Category: Book Business (Page 1 of 3)

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.

May was a pretty good month. I had a BookBub Featured Deal for Daros on April 30th, with the book continuing free for five days, and that netted 10,081 downloads the first day and 14,341 over the five day promo. That’s a lot of books in people’s Kindles, although only a fraction of everybody who downloads is going to read it, and they may not read immediately.

The promo did a few different ways, as these free giveaways always do. One is obviously the free downloads, which gives the book to a bunch of folks who might not otherwise have discovered that book, or hopefully, all my books. Another is Kindle Unlimited page reads. When that many people download one of your books, the Amazon algorithm starts to think highly of it, and it pops up more for people to discover. There’s also likely a word-of-mouth boost as well, but that’s hard to quantify or track. You can see the results of the promo in my KU page reads here on a plot of the last 90 days:

Daros is yellow, and you can see that it grew massively after the promo on April 30th. The light blue is my Inquisitors’ Guild box set (three of my fantasy detective novels). They’re still riding high from a BookBub promo in February. Here’s the 90 days before the above graph. Note the axis here is 33% bigger numbers than for the last graph.

Yellow is Kenai here, with Daros in red. It’s clear the BookBub Featured Deals have a huge and lasting impact on KU page reads – I’m four months out from the box set promo and still seeing elevated reads.

A third way the promo helps is in reviews. Daros was at 162 ratings and 38 written reviews on Amazon prior to the promo, and now, a little over a month later, it’s at 315 ratings and 50 written reviews. There’s been similar movement on GoodReads and BookBub. That social testimony is valuable both when people see it and for the algorithm on Amazon to boost my book.

Finally, and this is new for this promo, I saw a big increase in audiobook sales for Daros. I only have audiobooks for four of my nine novels, and I don’t think I’ve had a BookBub for any of them while I’ve had the audio out. I had 107 audiobook sales over the few days surrounding the promo, which was really cool. I got the April payment from ACX just a little bit ago, and the per-book rate was a good bit lower than usual for me, so it may be that these folks were getting the book in a way that costs them less – I’m not quite sure what’s going on there. But it’s great to have people listening.

Revenues

I’m Amazon-exclusive for eight of my nine books, so my revenues are pretty easy to calculate. In terms of sales, I had 64 paid sales:

Daros in light blue was most of them. You can see a slight uptick after May 25, which I think is the Facebook Ads – a couple people bought my whole Inquisitors’ Guild series at once. I also had 47 audiobook sales, most of them at the start of the month from the Daros promo.

For page reads, I had a little over 100,000:

Daros is the big winner here in blue, with the Inquisitors’ Guild box set in yellow.

The Amazon revenue there is $538.77, which is a good month for me – more than double last month. That’s mostly the BookBub bumping up Daros. It’s 88% Kindle Unlimited, 16% ebook sales, and 2% paperback. With 47 audiobook sales, you can probably add about another $70-100 onto that, so let’s call it $610.

Expenses

The BookBub and associated stacked newsletter promotions for Daros were about $650. With the audiobook sales bump last month, I’ve probably broken even on that this month, and Daros sales and page reads should stay elevated for a while longer, so that’s a win. The visibility boost, word of mouth, and additional reviews are on top of that.

One other thing I did this month is that I started advertising my Inquisitors’ Guild series on Facebook. I used my most successful ad to date, one with some custom art I commissioned. I’m running them at $20 a day, and I’m getting a $0.27 per click rate, which I’d like to see higher, but it’s a lot better than my other Facebook ads have been. At that rate, I’d need about one in ten people who follows the link to either buy an ebook or read on KU, but because there are four books in the series, some folks will read the whole series, and if everybody did that, that’s more like 1 in 40, or 2.5%. I don’t think I’m that high in terms of sales, but I am seeing an uptick in paid sales. The KU data are too spotty really to see a signal. I spent about $140 on that in May.

I spent some money on a hotel going to ConCarolinas at the end of the month, where I was a guest and did five different panels. I wasn’t there to sell and didn’t have a vendor table, so I’m not going to count that as a book expense for me – more of a fun weekend, with costs for which I had no expectation of making revenue.

Analysis

If you count the $650 in BookBub and other promos plus $140 in ads, I’m at about $790 in expenses, which is clearly higher than the $610 in revenue I’m predicting. However, I also made $115 in Daros audiobook sales at the very end of last month, which was because of the promo. Adding that in brings revenues and expenses much more into line, and I should see elevated Daros sales and page reads for at least another month or two, so I’d say that’s also a win. Even if we don’t count the future benefits, I’m at $765 in revenues, $790 in expenses, for a loss of $25, one I’ll easily make up this month.

Whether the ads are a good investment remains to be seen. Next month, any impact they have is likely going to be blown away by the upcoming BookBub Featured Deal for The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar, which runs June 10-14. This is the first time that book will be featured, so I expect it will do pretty well. I’m not including the expenses for that in this month, but I will next month, when it goes live.

Links to books mentioned in this post:

• Daros
• Inquisitors’ Guild box set
• The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar
• Kenai

I’ve taken to summarizing my indie author business each month, so here’s March. This month, unlike many others, I did no new advertising (I have a couple small things that are ongoing). My books benefited from the afterglow from a BookBub featured deal at the start of February, although that’s fading now nearly sixty days later. So, this is a month that’s almost entirely profit for me, with very few expenses, and with a little boost from past marketing.

Revenue

Here’s my Amazon revenue (estimated, because they don’t announce the Kindle Unlimited rate until later).

The majority of this (blue bars) is the three-book box set of Inquisitors’ Guild books, which is what the BookBub feature in February was for. That’s $354 of the $487 total, or about 73%. The next highest is Kenai (in yellow) at $39 or 8%. Kenai has been a consistent leader for me. Third place (in red) at $32 goes to The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar, which may include some spillover from the Inquisitors’ Guild books, since it’s also epic fantasy. Good to see that book reaching some folks.

The $487 in revenue includes about $74 in ebook sales, $5 in print sales, and $409 in Kindle Unlimited revenue, making KU 84% of my revenues. That’s a high ratio for me, but I think it comes from the Inquisitors’ Guild set shooting upwards in the algorithm after the promo. I’m usually between 60-80% KU for revenues.

The story is almost the same as far as page reads go, since page reads were such a high source of revenue for me.

If you want to see the impact of the BookBub featured deal, here’s the 90-day history, which includes some time before it. I’m down from the immediate peak, of course, but the continued effects are nice and staying stronger than some of my promos do.

Added to these revenues, I sold seven audiobooks. Those usually net me about $3 each, although I won’t get confirmation for a few more weeks. So, figure I’m nearing $520 in total revenue for March.

Expenses

I spent a little under $4 on some ongoing Amazon ads with keywords that sometimes work, although I should probably cancel those. They’re very low-bid odd keywords, which are the only kind I’ve been able to make profitable, and they don’t scale well, so it’s kind of a waste of effort and time.

I’m obviously benefitting (or profit-taking) from the $700 or so I spent on the February BookBub and assorted related advertising. I broke even on that sometime in late February or early March, so it’s all profit now. I also have an ongoing year-long advertising buy with Dr. Who Online, which I paid for last fall. It was quite expensive and has done nearly nothing for me, so that was a mistake. They had a money-back guarantee, so I’ll see if I can get any of that returned at the end.

Summary

With $520 in revenues and $4 in expenses, this month saw $516 in profits. That’s pretty good, even if some of the profits come from prior months’ expenses.

Even with that success, this is a below-average revenue month for me. I had about $7400 in revenue in 2024, which would be a monthly pace of about $616. However, I reached that higher revenue with some ad spending that didn’t have positive return.

Is lower revenue with profit better than higher revenue with losses? In business terms, absolutely. In terms of growing my audience and my brand, maybe not. I’m going to try some advertising again in April and see if I can get some of my other books juiced up in the Amazon algorithm so that people see them. I can afford to blow some money on this to see if it helps. Still trying to figure out if the long-term growth impact of ad spending and audience building makes the short-term losses worthwhile.

I should also have a new mystery released in April, and I’ll have some launch expenses for that (cover, editing, promos), but I may also see some good initial sales – I usually sell 10-30 books in the month after a release, more if I put some ad money behind it.

I’ve taken to doing monthly reports of my financials as an indie author. I also started doing an annual report last year, which some people found interesting, so I thought I’d continue with that. If you’re curious, here’s last year’s report.

The Books

Here are my books and their relative sales through Amazon last year. It was good to see my newer releases doing well (What Grows From the Dead and The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar). I also had some good success with Kenai, which won the 2023-24 SPSFC this year (announced June 19th). I have audiobook and paperback sales on top of these figures, but Amazon provides most of my revenue.

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 (not counting the relative few paperbacks I sold at conventions or via my web shop).

Revenues

Here are my revenues by category for this past year. A total of about $7,400.

That represents a good improvement over last year, when I made about $4,800. A 54% increase. Yay!

Here’s my year-over-year revenues from regular sources (ebooks, KU, paperbacks, audio) without other minor sources:

So, that growth trend looks pretty good. Some of it is having more books out. Some of it is getting more BookBub features, which provide a huge boost to me. Some of it is getting smarter about how I spend money. And some of it is just spending more money on ads and other promotion.

Expenses

Here are my expenses by category for 2025. A total of about $13,400.

Notes

• I only bought one cover this year, the cover for The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar. Usually, that category would be higher. I spent some money getting art for ads this year, and some of that has been useful in creating Facebook ads.
• I have a very kind and talented friend, Tami Ryan, who has edited and proofed my last five or six books. She doesn’t like charging me money, although I try to send her payments. One time she asked me to donate to an animal shelter instead. So, my editing costs are unusually low.
• I overinvested in giveaways, blog tours, and contest entry fees. I did a ton of giveaways for the Indie Fantasy Addicts Summer Reading Challenge this year which was quite expensive. It’s a great group and fun to be part of, but there’s no way I recoup those costs from the small number of sales and reviews they generate. Blog tours are a lot of fun, and you get some fun reviews and insta pictures, but I’m not convinced they lead to very many sales. With contests, I tried a few new-to-me ones this year that had modest entry fees. That went nowhere, and I doubt I’ll do those again (except for BBNYA, which is very low-cost and run independently). SPFBO and SPSFC are great free alternatives, so I’ll stick with those. There’s no equivalent I can find for mystery/thriller books, which is too bad.
• Many of the convention supplies I bought for this year’s Crash City Con will serve me well for as long as I keep doing this, so those are one-time costs.
• The advertising I did was mostly through Facebook. I’m not sure I’ll continue that, because Facebook has taken a sharp turn toward bigotry in recent weeks, but it’s the only major advertising platform where I’ve come close to breaking even on my ads.
• I was able to get a few Bookbub featured deals this year, and they continue to be great. They’re very expensive, but they’re the only reliably positive-return promotion I’ve found to do. The “New releases for less” Bookbub feature I bought for The Glorious and Epic Tale of ady Isovar, by contrast, was a total bust and a waste of money. Won’t be doing that again.
• I also bought up a full inventory of my books (about ten each, a few more of some titles) in my home to sell. I didn’t have nearly that many before this year, and it represents about $600 in inventory value. So, some of that is product I haven’t yet sold – not really a loss, but rather a kind of unrealized profit.

Analysis

Like my revenues, my expenses also made a big jump from last year, when I spent about $7,200. Last year, I had $4,800 in revenue on $7,200 in expenses, meaning I only made back about 2/3 of what I spent.

This year, I made $7,400 on expenses of $13,400, so I only made back about 55% of what I spent, so that’s worse, both in having a $6000 loss and in having a worse return on expenses. Boo.

That’s not a great year-over-year for a business, unless it’s a business that’s still growing, or where there are other factors at work.

If I were going to offer caveats for some of the expenses, here are two big ones:

• I already know that audiobooks aren’t a good investment for me. Over the several years I’ve had audiobooks out, I’ve made $988 in revenue on about $6375 in expenses for the four books I’ve done audio for. This year, I made the decision to get two more audio books out there (Kenai and What Grows From the Dead) even though I knew they wouldn’t make financial sense. I was doing them more for fun than for profit. That’s a luxury I have with the money I have available. 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. In a sense, then, the $2600 I spent on audiobooks this year (and the $800 I spent this month finishing up the audio for WGFTD) could maybe lie outside my business model.
• I incurred a pretty major advertising expense late in the year, with ads that didn’t go live until December but will last for nearly all of 2025. This is with the Dr. Who Online site. I checked with a friend who had done a sponsorship there, and he said it had gone pretty well for him, so I went ahead and did a big buy there. The ads they created for me are really neat, and there’s some traffic from them, but given how it’s gone for the first couple months, I don’t think there’s any way it’s a good investment for me in terms of return. Live and learn, right? But it also seems like most of the $700 cost should be billed to 2025 rather than 2024.

If I deduct the $2600 in audiobook costs (more vanity/fun on my part than sound business) and maybe $650 of the Dr. Who advertising cost that hits this year, that knocks my expenses down to about $10,150. Kind of fake, yes, but that puts my return for the year at 73% of expenses with a $2,750 loss. Still not profitable, but comparable or a little better than last year.

Here’s how the big picture looks year over year. The shaded areas in the 2024 column at the right are if I take out the audio and 2025 advertising expense 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.

2024 Successes

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

My biggest thrill was having Kenai win the SPSFC. That’s an indie sci fi competition founded by Hugh Howey of Silo and Wool fame. This was the third year of it (Daros was a semifinalist in 2021-22). Kenai won out over 221 entries across nine judging teams in an exciting competition over seven months. I also had a great time meeting other authors – we did some fun interviews and hung out together on YouTube for a bit. Kenai sales and page reads make it my strongest book right now.

I got two new books out, the mystery What Grows From the Dead and the silly epic fantasy The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar. I had an absolute blast writing Lady Isovar, and it’s slowly finding its audience, maintaining one of my highest review averages (4.7 on 68 ratings on Amazon). It also reached the semifinals of SPFBO. What Grows From the Dead got a Bookbub promotion mid-year, and during the week or so it was out there for free, it was downloaded an astounding 20,000 times. That led to a long, successful ride on the Amazon algorithm, leading to a bunch of page reads and a huge number of readers. It’s closing in on 600 ratings on Amazon, which is 250 more than any of my other books, nearly all of them coming in about a three month period.

I hit my second million pages read on Kindle Unlimited, hitting 2,000,000 much faster than I did 1,000,000. This is the graph that gives me the most hope that I’m headed somewhere other than obscurity. Of course it’s been helped out hugely by Bookbub promos, which I can’t control, but I didn’t used to get those in my first four years of this, so that’s getting better too.

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.