I put together a progression of 60 days of my page reads in Kindle Unlimited showing good growth from 2019-2024. I stuck with the same date range each year, Sept 1 to Nov 29. Pretty happy with what I found.
Data Notes:
— I rescaled the default vertical axis for the graphs to be comparable year over year.
— I was advertising my first book pretty heavily the first year (2019) which I assume is why the numbers were stronger than 2020.
— I had a BookBub promotion for Kenai in late October 2024 which shows up on the final slide.
I’ve been doing a monthly review of my finances as what I think of as a middle-range indie author – more successful than some, far less successful than others. See here for my thoughts on the developmental stages of an indie author career.
November revenues
Here are my KU page reads:
The teal here is Kenai, for which I ran a recent BookBub promo. More on that later. That’s a very good month for me.
And here are my sales:
Yellow here is the tail end of the Kenai BookBub, while teal is a free promo for The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar. For both, I stacked a bunch of promo newsletter sites. So, most of those are free books, and this isn’t very helpful other than to see what the shape of an advertised free promo is. If you’re curious about that, this graph of the last 90 days shows how much more intense the downloads are for a BookBub vs. just FreeBooksy and other promo sites.
On this, Kenai (via BookBub) is the teal, and TG&ETOLI (via Freebooksy and a few others) is yellow.
If it’s a financial picture, though, the paid sales are more important. Here they are:
In terms of total revenue, I took in nearly $1000 as follows:
This total is overwhelmingly ebooks – I made $972 off ebooks, $10 off paperbacks. It is also largely from Kindle Unlimited, at $733 from KU, $250 from sales. That’s 75% of my revenue here from KU, which is more than usual, but I think that’s probably from the read-through for Kenai after the promotion.
I also had a very good month (for me) for my audiobooks with 17 sales. I won’t get a financial report from that until later, so I don’t know how much revenue it will be, but it’s historically been small, about $3 a book, so maybe $50 if that holds.
I also sold one book via my new online bookstore, for a revenue of about $15, net after shipping and book cost of about $4.
November Expenses
On my monthly ledger, I have $1365.53 in expenses, which is more than I took in. However, $699 of that was for a year-long future advertising contract with a sci-fi website which wasn’t even set up this month. So, probably not fair to put that one in November set against these revenues. If we take that out, we’re left with $666.53 in expenses, which would leave November with a tidy profit of about $370. Neat!
However, that’s not really true, because some of what went on this month is from the BookBub for Kenai which was $523. The BookBub listing itself happened in late October, but all the impact was this month. There’s no question it has already made back its cost in KU page reads and sales of the book after the giveaway, and its impact isn’t entirely finished, as sales and reads of Kenai are still elevated relative to its pre-promotion levels. But, we should probably set that cost against this month’s revenues, especially because I didn’t count it last month. That gets us to a loss of about $150. Not terrible for revenues totalling $1039, but not profitable.
Other notes
I did a bunch of Facebook advertising in September, October, and November. That had a big impact on sales on the books advertised (mostly The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar and my Inquisitors’ Guild series), but it didn’t make up its cost. You can actually see in the revenues and to a lesser extent the KU page reads graphs above when I turned it off, which was on November 15.
I always see an impact from Facebook ads, and I paid an artist to make a cool image for the Inquisitors’ Guild series. Here’s the ad, which is probably the best, most effective ad I’ve run. It had rotating text, so it wasn’t always with this text, and the format was different on phone vs. PC vs. tablet.
And here’s the TG&ETOLI ad, which got a comparable number of clicks but didn’t result in as may sales or page reads. It’s for a single book rather than the series, so that might have an effect, and it only has 50+ reviews as opposed to Flames Over Frosthelm’s 335.
I am happy that my ads get people to check out the book. That’s terrific, and it’s really neat seeing the sales and reviews come in. I wish that they generated more revenue than they cost. Having done this for five years, I’m closer to that point now than I’ve ever been, getting back maybe 80-90% of the advertising cost in revenues, but it’s still a net loss (except for the BookBub featured deals of all stripes). I’m not sure what will push it over the magical edge to profitability.
If it’s writing more books, I can do that, but it will take time.
If it’s getting better ad art and ad copy, I can work on that, although hiring artists is expensive.
If it’s finding better groups to show the ads to or better placements, that’s tricky. The Facebook ad interface is nightmarish and glitchy, and I have had a lot of trouble figuring out the best strategies there.
There’s another possibility, one that I’m toying with, but I’m not sure if it’s real or not. It could be that I just need to get my books seen enough that people read them and like them and review them and discuss them. If that’s the case, then this advertising money is worthwhile even if it is a net loss in terms of revenue, because it is getting me more eyeballs and more ratings and reviews. It could be that spending this advertising money at a loss is me blowing on the embers of my book sales, and it will take a goodly amount of blowing and care to get the books to catch fire and take off.
That’s a seductive thought, though, and maybe a wrong one. If I’m wrong, then advertising more will just keep losing me money, and I’ll be stupid. But I think I’ll keep trying Facebook ads and other pathways. It may be I just have to blow $10,000 or $20,000 to get to a more voluminous and more sustainable business model. If that’s true, it sucks, but it’s not unique to indie publishing – tons of new business operate that way, from burrito shops to car detailers to ecommerce.
The big picture
This year is shaping up to be another good one, like last year, thanks again mostly to the few BookBub featured deals I’ve landed.
Here’s how this year is looking with most of it done. You can see the two big free BookBub giveaways dwarfing whatever else I’m doing, except for the $2000 or so I dropped on Facebook advertising in late September to mid November. Teal here is What Grows From the Dead, while yellow is Kenai.
The KU pages picture is similar, and even more stark. The BookBubs really feed that KU revenue a lot. Interestingly, the Facebook advertising produces more sales.
Finally, here’s my five-year showing since my first release in June 2019. Closing in on two million pages read, which I may reach this year, and revenues growing year over year.
I’ve come up with a (likely imperfect and non-universal) set of stages in the development of an indie author. Here it is:
I’ve been at this five years, and I think I’m probably at the Crossroads stage. A lot of activity under my belt, consistent page reads, nine books out, but not yet making a profit at this (not nearly so).
I’m doing a summary of my October book business. That turns out to be a tricky month to calculate precisely. I’ll start with the basics and then get into the complications.
Basics
Sales
The total orders graph is stupid, because I had a BookBub fueled giveaway for Kenai in the last couple days of the month which wipes everything else out on the graph.
If you take out those zero-revenue giveaway books, I still have pretty robust sales through Amazon:
The top sellers by far were my fantasy books, with the other four books (sci fi and thriller) making up only 38 of the sales. The peak around October 10-11 is artificial – about 70 of those are free books I gave away as prizes as part of the Indie Fantasy Addicts Summer Reading Challenge (see discussion below).
Page Reads
74K is a lot of pages for Kindle Unlimited for me – a very good month. The top books were What Grows From the Dead and Flames Over Frosthelm at about 18K each, the Inquisitors’ Guild box set at about 13.5K, and Lady Isovar at 7K. All of those were books I advertised at various points, and I think the advertising (mostly on Facebook) helped them find readers. You can see a bit of a spike in dark blue on October 31 – that’s the echo (in page reads) of Kenai rocketing to the top of the Amazon rankings during the massive giveaway (14K books given away so far). That should persist into November if it follows the pattern of past promos I’ve done.
Income
Item
Sales
Value
Amazon Paperbacks
14
$31.08
Ebooks
234
$557.26
Audiobooks
48
$115.90 (estimated)
Web shop paperbacks
11
$144.57
Total Book Sales
307
$848.81
KU page reads
74107
$337.08
Total revenue with KU
$1,185.89
And here are my monthly expenses, at least the ones that relate to this month’s sales:
Expenses
Type
Expense
Advertising
$1,131.44
IFA free book prize codes
$323.76
Web shop book shipping
$25.32
Cost of paperbacks & reviewer copies
$101.68
Overseas IFA prize shipping
$50.65
Total
$1,632.85
Summary
OK, that’s a loss of about $450 with these numbers. Not great. However, some of that is because I ended up sending a lot of free books as prizes for the Indie Fantasy Addicts Summer Reading Challenge. That event is about $200 of my losses this month – a marketing expense that may pay off later as reviews and word-of-mouth comes in, and not something that happens every month.
One thing I tried deliberately this month is doing some Facebook advertising, something I haven’t done much of this year. It always has a response, but in the past, it’s rarely made back its cost, sometimes only a depressing fraction of its cost. I was closer to break-even this time, but I’m not there yet. I will probably slow that down in November, although it’s been gratifying seeing the (much) increased sales and page reads and reviews come in.
Complications
I said there were some complications, and boy are there. Here are some, just to give a fuller picture of what expenses I run more broadly:
Audiobook revenue estimates: I’m not sure I have that right. This has been the biggest month for Audiobook sales I think I ever had, not for any reason I can explain. Most of the sales are not the new Kenai audiobook – it’s mostly Daros and Flames Over Frosthelm which have been out for a long time. I did the estimate here based on the average revenue per book from October 2021-May 2024, which is only a couple dollars. That might be low, though, because a lot of those “sales” were actually free reviewer codes, and I didn’t give out any free codes for the older books this month. I won’t know the truth of it until ACX releases October revenue numbers, which probably won’t be until December.
IFA reading group prizes: I took part in the Indie Fantasy Addicts Summer Reading Challenge this year (check out their Facebook group). I was on a reading team, but I also participated as a sponsoring author, which means I got to send out my books as prizes to the winners of the summer challenge. I also put some of my books up as unlimited prizes, and a LOT of people chose them. Because nearly all my books are in KU, I’m supposed to be Amazon-exclusive for such things, which means when I give books away, I’m supposed to buy redemption codes for other people. This is only possible to do for the Amazon you’re local to (in my case US Amazon), but I tried to do it for all the winners who could take part. That was a lot of books this time, and it cost me the full price of the book, so I ended up spending about $435 on all the codes. However (even more complicated!) – (1) not everybody redeems the codes, so I can return the unused ones after a couple months, and (2) I get royalties for the redeemed codes, so I make back about $2.80 out of the $3.99 + $0.27 tax I spend on my own books. With 76 copies redeemed so far (out of 102 bought), that means I spent $323.76 but got $212.27 of that back in royalties. That’s included (both as books and dollars) in the tables above.
Other IFA prizes: The IFA SRC also included two paperbacks which I shipped internationally. That’s about $6.40 per book (which I spent months ago to build up my home supply) and about $25 in shipping for each of two overseas deliveries. I also gave away four audiobooks, but I could do that with reviewer codes from ACX with no additional cost to me.
Audiobook: In October, I started an audiobook project for What Grows From the Dead, so there’s another $700 there to get the narrator the first half of his money. I didn’t count that in this month’s expenses, because it’s a future project. I’ll certainly count it in my annual reckoning, although I’m sort of feeling like the audiobooks I do (three now, with a fourth on the way) are so far from making their costs back, and so slow to do so, that I’m doing them more for fun with extra cash than I am to make money. If I were making the decision strictly on profit/loss concerns, I wouldn’t do the audiobooks, at least not after the first one which took so long to recover. Alternatively, I’d do them with revenue-sharing only, but I don’t feel comfortable having the narrators do a bunch of uncompensated work for me, or I could self-narrate. But I’d rather have quality audiobooks out there. Maybe someday when I hit it big, they’ll make their costs back, but it’s a losing proposition now.
Restocking my web shop supply: I have been selling from my home supply both over my web shop (recently revamped), with books for reviewers, and at in-person events like Crash City Con. I have another couple events lined up soon, and I was running low on some of my books, so I spent another $368 restocking my home supply, which is about 120 books when fully stocked. I didn’t count that in this month’s expenses, although I’ll include it in my end-of-year, because it’s not really a monthly expense. I did count the cost (in bulk) of the paperbacks I sent out this month to customers and reviewers (about $6.35 per book) for this month’s expenses.
My end-of-month BookBub promo: I am in the middle of a giveaway for Kenai via BookBub and other stacked promos. That’s having a big impact, but nearly all of the revenues will probably be in November, so even though I paid for all of it in September and October, I’m leaving that $701 or so out of this month’s expense summary.
Expenses for next month’s free promo: I scheduled a free promo for The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar for November. It’s not a BookBub one, so it’s a lot cheaper, but there are still a couple hundred dollars of expenses there. I’ll put them in the November summary (and the end-of-year reckoning also).
Here’s a recap of how it went for my first attempt at selling books and games at a convention. I was at Crash City Con 2024. The registration was easy, the hosts were kind and helpful, I met cool people, and it was overall a fun experience.
In terms of how the business end went, here’s the skinny:
Books sold: 31 Games sold: 12
Total Revenue: $341
As far as direct event costs, I had the following:
Vendor space: $100 Hotel: $263 Gas to Roanoke: Maybe $18 Credit card processing: $7
Total event costs: $388
So, that gives me this:
Direct event return: $341 – $388 = $47 loss
Nearly breaking even that way. But now let’s look at cost of goods:
Cost to me of books sold: $198 Cost of games sold: Calling it zero. I have a ton of these still, and I’ve already more than made back printing costs for all five print runs, and I’m unlikely to do another print run, so each one sold is effectively pure profit for me. Just trying not to die with 2,000 games in my basement.
Not counting food or my time, because my job is this now, and I’d have eaten anyway.
Net return with goods costs: $341 – $586 = $245 loss
That’s not super sustainable, but it’s not too terrible for a learning experience, given this was mostly a trial run for doing this kind of thing more.
Lessons learned:
This particular convention had just moved to a bigger venue, and the vendor room was in a side space and pretty dead for most of it. Other sellers with more experience doing this were disappointed in their sales relative to other events. People who’d been to this one earlier said they’d had a better experience before.
I should probably find a convention that’s broader interest, not primarily RPG gaming like this one, since the books and puzzle games were only a side interest for many.
I should bring more books. I sold 7 of Daros and only had a few left. If the sales were stronger, I’d likely have run out of a couple titles.
I probably discounted the books too much. I was below the prices from other authors, and I didn’t leave myself much of a margin if people bought 3-4 books or more.
Very few people, even kids, wanted the cool stickers I printed up.
On the intangible benefits side, I got to meet some cool authors and made friends with my booth neighbors. I participated in a comically tragic author panel (the audience was nearly 100% wives of the panelists). I got to meet some new readers and spread the word about my books, even if they didn’t buy anything. The ones who bought one or two books might be back to buy more.
Most wonderfully, a reader who’s read and reviewed almost all my books tracked me down at the con and brought a stack of her paperbacks for me to sign. Once she introduced herself, I knew exactly who she was – she writes wonderful, warm reviews of all my books. So great to meet her in person. We talked about books and other stuff for 10-15 minutes.
All in all, an interesting experience, and it seems worth trying again with these lessons learned. I bought some shop and display supplies that I can use again, and the logistics I set up mostly worked.
I landed a BookBub featured deal about a month ago for my mystery novel, What Grows From the Dead. I’ll abbreviate the book as WGFTD for ease in typing from here on out. BookBub featured deals are competitive – I’ve been applying for them for five years since my first novel came out, and I only started landing them last year, despite applying with most of my books every month. This was my sixth, my second world-wide (as opposed to just non-US markets), and my first free deal (a giveaway). Because it was a deal for free books, I wasn’t sure it would be worth the hefty price tag, $712, because I wouldn’t earn any direct income from the books being claimed and downloaded.
Still, every other BookBub has either made me a positive return on book sales or come close, and they’ve all had a big response, so I decided to try it out.
Costs
I had five days I could set the book for free. I decided to use the BookBub promotion as my first-day promo and then add other book newsletter announcements afterwards. This is called “stacking” – doing announcements on successive days to keep your book being downloaded by new people, to make the most of your promo. I’ve seen a number of people recommend this, although I have no way to test if it’s better or worse than just one big announcement, or putting all your announcements the same day, but I figure I’ll listen to people smarter than I am. I set up the following announcements with the following costs:
Day
Site
Cost
1
BookBub
$712
2
FreeBooksy
$100
3
Book Adrenaline
$30
3
Book Cave
$49
Total
$891
These are all promo sites I’ve had some luck with for giveaways in the past. I also ran a set of smaller free newsletter announcements through KDROI, a Firefox plugin I bought a while ago that submits to about 30 smaller newsletters for free.
So, let’s go with an $891 total cost.
Results: Downloads
The results of my five-day free giveaway period were way beyond what I expected. I’ve done free giveaways before, promoted with FreeBooksy and other stacked promos, and I’ve had never more than about 5000 downloads, often more like 2000 or 3000. For this one, with BookBub, I had 20,000 downloads on the first day, and a little over 30,000 overall over the five days. Here’s how it looks for that one book with the others stripped out (they weren’t free, so they don’t show up here even though it says All 10 books).
To put that in context, for all my books, over five years, I had about 47,000 downloads. In five days, I got another 30,000, all of one book. Here’s how that looks on my Amazon history graph, with the blue bar at right being this five-day giveaway.
Note: The vast majority of these “units processed,” 93% of them, are free giveaways run at various times over five years. I only have about 5500 actual sales, and a good chunk of those (maybe 3000) are from $0.99 promos.
So, I definitely moved a ton of books. A crap ton, if I might be so bold. And that earned me precisely zero dollars. However, there were some other benefits to doing this. These are benefits I expected, but I had no idea what the magnitude of them would be.
Results: Page Reads
The primary way I was going to make a return on this promotion was through page reads in Kindle Unlimited. I’ve chosen to put all my books but two (my children’s book from 1998, which is traditionally published, and my promo novella, which I use as a reader magnet) in Kindle Unlimited, and it generally makes up about 2/3 of my total income from the books any given year.
The page reads for What Grows From the Dead soared as the promo got going. This has happened for me in the past with other free promos. I’m not entirely sure of the mechanism for this, but I think it’s an algorithmic response within Amazon’s system and/or with readers. My book certainly jumped to the top of the main Amazon rankings for free books (see below) and to the top of its categories (mystery/thriller, cozy mystery). So, anybody searching for a book like this (or, actually, for any book at all) probably had a much easier time finding it while it was famous from all the downloads.
Here’s what’s happened with the page reads. I included a good chunk of June to show a before and after. The teal blue is the promoted book. The growth in page reads starts up on June 28th (the first day of the giveaway) and then peaks from July 2-8, and then starts to drift down.
There’s a little bit of read-through to my other books as well, although not a ton, which you can see if I take out WGFTD:
The book that gets the clearest boost is Got Trouble, in red on the bottom graph, which makes sense – it’s the closest match in genre to WGFTD, so the next logical one of my books to read. I think it’s fair to say that nearly all of my other books (epic fantasy and sci fi) do a little better following the Jun 28 promo.
Results: Rankings
When you do a promoted free giveaway, you’re looking for a jump in rankings. WGFTD got that, reaching as high as the #2 overall free book on Amazon, and the top mystery and cozy mystery, a status that lasted for a couple of days. Once your book is no longer free, it blinks back to the paid book rankings, which don’t include all the free downloads, so your sales rank plummets back to about where it was before the promotion, maybe boosted a bit from follow-on sales after the promotion from recommendations or other readers who notice it.
However, the Sales Ranks listed on the book’s public-facing Amazon page aren’t the whole story. On your Author Central dashboard, you can go to the Reports + Marketing tab and see your book’s sales rank history. This is clearly some kind of amalgamation between free and paid sales, plus maybe KU page reads, because it doesn’t have a sharp drop-off after the book switches back to paid. So, it’s a kind of overall ranking, although I have no idea what the math behind it is. Here’s what WGFTD’s sales rank looks like over the past four months since publication:
You can see the clear and sustained spike at the right side as the promo begins, staying high for a while afterward.
One problem with these graphs is that they don’t have a consistent Y axis scale, so it can be hard to compare one book to another. WGFTD has a broad scale, going to 1.25 million at the bottom. You can see a bit of a response following the June 28th promo in the rankings of my thriller, Got Trouble, but note this graph only goes down to 1 million at the base, so it’s a bit more stretched out than the previous one.
None of my other books show a clear June 28th inflection, so the carryover ranking effect for them is likely small, maybe within the noise of individual sales for those books. That’s what I think those sharp peaks are on the graphs – individual sales, or maybe page-read clusters, that peak and then get smoothed back to baseline.
One thing to note here is that I haven’t promoted these two mystery/thriller books in many other ways this year. I’ve done essentially no promo for Got Trouble, and I’ve done a GoodReads giveaway (which seems to have had no effect on sales rank or on much else) and a small LibraryThing giveaway for WGFTD earlier this year, plus some promo for the release on March 9th, but no ads or anything else. So, whatever’s happening on the right end of these ranking graphs is almost certainly from the BookBub free promo.
Results: Sales
There was a little bit of sales activity for the book during and following the giveaway, probably in response to the high ranking, or maybe some word-of-mouth from people who read it right away. As you can see below, where WGFTDis yellow, I only had one sale in June prior to the promo, and afterward, I have 16, two of them paperbacks that were bought during the promo itself. This isn’t a huge return cash-wise, as I only make about $2.75 per book sold, but it’s definitely a bump. Call it $40-45.
Results: Ratings and Reviews
The other big boost from having so many books out there is that people actually read them and offer reviews. This isn’t a cash return on my promo investment, but I think it’s still important. I should have made better notes, but I think WGFTD was at about 35 ratings on Amazon before the promo with maybe 15 written reviews. On Goodreads, you can go back and track those stats on your author dashboard, but they don’t match the page exactly, and it’s hard to know why. I think I had about 30 ratings on GoodReads and 25 reviews.
As of right now, I’m at 334 ratings, 29 written reviews on Amazon, and 226 ratings, 38 reviews on Goodreads.
So, if we’re willing to assign all of these new ratings to the promo, which is probably not exactly true but is mostly true, it looks like this:
Site & Type
Before promo
After promo
Change
Amazon ratings
35(?)
334
+299
Amazon reviews
15(?)
29
+14
Goodreads ratings
35(?)
226
+181
Goodreads reviews
25(?)
38
+13
So, there’s been a tremendous increase in ratings on both platforms and a smaller but still significant increase in written reviews, both of which offer reader testimony as to the book’s quality. The readers you reach in a free giveaway like this aren’t likely to be as attuned to your work as the fans who find your books as they come out, so you’d expect the ratings to drop with this wider, less die-hard audience. That happened a bit, although not by a lot – WGFTD was about a 4.6 on each platform before the promo, and it’s now down around 4.5 on each. Interestingly, most of the new responses were ratings-only, not written, which is different from the readers I generally attract, who are more likely to write a review when they rate.
As a bottom line, in under three weeks, WGFTD has now exceeded the number of ratings for my most popular book, the epic fantasy detective story Flames Over Frosthelm that’s been out since 2019.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
As I’ve shown above, I have some degree of economic return on my investment in this promo from page reads and increased sales. I also have intangible returns in the form of higher sales rank and more visibility on Amazon, more ratings and reviews, and more readers who’ve now experienced one of my books and might get a nudge when I release another (or, if I’m lucky, might follow me and eagerly await a next release). It’s very hard to put a dollar value on those intangible returns, so let’s skip that and see how the world of cold, hard cash looks.
To do that, I’m going to attempt to figure out what my baseline book income was before the promo. Using KDP’s Royalties Estimator, that looked like this for about three weeks prior to the promo:
That averages out to about $6.94 per day, composed of sales and KU page reads.
After the promo, it looks like this:
That averages out to about $37.17 per day, with the majority of it being KU page reads of WGFTD.
If I subtract out the $6.94 per day baseline and multiply by 22 days since the promo started, I get $30.23 x 22 = $665.08.
By that math, I’ve lost $891 – $665 or $226 on the promo. A net loss. However, the revenue hasn’t stopped – I’ll bet my page reads stay elevated for a bit longer, although it’s hard to know how long. That will help close the gap, as will sales from word-of-mouth recommendations or the higher sales rank I now enjoy.
Also, the intangibles – the sales rank, the visibility, the (I hope) new fans, the glut of new ratings and reviews – all of those are things I’d gladly have paid a couple hundred bucks pursuing. So, I’m going to call this a clear win, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
I did a financial wrap-up of my indie publishing efforts for 2022 that garnered some interest from other indie authors. The bottom line for 2022 was that I made a little over $2000 in revenue in 2022 compared to about $6700 in expenses, for a loss of around $4700. Not great, but growing in some good ways, and $2000 of the expenses last year was for production of the audio version of Daros, a big one-time investment that won’t repeat. I thought I’d do the same for this past year.
Revenues
So, let’s look at 2023 revenues. Here’s the Amazon revenue picture:
Here are the results for 2023 for individual books:
Markets
Amazon reported revenue from 11 countries, although many of them were negligible, including my three-cent totals from Brazil and India. Here is the breakdown by country – you can see the seven smallest markets fit into less than 1% of total revenue.
Formats
Here’s the revenue breakdown by format:
For me, Kindle Unlimited is a huge piece of my income. A lot of indie authors feel like going “wide” and getting rid of Amazon exclusivity helps them, but that move would have to more than double my sales revenues to make up for the lost Kindle Unlimited revenue to be worth it for me. I’m not ready to take that risk yet.
Audiobooks
There was another approximately $218 in Audible payments for Flames Over Frosthelm and Daros. At that rate, it will take a good many years to recoup my expenses (about $3200) for creating those two audio books, making it not a very good investment, but if I am able to grow my audience and increase audio sales, that analysis might change.
There’s also a small amount of revenue for paperback sales through my online store (and also in person). The profit and volume on those is pretty negligible, but it’s probably another $50 for the year, give or take.
That total revenue, maybe $4750-$4800, is a whole lot better than last year’s $2000 or so, more than double. Yay! But why? I would hope some of it is just from having more books out (I released two this year, Got Trouble and Kenai), and also from having reached more readers as I continue to work to expand my audience. But it’s also because of BookBub.
The role of BookBub featured deals
My first four BookBub featured deals were key revenue events this year. I’ve been applying for these competitive opportunities since I started publishing back in 2019, but I didn’t get any until this year. I’ve heard that BookBub is less willing to feature an Amazon-exclusive book, so that might be part of my difficulty, but it’s hard to say.
I had four features in total this year, each of which produced results big enough to be visible in the revenue graph above:
March 2023: (the big one) A global featured deal for my 3-book Inquisitors’ Guild compendium (light blue above) for $0.99. This cost me $712 plus a bunch of other advertising I stacked with the BookBub, but I made the BookBub cost back in sales and then had improved Kindle Unlimited page reads for several months afterward, making it a definite win for me.
September 2023: Another featured deal for the 3-book compendium, this one non-US only. This cost $196 plus other stacked ads and had a much smaller impact, although I still think it was a net positive.
November 2023: A non-US feature for Kenai (yellow above) for $167, which I think had a significant impact, although Kenai was doing well all year since its release.
December 2023: A non-US feature for Daros (green above) for $167. This also seemed to do well, reigniting interest in a book that had a great 2021 but which has slipped a bit since then.
I’m really hoping that I can continue these featured deals in the coming years. They’ve had by far the best return on investment of my advertising efforts. However, I have no control over when they are granted vs. rejected, which is a little frustrating.
Expenses
I didn’t do any audio books this year, which was a significant savings compared to last year. I did continue routine advertising, mostly on Facebook and Amazon, but also including blog tours for Got Trouble and Kenai. I spent a lot on some probably ill-advised expensive ongoing ads for Got Trouble on Amazon, too. Here are my expenses by category:
Promos (paying services to advertise free or discounted books) and Ads (general ads for my books) are similar, but I broke them out so that I could see what was happening. The BookBub featured deals mentioned above are a major component of the Promos category.
The “Giveaways” category is a GoodReads giveaway I did there for Got Trouble. I’ve done a few of those for other books. I’m not sure how much return there is for those, although it does get your book added to people’s “To Read” lists.
Summary
Last year, I had $2000 in revenue on $6700 of expenses, or a loss of $4700 or so, or -235% of revenue. That sounds bad, but of course I’m in this for the long haul, and I expect to lose money for a while until I get more established and figure out what expense choices produce useful results.
This year, I have $4800 in revenue on $7200 in expenses, or a loss of $2400 or so, or -50%. That’s progress, although it’s still not positive. But it’s headed in the right direction.
I have the ability (and true privilege) to be able to sustain losses like that for a while to get this going – I don’t need my book revenue to pay my mortgage or put food on the table, which is a huge advantage. And profitability is of course not a great way to measure the value of art. But it’s still interesting to keep track.
A loss of $2400 sounds bad, though. If I want things to look better, I can focus on revenue and readership, and for those categories, 2023 looks like a really good step in the right direction.
The good news about 2023
I had a huge number of paid orders compared to previous years (although many of them were at $0.99 for the BookBub deals, which made me only about $0.30 per book):
Light blue here is the Inquisitors’ Guild compendium, red is Daros, light green is Kenai, yellow is Flames Over Frosthelm, and purple is Got Trouble.
I also broke a million total pages read on Kindle Unlimited, with over half of that million coming this year, much of it buoyed by the BookBub promotions:
Light blue here is the 3-book Inquisitors’ Guild compendium, light green is Kenai, purple is Got Trouble, red is Daros, and yellow is Flames Over Frosthelm.
Conclusion
So, 2023 was a banner year in a lot of ways, but not yet a profitable one. The year-over-year trend is terrific, but it’s probably not sustainable – there are only so many BookBub featured deals I can get, and they’re not certain. But, if I keep writing more books and reaching more readers, I might even get this thing to work.
I’m having a lot of fun, and it’s great to see people responding to my books, and that’s the most important part.
Until October 13, you can get a free copy of The Outcast Crown for Kindle via Amazon. Enjoy the second story in the Inquisitors’ Guild series. This novel introduces some new characters and carries on the story of some of your favorite characters from the first book.
It’s not necessary to have read the first book to enjoy the second – it’s a stand-alone story, full and complete. However, you might enjoy starting with Flames Over Frosthelm if you want to read them in chronological order.
For the moment, I’m offering a free ebook copy of Traitors Unseen to anybody for signing up for my newsletter mailing list. To claim your free copy and sign up, go to this link: Get my free copy of Traitors Unseen
I’ve done two free promotions now, and both of them have been followed by bumps in Kindle Unlimited page reads. Here are the page reads in graph form. The green arrows show the timing of the five-day free promotions.
The first promotion resulted in over 3000 free copies given away. The other one was more modest, I think in part because of the time of year (after Thanksgiving), with about 1600 books given away. In both cases, the ranking of my book shot up in the categories it is in, reaching #1 or #2 in some cases. That is supposed to impact discoverability on Amazon, even for free books, so I think it really helped.
I also got some more reviews on GoodReads and on Amazon after each promotion, which was great, and what I was looking for.
