I occasionally do reports of my financials as an indie author. I’ve also started doing an annual report a couple years ago, which some people found interesting, so I thought I’d continue with that. If you’re curious in my progress over time, here are the year-end reports from 2023 and 2024.

The Books

Here are my books and their relative sales through Amazon last year. My newest novel, Unwelcome Matt, had a more modest release than some of my others, although it has not yet landed a BookBub Featured Deal, which has really boosted other books, including my top earners. In addition to these figures, I have audiobook and direct paperback sales from my home shop on top of these figures, but Amazon provides the vast majority of my revenues.

All my books are exclusive to Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited except Traitors Unseen, which I use as a reader magnet giveaway on other platforms. Unlike other authors who don’t get much out of KU and prefer the increased sales that come with selling on places like Kobo, Apple, Google, and Barnes and Noble, I have done pretty well in KU, so well that I don’t feel comfortable giving it up. Here is my revenue breakdown for my sales.

Revenues

Here are my revenues by category for this past year. A total of about $5,588.

That represents a significant drop from last year, when I made about $6,600, but it’s above 2023, when I made about $4,800.

Here’s my year-over-year revenues, mostly complete, but occasionally missing a few of the minor sources:

That growth trend looks pretty good until things drop off in 2025. However, I spent a lot less advertising in 2025, and I also didn’t get as many BookBub featured deals as in 2024, which had an impact.

Expenses

Here are my expenses by category for 2025. A total of about $10,650, which is down a little under $3000 from last year.

Notes

  • I published one book and redid the cover for two others this year, so that was a higher cost than usual. I also paid a premium rate (much more than I have in the past) for the new cover art for The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar.
  • I have a very kind and talented friend, Tami Ryan, who has edited and proofed my last seven or eight books. She doesn’t like charging me money, although I try to send her payments. So, my editing costs are unusually low.
  • I reduced my expenses for advertising by quite a bit – that’s the major change this year, and I suspect also it’s the reason for my lower revenues.
  • I increased my spending on newsletter promos for my price promotions (free and $0.99 promos). Part of that is getting access to more of them on BookBub, which I’ve started to do with more regularity. However, I’ve found them to be less effective than they used to be, which may be because their reach is fading, but it may also be that I’m sometimes doing BookBubs for books I’ve already promoted there. They’ve also started a new service which is a little cheaper for free book promotions. I’ve tried that maybe 3-4 times, and it does not have the impact of the featured deals that BookBub is more famous for. I will keep trying to see how much of a return that has.

Analysis

I managed to cut costs this year by $2750, even with some single big-ticket items like part of an audiobook ($800 this year for the 2nd half of the narration) and new premium cover art for Lady Isovar (a little under $1000). With less advertising, though, my revenues fell by about $1000. That is sort of progress, in that I managed to lose $1750 less this year than last, but I’m still net negative by a good margin.

That puts me marginally better off this year than last, as this table (with numbers rounded to the nearest $100) shows.

This isn’t the image of a thriving business, although I am fortunate enough to be able to afford the losses as I try to make this work. Unlike many other indie authors, I also am not necessarily interested in (nor do I need) to have the business be profitable to sustain my livelihood. I’m far more interested in reaching more readers than in finding the highest profit margin that I can. If I could spend $95,000 to make $90,000, for example, I’d be much happier with that $5K loss than spending $15,000 to make $20,000 and netting a $5K gain.

That mindset means that I take some risks and make some indulgences in my expenses that I wouldn’t if I were trying to maintain a strict focus on the bottom line. With that in mind, I can offer some caveats for some of the expenses:

  • I already know that audiobooks aren’t a good investment for me. Over the several years I’ve had audiobooks out, I’ve made $1739 in revenue on about $7175 in expenses for the four books I’ve done audio for. I did have a slightly better year in 2025 than I’ve had in the past, so it’s possible they might eventually cover their cost, but I am doing them more for fun than for profit. That’s a luxury I have with the money I have available to invest. If I were trying to become profitable as fast as possible, I’d have skipped every audiobook after the second one once the pattern became clear. Therefore, the $800 spent on audiobooks this year could maybe lie outside my business model.
  • I also would not count my attendance at WorldCon against my budget. I was not a guest at the convention and wasn’t part of any sessions, so I was there as a fan rather than an author. I had a great time and learned a lot from the panels, but from a business perspective, it sure didn’t make sense to go. If we view that as sci-fi tourism rather than business expenses, that’s another $250 I could knock off the expense side.
  • I also splurged on new covers for two books, Got Trouble and The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar. For Got Trouble, I wanted all my mysteries to have covers by the same artist, Abby Blanchard, and for Lady Isovar, I thought it might be interesting to see if more expensive cover art from a higher-profile artist might translate into more readership. All told, those two redesigns were about $1,430. This was completely an optional expense, one that, if I were trying only to be profitable, I definitely wouldn’t have done – I had good covers for both already.

If I deduct the luxury splurges, i.e. $800 audiobook, $1,430 new covers, and $250 WorldCon participation, that knocks my expenses down to $8,170. That’s admittedly kind of fake, but that puts my return for the year at 68% of expenses with a $2,582 loss. Still not profitable, but at least comparable to the last couple years.

Here’s how the big picture looks year over year. The light-shaded areas in the 2024 and 2025 columns at the right are if I take out the luxury spending like I mentioned above. That’s probably a little bit of BS to make me feel better, but I’m giving both figures, so read it how you want.

2025 Successes

I had some good developments this year in trying to move my indie author career forward. Here are a few:

After winning the SPSFC in 2024 Kenai, I served as a judge last year and this year. The SPSFC is an indie sci fi competition founded by Hugh Howey of Silo and Wool fame, now in its fifth year. I’m in the midst of reading some fun indie sci-fi now, and I look forward to seeing how the competition progresses.

I got one new book out in 2025, the mystery Unwelcome Matt. It’s been doing pretty well, although I am really hoping to get a BookBub deal for it. That’s what really took What Grows From the Dead to its big start in 2024. I also had a story accepted for a long-running sci-fi anthology series, The Expanding Universe, volume 11. This appeared with stories by authors who’ve sold hundreds of thousands of books, so I was proud of that. I also co-wrote a romance novel, Best, with Sarah Estow. We’ve got that drafted, revised several times, and copy-edited, so it’s now just waiting for Sarah’s agent to take a look at it. It was a real blast writing that, and Sarah was a tremendously fun partner with whom to explore a new genre. I also made progress on three other projects, but none are ready for publication.

In terms of milestones, I hit my highest ever number of books downloaded from Amazon in 2025, as shown below. Because Amazon can only show ten books at a time, this actually leaves off the 6,032 downloads of Unwelcome Matt, so the 2025 bar should be around 86,000, and the total at the top left should be right around an even 200,000. The vast majority of these downloads (over 95%) are free books downloaded during price promotions I ran, many of which end up buried on Kindles and never read, but even so, that’s a lot of copies, and it’s still nice to see the numbers going up.

Light blue here is What Grows From the Dead, yellow is Daros, light green is the Inquisitors’ Guild box set, red is Kenai, and purple is The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar.

I had a good year for pages read on Kindle Unlimited, with nearly 800,000 pages this past year. The biggest single force driving the increase is Bookbub promos, which I can’t control. I didn’t used to get those in my first four years of this, but I’ve been getting more opportunities there in the last few years.

The light blue there is the Inquisitors’ Guild box set, with the yellow being Kenai and the red Daros. You can see the big reception for What Grows From the Dead in 2024 in dark blue, but it didn’t sustain into this year, for reasons I haven’t really figured out.

Thanks for reading! I’m happy to answer questions in the comments. If you’re interested in any of my books, please check them out on my book page here.