Year end check-in time! I’m going to keep this here instead of the newsletter, because I believe in promoting more transparency around sales and financials in indie publishing, especially in the murky middle of the pack. I hear all the time about people making millions self-publishing, and good for them; I hear all the time that most self-published books go unread or almost unread; I don’t hear much about the middle.
Hi. I’m in the middle.
Context
- Here’s last year’s check-in.
- Late 2024 marked the 10th anniversary of my first book, which is wild to think about; I went over some of that book’s individual sales stats here.
- First full year back in Kindle Unlimited, which we’ll get into later.
Releases:
- Therapist book 6 (Level 99), March
- Therapist book 7 (Sweet & Salty), April
- Therapist book 8 (Bardbarian), October
(Let’s note right here that 99 and S&S were both written in the summer of 2023, and Bardbarian was started in late summer 2023. I’ve been writing more/faster than I used to, but not that fast.)
Total books in the world: 3 Healers novels, 7 Therapist novellas, technically 1 Therapist novel (Bardbarian is just over the line); 1 omnibus of the first 4 Therapist novellas. Plus the two newsletter extras / magnets.
Other milestones:
- Joined group promotions in April, July, October and upcoming in December
- Started newsletter, November; including completing a new story in each series (and bundling some Healers stories I had written a while ago)
- Commissioned new covers for Healers trilogy, November
- Finished first draft of my first attempt to return to the Healers-verse since starting Therapist
Spread the Word, or Don’t
Advertising was a new venture this year. Up till now, I had tried a few email list promotions – on the reader side, those are the “sign up for this list and get a list of books on sale every day” newsletters, the largest of which is BookBub. On the author side, it’s a one-time ad. I’ve run a few in 2015 and 2023 to varied effect (not BookBub; you can tell by the lack of gold-plated yachts).
In 2024, I finally tried Amazon ads. These have a few different configurations, but in this case they’re based on keywords and charged by the click. When you search on Amazon, those are the ones with “Sponsored” labels.
By and large, these did not work for me. Which isn’t to say the system is broken; I don’t have enough research to say that. But I got few clicks and even fewer sales, so I shut them all off.
What did work, as I’ve mentioned on this blog before, was the group promotion – Cozy the Day Away graciously has a “cozy-adjacent” category so far, and so I have continued to join that.
Group promotions are coordinated sales among a group of authors who have decided their audiences would overlap. Everyone individually puts their book or books on sale at the same time and cross-promotes, so that readers can browse a list and find other books on sale that they’d like.
Participation in many of the other group promotions out there are predicated on the size of the audience you can cross-promote to, so I’ve got some growth to do before I can join some of those. In the meantime, we’ll see how it all goes.
Sales
This is all simplified by the return to exclusivity. Amazon is it for now. That said, it’s still splitting up some of the books into multiple lines because of edition changes, and reporting 16(!) titles instead of 12 (3 Healers, 8 Therapist, omnibus).
Edit, the next day: Something was off about the ebook/print charts (old browser cache?). Fixed.
Ebooks and paperbacks, overall:
Up there I mentioned the group promotions, Cozy the Day Away, in April, July and October. You can see ‘em from space on my charts, especially April (the inaugural one) and October (which was cross-promoted with the cozy fantasy convention). Which is why I thank them so effusively for letting me contribute from the fringes. Also because they’re very nice and patient people.
In April I ran a sale on Road; in July, Road and Therapist 1; in October, Road and the Therapist omnibus, which did a lot better. (In December I’m planning to run Road – new cover, who knows – and Bardbarian.)
Edit, after the December sale: This one was good to me, too; thanks again to the organizers and readers!. The final total for 2024 was 693 sales, 115(!) of which happened on the two days around the sale and BookBarbarian promotion.
The breakdown [pre-sale] – as you can see, the old paper editions are now splintered off in an annoying way.
Kindle Unlimited
First, I’ll note that “pages” is a standardized measure that Amazon uses for KU; it does not correspond to an actual paper page. It’s more like half a page in print. (The Healers books end up between 600-700 “pages” by this metric, and the Therapist books are about 200.) All of my books are currently in KU except for the omnibus, since that would be redundant.
I returned to KU late last year, and have gotten as many page reads in one year as I had in all other years combined. While I understand the strategy to “go wide” (use all the various storefronts besides Amazon), between the readership I’ve gotten and the simplicity factor, I’m staying for now.
Post sale / final-final KU total: This is less affected by the sale, of course, but the final-final total for KU was 114,816 pages.
Breakdown book by book:
In which we learn two things:
- some people are reading Salty and Sweet who haven’t read the rest of the series, which I find entertaining (hope you enjoyed it! I didn’t write it as a standalone, but that’s cool!)
- my decision to put Bardbarian into the next CTDA sale is rather hubristic. But I like it, dammit, and so I’m going to try. Just once. The winter setting matches the December sale, after all.
Money (7/4 bassline ensues)
That’s not nothing. I don’t have to live on it, so it’s not a cause for stress.
Edit, the final one: Very-end-of-the-year total: $1,184.00 even.
Although…
Expenses:
- About $100 for website hosting
- About $100 for a PO box, which I’m finally using again
- $100 for a yearly StoryOrigin subscription (hosting for newsletter extras)
- $40 each for two ads on BookBarbarian, April and December (the latter is scheduled for the day after CTDA and hasn’t run yet)
Covers:
- I bought 99’s last year
- Sweet & Salty, about $150
- Bards, about $150
- Healers revamp, $240 each x 3, not counting tips
Total: $1,400
There was also an attempt at commissioning illustrated covers from an independent artist for Healers that I still feel bad about – they were never delivered, and I held out hope and resisted asking for a refund until long after the window for disputing the payment had closed. So… I still wish it would have worked out, but it didn’t.
In other words, I am in the hole for the year. Far in the hole, if you include the debacle above. But over its lifetime, Healers is still in the black far enough to carry the entirety of Therapist. Apart from the nondelivery thing above, I don’t regret any of it. I don’t spend money I don’t have, even for this.
Meanwhile…
As I’ve talked about in various blog posts, while this was going on (mostly April through October), I was working on a new book in the Healers world. After Healers 3 was a pandemic-era bear to get through and I switched gears for something lighter and fluffier, I worried that I couldn’t go back. That I wouldn’t have it in me.
Long story short, I unearthed the first few chapters of an old project to see if it had legs after all, finally clicked with the characters, and took off. I’m editing it now, and it needs some work – the first draft clocks in at 150k, and since it’s the Healersverse, trust me when I say none of that is worldbuilding – but I am optimistic. It’s a much stronger first draft than any of the other Healers books had.
Meanwhile, I hope to keep coming up with stories in the Therapist world as well. It’s a fun sandbox, and somehow the characters keep popping up in my head. This one-trick pony has some other tricks after all.
You never know till you try.