Six & 1/2 Years in Self Publishing

 

Once again, it’s time to report my first half sales – sales from May 2021 through October 2021.

Long story short: it was a good first half of my seventh year of self-publishing thanks to sales on Google.

I released one new book, a Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure series, Shadows of an Iron Kingdom, on 15 July 2021 and one novella, A Night on Isvalar, on that date as well, which I wrote for Amazon’s Vella serial fiction service. After 30 days in Vella, I was also able to release it on Amazon’s KDP platform for Kindle Unlimited. This novella is my only Amazon exclusive release. My thinking on writing and releasing A Night on Isvalar on Vella and the Kindle Unlimited was to use it as advertising for my other releases which, being mostly free and unadvertised, are likely never seen by most readers.. I don't think it worked. But we'll keep it in both services for now. On to the numbers.

My Sales Numbers

As usual, almost all of the sales are free ebooks sold through Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, and Google. My books are also available on Kobo, but they do not report free sales to Smashwords, and on Barnes & Noble which 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. 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 for this first half of my sales year to my sales last year for this period along with each books total sales to date from the companies that report sales. (Numbers are approximate. None of them ever quite match up. Very quantum.)

Book Title / Release Date	1H 2020 Sales	1 H 2021 Sales	Total Sale To date
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	370	223	8,039
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	163	209	4,305
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	542	511	14,053
Castaways of the Lost Star 4 Aug 2016	Withdrawn	Withdrawn	2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	439	506	7,475
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	253	438	3,230
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	221	441	2,773
Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	240	391	1.268
Lines in the Lawn 8 June 2020	55	13	96
Keiree 18 Sept 2020	174	367	950
The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon 11 Nov 2020	n/a	648	1758
The Secrets of Valsummer House 18 March 2021	n/a	469	734
Shadows of an Iron Kingdom* 15 July 2021	n/a	679	679
A Night on Isvalar* 15 July 2021 (Amazon only – all $ sales only)	n/a	14	14
Total Six Month Sales * New releases.	2,217	4,909	47,550 Sales at this point 2020: 38,273 12 month Sales: 9,277

Comparing last year with this year, my my sales split between Amazon, Google, and Smashwords (including sales on Apple and B & N) works out like this for last year (2020):

Amazon 35%

Smashwords (Apple & B & N) 39%

Google 26%

This year in this time period the split looks like this:

Amazon 32%

Smashwords (Apple, & B & N) 18%

Google 50%

First the numbers. It was a good first half of the year. I more than doubled my sales compared to last year, helped in part by four additional books for sale. This total exceeds my record 2019 sales for this period which came in at 4,590 copies. Thanks to a surge in sales on Google, I moved 968 books in September and 1,236 books in October. Can't complain, but for both the monthly totals and the half year totals, it is important to keep in mind that this period has six more books for sale than I hand in the 2019 period. And I have to also point out that in the months after the release of my 4th book, Castaways of the Lost star in 2016, I sold 838 the first month and 1,324 books the next, and with the release of The Lost Star's Sea, in 2017 I sold 1,205 that month and 831 the next. These days I have 11 books for sale and my monthly sales are similar to what they were when I was selling three or four books. As I've been saying for some time, it gets harder every year to sell books that are not precisely targeted and effectively advertised. Looking at the numbers it is also clear that my newer books, the Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure stories in particular are carrying us along, especially on Google. Their numbers are being held back somewhat because they are not free on Amazon US.

Significant trends

The headline news of my first fiscal half of the year is the performance of Google’s Play Store Books, especially in September and October this year. Below is a chart of my Google sales for the last three years. As you can see, sales grew slowly for the first two years, started to takeoff at the start of 2021 and exploded in September and October.

I have no explanation for this phenomena. Looking at the Play Store, I can see no reason for this jump in sales. None of the books are in the top 100 free, and when you go to the genre listing for science fiction, many of the categories are simply jokes, filled with a strange collection of books that have nothing to do with the supposed sub-genre. How readers find my books, or any book, is a mystery to me, save that if they do find one and like it, they can search for the others. I don’t expect this level of sales to continue, but I think it is clear that Google will continue to be a major contributor to my sales going forward.

Smashwords, on the other hand, continues to fade as a source of sales. New releases goose sales for a month or so, but even these peaks are ½ to 1/3 what they were in the 2015-2017 period. Once the peak is a month or so behind us, sales drop to less than 150 books a month. Below is an incomplete chart from 2018 to date. Smashwords changed their storefront in January 2020 and my sales jumped and continued to sell well, until one day in October.. On the 6 October, something at Smashwords abruptly changed. I had no sales for that day, and when they resumed they were less than half of what they had been, and have continued that trend to the point where I sell as many books on Apple some months as I do on Smashwords. In the chart below you can see the spikes when I release a new book, which, as I mentioned are much reduced since the happy days of 2015 & 16.

Amazon is always a wild card. It is feast or famine. Amazon monthly sales in this period ranged from a high of 328 to a low of 130. As you can see for the 90 day chart below, you can go for a month with sales ranging from 0 to 10 copies a day and then get 50 sales in one day for no apparent reason.

Looking Ahead

I’m hoping to publish a new Nine Star Mystery/Adventure story in February or March of 2022. I would like to write a longer, more ambitious novel after that, but then, I just spent a fruitless summer trying and failing to come up with just that, so we’ll have to see how that goes. New books drive sales, and without new books, sales languish, so it is hard to predict what lies ahead.

In addition, there are several wild cards in play. The first is that I entered A Summer in Amber in the Self Published Science Fiction Contest. Depending on how far it goes and how well or poorly it is reviewed, the contest might generate interest and increased sales for it and my other titles as well. Plus, next spring I expect to enter Beneath the Lanterns in a similar Self Published Fantasy Blog Off contest, though any results from that contest are likely 18 months down the road. Finally, I am also toying with the idea of spending some money promoting my books next year as well, but more on that after the first of the year.

Summing It All Up

I’m very happy with the way sales are going, though the future, as always, is up in the air.

Six Years in Self-Publishing

 

This has a couple of books published in the future.

Well, well, here we are, six years after I self-published my first novel, A Summer in Amber. So where in the blazes are we? We're not in Kansas anymore. And it ain’t 2015 anymore either. Looking around, self-publishing is very different industry from the one I started out in 2015. 

In 2015,  self-publishing was in the final stages of its gold rush era. I released three very different books for free, and without any effort or money spent promoting them, I gave away more than 6,000 of them between Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. Customers of those stores were still happening upon one's books back then. 

Fast forward to 2021. Those days are long gone. Big entrepreneur/writer/publishers, some who even employ ghost writers to write the actual stories, now dominate Amazon. Today they need to spend thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars on ads and crank out books every couple of months just to maintain their readership. Beyond Amazon, Smashwords has changed their format to one that seems to favor best sellers. B & N's ebook store has faded, as have my sales on Apple. Kobo -- who knows? They don't report free sales. The bright spot these last two years is that readers are finding my books on Google Play Books -- somehow I sold more  books on Google than I did on Smashwords/Apple by a long shot, this past month. 

Long story short, I'm quite certain that if I did today, what I did six years ago, I'd count myself lucky if I did 10% of the business I did back in 2015.

Luckily, over the past six years I've managed to built a modest readership, one that I'm quite happy and thankful for. To be honest, I don’t think I’d enjoy being wildly successful – what with all the demands on your time that comes with the territory. I have just the sort of readership that I’m comfortable with. A good readership. I like’em.

Year Six Results 

So how did I do in my sixth year as a self-published author? The numbers are below, so you can judge for yourself. 

Year five was my best year ever, though I didn't expect it to continue, given the way the ebook market was evolving. This year my four to six year old books did half the business they did last year, though my space opera, The Bright Black Sea remained my bestseller.. However, I released two novels and a novella this year, and while none were breakout hits, they shored up my sales, so that year six turned out to be better than I had anticipated.

The three new books this year  were my Mars novella, Keiree, and two Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventures, The Secret of the Tzarista Moon, and the Secrets of Valsummer House, plus one children's short story, that I had laying about for a decade: Lines in the Lawn, (on Smashwords only). I’m writing shorter stories these days, as I find them much easier to dream up and write down.

I also revamped my covers this year. I never see any difference, but it keeps me amused.

And, as usual, my odd, mostly foreign Amazon store sales pretty much cover my expenses (paper books for my beta readers) so that if I'm in the red, it's pocket change. Being a self-published author is an inexpensive hobby for me.

Year Seven Expectations

Next year? I’m going to go out on a limb and say, it will be pretty much like this year -- and almost every other of the last six years. It will depend on how many stories I can write and release. I'm currently within a day or two of finishing the first draft of my next and last Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure book for this set of books. I should release it in early July 2021, at the latest. 

My next project will be to try writing a 30-35K word novella in 60 short episodes for a new venture by Amazon called Vella. Vella will be an iOS only Amazon app designed specifically for serial stories in the 600-5,000 word per episode range to be read primarily on iPhones. My idea is to use this format as a vehicle for reaching readers who never bother searching beyond their Kindle Unlimited selection, which my books are not enrolled in. It remains to be seen if I like writing in this format and whether or not I pursue it beyond experimenting with it. Other than that, I've not settled on any definite next story. After producing four books in twelve months, I think that I can take the summer off to come up with some new story ideas. We'll see.

Six Year Numbers.

As usual, "sales" are mostly free downloads. Numbers are approximate, likely due to quantum fluctuations. i.e. I'm 11 books off from last year's total.

Book Title / Release Date	Year Six Sales (#) Year five Sales	Total Sale To date
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	598 (818)	7.816
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	358 (726)	4,211
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	1,320 (2,656)	13,816
Castaways of the Lost Star	--	2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	986 (1,962)	6,969
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	551 (1,087)	2,792
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	728 (1,043)	2,332
The Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	632 (244)	877
Lines in the Lawn 1 July 2020	83	83
Keiree 17 Sept 2020	853	853
Secret of the Tzarista Moon 19 November 2020	1,110	1,110
Secrets of Valsummer House 18 March 2021	265	265
Total 6th Year Sales	7,484	43,300

Yearly Sales History:

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 book one day sale 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)

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 Six Sales by Outlets 

Over the last year my sales by digital storefronts were: 40% from Amazon, 40% from Smashwords (+ Apple & B&N) and 20% from Google. 

Note: Kobo does not report free sales to Smashwords. Barnes & Noble's numbers no longer appear on my daily sales record. However elsewhere I find that I sold 128 books in 2020, and 40 in 2021 to date on B & N. 

The trend here is that  both Smashwords and Amazon are fading, while Google is stepping up to fill in. Amazon is up and down. I've had a good couple of months in 2021 on Amazon. In March, not only did I have a new release, but The Bright Black Sea received a nice writeup on the blog of Nathan Lowell, a popular SF author, which together produced a near record month for free books, and a record month for actual money sales of some 120 copies. That trend faded a bit in April, but it was still a solid month. The other bright spot in 2021 are my sales on the Google Play Store. They have been rising all year. In March they essentially matched my Smaswords sales, and in April 2021  they almost doubled my Smashwords sales. This increase in Google sales has helped keep my yearly sales in my usual range.

Summing Up Six Years of Self-publishing

I've done exactly what I wanted to do. Write. I've gotten to know some of my readers, some of whom have kindly volunteered to be my beta readers. And they have made a appreciable difference in the quality of my books. I have made an effort to write better in little ways, and I'd like to think that I've had some success. Covers have become a pain to paint, but other than that, I've got the whole process of self-publishing down pat. And I'm still having fun doing it all. I'm looking forward to my seventh year report.

The eBook Market Visualized

 

People sometimes ask me why I don’t sell my books, though, truth be told, few people know or care that I write books. Still, those that do have asked me that question. I tell them that these days self-publishing is a big business, and you need to invest lots of money, if you want to have a ghost of a chance of making money in it. And unless you approach it systematically as a business – identifying the markets that move the most product and can produce a competitive product rapidly and relentlessly, you probably are not going to make money no matter how much you spend. Essentially you must be a business person first and a writer second – if at all. You can always hire ghost writers to produce the books you want, as long as you know just what sells.

In my imagination I picture the ebook market of Amazon, and other ebook retailers, as a vast marsh covered with reeds as far as the eye can see. Each reed is a book. Millions of them. The money that flows through this marsh can be seen as water. Let’s cross this marsh.

At the fringe of this marsh, the ground is hard and dry, the reeds brown. These are the books that people write for themselves, with either very limited appeal for one reason or another. And as a result, no money in the shape of water has reached them. They’ve never sold a copy. We push on, and eventually the ground becomes moist. You don’t see any water, but the reeds are thick and green. These are the books that have sold a few to a dozen or two copies, mostly to relatives, friends, and a few explorers of this wilderness of books. They may not be much better than the dead reads, but their authors come from big families, or have a lot of friends. In both of these cases there are no doubt true gems of books, but they are lost in the millions of reeds.

We walk on, and on, through these millions of reeds. Slowly the ground grows softer and eventually, there’s a little pool of water in our footprints. We’ve reached that part of the marsh where the reeds are books that have sold a hundred copies. These are the books of writers who have persisted, gotten better at writing, and have become more savvy in the trade. They may be on to something. Or not.

A few steps further and now there’s a thin sheen of water over the surface. We’ve reached the part of the marsh where books have sold maybe 500 copies. I’ve seen it reported that the average book sells 250 copies, so these books can probably considered success, if modest ones. They’re not paying many bills, and may not have earned out their publisher’s investment in covers, editors, and advertising. But they’re in business, anyway.

Just a step or two further, the water’s up to our ankles, but we can push on no further, as we have come to the shore of a swiftly flowing river. This rushing river is very narrow, but deep, the reeds submerged beneath the rushing water. We’ve reached the best sellers, awash in money from purchases and page views on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. The reeds under this surface are selling five, ten or more copies a day, earning their authors thousands of dollars a year. These are the books that the avid ebooks readers favor, and consume one after another.

Now we take to the air, like a bird. And looking down, we see not one of these narrow rivers winding through the broad flat marsh, but several dozen, perhaps. These rivers are the genres, or sub-genres that the avid ebook readers crave, and we can divide the marsh into sectors – romance, fantasy, science fiction, thrillers, etc. And through these sectors, several of these narrow rivers flow. If you can discover the formula of these best selling books, replicate it, and then bring it to the attention of the avid readers, you too could plant your reed of a book in the riverbed of these swiftly flowing streams, and make a lot of money. It’s almost that simple. But I have a feeling that it takes a little magic as well – either in the writing, and/or the blurb, and/or the cover, and/or the advertising to make it happen. And probably just pure luck as well. But you have to reach the banks of those rivers and plant your reed before all that can happen.

Unless you were born with a rare gift – the books you want to write match the books the avid readers in your genre want to read – and luck follows you like a dog you’ve raised from a puppy, writing books that sell well will be hard work. A job that demands a lot of hours, but doesn’t pay you a wage every two weeks. The rewards may be great, but so are the risks.

I cheat. I write the books I want. I don’t do any market research. I don’t spend any money on my covers, editing, or advertising. So, viewed as commercial products, you’ll find my books where the soil is merely moist. But because I give them away, my books perform as if they were a step or two or three away from those rushing streams. I was born with a rare gift. I’m not ambitious. Whereas most authors feel that selling books is essential to their self-image as an author. I’m able to embrace my amateur status and not discount my talent because I don’t sell my books for money. As a result there are some 40,000 of my stories on thousands of people’s devices these days.

Writing as Art

 

In a Wilderness of Dunes, in my impressionistic style of painting 

I view my stories, like my paintings, as art. I write and paint to bring something new into the world. To create. I also try to make it good, though I am the sole judge of what is good, and what falls short of being good enough. I try to be critical of my work. I don’t expect to succeed all the time, or indeed, most of the time. I expect to always fall short of total success. Masterpieces are masterpieces because they are very rare. However, I don’t get discouraged by falling short of perfection. Falling short is part of the process – especially if you, like me, are exploring an art form on your own rather then by the book or in class. We must expect to learn by trial and by error. And mostly error. We have to be honest with ourselves about our shortcomings. And yet, be happy enough with our little successes to try to fix our shortcomings the next time we set out to create our art. It’s a journey, not a destination.

Big Pine Bend in my watercolor style of painting

For me, the criteria I judge my writing and painting on, are my own tastes. Period. Everyone else is welcome to their opinion, but for me, my opinion is the only one that counts. I will often come across writing advice that says that you need to get other people’s input, which I do. My wife will tell me if something seems wrong. But they also advise one to hire an editor, because you, as the writer, are too close to your work to see its flaws. This advice comes from a particular, and often unsaid mindset – that you are writing to reach a commercially viable audience – or at least you should be. A good editor knows what is selling in the fleeting moment, and will shape a manuscript to conform to the current tastes of the target audience so as to increase the chances of the book selling enough copies to make publishing it turn a profit on it. Which is all fine and dandy. Makes sense. Book publishing is a business, and business have to make money if they are to continue to be one.

Misty Morning in Crofthaven, in my impressionist style

However, I am not in the business of publishing books. I’m not in business at all. I’m terrible at business. As I said, I’m an artist. And what I seek to do is to bring my imaginary people and places to life in the imagination of other people through words and paintings. In doing so, I take the same approach to writing as I do to painting. I try to be critical of my work, and release the best book I reasonably can. Reasonably, in the sense that there are a hundred different ways of saying anything in English, and that on any given day, I know that I’ll prefer one way over the other ninety-nine. This means that I can never read more than a few pages of mine without wishing I’d said something better. However, if you are ever going to share a story, at some point you have to say, enough is enough. It is what it is. Release it, and hope to do better the next time.

Cealanda in my watercolor style, though in this I used acrylic paint on canvas

In addition to deciding when I’ve reached the point where I could fiddle with it forever without making it appreciably better, I also make decisions about what I want to tell, and how. Since I am not in the business of writing, I’m not concerned about how to make my stories appeal to the most people. Instead, I tell the stories the way I think my first person narrator would tell them. For example, in A Summer in Amber, I have two chapters devoted to weekend trips – a bicycle tour and an overnight sail. Neither chapter advances the main plot one iota. At best they can be considered world building. However, they remain in my story because I enjoyed writing the character Red Stuart, who is featured in those chapters, and secondly, because my narrator, Sandy Say, is writing essentially a “what I did on my summer vacation” story, would certainly have include those adventures in his story, since they were part of that memorable summer. All of my stories have that same priority – they are told by a character in that story, and told in a manner that character would tell the story. As such, they include things that the character would include in his telling – regardless of what an editor employed to take a creative work and make a product out of it, would think of it.

Crescent Park Study 2 in my impressionist style

And perhaps I should add here, that I write, as I paint, by instinct and, I would like to believe, talent.  I am always amazed when I hear authors talk about their books as engineering projects, with all sorts of standard components placed in standard patterns. Every component of the story is engineered to produce a desired effect. Not that I'm criticizing that approach, I'm just saying that I can't think of a story in that way, at least not in the detail they work with. I take a much more organic approach to a story. 

However, writers, like myself, live in a sort of golden age. Ebooks, the internet, and self publishing has allowed me and millions of other people to tell our stories. Now, many, but by no means, all, of those stories are written as products to sell. And many, if not most of those products, are really bad products. Still, as I said, there are those of us who simply have imaginary stories that we want to bring to a life outside of our imaginations. And judged on that basis, there are no bad stories. What counts is that journey from our imagination into the world, not the number of destinations it arrives at. Being creative is what matters.

Side Note

I've illustrated this post with several of my paintings in my two main styles of painting. I started painting regularly (50 paintings a year or so) using ink and watercolors 1992. They are of an imaginary country, Cealanda, that I, as the painter, rambled around in painting what I saw. I suspect that my paintings in this style are several times (or more) more popular than my impressionist paintings. I turned to oil and acrylic paints when I started selling paintings in 2003, as they command more money than watercolors. I found it hard to paint in thick paints, and at 53, I didn't have time to start over again. Luckily I always like impressionist paintings, so I adopted that style as my own. I think my impressionist works are better than my watercolors. I've painted a thousand of them, even though maybe only one person in a hundred (who appreciate art) really appreciates them. Like in my writing, I get to decide what is good and want isn't. Not the market. And the best of them are good.

Five and One Half Years in Self Publishing

 

Time flies, and so, once again, it’s time to report my May 2020 through October 2020 results.

I release two new stories in the last six months. The first was Lines in the Lawn, an illustrated children’s short story via Smashwords only. It was something I had laying around for a decade and I decided to get it out. The second new release was a novella, Keiree. Currently it is a stand alone story, but I hope to build on it, to eventually roll it into a novel.

Sales Numbers

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 but they do not report free sales to Smashwords, plus some are also listed on other sites that offer free books as well.

Book Title / Release Date	1H 2020 Sales	Total Sale To date
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	371	7,589
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	163	4,016
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	542	13,036
Castaways of the Lost Star 4 Aug 2016	Withdrawn	2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	440	6,423
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	253	2,493
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	221	1,825
Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	240	485
Lines in the Lawn* 8 June 2020	55	55
Keiree* 18 Sept 2020	174	174
Total Six Month Sales * New releases.	2,219	38,275

For comparison sake, for the same time period last year I sold 4,590 books, without the last three books on this chart. So last year I sold a little over twice as many books last year as I did this year. Last year, however, was unexpectedly, my best year ever.

For this time period my sales split between Amazon, Google, and Smashwords (including sales on Apple and B & N) works out like this:

Amazon 35%

Smashwords (Apple & B & N) 39%

Google 26%

Last year, 1 Nov 2019 the breakdown was,

Amazon 39%

Smashwords 52%

Google 9%

If we look at sales this past month, October 2020, the split looks like this:

Amazon (15%)

Smashwords (54%)

Google (31%)

The numbers show that my Amazon sales are fading. Smashwords is, more or less holding steady (though half of what it was in 2019), but Google has come through to pick up some of the slack. My goal is to sell at least 300 books a month, as so far I’m clearing that bar, though it takes more books in my catalog to do so.

Back in May, in my 5^th annual report, I wrote that I did not expect 2020 to be a banner year. Indeed, I had not expected 2019 to be a banner year either, but it turned out to be one. However, this time around, it’s looking like I’ll be right. The first half hasn’t been terrible, but it is definitely off last year’s pace.

Headwinds

As I see it, there are two things outside of my control that are weighing on my sales. The first is that it seems that Amazon no longer feels the need to match prices. While my older books are still free, my newer books are not. I’ve made the usual efforts to get them to match the free price of the other ebook stores, but even if successful, that only lasts for a couple of weeks before they’re back to full price.

Now, $.99 is a cheap price, and I do sell some at that price, but free sells much better. Unfortunately, Amazon accounts for something like 70% or more of the ebook market, so this new policy bites into my sales.

The second drag on my sales is the way that the ebook market has evolved. Five years ago, ebook advocates were talking about how ebooks would come to dominate the market for books, making paper books extinct. This is clearly not the case now, nor will it be for the foreseeable future. Ebooks have evolved to dominate some types of genre fiction, like romance, and SFF, which were formally served by pulp magazines, mass market paperbacks, and libraries. And in those categories they cater to to a very special type of reader, the avid reader. These readers want and expect books to reliably deliver what they expect them to deliver, like the fans of Big Macs, which are expected to taste the same no matter where you consume it. Ebooks are, in short, have become the fast food of books.

This is, of course, a legitimate market. And nice work, if you can get it. But it takes more than books to get in it. These days it takes thousands of dollars of advertising, and a large, established readership that an indie-publisher can bet those thousands of dollars of advertising on. Pay to play, as they say. Just as with Etsy, where the local handmade goods market evolved into handmade goods from the sweatshops of China, the author self-publisher has evolved in a similar way. Today, the best selling books are produced by the entrepreneur publisher who either works 16 hours a day to write, manage advertising on a daily basis, hire editors, cover artists, and manage the business in general. Or they may simply be publishers who hire others to do all these tasks, including writing, in order to produce a dependable stream of, good-enough Big Mac type books to feed their customers in the Kindle Unlimited all-you-can-read buffet.

I have no desire to be on that treadmill. Better them than me, is pretty much my attitude. But the downside of this evolution is that unless a writer is producing and spending big money promoting their Big Mac books, the market is for ebooks is deceptively shallow these days. I’m lucky to have gotten into self publishing when I did, as I doubt that I’d be able to give away 38,000 books in five and half years on a zero advertising budget if I was starting today. My initial experiment was to see if I could use free books to build an audience and a presence large enough that I could some day, if I cared to, charge money for my books. I have to say that, given the way the market has evolved, the answer seems to be no. Fortunately for me, it was an academic experiment, so I can’t, and am not complaining.

Looking Ahead

I will be releasing my next novel, a cozy SF mystery/adventure, The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon, either this month or in early December. I’m planning on starting a second cozy SF mystery/adventure with the same characters this month, with a target release date of late February or early March. I may decide to release Lines in the Lawn on Amazon. And I have another small project of short-short stories and cartoons dealing with robots that I might work on at some point as well in the next six months. I’ve got nothing better to do these days than write, so as long as I have ideas, I’ll be writing, if not selling a ton of books.