LJD's Self-Publishing Thread

LJD

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My second book, Mr. Hotshot CEO, will be out tomorrow! I have 124 pre-orders on Amazon.
 

LJD

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My second book, Mr. Hotshot CEO, has been out for 3 weeks, and I've had 312 sales (including pre-orders) in total. It's not selling as well as the first book (which I expected), though the reviews are really great! (better than for the first book)

Unfortunately, I've had a family emergency, which resulted in me spending most of my release day at the hospital, and the situation is still...not good. So I haven't had as much time to promote as I'd like. Now trying to figure out Amazon ads. Just started running a few yesterday, so...we'll see.
 

M. H. Lee

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I forgot to tell you that your first book was used in a presentation at RWA as an example of a great book title. (It was in a presentation by Jennifer Lynn Barnes on writing for your Id.)
 

Norman D Gutter

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Congrats on the new book out.

Let us know about your Amazon Ads experience. I'm considering using that.

NDG
 

LJD

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I forgot to tell you that your first book was used in a presentation at RWA as an example of a great book title. (It was in a presentation by Jennifer Lynn Barnes on writing for your Id.)

Thanks for telling me about that! lol

Yes, the first book title did seem to be an inadvertent stroke of genius on my part. Here's the thread where I debated whether I should use it. It wasn't the original title for the book.
 

LJD

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Sorry, I have been terrible at updating this, but I thought I'd post now that 2018 is over.

In 2018, I published 4 short novels (as planned) and an unplanned Christmas novella (mainly as a freebie for newsletter followers, but it's for sale, too). Here are all my pretty covers!

2018-releases3.png


In total, I sold 3364 copies of my books, Grumpy Fake Boyfriend being the largest seller. Amazon is 75-80% of my sales. I did not make a ton of money, but I definitely achieved my goal of not losing money! I ended the year solidly in the black, even without being paid for November/December sales yet.

I was active on social media, especially Twitter, and I think a lot of people found me on Twitter. I've played around with AMS ads and sold some books that way, though they really haven't been doing much for me since October. I haven't done any other advertising. I only have e-books, but hope to have print books soon. I have run a few price promos on Kobo with little success, but I had Grumpy Fake Boyfriend on sale for 99 cents for the end of December at all retailers, and that went reasonably well (over 300 copies on Amazon).

A few of my books ended up on people's Best of 2018 lists, including Alyssa Cole's list on Buzzfeed here.

So I've been fairly happy with my first year in self-publishing, and I have a bunch of things planned for this year. I've sold much better self-publishing than I did with small presses. (I think the majority of those books only sold in the double digits.)
 

EMaree

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Wow, LJD, you're doing amazing! I've seen Grumpy Fake Boyfriend everywhere and didn't realise it was by an AW-er. Well done!
 

LJD

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Wow, LJD, you're doing amazing! I've seen Grumpy Fake Boyfriend everywhere and didn't realise it was by an AW-er. Well done!

Here is the thread where I debated about the title :)
 

LJD

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So I had a Pi Day book come out last week, and another book scheduled for May! Not sure about my schedule after that, but I finished the first draft of Book 3 in the series today.

The recent release was better than my November one, sales-wise, but not quite as good as I'd been hoping for. (My first Jackie Lau book, Grumpy Fake Boyfriend, is still the one with the strongest release week and greatest number of sales overall.) I need to do a bit more research on launches and play around more with ads (which I don't do much of).


baldwin-village.png
 
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LJD

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I haven't posted in this thread in about a year, so I thought I'd update!

I now have 12 books out (7 short novels and 5 novellas). My last series was a quartet of romance novellas centered around holidays. I released them all within a 4-month period.


holiday-all-fb-banner-resize-1.jpg


The last two were released in January and February, and income-wise, these were my best months on Amazon US! (Amazon US is over half of my total sales) The single-book sales were still not as good as the release for Grumpy Fake Boyfriend, but with sales for other books in the series and the rest of my backlist, they were good overall (low four figures). So I feel like I am slowly building an audience.

March sales have not been great (not my worst, though), but I didn't have a release, and there is a lot happening in the world at present.

In 2019, my revenue was low five figures (CAD), but with my expenses, it looks like I made almost nothing. (Note, however, that I did attend an out-of-country conference.) Other expenses included edits, covers, and advertising. However, I really haven't figured out how to make ads work for me, though I've read a bunch on this topic. FB and BookBub (ads, not feature deals) have been a waste of money so far. I do have some limited success with Amazon Ads, but am not running them at present. Back in August, when I had a book on sale for 99 cents, I paid for listings in a few services that send out e-mails about free/cheap books, and I was disappointed with the results. So, at some point I need to figure out how to make ads work for me, but it hasn't happened yet. Not looking to do this right now, however. Twitter continues to help my sales the most.

In 2020 I am hoping to make more of an actual profit :) I have 3 more novels and 1 novella planned. The next one (Pregnant by the Playboy) will be out in May. I have box sets planned, too, and there will be a bunch of free/99 cent sales.

My Holidays with the Wongs series was a little different from the previous one in that it has illustrated covers, all books are novellas, and it's very low angst and conflict (even for me, lol). This series was planned about a year ago, and I intentionally wanted to write something that wouldn't be tough on me emotionally, due to what was happening with my family. Illustrated covers have been huge in trade paperback rom-coms, but haven't become as popular in self-publishing, though there are still some. I found that these covers got less attention when I first revealed them on social media, but my pre-orders were a bit better than for all my other books (except Grumpy Fake Boyfriend)...though this might be me building an audience. I'm planning to go back to photo covers for the next 2 series, but we'll see how it goes. These novellas are all $2.99 and about 30k in length; my novels (about 60k words) are all $3.99. The epilogues of these novellas also very clearly hooked the next couple in the series, and I do think this may have helped sell-through.

I now have print versions of my novel-length books, which I set up through IngramSpark. They are sold in a few romance bookstores, such as The Ripped Bodice and Love's Sweet Arrow. I didn't expect to make much money on these at all (I did them mainly for signings and because one of my books was in a sex toy/romance subscription box), but I actually do make $50-100 a month, so that's nice.

My books have appeared on various lists and articles, and when I went to the RWA conference, lots of people seemed to know who I was. I recently got an agent, and hopefully she will be able to sell subrights for some of my books. She was supposed to put something new out on submission for me this month, but then...COVID-19 happened. I definitely want to continue self-publishing, but I'd be interested in having a book a year at a trade publisher, if possible, to get in more bookstores...and also, rom-coms are hot right now.

I'm not a huge success, but I'm reasonably happy with how things have gone, and it has been nice to see my sales build over time. If you have any questions, let me know! The rest of my books are here: jackielaubooks.com/books/
 
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LJD

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I released my 13th book at the end of May, about 2 years after my first self-published book came out. It's called Pregnant by the Playboy.

January, February, and May of this year were my best 3 months ever on Amazon US.

This is a breakdown of where my money came from for my payments this year:
Amazon: 69.7%
D2D: 17.6%
Kobo: 8.8%
Lightning Source (print): 3.9%

At Draft2Digital, my income comes from:
1) Overdrive
2) Apple
3) B&N
4) Scribd
(all other retailers are negligible)

You can see more about this in my Twitter thread here.

I've had 3 different books free for a period of 4-6 weeks each over the past 7-8 months or so. The last one was Mr. Hotshot CEO, and I paid for a bunch of newsletter promos. You can see discussion and lots of graphs/tables here. This was Book 2 in the series, and I made my money back in sales of Book 1 within the month.

I also got an agent this year and she sold a book to Berkley for me. I posted about this in Goals and Accomplishments, and you can see the announcement here. I am going to keep self-publishing, but my hope is to have 1 book a year with a trade publisher going forward.