The Theory of Selling Ebooks for Nothing

The theory of selling ebooks by offering them for free is simple; it eliminates nearly all the friction involved in buying an ebook. The potential reader sees the book and the free price, and if the book sparks any interest at all, they move their cursor to the BUY button and click. Bingo! Sale closed. 

Of course you've made no money on that sale, but on the plus side, you haven't lost any either. The only thing you may have lost is the opportunity to sell that book to that customer for money. You can judge how likely that prospect was for yourself. On the plus side, you have created the possibility of that reader enjoying the free ebook and going on to buy more of your books with higher price tags, books that they would've purchased if they had not sampled your free ebook.

The fact that copies of ebooks cost the author nothing to produce means that they can be sold for nothing without losing money. Oh, there is often some fixed cost associated in the production of an ebook, but that cost is fixed, i.e. it is the same whether one sells one book or a million, so there is no way to attach a set cost to individual books, as it will vary by the number of books sold. You might as well just look on it as the franchise cost, the price of starting your publishing business.

In practice, free ebooks are most often used to sell the other books that an author is offering for more than nothing, i.e. a form of advertising. Since giving free ebooks away involves no out of pocket money, you can give away a million free copies to a million readers at no cost. On the other hand, active advertising can cost money, and a lot of it, if you want it to be effective.

In advertising you pay either every time someone sees your ad, as in Facebook ads, or every time someone clicks on your ad, as in advertising on Amazon. You can also pay to place your book in various book related newsletters like BookBub. I've never advertised any of my books, so I can say nothing about how effective, or not, advertising is from personal experience. I do, however, believe that some sort of promotion and/or advertising is, in 2023, essential for commercial success in indie publishing and for it to be effective, a fairly large advertising budget is required. Even so, free books have a place in that effort as well.

Advertising is only one factor in the formula for commercial success in indie publishing, and I think I can say that advertising alone will not be successful unless you are promoting a book that is on point for the target market. Even so, the ads themselves will often cost more than the royalty the sales brings in. Ryan Cahill, a best selling indie fantasy author spends something like a thousand dollars a month on ads. He has said that he probably loses money on each book he sells from one of his ads. Nevertheless he feels they are worth the money spent since that book sale often leads to sales of his other books. (Pro tip: don't advertise your book before you have several books to sell.) Ideally what advertising and other promotional activity does it to build buzz that gets people interested and talking about your book. It is readers who really sell books. That said, you also need ads to continuedly keep your books on reader radar, since with so many books to choose from, readers can easily forget about yours. For that reason, if you want to be a commercially successful author, you will need to run ads continually - as well a produce books every few months... Free ebooks alone won't do it.

However, if your goals are less lofty than making a living as a self-published author, or your budget is limited, the ease of selling a book for nothing may be a good way to expand your readership. Still, there's a catch, there's always a catch. And that catch is that free ebooks do only half of what paid advertising does; while it can can put a book into the hands of a reader more readily than a book with a non-free price, what it can't do is get your book before the eyes of potential customers. Readers still have to find your free ebook to buy and try it. The big advantage of paid advertising is that it places your books before the eyes of potential buyers. A free price alone won't make your book any more visible. Or maybe it will...

There are readers, and lord knows, I'm one, who are accustomed to reading books without having to pay (or pay very little) for them. We borrow the books from the library. We pick them up at yard sales for next to nothing. And we shop for free ebooks on all the major ebook retailers. I have a feeling that we are a distinct sub-category of readers - a distinct market. And while it is obviously not a lucrative market, it is still a fairly substantial market. What is important about this market is that there are far fewer ebooks in this market to compete with. Your free ebooks are far easier to find in this market than a retail priced book in the paid market. There are millions of ebooks on Amazon, but the free ebook market probably has only 100,000 ebooks at any given time. Amazon even offers lists of 100 free books for almost every sub-genre, making your books far more readily visible to these bargain readers. Most other retails also list free ebooks by genre, making discovering your book a simple matter of scrolling through a dozen web pages of the appropriate list. Plus, many of these free ebook readers are avid readers, hence the necessity of acquiring books on the cheap. They will take the time to scroll through those pages to eventually come across your free ebook, And they might even spend money to read your full price books, if they are impressed enough with your free ebook. Anything is possible.

All of which is to say that free ebooks, when considered their cost, i.e. nothing, and the possibility that being free will bring them to the attention of more potential readers makes them a good method of promoting an author's work. And because of that it is one that many authors use.

In next week I will conclude my manifesto with "The Practice of Selling Ebooks for Nothing." I'll take a closer look at the ways and various outcomes of selling ebooks for free. Stay tuned.

Oh, by the way, shown above are some free ebooks: Links to the various stores that offer them in the right hand column.

7 & 1/2 Years in Self Publishing - A report

 

It’s once again time to report my six month sales figures for my eighth year in self publishing – from May 2022 through October 2022.

Long story short: it was a very good first half largely due to sales of audiobooks on Google.

I released one new book, a novella, at the end of September, the fourth entry in the Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure series, The Aerie of a Pirate Prince. It had been more than a year since I released a new book, so it was the new auto-narrated audiobooks that carried the ball this half.

My Sales Numbers

As usual, almost all of the sales are free ebooks sold through Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, and Google. What is new is that my sales now include audiobooks offered through Google’s Play Store. My ebooks are also available on Kobo but they do not report free sales to Smashwords. Barnes & Noble do 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 this half to my sales last year for this period.

Book Title / Release Date	1H 2021 Sales	1 H 2022 Sales	Total Sales To date ebook & total sales
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	223	244 244 Audio	8,467 8,711  total
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	209	221 331 Audio	4,832 5,163 total
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	511	925 520 Audio	15,720 16,240 total
Castaways of the Lost Star 4 Aug 2016	Withdrawn	Withdrawn	2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	506	423 433 Audio	8,339 8,772 total
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	438	299 377Audio	3,845 4,222 total
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	441	344 299 Audio	3,534 3,833 total
Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	391	310 359 Audio	1,915 2,274 total
Lines in the Lawn 8 June 2020	13	17	130
Keiree 18 Sept 2020	367	331 349 Audio	1,525 1,874
The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon 11 Nov 2020	648	428 255 Audio	2,582 2,837
The Secrets of Valsummer House 18 March 2021	469	290 382 Audio	1,413 1,795 total
Shadows of an Iron Kingdom 15 July 2021	679	409 989 Audio	1.640 2,629
A Night on Isvalar 15 July 2021 (Amazon only – all $ sales only)	14	19	33
The Aerie of a Pirate Prince* 29 Sept 2022	n/a	154 36 Audio	154 190 total
Total Six Month Sales * New releases. (#)B & N Sales 66 NOTE: For some unknown reason the Shadows of an Iron Kingdom audiobook sold very well in Japan. Weird.	4,909	4,414 + 66# 4,480 ebooks 4,574 Audio-books Sales Total this Half: 9,054	56,305 ebooks 4,574 Audio-books Grand total to date: 60,879 Sales at this point 2021: 47,550

Breaking down sales via venue gives us:

Sales figures for the same period in 2021 (for comparison):

Amazon 32%

Smaswords (Apple, & B & N) 18%

Google 50%

Sales figures for 2022 including only ebooks:

Amazon 19.5%

Smashword (Apple & B & N) 24.7%

Google 55.8%

With audiobooks now included we have the complete picture:

Amazon 9%

Smashwords (Apple & B & N) 11.3%

Google 79.7%

Even just comparing ebooks, my sales percentage continues to grow on Google vs. Smashwords and Amazon. This is largely due to declining sales on those two sites. However, ebook sales in total is down from last year almost across the board. 

The Headlines for this Sales Period.

I wrote one stand alone novel, The Girl on the Kerb, in 2022, which I expect to release as a self published book in the first half of 2023. I currently have it on submission to British SF publisher Gollancz and I’m waiting to hear back from them – likely in the 1^st quarter of 2023. In the meanwhile I have been querying agents with it, with no luck so far. (And none likely.) I hope to submit it to Orbit Publishing when they launch an ebook/audiobook line later this year. I am not holding my breath about selling this novel, hence its expected release in the first half of 2023.

I am currently writing third story set in the Tropic Sea called Passage to Jarpana, which I expect will come in as novella or a very short novel. If it works out, that could see a release in either late December 2022 or early in 2023. As usual, there is no guarantee that it will actually get finished, but I’m hopeful.

This summer I republished all my paperback books in a smaller size and a matte cover with the idea of making them more like the fiction trade paperbacks found on bookshop shelves. I continue to toy with the idea of spending some actual money to get them on the selves of some selected SFF orientated bookshops. However, that would mean that I would have to become a distributor of the books, as I am sure no bookstore is going to buy from Amazon – and well, I didn’t set them up for extended distribution anyway. I’m still just thinking about it, not for making money, but just have a few of my paper books around after I’m dead.

Sales wise, as you can see from above, Google not only continues to lead the pack by a long margin, but dominated my sales not even taking audiobooks into account. Sales on Smashwords crept up a bit on the strength of Apple sales and the release of the new novella, while Amazon continued to fall. Part of the decline in Amazon sales is that I no longer try to get Amazon to price match the free price elsewhere – letting sleeping dogs lie – so most recently released books are full price on Amazon and free everywhere else. I added two European sales channels via Draft2Digital, Tolino and Vivlio, but I don’t expect any sales to result from that. I did it because Draft2Digital has purchased Smashwords and they will eventually merge, so I was just getting my ducks in order early. One novella. A Night on Isvalar is on Amazon’s Vella platform for serial works earns me bonus money without any sales at all. I also have that story in Kindle Unlimited, so it gets the occasional page read and sales. I keep it there merely as a signpost to my other books for readers who would probably never find them otherwise. That, and pure laziness.

I earned $53.22 in royalties, plus a $10 bonus payment for my novella on Vella, for a grand total of $63.22 for the last 6 months. My only expenses was the books I sent to my beta readers that came in under $63.22, so I continue to operate in the black.

The big news is obviously audiobooks. As I noted last May in my 7 year report, Google offered to create audiobooks from my ebooks using their text to speech technology for free, as part of a beta program. I took them up on their offer. Since my stories all being first person narrations, I don’t think they suffer for having only one voice narrate the story – that’s really the way they are written. You see the numbers above, they accounted for half of my sales. The the audio versions have gotten 50 plus ratings to date, all in line with the ebook ratings, and I’ve received no criticisms of the auto-narration quality, so I’m very happy with the results of that experiment.

Looking Forward

I have three goals at present, first is to get Passage to Jarpara written and published in late 2022 or early 2023. Second is to either sell to a traditional publisher or publish The Girl on the Kerb in the first half of 2023. My third goal is to write a new standalone novel over the winter. It will be a fantasy story – I’m going all in on fantasy as it is far more popular with agents and publishers than science fiction, so it is more salable. And salable is what I’m looking for, going forward, since I plan to spend 6 months querying every new standalone novel I write before I self-publish it, assuming I fail to sell it. My attitude is “Why not?’ The gold rush in self-publishing is long over, so a six month delay means nothing and gives me a sliver of a chance to get traditionally published, just for bragging rights.

I have tweaked my tags on all my books on Smashwords and Amazon to see if I can increase sales. In the past I haven’t paid as much attention to them as I should, and I hope to remedy that. We’ll see if we can find an increase in sales as a result of better tags.

Summing It All Up

A very good half. Experiments paid off. We’ll see if better tags pay off. We’ll see if we can sell stories to traditional publishers. We’ll see if I have another novel in me. Always a question. Stay turned.

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.

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.