So, I didn’t get around to running the ads I was hoping to this month, so it was another quiet month of sales, and one that would have been almost pure profit, except that I landed a BookBub Featured Deal for Daros which ran on April 30. This was a free promotion (i.e. giveaway), which for me means there’s a big spike in downloads, but the revenue comes after, mostly from Kindle Unlimited page reads and to a lesser extent from increased sales after the book jumps up in the rankings.

That means I’d normally count the expenses for the BookBub and associated stacked promos as a May thing, because most of the impact would be in May. However, for the first time ever, I had a big jump in audiobook sales that hit with the BookBub promo, selling 107 copies. Here’s how it went:

My audiobook sales are generally very low when I’m not advertising. By comparison, I’ve sold only two other audio copies of Daros this whole year. So, this was absolutely unexpected for me. I’ve never had a BookBub for a book I have an audiobook out for (except for the Inquisitors’ Guild box set, for which Flames Over Frosthelm has an audio version, but that’s never produced an audiobook boom, probably because they’re not linked on the BookBub deal).

I generally make about $3-4 per audiobook sale reported on ACX, although the accounting and payout comes much later, so I won’t know for sure. But, call this 71 books on April 30 times $3 yields $210 in revenue, a significant fraction of the BookBub cost. This is great for my otherwise somewhat disappointing audiobook endeavor, although it still doesn’t make audio profitable. The books cost me between $1200 and $2000 to produce with a human narrator, which doesn’t make sense financially at this point – I’m still deep in the red for all four audiobook projects I’ve done, having only sold 504 copies of all four combined. But the increased audio sales make the BookBub promos an even better financial deal, even with the book as a free giveaway.

Revenue

My April revenue estimate from Amazon was $242.67:

The biggest piece there is the Inquisitors’ Guild box set in light blue ($121), which is still elevated from the BookBub promo on Feb. 4th. Kenai is the next highest at $40, Lady Isovar a close third at $32, and the other six books lower. $48 from ebooks, about $8 from print, and $187 from Kindle Unlimited, for 77% of Amazon revenue from KU. That’s high, but I always have a high KU percentage, and it’s not out of line.

To that we add potentially $225 or so from 75 audiobook sales, for total revenues of $465.67.

Expenses

The Daros BookBub ($450) plus other stacked promos was a total of $580. BookRaid is still out there but will come in in May at $60. Other than that, I had about $3 in a few low-cost low-impact Amazon ads, and my annual $70 for StoryOrigin, a website that helps organize author partners to feature for my twice-monthly newsletter. So, total billed expenses was $653.

Reckoning

So, that’s $653 in expenses vs. $466 in revenues for a loss of $187. A big chunk of that loss is the BookBub feature, which was the last day of the month, so most of the income from that will accrue later. Another chunk is the StoryOrigin subscription, which is annual, so again that’s hitting April hard. All in all, not a bad month.

Schedule willing, I should have a new release this month. That means some expenses for cover and cover design, but it also means I should have a modest chunk of sales as my fans pick it up. I do want to get some ads going to preserve a little bit of this momentum from the BookBubs and try to get the fire burning in a more robust fashion.