I’ve been doing monthly business posts, so here’s my first of 2025.
Revenue
Here’s my revenue from Amazon:
I had nine audiobook sales through ACX, which will be about another $25, and I sold two books in person at an author event at my local library ($30 in revenue). So, put me down for about $315 in revenue.
Kindle Unlimited page reads are in the table, but here’s how it looks in a bar graph. Kenai is the light blue at the bottom of the columns, by far my most-read book, making up more than half of page reads and 1/3 of sales.
Expenses
I turned off my Facebook ads in mid-November and haven’t started them up. I have a few Amazon ads running, but the bids are so low that I seldom get them placed. I invested in a sponsorship for Dr. Who Online that’s still running, but I paid for that back in November, and it’s not doing much. The two books I sold came out of my home stock, which cost me about $6.50 each, although I paid for them back in mid-2024.
All of that is to say, I’m not running many promotions now and haven’t since the middle of November. What that means is that my revenue now is probably my current baseline – what I bring in if I don’t spend anything on promotion or advertising. It’s great that this seems to mean I can still pull 40K page reads and $300 in a month without spending anything, but I’d like to be reaching more readers than that, and some of my books aren’t finding an audience without help from ads.
Upcoming strategies
I have a BookBub promoted free deal hitting in a few days for my three-book box set of Inquisitors’ Guild books. If it works as they have in the past, that will probably lead to thousands of downloads and a whole mess of page reads, and it may lead to read-through on my other books and a bump in the Amazon rankings that lasts for a couple months. That’s what’s happened for most of my other BookBub featured deal promotions, so I’m hopeful it keeps up.
I’ll have some expenses in the next month for new covers in preparation for a mystery book release in February or March and an updated cover for Got Trouble. I’m also probably going to start up some advertising again. I’ve been trying to do some reading on how to make my ad dollars go farther, so we’ll see if I can apply anything I’ve learned.
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.
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).