Eleven Years as a Publisher

 

It was a good year, my best year for sales, with total sales with 24,774 books sold, handily beating 2022-2023's 19,524 books sold. Revenue came in at $221.75, down from $379.21 for my 10th year in publishing. Heads will roll at Celanda Publishing for that result! Still, I have nothing to complain about.

It hasn't gotten any easier over the years to sell books, even free books. In fact, it's a lot harder in 2026 than it was in 2015. If I was only selling my books in the stores I was in 2015, when I launched my publishing business, i.e. Amazon and the stores Smashwords distributed to, and only selling ebooks, my sales-per-title-per-year would be down 93%. Though to be fair, Amazon listed my books for free until a couple of years ago, which explains perhaps half of that drop. Luckily I added Google in 2018, and then auto-narrated audiobooks from Google in 2021, so my sales-per-title-per-year is now down only 50% from 2015. Because I am now offering seven times as many titles as I did in 2015,  I can ignore that sad statistic and just gaze with great satisfaction at the total sales numbers per year.

Sales by book for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year

Book Title/ Release Date	Year 2025-2026 Sales #11	Total Sales to Date
SALES PERIOD May 2025 – April 2026	Ebooks, Audiobooks & Paperback combined	Ebooks, Audiobooks & Paperback combined
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	961	11,990
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	801	8,068
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	1,971	22,063
Castaways of the Lost Star (initial Release – withdrawn) 4 Aug 2016	0	2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	1,247	12,898
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	1,006	7,145
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	1,110	9,934
The Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	956	5,392
Lines in the Lawn (Short story) 8 June 2020 (withdrawn)	0	174
Keiree 18 Sept 2020	888	4,920
The Secret of the Tzarista Moon 11 Nov 2020	1,162	6,681
The Secrets of Valsummer House 18 March 2021	1,054	5,677
Shadows of an Iron Kingdom 15 July 2021	1,650	7,487
A Night on Isvalar 11 Aug 2021	929	1,846
The Aerie of a Pirate Prince 29 Sept 2022	1,114	4,132
The Girl on the Kerb 6 April 2023	1,618	8,618
Passage to Jarpara 6 March 2024	1,032	2,004
Chateau Clare 17 Oct 2024	1,030	2,287
Glencrow Summer 21 Feb 2025	1,987	2,691
Lost Star 6-book series Aug- Sept 2024	73	222
Omnibus Editions (Withdrawn)	0	30
The Darval-Mers Dossier 6 June 2025	1,811	1,811
The Founders’ Tribunal Oct 2025	1,087	1,087
The Isle House Ghost 5 Feb 2026	925	925
The Red Wine Dossiers (paper back only) May 2026
The Poison-Pill Will June 2026
Total Sales Year 11 (According to retailer figures*)	24,774	128,490
Revenue  $221.75

*I'm using sales figures from the retailers. I've not bothered adding up all the books from my individual sales figures taken from my monthly sales records. I would only end up pulling out whatever hair I have. So, they may add up slightly differently. I'm too careless to be an accountant.

Sales by Store ( ebook/audiobook, store sales, and store % of total sales)

Draft2Digital*   2,475 ebooks   1,091 Audio books (11.7%)   3,566 Total    14.4%

Kobo                    229 ebooks              n/a                              229 Total    .9%  

Amazon               550 ebooks   0 Audiobooks (0%)   7 Paper     557 Total     2.3%

Google           12,203 ebooks   8,226 Audiobooks (88.3%)   20,429 Total     82.4%

* D2D includes sales via Smashwords, B & N, Apple, & a few European stores. Audiobook sales from Apple.

A Table of Yearly Sales 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)

19,524 Year Eight 2022/23 (1 short novel, 1 novel  Audiobooks)

14,468 Year Nine 2023/24 (1 sequel novel, 1 novella release wide in late April)

16,950 Year Ten 2024/2025 (2 novels)

24,774 Year Eleven 2025/2026 (2 novels, 2 Novellas)

The Complete Yearly Reports on this Blog

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

Year 8: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2023/05/eight-years-as-authorpublisher-report.html

Year 9: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2024/05/nine-years-as-authorpublisher-part-2.html

Year 10 https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2025/05/my-tenth-year-in-publishing-numbers.html

The Takeaway

First, offering 20 titles in three formats makes a vast difference. Especially since sales for even for my early releases continue to hold up. All titles come in at an average of 1000 books sold per year.

Next: new releases drive sales of both new releases and my back catalog, and with four releases in this fiscal year, they drove sales to new heights. The fact that two of the releases were just novellas, and one of the novels, was a short novel by my standard, did not seem to matter. Novellas take less time to write, and so can written and released more often while delivering the same boost to sales that a new novel brings. That said, I wasn't writing novellas to goose sales. I write the story as long as it needs to be, well, usually longer.. and I just had little stories to tell.

Otherwise, the numbers above speak for themselves. My books, both ebooks and audiobooks, do extremely well on the Google Play store. I think this may be due to the fact that affordable everywhere and reaching the entire English reading world on a device that billions use everyday, the smart phone. Though my books are also free world wide on the iPhone, I think that's a more an upscale, US-centered platform where free has less appeal. Still, while my sales don't approach Google's, it's my second largest market. Selling books at any price other than free, as I do on Amazon, with out promoting them, simply doesn't work in 2026. Finally, audiobooks continue to do well, even if they are vanilla-plain auto-narrated audiobooks. They may not work for hard-core, deep pocket audiobook fans, but they offer the experience to readers who aren't that fussy or can't afford the fancy-pants audiobook experience.

And let us not forget, every book doesn't have to be a hit with every reader. When you have a back catalog of twenty-some books for readers to explore, if you can capture a reader, at even a 5% success rate, they may go on to read all your books - you've sold 19 more books. Scale counts. As does genre, as you can see above with my space opera The Bright Black Sea. It has always been my best seller. It sequel sells less, though these days not 50% less, as it would appear by total sales column. But then, it's not a space opera, despite having the same characters. It's a planetary romance. You just never know. Take, Shadows of an Iron Kingdom. It out sells all the other books in that series, even though it's the third book in the series. What gives? It probably isn't its cover. And why is Glencrow Summer outselling Chateau Clare these days? I have no idea.

Looking Ahead

I just released. on 4 May 2026,  The Red Wine Dossier as a paperback omnibus that includes all the Red Hu/Red Wine novellas and short stories. I create paper books for my shelves and for those of my beta readers who want a paper copy. I sell one or two every-so-often, as you can see from the table above.

More significantly, I'm planning to release one more novella-and-short story ebook/audiobook in the Red Wine prequel series. The Poison-Pill Will & The Pawns' Game in the June. It's completed, cover and all and ready to go.  I'll upload it to Amazon for pre-sale shortly.

Looking further ahead, I'm hoping to complete and release a full novel this fiscal year, likely in the Feb-March time frame. I have one "on the stocks", as it were, that, if it is ever completed, will be my most boring story yet. But then again, it's been in the works for more than a year already, and I'm maybe half way done with it, but the going is slow, so don't hold your breath. Instead, I'm hoping to dream up and start on a new novel this fall, possibly writing it alongside the boring story. But again, that's just a bird in the bush, which could fly away at any moment. 

With new releases driving sales, and only two releases likely, at best, I don't expect year 12 to match or exceed year 11 sales. But anything is possible. 

And once again, I'd like to thank all of you, dear readers, who make not only these numbers possible, but make me happy and content. And motivated to write another story or two.