Category: Monthly reports

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.

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.