The tenth anniversary of my first book is coming up in about two weeks. I hope to be busier then — coincidentally, both my first-in-series will be on sale that week — so I’m going to do a little retrospective post now.
The Communities
In the lead-up to my first release, I followed Kboards, an old-school-style internet forum that was, technically, only partly dedicated to self-publishing. But even though it had many, many other sections that I never even looked at, its self-publishing section was the place for information at the time. (I think it’s still around? Not going to check.)
Ultimately, Kboards was bad for me psychologically — like a lot of indie writing communities, it talked nonstop shit about people who don’t sell big numbers, and I could never live up to that. (Still can’t! Details below!) But in terms of information, it was invaluable at the time.
After feeling like complete crap reading Kboards, I wandered in the wilderness for quite a long time. Nowadays I read r/selfpublish probably more than I should, and try to be helpful there. There’s a giant range of options now for people to learn from and compete with one another, for good or ill — Discord servers, forums, subreddits, Facebook groups. I’m pro-sharing information. I just have to keep my comparisonitis in check.
The Logistics
I published on KDP, Amazon’s self-publishing system, which still works more or less the same as it did in 2014 — albeit with options for robot-voiced audiobooks and more scrutiny about one’s identity as a human. And though I halfheartedly tried to enter other storefronts in 2020 and 2021, I’m back there exclusively now. Like I ramble about on the Healers page, there are all sorts of strategies out there, and this the one I’m going with right now. It’s not a justification or an excuse, really. It just is.
The Personal Stuff
In 2014, I was still pretty depressed. I had started therapy sometime during the long, long writing process of Healers’ Road, so it was not remotely my lowest point (that had come in 1999/2000), but the world was still behind smoked glass. I hadn’t reevaluated my relationship to gender performance and how much pressure I put myself under. The same week as the release, my spouse and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary; we went on a weekend trip to a bed and breakfast and biked a little piece of the Great Allegheny Passage trail. Things would get rockier after that. But we’re still here. Better now, after a lot of work and several steps of being more honest with ourselves and one another. This is year 15.
As happens sometimes, I have often let my writing become a lightning rod for my insecurity. I’ve written as a hobby and a means of self-expression since I was ten years old; the process is just a part of me. And because of that, I have tended to conflate this thing I love doing with my own worth — how is it selling, do people like it, is it normal, is it good enough. I try to do less of that, less seeking external validation. It’s a habit that’s easier at some times than others.
The Numbers
Edit: Noting that all of these numbers are solely for The Healers’ Road, book 1, from its original publish date till the day of this post. That said, THR still makes up the biggest chunk of my sales to this day.
“2 selected books” = the dashboard separates print and ebook in some ways, because of changes in the “A Slice of Life Fantasy Novel” subtitle. Hopefully a new edition will iron that out down the road.
So….this is what it is. I can explain the bumps in 2015 (ads on EReaderNewsToday and GenrePulse, which still sends me coupons for promos nine years later) and in 2019 (this might be a book blogger’s post proposing slice of life fantasy as a subgenre and name-checking my book, which I’m still staggered by). It has been declining since 2019, I’m aware. But for a book that’s 120 times over the supposed 30-day expiration date for indie fiction, that’s not too goddamn shabby.
On the other hand: Kindle Unlimited is…confusing.
** For those who have not wrangled KU: “Pages” are a standardized unit used in KU and tend to trend higher than the paper pages of a book. Ex. The Healers’ Road is 611 KU pages, but only 288 in print. In other words, this represents about 150 copies, although it also includes partial read-throughs (one “copy” might be two or ten or a hundred partial read-throughs).
I don’t know what’s going on here, but I certainly welcome the readers. 2020-2022 were the years when I pulled all my books from Kindle Unlimited and tried to go wide on other storefronts. (I believe the trickle of pages were from people who had already “borrowed” it but hadn’t read yet?) However, I didn’t have the energy or time to promote them there, and reversed my decision in late 2023. The timing of this decision was terrible. But we can’t undo that.
I don’t really know why 2024 was so much higher than the others. I have run an ad or two and entered Healers’ Road in one group promotion (although it only partly overlapped the group’s target market). That might be why. We’ll see how next year goes, I guess.
Putting these together, along with a tiny blip from the other markets in 2020-2022:
a) an average of $25 per month is humbling, however:
b) the last $0 month was August 2016. (January 2017 was extremely close, but not zero.)
Conclusion
The conclusion here is kind of a mantra for me: I’m still here. Am I a success? No. By basically any metric, no. Except that I have not given up. Sheer bloody-minded, hanging-on-by-the-teeth determination is something I come back to a lot — it’s why I’m still on earth, and it’s why I’m still doing this. (Just noting that Keifon takes a surname that translates as “one who perseveres” in book 2. He’s not a self-insert, but it’s not a coincidence.)
But I don’t expect to succeed. It would have happened by now if it were going to happen. Success is not why I’m here. Perseverance itself is why I’m here. I don’t try for the sake of winning; I try for the sake of trying, and maybe that’s why I seem to be constitutionally incapable of giving up. Besides, I love writing. The marketing and promotion side drives me up a wall sometimes, but I still love writing, and I love sharing it enough to make the marketing-and-promotion stuff worth doing.
If you’ve read The Healers’ Road, thank you. I learned a lot in writing it, I’ve learned a lot since then, and I hope to keep learning. Even though there are choices I’d make differently if I were to write it now, I still love the characters and the story. Even this much later, and with all its flaws. And that’s the thing: If I were to write it again now, it would be a different story. It’s a product of the person I was at the time.
I’m glad we’re still here. Here’s to the next ten years.