A Very Small Fish Jumping Into a Very Big Pond

Since I'm logged on and it's the end of the first quarter of the year...

As usual I've deviated from my plans for the year already. I started work on the new fantasy series, but then realized that writing to market really just doesn't work for me and I was letting too many voices in my head in terms of what I should or shouldn't write. So instead I'm working on the video courses. AMS Ads for Authors and Excel for Self-Publishers are both done and published. I wasn't expecting huge sales from either one, so combined they've done nicely by that metric. And now they're there and people can find them as they want to. (Discount links on my blog if anyone is interested.)

The short stories on Google experiment failed. Putting my romance novels in KU did well enough that I let those renew for another term, but I'm pulling the romance short stories back to wide. Setting a title free in those series and just letting them tick along gives me a handful of sales of the collections each month wide and at no cost.

I saw a surprising amount of paperback sales this quarter. Almost $2000 worth just last month. And even taking away the top two titles which were the bulk of that, I still had about 50 paperback sales across a wide range of titles. About four times what I had for the same month last year. And since it's across pen names that aren't related, it seems to be a general trend more than one title bringing the others up.

My top title in terms of overall sales and profits and advertising ease is now a non-fiction title. As of last month it has outearned my romance. And that's okay with me. In certain respects writing non-fiction is easier to do and easier to advertise and keep selling. I still plan to start a new fantasy series and write another romance novel this year, but it's likely I'll be writing two non-fiction titles before then and publishing at least four more video courses before the end of the year.

I'm also seriously considering writing an MG fantasy, but that I'd want to go the trade publishing route for.

Too many ideas, too little time. But that's what makes it interesting.

Sometime in April I sold my 2500th copy of Rider's Revenge, so that was a nice milestone. (Of course, sales numbers without profit is not ideal. I have other titles that have sold less copies but made me far more money.) I've also hit five-figures for the year. Took me until October last year to do that, so that was nice to see. And I published my third and fourth video course this weekend, which means the end of that little venture for now.

Time to get back to writing something new, although non-fiction for now. I have five more non-fiction titles I want to do before I turn back to fiction.

J. Tanner said:

I see Rider's revenge is $5 on Amazon, so why no profit? Are you factoring in fixed costs like cover (it's pretty stunning) and editing?

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Yeah, it's covers and advertising. (I self-edit so no cost there.) Covers across the entire series were almost $2,000 and I'm still about $800 in the red across the series.

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Fullon_v4.0 said:

Thanks for your transparency and sharing your story! I really hope things go well let us know your progress!

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Thanks!

Time for my five year update...

End of August 2013 was when I self-published my first title, a little bit of non-fiction I knew I could never get trade published called Don't Be a Douchebag: Online Dating Advice I Wish Men Would Take. Surprisingly, it still does well in audio. Go figure.

Since then I've published short stories (romance, erotica, sci fi, fantasy), seven novels (five of which have done well, one I took out of print because I wasn't going to write the sequel anytime soon), and a whole slew of non-fiction across a variety of topics from dating to raising a puppy in an apartment to Microsoft Excel.

11 of my titles have made at least $1,000. A whole lot have made almost nothing, mostly the short stories. 18 of my titles have sold at least 200 copies and 3 have sold over 2000. My top three titles in terms of revenue are a non-fiction title, a romance novel, and a YA fantasy novel.

This year my revenue is about equal to what I earned at my job my first year out of college. So four years of college and one year of work equals five years of self pub. Of course, that doesn't account for expenses. Take those into account and I'm a little above minimum wage in terms of actual income. But that's a four-fold increase over last year in terms of revenue and a seven-fold increase in terms of actual profit, so I'm moving in the right direction. I'd say a lot of the growth from the last year was because I mostly published titles under one name and that could feed into one another and actually published something people were actively looking for. Funny how that works...

Ironically, the closer I get to my goals the farther away they seem. It's like, "Oh, okay, sure, I can see having $50K in revenue a year. Yeah, that can happen. But $100K? Hahaha."

It seems to me that the angst level in self-pub has gone up drastically this last year and I'm having to fight to not let that get in my head and under my skin because it kills productivity and takes all the joy out of this. I probably have another six months before I need to make some big decisions. The "do I stay where I am and take on some of the work I used to do" or "do I move to Cheapville USA so I can keep writing" type. I suspect the "Wow, that release went well, all is good" path is not going to happen as much as I'd like it to. But I'm still going to try anyway.

I'm sorry I don't give more title-specific details here, but honestly I don't think it would help anyone much. I'd say that spending big money on covers is not worth it unless you are writing to a strong market that will deliver sales to pay for it. That you have to advertise in some way, shape, or form if you want sales. People need to know a book exists if they're going to buy it. That for most non-fiction that should be pay-per-click ads not discount ads. That writing what people already want is going to make books easier to sell rather than writing whatever you want to write. That if you can focus on one name/series/genre and meet the needs of readers in that area that you'll do better. (Meeting reader needs is the key, though. Don't beat a dead horse.) That, in general, novels will do better than short stories but it's also about delivering the experience the reader expects. An overbloated novel is not going to be an enjoyable read. So make the story the length it needs to be and worry about selling it after, but if you have to choose between a 10K story idea, a 90K novel, and a 200K epic, choose the 90K novel.

I will say I enjoy all of this process. I get to learn new things all the time which is what I love. And I have control and authority and autonomy which is what I crave from work. If I won the lottery tomorrow I'd keep doing this. And if I go back to non-writing work I won't regret the time I took to do this although I calculated a while back how much stepping off the consulting path to write has cost me and that number has a lot of zeros after it. But you only live once. My dad was dead by 45. My good friend who is 46 has terminal cancer. I'm not going to regret choosing my dreams even if that choice turns out to be a "failure" in the end. But if it is a failure, it's only a financial failure. And that I can accept.

I should be working on the next novel, but I'm not so figured I could give a little update.

Last month I published my first cozy mystery. Yep, yet another pen name and genre, because why follow the lessons you've learned from your prior experience? But my reasoning was that while the non-fiction is doing well it's not something I can easily add onto and that writing more in the fiction genres I'd already published in didn't have a good chance of bumping my performance substantially. So I figured I'd study a hot market and write an idea that had been kicking around in my head for a couple years.

It was tons of fun to write. Most cozies seem to be written in first person so it was really just like sitting down to tell a funny story to a friend and I put all my love of my dog, family, and friends in there. And results are promising. It's been about a month and I have 200 sales/full reads and good reviews so far. I'm behind money-wise because of ad costs, but less so each week and if I get out another title or two that won't be the case for the whole series. It's also a genre that's okay with shorter novels than, say, epic fantasy, so I can write and publish a cozy in two months without a lot of stress. Now I just need to hold my focus long enough to get at least three of them published and hopefully more like six by the end of next year. (The biggest names in that genre have 50+! Yikes! That won't be me anytime soon.)

I also queried a children's picture book because that's just not something it's viable to self-publish. If I get a bite on that then I'll probably work on one of my MG fantasy ideas to sell to a publisher sometime next year because that's another genre that I think has more potential going trade than self and if someone wants to take me on for a picturebook I need to give them something more meaty that they can make some real money off of. MG is also another genre with shorter wordcounts, which is nice.

And I added a payhip store to my website for my non-fiction. I've had a few sales that way, so that's nice. And it was free to set up, too.

So where am I overall? As of end of October I've sold about 25,000 books, grossed about $60K, and netted close to $30K. Those are lifetime numbers and a lot of that is from non-fiction, though, so take it for what it is.

Oh! And my YA fantasy series is finally profitable. Only took four Bookbubs to get there. (I'm now experimenting with a $7.99 price point so it may not sell much more than that, but author KA Linde said at RWA this year that her YA fantasy sold best at that high a price, so it was either drop it to $4.99 or up it to $7.99. I figured I'd try up before down since I'm not actively feeding that pen name at the moment.)

At this point the only unprofitable "series" I have left is my cookbook, which was too cleverly titled. I just changed up the title to something very direct and obvious and early indications are that it sells much better with a straightforward title. So hopefully that one will be profitable soon, too.

November and December are always brutal for me in terms of ad spend versus income. Last month was probably my best month in terms of gross revenue (I don't have final audio numbers yet and haven't done the currency conversion for UK sales) but ad cost was up substantially at the same time so it'll be about my fifth-best month in terms of profit. Those are the parts of this business it can be hard to remember and factor in when planning things. And it's different for each author, too, so you have to find what your own patterns are, you can't rely on someone else's.

Anyway...What can I say to add value for others? Don't be afraid to experiment with titles, prices, new ad options, etc. Be careful of being too clever with your non-fiction titles. (A lesson it seems I never learn.) "Budgeting for Beginners" really does sell better than "Juggling Your Finances". I'd also say that beyond minor changes like a new title and some tweaks to an introduction it's best to be moving forward rather than trying to fix something that wasn't perfect. If you sit down and look at most authors who are doing really well, they have a number of titles out. So even if you go back to that first book and polish it to perfection, you're just going to have that one book. And that's rarely enough to live off of or get momentum. I know some won't be able to take that advice or will disagree, and maybe they'll be one of the unicorns that publishes such a phenomenal book it does sustain them, but for most writing more new material is a better bet.

And if things aren't working, don't be afraid to let them go and try something new. It's sometimes hard to know when you just need to push through versus when it really isn't going to be anything no matter how much effort you put into it. (And we all have our own reasons for doing this, too. So if you're getting what you need out of it, then who cares? But if the goal is "success", however you define that, then maybe change things up if you're not seeing that from your current efforts.) Just a thought. From someone who still isn't there, wherever there is, but who feels like they're getting closer with each step because they've let go of what wasn't working and tried new things.

CathleenT said:

Lots of folks seem to be doing well with cozies. Here's hoping you'll be one of them.

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Thanks Cathleen.

Two months into the cozy experiment and I figured I'd share my numbers. This is for a cozy title of about 45,000 words that is priced at $3.99 and in KU but also has a paperback version up on B&N. The paperback is priced at $7.99 even though it's a trade pub size, so pretty low profit per sale compared to my other paperbacks.

Month 1: 64 ebook sales, 36 paperback sales, 29,353 page reads
Month 2: 41 ebook sales, 31 paperback sales, 17,927 page reads

Total that's 172 paid sales as well as 199 full-read equivalents

So it's promising. It's better first and second month sales than anything I've published so far because I don't do big launches in general. And the reviews have been good, too. I did lose money in the first month because I was using AMS and bidding high enough to drive visibility. But when I backed that down to profitable levels I continued to see sales. Problem is getting out enough of the books to make it viable.

I figure if I get three cozies out I could do nicely. I was hoping to get another one out early February but struggled to write the second novel in December so now it's looking more like late February. (I wrote another non-fiction book in the interim rather than just bang my head against the wall.) Cozies have certain expectations/requirements and I kept violating those in the second novel drafts, but hopefully I can work it out now. I'd also had that cozy idea for the first novel in my head for years and now I have to come up with a new one with each book, so that's another trick. Series are always harder than standalones for so many reasons...

And I always hope with anything new that I publish that it will just take off into the stratosphere despite knowing how rare it is for that to happen. I swear, expectations are the biggest killer in self-pub, at least for me.

Anyway. It's promising enough to at least write the next two if not more this year. And if I get stuck, there are always the other pen names and genres waiting for more material.

Oops. That was poor wording on my part.

I have paperback versions on both KDP Print and Nook Press. Nook was only 3 of those paperback sales. The rest were KDP Print.

And, yes, I do think that taking an initial hit to profitability can be worth it on Amazon to get "sticky". The first month I was about $150 in the red all told. I haven't made that back yet, so I'm still in the red but I'm not still losing money.

With AMS I do cut back on non-performing keywords pretty fast, but I also dropped the bids I had on all of the keywords, even the ones that were converting, after about three weeks. You can sometimes get away with that if by then you've shown that your book will sell. Amazon will keep showing the ad even if you're not the highest bid. But there was some slow down in sales/ad spend because of the lower bids.

Given the discussion on another thread about not being able to sell at $7.99, thought I'd circle back here and share my experience with doing that with my YA series. I had been priced at $5.99 and moved my price up to $7.99 for December and January. I had a Bookbub in October, so I'm just using book 1 sales to ignore sellthrough. In November when it was priced at $5.99, I sold 14 copies of book 1 on Amazon. In December I sold 13 copies of book 1 on Amazon at $7.99. There was a shift, though, in terms of where those copies sold. At $5.99 I was mostly selling in the US store. At $7.99 I was mostly selling in the UK store. I stopped the experiment this month because I'm putting the books in KU for a bit so US ranks are going to matter more.

With this particular series I haven't seen a significant difference in units sold anywhere between about $4.99 and $7.99. I think I even tried $3.99 at one point and that didn't change things much either. Not enough to justify a lower price. I realize 13 copies a month isn't a big number to a lot of authors, but just pointing out that not all readers judge by the publisher name so there's no harm in experimenting with pricing and seeing what's possible for a particular book. (And with this series I've used a higher normal price and 99 cent Bookbub sales strategy, so pricing higher worked for me.)

As always, YMMV, etc. etc.

In more general news, last month was my best month so far in terms of gross sales but ad costs went up enough to hit my profits which was frustrating because at the end of the day what really matters to me is profit.

Old Hack said:

In the 1980s I worked for computer games companies and I can remember some research we did at that time on how various price-points worked. I can't remember the finer points of it, and it would be horribly out of date now anyway: but I do remember that games users didn't see any significant difference between prices of £6.99 and £7.99, for example, so it made sense for us to price our mid-range games at £7.99 rather than £6.99; there was a significant difference between £1.99 and £2.99, but no difference between £1.99 and 99p, so our budget range was priced at £1.99 and we didn't bother with anything more than the game, the case, and rudimentary instructions; and that anything over £20 was seen as very expensive and needed added value--so a bigger case, more extensive packaging notes, posters, etc.

As I said, that research would now be very out of date: but there are other analyses available online which might be worth looking at. It's interesting how peripherals (the posters, etc., that I referred to with the more expensive ranges) help sell items at higher prices, even though they don't add anything to the actual product you're selling other than giving the consumer a bit more stuff to look at.

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Interesting. That does make me think I need to experiment a bit more with my other books to see what the price ranges are for each of them as well...