My Indie Author Business Report – February 2025

February was a pretty good month for me. A great month in terms of exposure and downloads, and pretty good in terms of income.

Revenue and a BookBub deal

I was chosen for a BookBub Featured Deal in early February, and those always give me a big spike in readers. In this case, the deal was for the three-book set of Inquisitors’ Guild stories, and they asked that I make that book free. That led to a bonanza of over 25,000 free downloads as shown here:

For comparison, I only have 128,517 downloads for all nine of my books over the six years I’ve been doing this, so to get a fifth of those in five days is remarkable. Most of those downloads came from this and other free promotions – I only have a little over 5,000 paid sales over six years.

As far as the economics, that’s a lot of free books to give away all at once, for which I don’t get any income, and I also had to pay $489 to secure the feature, plus another couple hundred with other book newsletters who can advertise my feature. That sounds like a losing proposition, but I make back that money in a couple ways. One is that a feature like this sparks a good number of sales after the free period – I had 94 sales of my books in February compared to 34 in January, and I sold some audiobooks too. That’s about $179 in income for February. But the big way it helps is with Kindle Unlimited subscribers, for whom I get a flat rate per page for any of my books they read. A feature like this with that many downloads launches my book upward in popularity on Amazon, and that means a lot of Kindle Unlimited readers who would otherwise not found my books learn of them and read them, sometimes all of them. Here’s what that looks like:

You can see the big increase in pages read on Feb. 4 and 5, sustained throughout the month. That comes out to about $600 in page reads, which, when combined with the sales, more than pays for the promotion. And the surge isn’t over yet, although it usually tapers off after a couple months.

As a bonus, I’ve added about 70 new ratings and some new written reviews for the Inquisitors’ Guild box set over this time, so that’s been neat to see and certainly helps the visibility of my books. These BookBub promotions are the only 100% reliable way I’ve found to market my books effectively.

I also had 14 audiobook sales. The income doesn’t report until later, but these usually earn me between $3 and $4. So, call that maybe another $45 in revenue. Plus one paperback sold through my online shop for a net $9 after shipping.

So, with $172 in ebook royalties, $17 in paperbacks, $614 in Kindle Unlimited, and $45 (ish) audiobooks, I’m at $848 in total revenue.

Expenses

I didn’t do much advertising or incur any other book expenses for January, so we’re looking at mostly the BookBub promo and related expenses plus a few other little things. I paid for the BookBub back in January, but we’ll count it here because this is when it happened and had its impact.

Profit!

So, I made $848 and spent $767, leaving me a net profit of $81. Not paying the mortgage, by any means, but I’ll take it.