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.
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