Sounds like you are doing pretty good to me!
Thanks! Probably one of the hardest parts of this writing gig is comparing yourself to others and wondering why you aren't doing better.
So a little update...
I got my first Bookbub in January! It wasn't life-changing because it was in a smaller category and international-only, but it was nice to get one and returned about three times what it cost between sales of book 1 and book 2. It was a 99 cent one and the book had good reviews but not a ton of them, so all I can say is you never know and might as well submit and try to get one. I'm hoping I can get a U.S. one closer to when book 3 releases. That could be a game changer.
In the meantime I've actually upped the price on those books to $6.99 instead of $4.99 because I noticed with the authors I was targeting for my AMS ads that their books were priced at $6.99, $7.99, or even higher. So far, I'm pretty pleased. I have ten sales at that price in the last eleven days. Since book 3 isn't going to be out for a few months still, that's a nice steady result that keeps me motivated but doesn't make me worry I'm going to lose those readers by not having the whole series out for them to go on to. (I'm also seeing sales of book 2 at that price but hard to tell if those are the same readers that are buying book 1 at that price or the Bookbub readers buying the second in series. I suspect it's book 1 readers buying book 2 and I'll need to run a promo on Book 2 to catch those Bookbub readers for book 2.) I wouldn't be getting those Book 1 sales though without the AMS ads driving the traffic.
I'm also experimenting with FB ads. I did one of those mailing list promos last year and ended up with a list of 5,000 names, but couldn't get a mailing list provider to let me load it due to high risk of unsubscribes, so instead I decided to create a look-alike audience using the addresses as the template. I don't actually expect a lot of sales off the ad due to the price, but it's more that "seven times to a sale" idea. Let them see the cover, see the tagline, know it's out there and then when I do run a 99 cent sale on it later, maybe they'll be primed to buy. I was able to use BB CPC and FB ads to complement my Bookbub ad in January, so it can work but was a little pricey. I think I spent $50 for about 35 sales or so. (Compare that to $50 on the BB ad itself that generated about 200 sales.)
I also get to do my first writer talk at a local library. They reached out to a writer's group I'm a member of looking for writers willing to do talks. I gave them a bunch of ideas and they were interested in a number of them, so we'll start with one next month, see how it goes, and continue from there.
I'm also finally going to move to using Vellum for ebook formatting from just uploading Word files everywhere. I put some of my 99 cent titles up through Pronoun instead of Amazon (better payout, but they have some kinks to work out so not recommended for your whole catalog) and liked the look of the fancy formatting so decided I should do that on more of my titles. Also, I have an issue with some of my non-fiction titles that makes D2D not feasible as a conversion option. I was using Kobo's formatting but it's kicking out a few errors now that keep me from listing on Overdrive, so...time to level up.
Other than that, just trying to up my writing volume. I have a list of things I'd like to write this year that totals to 645,000 words. Not sure I'll hit them all, but the closer I can get to that number, the better off I'll be. I know I need to cut back on the number of pen names and focus on one, maybe two, but...well. Seems I'm just going to have to be on the slow burn path to success because I can't seem to do it. My to-write list has titles for six of my eight pen names on it. Sigh.