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).
