ones are now available as audiobooks on Amazon and Audible. The other downside, for me, is that the minimum price is $3.99, which I think is cheap for audiobooks, but will limit the number of audiobooks I sell. Numbers to come next week as well.

Clearly, I'm bullish on audiobooks, as I think they will continue to grow, and producing them now, even with AI generated voices, is future proofing them. I'm also bullish on the technology behind AI generated narration - it will continue to improve over the next few years to a point where it will be indistinguishable from all but the most dramatic, and highly paid, human narrators and the narration of my books will keep pace with those improvements.

My big takeaway from this year is that in publishing, like in real estate, there are three most important elements for success. In real estate they are location, location, and location, while in publishing they are visibility, visibility, and visibility. Sales of The Girl on the Kerb exploded when Amazon began to promote it. And it has remained visible in the top 50 titles on Amazon's list of Free Espionage Thrillers since its release, and in the top 100 on its other list. And in a wider sense, my sales are driven by readers searching for "Free science fiction" or some such search term, with "Free" being the key. Out of the millions of books available, my books can be found by random readers searching for free books to read within the first 10 -20 search result pages. Enough to keep sales ticking along at more than a thousand copies a month. 

My other takeaway is that far more people than I realized read books on their phones, so that offering books to be read on phones, conveniently from stores on their phones, is the way to go for both ebooks and audiobooks. That seems to me to be the main reason for my success on the Google Play Store, and my hopes for Apple audiobooks.

I think that petty much covers looking back on my ninth year in the business. Next week I'll have all the numbers, and perhaps talk about what I'm expecting for my tenth year. Stay tuned!