The Kingfisher Has Landed

I'm going to be self-pubbing an anthology here shortly--reprinted short stories and a new novella--and I'm trying to figure out a way to avoid the Smashwords meat grinder. I can put together a fairly slick ePub/.mobi version, but having to go back to Word and hand-create a table of contents, manually add titles and so forth is...not so much a lot of work as an obnoxious duplication of work.

Draft2Digital is getting rave reviews from my friends for uploading to various stores, apparently very fast compared to Smashwords, and they'll work of an ePub--my only concern is losing those few readers who require a format like .txt or .pdf, which Smashwords is good about supplying.

I'm thinking that I will just upload an ePub to Smashwords, for the few buyers there, and try D2D for the other stores, plus Amazon of course. We'll see if that has a significant impact on sales...

I'm definitely gonna upload the ePub to Smashwords--thanks, J. Tanner, didn't know I had to include that edition note! I shall be careful to do so...

Thank you, Polenth! That's super helpful to know--I use Calibre too...

Market Research Results

My quick and unscientific poll of the readership is that 95% are fine with ePub, Kindle, or one of the stores like Kobo or Nook, and very very few require the PDF version available via Smashwords.

My solution is to upload the ePub version to Smashwords and offer the PDF for direct sale to those specific readers--they're mostly long-time fans and I don't mind selling a half-dozen or so copies via Paypal--I don't wanna leave them behind!

Draft2Digital was very straightforward to use for uploads. I'm waiting to see how long it takes to push out to the various stores, though.

All that said...it's launch day. I am nauseated and tense and can't sit still, so that's all normal! (Why did we become authors, again? I could be digging ditches right now! Glorious, glorious ditches!)

Holy mackerel, Draft2Digital ported "Toad Words" to Kobo in four hours! Smashwords literally took a month. I am amazed. If they handle the others in under a week, they will have beaten Smashwords on delivery time by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Aerial said:

Just read page 1 on Amazon's look inside feature and I am so going to buy Nine Goblins when I get home

I swear, nearly every good book recommendation that's come my way in the last 2 years has been from this site.

Click to expand...

Aww, thank you! I hope you enjoy it!

They had a one day turnaround on getting it onto Nook--just landed there. (Also Scribd and something called Inktera I've never even heard of, but hey, a sale's a sale...)

So a few thoughts, now that Toad Words and Other Stories has been out for THREE WHOLE DAYS. (Madness!) But it's earned out what I spent on editing in that time, which is lovely.

Definitely a small bump for my first SP book, Nine Goblins. Since Smashwords is kind enough to send a receipt with what the buyer bought, I can see that a dozen or so people bought both books simultaneously. Which I expected, but it's nice to see I'm right.

Did not really get this bump on Amazon, interestingly enough--sales on Nine Goblins ticked up a couple copies, but not as many as Smashwords, even though I sold three times as many copies on Amazon. Dunno if that's due to the way the pages are displayed or what.

(Also, I sold three times as many copies on Amazon as Smashwords.)

That said, though, Smashwords continued to be a valiant chunk of sales--80+ copies! While long-term sales are infinitely better at Amazon, Smashwords is clearly worth it, particularly as an ePub only upload so I don't mess around with the meatgrinder. (I'm assuming that's mostly readers who, for whatever reason, do not wish to mess about with Amazon, although I know a few wanted the book NOW and were not willing to wait for Nook or Kobo.)

Very happy with Draft2Digital, all in all. I could wish they'd tell me which platforms the books are selling on, the way Smashwords does--I know I've sold 15 copies, but Nook? Kobo? Don't know. Still, that's minor and for my own amusement.

ETA: Just checked the numbers, and to my intense amusement, I have sold EXACTLY as many copies on Amazon in three days as I did of Nine Goblins. From this I can calculate that I have exactly 285 Kindle-reading fans who have to have the book immediately upon release. Well, that's nice to know...

As for what I'd consider success...well. I pretty much figure I'd like to make eight cents a word, which is SFWA qualifying rates. Nine Goblins has managed double that, and still averages about 1.5 sales a day. Toad Words runs 45K, so...$3600, plus the $250 I spent on editing the novella.

So if my math is correct, 1300 copies would be the point at which I cannot possibly complain about how the book is doing. *grin* (Since it's an anthology, a notoriously low-sales sort of book, I do not dare hope for more.) We are still substantially off from that, but we'll see how it goes!

State of the Book

A week on, and 600 copies sold! Doing very well (by my standards, anyhow.)

Solid sales through Draft2Digital--about 10% of total--but also very solid through Smashwords, at around 20% of total. (3 people have availed themselves of buying a PDF directly.)

Those sales alone would be enough to keep me on Smashwords for the ePub, but people also seem to be buying it who specifically want to avoid any particular platform, and I'd stay there to cater to that, even if sales were lower.

Sales bump on Nine Goblins was nothing to sneeze at, about 40 copies or so--that's a round of groceries, so I'm not complaining!--and now it's easing back down toward the 1.5 copies a day it had settled on.

One really cool thing was a review on Amazon (okay, I actually looked at a review, I never do that) saying that they didn't know who I was but saw the book on Amazon recommendations. Since I sort of assume that all sales are to long-time fans of my art and whatnot, it was very gratifying to see that people are finding it in other ways!

First Month

Sales report for the first month of the Toad Words anthology:

Amazon: 629
Smashwords: 135
Draft2Digital: 98
PDF direct sales: 4

August Total: 866

Which was about what I got at a month in on Nine Goblins, the first book I released, so I can extrapolate that there's not quite 900 people who will buy one of my books right out of the gate. *grin* (Thank you, slightly under 900 people! You rock!)

The nice thing is that on Smashwords, at least, I can track a whole bunch of people (40, to be precise) who bought Nine Goblins paired with Toad Words. (Which probably means they were existing fans who hadn't known I had another book out, or that they REALLY enjoyed the samples, one of the two.) Since Nine Goblins was moving like 5 copies a month on Smashwords, that's a huge bump there. It also got a bump on Kindle, with 94 sales, which is up significantly from the June & July numbers.

This is all pretty much what common wisdom said would happen--that the best advertisement for a book is a new book!--but it's nice to see it with real numbers!

I hope to have another T. Kingfisher novel out in November--currently at the editor--so we'll see how that much of a shot in the arm that gives the other two. (My guess is that a novel will sell better than an anthology, but I don't know for certain.)

Thanks, guys!

Hybrid definitely seems to be the money-making route, in my very limited experience! (Sadly I don't quite get in on that as much, since my widely published stuff is children's books, so I'm self-pubbing under a pen-name. Still, the carryover from my old comic and my blog is pretty good!)

About 90 copies sold so far this month. That's not a bad total, of course (I'll gladly take the money!) but it seems to be dropping off a lot faster than Nine Goblins did, averaging four or six copies a day instead of ten to seven.

My suspicion is that it's because it's an anthology, and while people will risk money on an unknown novel or novella, an anthology is just plain a harder sell. (Which I knew going in...)

I have an article coming out in a speculative fiction blog which will hopefully kick up a few more sales, but it seems like the taper may set in faster and harder on anthologies. (Or, for all I know, it's the phase of the moon. Or sunspots. Or that this book isn't funny and the novella was. I am extrapolating from very little data here!)

My next novel is tentatively scheduled for November--we'll see how that drives things. After that, there'll probably be a six-to-eight month gap, unless one of my WIP suddenly wants to be done RIGHT THIS MINUTE.

My ultimate goal these days is to have enough of a backlist that I can bring in basic living expenses every month. (Figure a thousand bucks, give or take.) That'll take awhile, obviously, but while I currently make a decent living as a children's book author, it'd be nice to have a reasonably solid income that doesn't hinge on the good graces of any given publisher.

Nine Goblins eventually averaged out to 1.5 sales a day, give or take, and seemed to be holding steady there. If most of my books settle down to that level, allowing for some wiggle room and variations on pricing, I could reasonably earn that on a backlist of a dozen books. (Assuming the market doesn't crash, assuming Amazon doesn't change their percentages, assuming I am not caught up in an international scandal involving a goat...)

So that's my current self-publishing goal. Writers of weird, quirky fairy-tale retellings do not generally make enormous fortunes on the backs of those retellings, but I'd be pretty happy just to make rent.