My Year as a Publisher 2024 Edition.

My prediction and my sales numbers

Last year in this post I predicted: "Unless my Apple audiobooks do a lot better than I expect, I don't think 2024 will come close to 2023 in terms of sales. Book sales always decline over time." My 2023 sales were a record 18,928, thanks to the unexpected, and inexplicable, success of The Girl on the Kerb on Amazon, and thus, would be hard to beat. For comparison, the year before, in 2022, sales were 13,779, a sales record at that time as well. So how did I do in 2024?

Drum roll.

14,970 books. Though down by more than 4,000 copies from last year, I'm still  very pleasantly surprised with that number. Better than I expected, though there were some reasons. See below.

The details

This was the year I went almost all in on using Draft2Digital as my distributer. I moved all my books over on the 1st of January, from Smashwords - except those on Smashwords itself - and submitted my books to Apple to be converted to audiobooks. The conversion stretched out over the year, with three books still not converted, for some reason. In July I unpublished my books on Smashwords and had then republished them on the Smashwords store via D2D. And in October I unpublished my books in the Kobo store via D2D and submitted them myself to Kobo. I've talked about all of these moves in previous posts, so I won't repeat the reasons and results of all these moves here, except to say that for the most part, all of the moves had positive repercussions.

My sales on Smashwords thru July 2024, when I switched to D2D were 131 ebooks

My total sales on D2D ended up being approx. 3,321 (I don't quite have the final total when writing this.)

Apple ebooks accounted for 1,160  of those sales, edging out Amazon as my second largest ebook sales outlet. For reverence, I sold 775 books on Apple in 2023 via Smashwords.

2D2 Audiobooks on Apple accounted for 1,175 in sales. Well, as it turned out they did pretty well, once they became available. As you can see, adding Apple audiobooks basically doubled my sales on Apple.

Smashwords sales (via 2D2) were 664 ebooks 

Barnes & Noble sold 239 ebooks

Various other D2D outlets accounted for 83 ebooks

Kobo I've been distributing to Kobo directly since October 2024, my sales in the last three mounts amount to 91 ebooks. Comparable to B&B so far.

In order to get all my work on Amazon as audiobooks, I broke up my two massive books, The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea into a six book series since they were too long for Amazon's auto-narrated audiobook program. I also sell them that way on Kobo as well. I have also priced the first books in my three series at $.99. 

My total sales  on Amazon were, 1,012

Ebooks, 976, most were the 2 free books,

Paper books 22

Audiobooks 14 

I earned $356.13 on my Amazon sales in 2024 I spent less than $100 on books and mailing for my beta readers, my only expense.

Last, but far, far from least, my sales on Google. It was steady as you go, for Google.  

Total Google sales amounted to 10,415 books

Ebooks sold, 5,055

Audiobooks sold, 5,360

Just as with Apple, audiobooks slightly outsold ebooks, providing half of my overall sales.

All in all, 2024 proved to be a solid year, performing better than I expected, though not a record year. I should note, however, that I did release two novels in this year and new books always drive sales.

All that said, my sales, now including audiobooks, are not much more than twice my sales of my first year, (via Amazon and Smashwords only) with only three books released, compared to a catalog of some 20 books these days. Take away Google and audiobooks and my ebook sales would've been half of my first year ebook sales. Yikes! As I have mentioned in the past, it is getting increasingly harder to sell books outside of the mainstream. I owe my continued success to several factors,

1. My competitive pricing.

2. Having built up a modest readership starting in 2015 back when it was far easier to do so.

3. Having written and published twenty books over the last almost ten years. I can't explain how I did that. I also published two new books this year. All these books mean that I have a good sized back catalog to offer any new reader who happens upon one of my books and likes it to explore.

4. Having explored new markets, including adding Google early on, and jumping on audiobooks when they became financially feasible. 

 Well, looking ahead, if I recall right, 27 April 2025 will mark my 10th anniversary as a publisher. I enjoy what I'm doing now, but maybe after ten years I should shake things up and try something different. I'll be considering what, if anything, in the next couple of months. If I do nothing stupid, I would expect to see similar results to this year, as I do hope to publish at least one novel in 2025 - my "Project 2026" book a little early. We'll see. Stay tuned.

I would like to thank all my readers for making this year another good year for me. I hope that in my own little way, I made 2024 a little better for you as well.

AND I HOPE ALL OF YOU HAVE A GREAT 2025! GOOD LUCK!

The New Gatekeepers

I’ve watched a number of videos over the last year where established indie authors urge authors interested in self publishing to go about it in the proper way. Which is to say, the traditional publishing way. By this they mean authors should hire professionals to produce their books, professionals ranging from developmental editors to punch up the story, plus line editors and/or proofreaders, professional cover artists, and even professional cover designers, as well as professionals to format the book, and human narrators to narrate audiobooks. This process costs thousands of dollars. Indeed, I’ve heard $5,000 to $10,000 figures tossed around as the cost of self publishing a book these days, though I have to assume that includes ebooks, paper, and audio versions of the book. While these authors may acknowledge that this may cost more than some authors can readily afford, and may mention in passing, some cheaper alternatives, the thrust of their advice is that authors owe it to their readers to produce as professionally produced book as they can afford to spend. Moreover, they imply that authors owe it to the self publishing industry to produce traditional publishing quality books, in order to raise the perceived level of quality in self published books. To do any less is to let the side down.

Well, yes and no. Yes is likely a given in that most, of not all, self-published authors try to put out the best book they can, if only as it is a reflection of their expertise. However, publishing is a business and should be approached as a business. The chances of making back even $1,000 are statistically very slim. An author would need to sell at least 200 to 270 ebooks at full price to cover every $1,000 they spend on a book. The average self-published book is said to sell a 100 copies. Just say’n. 

Moreover, no matter how much professional help is hired, indie authors can only charge self-published prices for their books, if they expect to sell it. Thus, all these professional services add no tangible financial benefit to the books. Finally, it's not the quality of the book that limits the sale of most self-published books. Its visibility, or rather, the lack of visibility. A developmental editor can't increase the chances of a book being discovered. Even a professionally designed cover can’t pay for itself if the book is rarely or never seen by a receptive audience. Unless we can get our books seen and talked about, these expensive professional services just don’t matter in the end. Money wasted.

There are a number of reasons why this proposed method is wrong. First, look at  the proposed business model. Only one book out of three in traditional publishing ends up making the publisher any money. Indeed, the industry is largely dependent on a relatively small number of bestselling authors and books to make most of their money. Is this really a successful business model that solo authors should imitate in their self-publishing business, especially if their publishing business has yet to start minting money needed to support it? It is a system that works only for best selling authors, traditional or self-published.

Next, let’s look at the market, or rather the markets. While there is some overlap of readers, the traditional publishing market and the ebook/Kindle Unlimited market are very different beasts, in both expectations and priorities. The ebook market is largely made up of avid, story-orientated genre readers who will overlook nondescript writing and a certain amount of typos, if the story is compelling enough. I speak with experience here. On the other hand, the readers of traditional published books are more likely bookish readers who place a greater emphasis on style and writing quality. There are few, if any, grammar connoisseurs reading self-published ebooks, so there’s no need to spend thousands of dollars to please them. Beta readers are sufficient.

So, all in all, I see promoting this expensive method of producing a self published book as the best, and most ethical way of producing a book, as a form of gatekeeping. 

By setting such a very high financial bar for entry into the self publishing market it discourages many would-be author/publishers from even attempting to publish their work, unless they already have the six figure income necessary to spend, and likely lose, on their publishing project. And even if these authors did mentioned less expensive ways, the clear implication was that you needed to spend as much as you could scrape together to publish your book in a manner as close to the right and proper way as possible.

The reason, we are told, that these services are expensive is that these editors, artist, and such need to make a living. Most authors, traditionally published or self-published rarely make a living writing. But now we self-published authors are being told that we need to pay a living wage to these self-employed professionals, before the we ever have a chance to earn any money from our book at all. There is something wrong in the traditional book business where the the very basis of the business - the writer of the book - is paid the least. And so those promoting this unfair system for the self-publishing business, earn my wrath.

I view this message as a subtle method of gatekeeping. A way of keeping self-publishing to an exclusive group of would-be self-published authors - the well heeled and well connected. They want to close the gate behind them. 

There’s always been people selling authors all sorts of schemes and services to sell books. Would-be authors are some of the greatest chumps in the world. It’s like shooting trout in a barrow. So this pitch, in a way, is just the same old thing. But it is also different in that it is being promoted by people who are not trying to make money from selling their secret to success. They might even be well meaning, and believe this is the right way to go about self-publishing a book. Anything is possible.

But still, the cynic in me sees it as a subtle way to discourage the competition in a field were there is way too much competition – at least from an author’s point of view. For the readers, well, it’s a wonderful opportunity. I’m for the readers. The more books there are, the merrier.

Best of Times, Worst of TImes

 

The Tale of Two Cities opens with the line; "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." Looking at my latest sales report, that line could apply to my report as well. Not that I'm complaining, it is still the best of times when it comes to sales totals. But if you look closer, you can see that those numbers hide, if not the worst of times, a tale of how times have changed in author publishing business, for the worst, for most of us. 

Let's take a look at my sales, specifically how easy or hard it is to sell books, and how it may have changed over the years. I will compare my first year as a publisher, that would be 2015-16, to my last full year, 2022-23. A Summer in Amber was my first book. I released it in late April 2015, followed in July by Some Day Days, and then The Bright Black Sea in September. In those first 12 months I sold 6,608 books. The best way to answer my initial question seems to be to measure those sales with a crude metric, sales per year per book. To do that we simply divide total sales into 3 equal parts, one for each book, even though they were on the market for varying lengths of time and sold in different amounts. What we want is an average sales rate per book per year. Dividing 6,608 by 3 we get 2,202 copies sold per book per year on average in 2015-16.

Now let's compare that average per book sales to my 2022-23 sales results. I sold 19,524 books in 2022-23. A record number. Great! However, since I now have 14 books for sale, we need to divide those 19,524 books by 14, which gives us a sales per book per year average of 1,394 copies! Nearly half of the per book average of 2015-16. It certainly seems that it is getting harder to sell books. Even free books.

But wait! That total included audiobooks. I wasn't offering audiobooks in 2015-16. So if we want a more accurate comparison, we should only count ebooks for 2022-23;which would be 11,326 of them. Divide that number by 14 we get a sales per book per year average of just 809 copies, down considerably from the 2015-16 rate of 2,202. In 2022-23 I'm selling books with about 37% of the efficiency that I was in 2015-16. And this, mind you after having been in the business for 8 years.

But you know what? Those 2021-22 sales numbers above include ebook sales on Google. In 2015-16 I wasn't selling books via Google. I sold only thru Smashwords, et. al. and Amazon. So if we want to accurately study the decline in sales, we need to compare sales rates between 2015-16 and 2022-23, apples to apples. Thus, we should probably count only my 2022-23 Smashwords and Amazon sales of ebooks, which came in at about 6,253 copies. Dividing that total by 14 yields a sales per book per year average of just 446! Yikes! I'm now only 20% as efficient at selling books compared 2015-16 on those two stores. And the 2022-23 number includes the unparalleled sales of 2,790 copies of The Girl on the Kerb. Had that book sold like all the others, the result would have been even lower. More like 300 copies per book. 

So, over the last eight years, I've gone from selling an average of 2,202 copies of every ebook I offer per year down to only 446 copies per ebook per year between Amazon and Smashwords. If sales had continued at the 2015-16 rate I would be selling something like 30,828 ebooks a year on Amazon and Smashwords alone, instead of 6,253. Talk about diminishing returns. Only the fact that I expanded my distribution to Google in both ebooks and audiobooks has kept Cealanda Press chugging along. And Google sales will no doubt fade as time goes by as well.

The simplest explanation would appear to be that I'm not writing books people want to read. There is some validity to this, as my books are not mainstream SF. However, since I've been writing in a very similar style right from the get go, that seems unlike to be the reason for the decline in rate of sales. I think the fact that I write a variety of stories may make it hard to capture every sale from every reader; illustrated by the fact that my space opera, The Bright Black Sea outsells every  book by a significant margin. A slightly more likely explanation is that I may have already reached most of the "low hanging" readers who are open to reading my books, making finding new readers increasingly harder to come by. New books? New books sell more, and I had released three new books in 2015. Well, I release 2 new books in 2022-23 so that newly released books are likely not a factor. While most of the books in my catalog "old," having been around for a few years, that is not a negative. Having a back catalog of books is, I think, a plus in author publishing, allowing a reader who stumbles upon one of your books and likes it, the chance to immediately go on to read more of your books. 

One might also blame the fact that there are way more books available today than in 2015. But even back then, there were way too many books as well, so I don't think this is a major cause in the decline in sales efficiency I'm seeing.

What I think makes it ever harder to sell books is the fact that the author publishing market has consolidated, just like businesses do in the real world... It has become a "big" business, relatively speaking, compared to the good old days of 2012 -16. These days you need to go big or go home. Now an author wishing to publish their book has to approach publishing very much as a business if you want to sell more than a handful of books. And be ready to spend money on it.

Another factor may be that readers of ebooks have found their groove and settled into it. They don't leave it to beat the weeds for new and different reads like they may've back in the early days of ebook publishing. And even if they do search out new books, there are so many books to choose from, that no author publisher can expect to sell many books to these intrepid explorers. 

A final reason may be that Amazon has gotten serious about make even more money off of author publishers by selling, rather than just giving away, discoverability to authors; i.e. they sell ads on every product page. Most of the books you see on any product page appear there because some author paid money to have it there. These ads are critical to finding readers. So much so that I know of several full time fantasy authors who spend "only" $1,000 to $1,200 per month on advertising ($12-18K a year). Of course their sales support those ad buys, but it serves to illustrate the scale of business operations needed to sustain a successful full time publishing career in author publishing these days. One can probably get by on less, if one doesn't need to earn a living from writing, but even so, one can easily spend thousands of dollars, and never see much, if any, of it again.

I have to wonder if anyone starting off as an author publisher today with anything less than a great book, accurately targeted at a lucrative genre/subgenre, and a startup budget in the thousands of dollars will ever sell more than a handful of books. 

Oh well, I guess I can play the "glad game" and say that I'm glad I'm still selling as many books as I am, enough so that the "best of times" numbers do a darn good job of masking the "worst of times" numbers of my publishing business.

The 8 1/2 Years in Publishing Report

It is time once again for the semi-annual report of my publishing venture. As an author/publisher I wear two hats. As an author, I consider myself an amateur, which is to say that I write for the joy of creating. I don't need to be paid for this effort, it's its own reward. However, I take a more business-like approach in my role as a publisher.

As a publisher, my "mission statement" would read something like this; Cealanda Press's goal is to sell as many C Litka books as possible, as efficiently as possible, without loosing money in doing so. Since C Litka books are not mainstream Amazon ebooks, the likelihood of making enough money to make a financial difference in my life is nil. Thus, making money is not a priority in my publishing business. That said, not losing money is a priority, even if it could be justified as "spending" money on my "hobby." My business model is designed to meet these criteria.

With the exception of beta reading by outside volunteers, the production of my ebooks, paper books, and audiobooks is done inhouse, and as such, it involves only a minimum amount of expenditures, namely author copies of my paper books for my beta readers and postage to send it to them. This minor expense is covered by my non-free sales on Amazon. In order to achieve the widest possible sales, with the greatest efficiency, which is to say, with the least amount of effort on my part, I price my books at my cost and let their low price do all my promotional work. 

In the chart below, you can see how my publishing business is doing. The first two columns compare my sales for the first half of this fiscal year year, May thru October 2023-24 to the same period last year, the last column reports total sales of each of my books to date.

I sell my ebooks for free via Smashwords, whose sales totals includes sales from Apple. Sales on Barnes & Noble (via Smashwords) is a rounding error, that I just add to the total number of books sold to the sales total. Kobo (also via Smashwords) does not report free book sales, so they are not included in these totals. I also sell ebooks and paper books via Amazon. Most, but not all, of my ebooks on Amazon.com are free, most, but not all of my ebooks are full price on Amazon stores outside of the U.S. Those sales, and the odd paper book sold account for all my revenue. In addition, I sell ebooks and audiobooks via the Google Play Store, both are sold for free. My books also are available from several other non-U.S. bookstores and libraries via Draft2Digital.

For reference, my last report, my full 8th Year report can be found here.

The Sales Chart of the first half 2022-2023 vs 2023-2024

Book Title / Release Date	1H 2022 Sales	1 H 2023 Sales	Total Sales To date ebook & audiobooks total sales
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	244 244 Audio	289 231 Audio	Total 9,683
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	221 331 Audio	321 201 Audio	Total 6,199
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	925 520 Audio	397 306 Audio	Total 17,753
Castaways of the Lost Star 4 Aug 2016	Withdrawn	Withdrawn	Total 2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	423 433 Audio	371 306 Audio	Total 10,156
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	299 377Audio	296 215 Audio	Total 5,160
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	344 299 Audio	304 196  Audio	Total 4,858
Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	310 359 Audio	286  230 Audio	Total 3,380
Lines in the Lawn 8 June 2020	17	24	Total 169
Keiree 18 Sept 2020	331 349 Audio	339 234 Audio	Total 2,987
The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon 11 Nov 2020	428 255 Audio	357  214 Audio	Total 4,143
The Secrets of Valsummer House 18 March 2021	290 382 Audio	265 251 Audio	Total 3,225
Shadows of an Iron Kingdom 15 July 2021	409 989 Audio	351  301 Audio	Total 3,933
A Night on Isvalar 15 July 2021 (Amazon only  @.$.99 & Kindle Unlimited) 9 Star Nebula. Mystery Omnibus ($.99) Lost Star Omnibus ($.99)	19	6 8 2	Total 46 Total 8 Total 2
The Aerie of a Pirate Prince 29 Sept 2022	154 36 Audio	344  222 Audio	Total 1,594
The Girl on the Kerb 6 April 2023

The Girl on the Kerb Experiment

 

Six months ago I released my 2023 novel, The Girl on the Kerb. Until this book all my books had been released as either science fiction or fantasy. I used SF mostly as a setting for the story. By doing so, it allowed me the ability to write the story I wanted, as I wanted it, without somehow shoehorning it into a known time and place. Even though my stories were set in the future, many of the settings I chose to use have been reminiscent of life in the first half of the 1900's. I seem partial to that historical period, perhaps having read a lot of stories set in that time period. The Girl on the Kerb was no exception. Though set in the far distant future, the society was reminiscent of the 1930's, with radio, newspapers, trains and cars, but no cell phones, internet, and personal computers. This being the case, I decided to release the book based not on its setting in the far future, i.e. as SF, but on the major plot element of the story, which is to say, as an espionage novel. 

There were both pluses and minuses in doing this. Let's look at them.

On the plus side, I was pretty sure that my regular readers would find the book no matter what category I released it in, so that I did not expect to lose many, if any, regular fans. On the other hand, by releasing the book in a new genre, I could potentially reach new readers. And some of these readers might go on to read more of my other books.

In the minus column there were several points to consider related to these potential new readers. Espionage is not a standalone classification. It falls under the "Thriller" classification, i.e. Thriller/espionage, and Thriller/adventure. I hadn't written a thriller in The Girl on the Kerb unless there is a "cozy thriller" sub-genre. This meant that hardcore thriller readers were not going to find many of the things they usually look for in a thriller; violence, guns, death, sex, and high stakes. In addition they would be on unfamiliar ground, since the story was not set the familiar modern world but in the future. The question was/is how would they react to these twists in the genre? There seemed a good chance that I could annoy at least some of the regular readers of the genre and risk being hit with low ratings as a result. I decided to take that risk.

So how has it gone, after six months?

First off, it enjoyed some very unexpected sales. I can't definitely assign this result to releasing it as an espionage novel, it is probably serendipitous, but I never sold so many books in the first month as I did with The Girl on the Kerb. I released it as I usually do; free everywhere except on Amazon, where I priced it at $3.99. I had the ebook up on preorder for a month, and sold 17 copies at that price in the first week, which was very good for a book of mine. However, within a week Amazon caught wind of the free price elsewhere and decided to match the free price. This was fine with me. I used to let them know about my free prices elsewhere just to get them to do that, but I don't bother any more. Anyway, the switch to free resulted in the sale of several hundred books in a couple of days, which, in turn, seems to have caught the attention of Amazon's promotional algorisms and they must have promoted it somewhere, somehow. It ended up selling 2,610 free copies on Amazon in April. Sales tapered off after that, of course, with monthly sales of 165, 193, 76, 108, only to spike again in September with 864 free copies and 2 at full price (i.e. non-US sales). Which means that in its first six months, I've sold a total of 4,035 copies on Amazon and the book has remained on the upper half of Amazons top 100 free thrillers in its categories ever since release. All told, I've sold over 4,600 copies to date. My usual releases may sell around 1,000 in their first year, at best. Did this have anything to do with its release category? Somehow, someway, I think it does, but I can't prove it.

So then, have  all those sales led to an increase the sales of my other books? 

Just eyeballing my sales on Amazon in the months prior to April and afterwards, I would say no, they stayed pretty much in the range they had been prior to the book's release. However, since ratings are only now coming in at an increased rate, any effect on the sales of my other books may still be a ways in the future. We'll see.

As to my fears, how did thriller readers react to the The Girl on the Kerb? 

First off, perhaps due to the number of sales, it has received far more ratings in the first six months than any other book of mine. It has about 80 rating at this point, all told, but only three reviews, with only one on Amazon. Currently its star rating is 4, plus or minus a decimal point depending on the source. While I can't complain, it is a tad lower than my usual books. The lower rating is due to it having 5 or 6 one star ratings, as well as a similar number of 2 star ratings, which are significantly more than what my books usually garner, especially in the first six months. Plus, its 5 star ratings are less than the 50% level that I would like to see. Of course there is the "and/or" possibility that the book simply isn't as good as my other stories, but that is something that I can't say one way or the other. Still, I'm thinking that I did annoy some readers and that the lower score is a result of some pushback from regular thriller readers. You have to take the rough with the smooth.

Will I do it again?

Yes. Any book I write in the future (birds in the bush) that is not connected to any of my published SF titles will not be sold as SF, even though they will also be set in the future and likely on another world, as usual. One small reason for this is because I'm so over SF. I'm no longer count myself a SF fan. However, given the results of The Girl on the Kerb, I see no reason not to categorize the story by story type rather than setting, and I think that I have a good reason for doing so with any future book. Trying new things in publishing is almost a requirement, unless you're minting money. I'm not.

So what might be my next non-SF book? Stay tuned for a glimpse of that bird in the bush next week.

The Practice of Selling Ebooks for Nothing

The practice of selling ebooks for free is dates back to the early years of Kindle, and beyond. There are four ways to use free ebooks to promote one's work. They all are designed to attract readers, with three of them also hoping to promote the sales of the author's other books at their full retail price.

The first method of using free ebooks is to offer an usually full priced ebook for free for a limited time; usually three to five days. You can only do this on Amazon when you are in the Kindle Select program on Amazon, and only for a limited number of times. I am unfamiliar with this program, so I can't really go into its details or how well it works from personal experience. I believe you can do this on other platforms as well. What I can say is that this method, with its brief widow of opportunity, offers the greatest incentive to hit that BUY button. I know I've collected a number of ebooks because of the nature of the sale; get it for free now, or forever hold your peace.

I believe that popular authors of books can sell thousands to tens of thousands of ebooks even in this limited window. There is a discussion of this on Reddit here. The main takeaway is :

"If you're going for a 5 day freebie, you're going to want to crack the top 100 overall free. That's usually circa 1500 downloads in 24 hours for the bottom end with the #1 position requiring 20k+ (and sometimes much much more; a really good freebie can nab 100,000 downloads in a day with a BookBub+ stack)."

The top 100 referred to above is the overall Free Ebook list. Getting into the top 100 in various genre and sub-genre requires much less books sold. To get these types of numbers, you also need to couple the free promotion with paid advertising.

Reading through the other posts, it is clear that these promotions usually do not produce immediate, if any/many positive results to sales, ratings and reviews. The reason is that the incentive is to pick up the book now, not necessarily to read it now. I suspect that most of the free copies sold end up on the reader's thousand book long TBR list in their Kindle account. If you have to spend money advertising, advertising your free copies seems to be a questionable practice.

Speaking as a publisher, not as an author, I have to say that us publishers are concerned with only one number; sales. We don't care what people do with their books after we've made the sale. A sale is a sale. Any sale that leads to more sales is a bonus. And when you are selling something that costs you nothing, the conversion rate doesn't matter.

For a more typical result of free ebooks, here is an account from a self-publishing author, Ron Vitale. He writes in his blog:

In 2021, I gave away nearly 25,000 free books (I spent more than a thousand dollars on newsletter ads), but I didn’t make my advertising money back. In 2022, I gave away more than 5,600 books, but spent $0 in marketing on my fiction. So I wasn’t surprised to see that I earned so little on my fiction books this year (around $175).

I’ve had several readers in the last few years who have thanked me for the free ebook that I gave away through my newsletter, but they then apologized that they wouldn’t be able to get to reading it because they had hundreds of other free ebooks on their Kindle.

Free books used to work for me, but the publishing business has changed dramatically over the last few years, and I’m pivoting away in a different direction.

Ron Vitale offers the first books of his three fantasy book series for free, which is the second method of selling free ebooks. As you can see they earned him around $175 last year. Since they are still free when writing this post, he hasn't pivoted yet. (What do you pivot to?)

However, using the first book in a series to promote the series is a very popular reason for selling books for nothing. It's usually accomplished by listing the books for free in the other ebook stores and then getting Amazon to price match that price; i.e. make them permafree on Amazon as well, where you normally can't list your books for free, except for those brief sales. Because the book is always free, it lacks the urgent incentive to pick it up now, so you may sell less of them in the short run. On the other hand, because it is always available, readers who do take advantage of the free price are more likely actually interested in reading the book now than those who are grabbing it up during a short, limited time sales window to add to their TBR pile while the book is free.

How well the free first book in a series works depends on a number of factors, the two most important factors are, one how accomplished the author is and how polished the book is. And two, does the book work for the reader. I've picked up a number of free first in a series SF books - all highly rated - and I have to admit that not only did I not continue on with any of the series, but I don't think I ever got more than halfway through any of them. They didn't work for me. But I would never have even tried them without the free ebook. The alternative, as I talked about last time, is paying Amazon, or Facebook, or some promotional email company money to feature your books, and from what I can gather, you can't expect a great return on your investment going that route either.

The thing is that the conversion rate of that first free ebook in the series to go on to buy the retail priced books of the series need not be high to be successful. With a free ebook you are casting a wide net, reaching readers who would otherwise not be willing to pay for the book. It is up to the free ebook to convert them, and the better the book is, the more it will convert. But, as I said in my last post, ebooks are free to produce, so it costs nothing to give lots of them away to gain even the occasional conversion. All in all, unless you are happy with the number of books you are selling, you likely have nothing to lose by making the first book in a series free.

It only takes a couple of minutes to change the price of an ebook, so you are never locked into any one way of pricing your books. Indeed, without experimenting with price, you'll never know what works and what doesn't. Well, you may know what doesn't work. And if your price is working, you don't need to experiment.

A third way authors utilize free ebooks is to offer an ebook for free on their website, usually as an inducement to sign up for their newsletter, i.e. to get a email address to market to. I think a lot of authors offer a free novella or short story related to one of their series. The downside is that the author still has to get a reader interested enough to visit their website - probably by advertising/promotion - and then have the site set up so that a visitor is able to download a file on request.

The fourth way to sell free ebooks is to sell all or most of them for nothing all of the time. This is a rather radical approach, but there is a case to be made for it. Luck is often involved in the success of a book. The chances of getting your book into the hands of a book bellwether; i.e. someone who can create the buzz needed to sell books increases with the number of your books available, and the ease of acquiring them. The more books you have, the more likely lightning will strike one. The easier it is for a book to be read, the more likely lightning will strike one. Just say'n.

I've taken this approach from the beginning of my publishing business in 2015. As a writer, I want my work read and hopefully enjoyed. As a publisher, I want to serve the needs of my author-self, i.e. getting my books read. While lightning has not struck any of them, I have sold over 77,000 books and grossed something like $600 on the non-priced-matched books on Amazon without spending a penny on advertising nor have I lost money publishing my books. I have no way of knowing how many books I would've sold at any price or how much money my publishing business has left on the table by selling them for free. But I do know that I'm not writing the type of books that fit into the best selling mainstream of any genre, nor am I writing them fast enough, so I don't lose any sleep over the money I might've left on the table by sharing rather than selling my work.

People will say that no one actually reads free books. Of course not all the books I've sold have been read. But then that is true of paid books as well. I once read that half of the paid books on readers' kindles had not been read. And when you see stacks of paper books on avid readers' TBR pile awaiting to be read, it is clear that a lot of people buy books with good intentions, but may never get around to reading them, at least anytime soon. And, as I've said before, we publishers don't care what people do with the book after we sell it; a sale is a sale. Now, ideally it would be nice if they did read them, like them, and then go on to read more of our books. But if unread books are the cost of acquiring readers, it's still a bargain.

Offering all your books free is not a popular option. Indeed, I know of only one other author who publishes all his books for free, and that is Michael Graeme. No doubt there are others, but, as I wrote about in the first installment of this series, I have a feeling that most authors feel like many readers; i.e. the price of the book reflects the value of the book. Nevertheless, pricing your products below competing products is a marketing 101 strategy. Companies sell products at or below cost - loss leaders - to attract buyers so as to sell them other products at a profit. Hell, why do all the ebook retailers carry free ebooks at all - even Amazon? They don't make any money on the sale of a free ebook, so free ebooks must bring some other value to their table. My guess is that value is that free ebooks enhance their catalog by inflating the number of books they offer, which in turn, entices customers to their store who will also buy non-free books. And as I will point out one last time; an ebook costs nothing, and can be sold at a price of nothing without losing money and that sale serves a purpose, promoting the sale of the other books by the author, or, in my case, expand my readership, which is why I write books. Oh, and perhaps to add a little joy to the world.

So to summarize; unless authors have been hired or are under contract to write a book, no one owes them any money for doing so. They can ask for money, but it will be the market that determines the value of their work, not them. Selling ebooks for free is a no-cost and widely used way to attract readers, introduce your work, and perhaps sell more non-free books. A free price will not, however, automatically make them more visible to the broad market; only active promotion and paid advertising will do that. However appearing in the smaller, but still significant marketplace of free ebooks, they will be much more visible due to the fact that this is a much less crowded market place. The fact of the matter is that there is no good, cheap, and efficient way to sell books. Traditional publishers choose a limited number of books to promote each quarter, ("lead titles") and let the rest sink or swim. (Most sink.) These days deep pocket indie-publishers dominate the self-publishing marketplace, and unless you have both deep pockets and expertise, and have written a well researched mainstream book, any paid advertising will likely be no more successful in promoting your work than free ebooks would, and cost you a lot more.

So, there you have it; the philosophy, theory and practice of selling books for free. For readers, I hope you understand better why I sell my books for free, and any authors reading this, I hope I've given you something to think about.

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.

The Philosophy of Selling Ebooks for Nothing

This will be the first of a three part series I've written about the philosophy, theory, and practice of selling ebooks for free. Seeing that the subject turned into something of a manifesto, I guess I have a lot to say about on the subject. Perhaps because it is the founding principle of my publishing business, and compared to similar author/publishers, my work is read by so many more people without having to give up much, if anything, in the way of revenue. I think it works.

The principle philosophical question that needs to be addressed is the connection, if any, between the subjective and objective quality of a book and its value as expressed in monetary terms. Or to put it more plainly, the fairly common perception that high quality commands high prices, low quality, cheap prices, and whether this relationship applies to art in general, and books in particular. Spoiler; I am going to argue that it doesn't.

Writing is an art, and art is often judged subjectively, i.e. whether it appeals to the viewer or listener of the individual work. There are, however, certainly objective standards that can be applied to judge how accomplished the art or artist is. In writing these standards can include, spelling, grammar, and story structure. However, in the name of art and originality, even the objective standards of any medium can be successfully challenged. In short, anything goes in art, especially if the size of the appreciative audience is not a consideration.  

It is uncontroversial to say that some readers and some writers equate the price of a book with the artistic quality of the book. It is hard to say just how many do, and at what conscious level, but I suspect this is a fairly common attitude. Indeed, I will suggest in my upcoming essay "The Practice of Selling Ebooks for Nothing" that when it comes to readers, you can divide the market into those that won't buy a free ebook, and those that only buy free ebooks - with some overlap and exceptions. As for authors, when I see the fact that authors are seemingly content to sell a handful of books a year, I have to believe that many authors also feel that there is a connection between the worth of their work and price in money they feel they must charge to reflect that worth. Clearly, I'm not one of them.

"If an author doesn't believe their book is worth anything and is just giving it away, why should I believe it is any good?" is a common response to a free book. To  answer that question the first thing one needs to accept is that every value of the quality assigned to a book is subjective, and because it is subjective, the value of the work, as expressed in dollars and cents, is a quantum value; it varies with how much each individual reader enjoyed the book. Nor is there any agreed on standard level of payment for the entertainment value of a book, making it impossible to assign any sort of objective value to a book in dollars and cents. While there may be a perceived relationship between the quality of a book and its price, when one actually thinks about it, it is clear that there is none. A reader can pay $30 for the hardcover version of a book, only to DNF it, because they hated it. The price they paid had no relationship to their subjective enjoyment of the book. Or to take another example, does the quality of a book go down, when it goes on sale? Quality and price are two different things.

The same logic applies to self-publishing authors who get to set the price of their books. They are free to price their work according to the value they believe it represents, so if they feel that there is indeed a connection between value and price, their price should reflect the value they perceive in their work. But do they? By and large, no, even if they think price should reflect quality. At least I don't think so. And why don't I think so? Because they price their ebooks significantly less than traditionally published ebooks by traditionally published authors. If they truly believed that price equaled quality, then what does the fact that self-published books are generally priced between one third and one tenth of the price of traditionally published ebooks? Are they saying that their work is only 33% to 10% as good as the traditionally published books? Maybe, but I doubt it.

What self-published authors realized, even if they do not acknowledged it, is that price is actually a tool of marketing. Sadly, self-published books are a victim of the price equals quality mindset. Because of the perceived inferior quality of self-published ebooks as a whole, self-published books usually cannot command the price of traditional published books, even though self-publishing authors have the ability to price their ebooks the same as traditionally published ebooks. Instead, self-published ebooks compete with traditionally published books and authors by offering books at a lower price, making them, ideally, a better value for the money. This lower the price need not reflect an acknowledgement of lower quality of work. Lowering the price of their work to be able to compete does not lower the quality of their writing. It is simply marketing.

And I might add that just as there is a distinct free book market, there is a self-publishing market that is distinct from the traditionally published book market. In both cases there is, of course, some overlap, but the important point is that a publisher can target a market that will generate the most sales, and that price is a key tool in doing this. Put a price on your book, and you won't sell to the free book readers, put a traditionally published price on a self-published book, and you won't sell to the self-published market, and likely not to the traditionally published market either. Once again; price is merely a marketing tool.

Given this lack of real connection between quality and price, and given that price is a tool of marketing, not a measure of quality, selling books for nothing can, and should be looked on by readers and authors as a marketing decision, not as any sort of a measure of quality.  Experience has taught me that there is a distinct market for free books. Readers are readers, and that this market is worth considering if one wants to be read and especially if an author's books are not in the mainstream of commercial fiction.

Next week my manifesto continues with " The Theory of Selling Ebooks for Nothing." Stay tuned, you won't want to miss it.

The Shape of Book Sales

The song "House of the Rising Sun" might have been written to warn poor sons and daughters not to become writers, since it's "been the ruin of many a poor soul." Artists tend to be temperamental, and a common fate of too many writers of fiction is to "wear that ball and chain" and "The only time he's satisfied, Is when he drinks his liquor down".  Maybe that's an exaggeration. But then again, maybe not.

The reason is that while a few authors become very famous - anything is possible, after all - the vast majority are not only not famous, but not even published. And even today when anyone can publish their own work at their expense, most are not read. As I have noted in the past, it is said that 60% of traditionally published authors are out of the business after three years, and 90% are out after ten. The rate is likely higher amongst self-published authors. The reason is that the book business is one where a relative handful of authors sell a ton of books, a lucky few sell enough books to stay published (this is a declining category) but most fail to click, selling a relative handful of books. I would go so far as to say that most traditional published authors are merely auditioning to become best sellers. They are given their chance - a contract - and if/when they fail to click, the luckiest ones end up either selling their future books to a small presses for a thousand dollars, while the rest find themselves looking for a new career.

To illustrate this sad fact, let's revisit some Amazon data dating back 2016 which I blogged about back then. To generate the data authors provided sales numbers and Amazon sales ranking to AuthorEarning. This data was used to reverse engineer how Amazon ranks each book by sales. Once a quarter, on a single day, AuthorEarnings collected the sales rankings from all the books listed on Amazon's many "100 Best Selling Books" lists and used known rank/sales numbers to estimate the sales of those books on that day. This captured data on 200,000 ebooks. Below is the chart AuthorEarnings "Data Guy" provided for Feb 2016. Click on the chart for a larger version.

The green and grey dots represent author supplied data points. The important thing to note about this curve is that it is logarithmic, both the sales numbers and ranking increase by an order of magnitude at every marking; i.e. sales on the vertical axis go from one book a day to 100, 1,000 and then 10,000 a day at the top, while the sales rankings run from #1 to a million on the horizontal one. This method creates a nice fat curve that looks promising, until you realize that by the middle of the curve, you've gone from 10,000 sales a day to 100 with a sales rank of perhaps 5,000. At the end of the scale you're selling one to 10 books a day. 

The graph below charts the above data on a linear scale, with sales represented by the red line. That fat curve in the graph above is the little bend in the red line below. This graph gives a much clearer idea of the big picture.

Using numbers from these graphs, we can roughly estimate the sales range for ebooks in the various levels of ranking, as they existed in 2016. The numbers might be slightly different today, but the picture is likely the same.

Sales Rank    number of titles  sales per day   sales per year at day rate

#1 to #10                        10     8000 to 2000    2.92m to 730,000

#11 to #100                     90    2000 to 500    730,000 to 182,500

#101 to #1000                900    500 to 100      182,500 to 36,500

#1001 to #10,000          9,000      100 to 12        36,500 to 4,380

#10,001 to #100,000    90,000         12 to 1            4,380 to 365

#100,001 to #200,000  100,000       1 or less            365 or less

The data collected only included the top selling 5% of Amazon sales. The lower 95% of books sell less than a book a day, and once a book's sales rank falls below 200,000, it is a book a month or less. Many sell none at all. While these figures are 7 years old, I doubt things have changed significantly - though pages read in the Kindle Unlimited lending library are now figured into sales ranking, somehow.

I do have one anecdotical bit of information that provides a glimpse of this sales phenomena. By some strange stroke of luck, my book The Girl on the Kerb earned some sort of promotion on Amazon after they cut the price to free, and so for several days it was selling between 700 to 800 free copies a day. This level of sales moved its sales rank up to being the #5 book best selling book on the 100 Best Selling Thriller-Espionage list, and I seem to remember it being somewhere near the 1,000 rank on the complete Best Selling Free chart. Today, with its glory days behind it, it still ranked around #29 on that list and #6,568 on Amazon's Best Selling Free list with its sales of 2 to 3 copies a day (76 for the month of July 2023), so that you see how fast sales fall off the further a book is from the top 10 sales spots.

All of which is to say that freelance writing is a very bad business to be in unless you are very, very lucky, and perhaps have some talent. To continue to be employed in it requires every bit as much luck. Heck, you need to be very lucky just to get your chance to fail at it. Failure is the norm. And it ain't easy being one of the lucky. I've seen an author literally begging people on Titter to buy his book, as he perceives his career circling the drain - without any apparent success. And you often hear of authors taking time away from pursuing their dream of being a published author for mental health issues. Plus, the initial high of landing a book deal- the dream of a lifetime - quickly fades as the reality of the business, settles in. Down through the ages machines have replaced people doing dirty, dangerous, and mind numbing jobs, and in this respect, the rise of AI written books could easily be seen as part of this tradition and a blessing in disguise. 

However, many people write simply for pleasure, myself included, so that AI will never replace writers completely. Human writers will find other ways to reach readers, and some may even find some sort of way of making some sort of money off of it. Again, anything is possible, after all. Perhaps these "handmade" stories will evolve into something that looks like the fan fiction community of today - a community of readers and writers who enjoy writing and reading, and not a business at all. Time will tell.