Tavia's Diary - Self-Publishing for a Lark

I know I just updated, but I hit a couple of milestones last night and I'm excited. So, shameless bragging time. Twenty-two days after launching my first title...

The Warlock's Command has hit 50 sales, and both titles combined have earned $100 in royalties.

I kept my expectations low going into this, and wasn't expecting to hit either of those numbers until another month out at least. So I'm honestly pretty thrilled right now.

A brief and belated February recap!

Command: 43 sales; $34.43
Plaything: 24 sales; $44.82

Total: 67 sales; $79.25

About 1/3 is from ARe, two sales are from B&N, and the rest is from Amazon. I'll be honest -- I'm pretty disappointed in my productivity this month. I lost a week struggling with a story that just didn't come together, and day job struggles slowed me down too. (Plus price updating struggles got Command stuck at .99 for two weeks instead of one week. I really think I lost a lot of royalties there :/)

I'm excited for March, though. Warlock 3 should be up within the week, and my anthology story is coming out late March. I'd like to get another short out around late March too, so that should give me a better month than February.

Forgot to mention, but... The Warlock's Summons went up last week to okay results. I'm going to focus more on standalones and first books instead of sequels/continuations for the next month or two -- each book in the Warlock series has done noticeably worse than the book before (though they do give previous books a bit of a boost).

On that note, Never Been Bitten, my first foray into vampire erotica, went live yesterday! It's too early to judge sales, but I'm fond enough of the cover that I added it as my avatar, haha.

Perhaps most excitingly of all, a lovely person on Goodreads gave four-star reviews to my first two books! I was totally floored, I think I spent the entire day grinning.

Annnd, it's March recap time! Here's how my January and February titles carried on --

Command: 11 sales; $17.68
Plaything: 8 sales; $15.82

I also put out three new titles during March. Summons is the third book in my Warlock series, and the other two are the first books in two new series. Never Been Bitten was published March 17, and Werewolf Happy Hour was published March 30. Full disclosure: the Happy Hour cover is ridiculous, and I had way too much fun with it. You've been warned!

Summons: 14 sales; $26.2
Bitten: 29 sales; $54.69
Happy Hour: 11 sales; $20.68

Giving me a total of $135 for the month. As before, about 1/3 was from ARe.

In way more exciting news, though, the anthology went live yesterday! My story's called A Game of Cat and Wolf, and it's set in the same world as Werewolf Happy Hour. Hopefully there will be some crossover between the two

Hi! I'd call mine short stories. Erotica is typically priced at 2.99 for anything from 3,000 words to 20,000 words -- prices may or may not change once you reach novella length. (Most people writing 15 or 20k are making the switch to erotic romance, though, so then they price according to e-rom norms)

Amazon's page counts can be confusing and tough to spot. Doesn't help that "page count" on an e-reader is an ever-changing variable! So I always include my wordcount in bold at the bottom of my blurbs to hopefully keep things clear

(I also always shoot for a minimum of 7k words, because I think 2.99 for 3k is very high.)

gallowayprof said:

Certainly, you wouldn't want someone to not see that and then give you hell in the review just because of that and not on the strength of the writing.

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Agreed. I've definitely seen a lot of that as a reader looking through reviews. Clear labeling helps everyone find what they're looking for, and the last thing I want to do is mislead someone who's spending money on my writing.

We submitted His Animal Instinct to a few reviewers, and so far one of them has picked it up. She got to my story (A Game of Cat and Wolf) first since it's first in the book... and just left a fantastic four-star review on Goodreads. It's so lovely, I want to print it out and frame it.

Decided to go ahead and post an April recap now, since I don’t expect the numbers to change very much before midnight tonight.

Over the course of the month I only put out a “box set” of my first series + the sequel to my vampire book. I was still seeing the initial spike from my releases at the very end of March, though!

I tried out a bit of promo for the first time. I ran a $5 Excite Spice promo on The Warlock’s Command (beginning of the month) and Never Been Bitten (mid-month, when the sequel came out), each at a .99 discount. I more than made back the money, with a decent boost to the sequels that day too.

Anyway, numbers!

The Warlock’s Command: 18 sales; $12.07
The Warlock’s Plaything: 6 sales; $12.13
The Warlock’s Summons: 12 sales; 23.72
Never Been Bitten: 49 sales; $50.27
Werewolf Happy Hour: 18 sales; $34.6
Sorcery & Submission 1-3: 17 sales; $58.15
Bitten With Benefits: 26 sales; $50.33

(I’m really pleased with the box set – that’s an extra $58 on stories I’d already written! And Command and Never have now each made over $100 on their own.)

April Total: 146 sales; $241.27

Which brings me to the part that really thrills me – I’ve now made just over $500 since I started in January. That feels pretty cool.

Svader said:

That's so exciting to hear! Great job so far. Thank you for posting the numbers for all of us to see, and the dollar amount as well. Keeps my hopes up for when I am ready to self publish.

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Thanks! I'm glad it's helpful. If I get into rent money instead of gas money, I might stop posting the dollar amounts, but for now I think it's useful to see what you can make just starting out in the genre.

ASeiple said:

Not a bad spot to be in!The more I read this, the more box sets look like easy money. And I don't mean that in a bad way! The way I see it, they're kind of like an achievement award for reaching 3 books. "Here, you went the extra mile and did a trilogy, so take some time off and have a bonus!"

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Yes, absolutely. And as far as I know, they're even better if you're in Select, because then you get all those page reads from KU readers. I'll note that ARe was comparatively uninterested in the box set -- only three sales there.

Bonus: there are some pretty snazzy photoshop templates out there for the box set covers! http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01E1RVF2Y/?tag=absowrit-20

Just a quick update for my May wrap-up! I ended up taking a couple weeks off writing, because the day job was looking to kill me. But I managed to get Bitten 3 up in the middle of the month.

So, sold exactly 100 copies across my catalogue, for a total of $185. 28 sales and $53 are from Bitten Steady, which delights me -- my previous third-in-a-series book only made 14 sales in a comparable timeframe. I spent $5 on promo with the first book in the series on sale.

I'm pretty pleased. It's less than April, but I released two titles in April. And it's more than March, when I released three!

Looking ahead, I'm focusing on a new novella that may go out under a separate pen name. For June, I'll likely just release the Bitten 1-3 bundle, plus I get to put out my anthology story separately.

I published A Game of Cat and Wolf separately last night -- and put it and Werewolf Happy Hour in Select. First time doing that, but since the anthology is still in Select for a few more weeks I figure it's about time I experimented.

So far results are mixed. The rankings boost is kind of phenomenal. Werewolf Happy Hour (published in March) was around 700,000 -- now it's down to 17,000 with just a few sales. It's almost like having a brand new launch day for it. However, so far page reads on A Game of Cat and Wolf aren't quite matching what I would have expected from ARe sales. It will be interesting to see how that holds out over the next several weeks, when I'd expect ARe sales to drop off.

A belated June recap! It was a very busy month for writing, and a fairly slow month on the publishing front. All I did was get A Game of Cat and Wolf out separately.

Since I put it and Werewolf Happy Hour in Select, I did run a few free days on each (separately, of course ). Netted me around 800 downloads each, which was better than I expected... plus some incredibly lovely reviews

Sales are down to 60 across my catalogue. With a conservative estimate on the KENP rate, royalties aren't far below May's.

Yesterday, I hit 500 cumulative sales! Not counting free downloads or KU borrows. It's a nice bit of motivation, as I'm plugging away at a sequel to Werewolf Happy Hour.

*updates six months late, with Starbucks*

Just realized I hadn't dropped into this thread in ages. Broad overview: I ended the year with 904 copies sold in 2016; so far, I've sold 462 in 2017.

I haven't published anything as Tavia since last summer, and spent the interim working on a couple of novellas. I published one of them under a new pen name late last year. It's doing quite well, so I'm going to be focusing on that name. I probably won't update this thread much moving forward, since I'm keeping the name very separate and it doesn't seem helpful to provide updates without context

Catherine said:

Thanks for the update and good luck going forward with the new pen name. I was wondering if the sales for 2017 are from the new name and if you are in the same genre? It's a sharp increase in sales. Can you tell us what the key was to getting such a bump?

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Yeah, most of the sales for 2017 are the new name, which is romance rather than erotica. I think the keys were: paying for the perfect cover, switching to a more popular genre and meeting genre expectations, and a hefty dose of luck. Having the year's worth of experience helped too.

RaiscaraAvalon said:

Wishing you the best of luck with the new pen name!

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Thank you!