2011 in review

Well, it’s been nearly a year since I began self-publishing—I actually started in mid-January 2011, but we’ll call it a full year to make it easy.  Overall I’ve been very happy with how things have been going.  I’ve made some cash and learned a lot and I feel well-prepared to keep moving forward.  Here are some random thoughts:

My experience with KDP Select is mixed—I have one story and one story collection in the program right now.  My sales have been good, but I couldn’t say that they’re a direct result of any exposure I have in KDP Select, since it might just be holiday buying.  Also, I find it maddening that Amazon’s sales reporting is so mushy, lumping in free “sales” with paid sales.  I really prefer B/N’s system.  As I’d said in an earlier blog post, I think that for those with a wide variety of other books, Select may be a useful way to introduce a new title, so I may try it again in the future.

I’m planning to focus almost exclusively on novels in 2012.  I released my romance novel the second week in December and I’ve had 10 sales, which I am thrilled with—no marketing, no ads, nothing, and I still got 10 sales.  I fooled around with the price a bit; it’s currently at 3.29 but I’ve had it as high as 3.95 (and I actually had some sales at that price).  The followup book is well under way and I hope to release it in February or March.

I absolutely love the Kindle Fire I got for Christmas, but I have decided to buy all my new books from Barnes and Noble from now on.  Amazon doesn’t need my help, but I would like to do my part to make sure B/N sticks around for a good long while.

November was my best month all year, and just today I edged past that on Barnes and Noble (and I am guessing that I passed last month’s Amazon total earlier), so December now jumped into the number one spot.  It’s still not a huge amount of money coming in—enough to pay some bills, though, so I’m not complaining.  I’m earning about 3% of what I would need in order to write as a full time job.

My goals for 2012 (keeping in mind Dean Wesley Smith’s recent post about the difference between goals and dreams):  finish and release three more novels (thus a total of four on sale), as well as two stories and a novella I have on the back burner.  Considering that the 2^nd novel is about halfway finished, I think I’m making good time.  And as for dreams?  Well, I have plenty of those too, believe me.

Happy new year!

Today's big, huge, enormous Amazon news

So I'm not going to pretend that I know enough about self-publishing yet to say that I can fully appreciate the announcement of KDP Select this morning.  But in a nutshell, holy shit! :)  So you can put up a title exclusively at Amazon to be lent to Amazon Prime members, yet still get paid a percentage of a monthly pot of a half-million dollars.  AND you can choose 5 days every 90-day period to make that title free--thus stimulating downloads by non-Prime members?  Amazing.  Of course, this will work best for those who have other titles that the above will generate interest in, so it might be a tad early for me.  And I'm sure that even this will not sit right with some authors, based on the never-ending debate about pricing, lending and so on.  But I'm certainly going to be watching this closely, that's for sure.  Once I have a larger backlist available--I'm thinking a year from now--this could be huge.  For others, this will be huge already.

 

About the only downside I see at the moment is that it requires that the titles are not available elsewhere in the same format, though if I remember paper books are okay.  Thus you can't sell from B/N, Smashwords and so on, or even your own website.  For many authors who have books out through other available channels, I suspect it would be more trouble than it's worth to take down titles, but for somebody who's just about to put out a new one, this Christmas gift came early.

 

Very, very interesting day.

82,243

So I finished the first draft of my novel at 6:27 this morning, topping out at a bit over 82K words.  All told it took me about 4 months to write.  Now I'm going to get it to my beta reader (AKA my wife) and make some edits, hopefully finishing everything in time to get it up for sale by Christmas.

After that, I'm planning to begin work on another novel immediately.  I'm coming up on 11 months self-publishing and I've learned a lot from monkeying around with shorter works this year.  By Christmas 2012, however, I hope to have a total of four novels completed.  In other words, I'd like to write three more novels in 13 months, which should be doable given my performance on the first one.  I have one largely plotted out entirely, another roughly sketched out, and the third is still percolating a bit.

I saw a Kindle Fire at Target yesterday; although it looks kind of plain, I have to admit that it is pretty F'ing cool.  My son, of course, recognized it as yet another way to play Angry Birds, so I might skip buying it altogether since I'd never get to use it while he's around.

Getting close now...

I've made good progress on the novel; as of this morning I topped 78K words and I'm down to three chapters that remain unfinished.  I hope to have it entirely completed a week from today, which will give me not much time for editing, etc. before Christmas, but I'm hoping it can be done.

 

Happy Thanksgiving! 

Making money

The only reason I don't have Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog in my sidebar is because her husband Dean Wesley Smith recaps almost every post of hers on his blog, as far as I can tell.  And my blog list is long enough as it is.  Okay, two reasons.

Anyhoo, one of her recent entries had one line in particular which really caught my eye:

Now, consider this: Traditional publishers never expect to  make a lot of money on one book.  They expect to make a little bit of money on every book.

I doubt I'll ever be up there with Locke, Hocking and Konrath.  But that doesn't mean that I can't keep working, adding to my digital shelf space, and in the end do well, bit by tiny bit.

The novel is being a stubborn son of a bitch, by the way.  It absolutely refuses to finish up; as of today I'm just under 73K words.  When I first started, I imagined that it would be about 50K.  Then I thought it would hit 60K.  Now I'm afraid that it will surpass 80K, even after I trim it a bit during revisions. 

I guess I don't mind too much, but it's a bit surprising since I wrote my 32K novella earlier this year and at the time struggled to write that much!

OK, back to work!

October update

So after a lot of thought, I decided to release a series of short stories in October--things I had thought of doing quite a while ago, but had decided not to do.  Why not?  Because the idea was for an erotica series with a smuttily amusing title, taking some sex scenes that I'd included in my earlier works and remixing them.  Frankly, writing sex is about the most boring thing I've ever done, and I wasn't eager to spend more time doing that when my novel still isn't finished.  However, I came to the conclusion that if I'm really going to treat this as a business--which I am--then I can't afford to pass up an opportunity to publish something that will sell.  And if there's one thing I've seen this year, it's that sex sells.

So I took two weeks and whipped out seven new titles (well, "new" is not exactly correct, but I was at least rearranging what I'd previously written).  The results?  Behold the glory of my first-ever graph:

I now have 22 titles out across Amazon, B&N and Smashwords, ranging from single stories at .99 each to bundled collections of stories (2.99-3.99), novellas (2.99) and bundled novellas (5.98).  At the risk of jinxing it, I can report that November is on a pace to be my best month yet in terms of both sales and royalties.

The novel is still not completed (due in part, of course, to the two-week break I took to write smut) but as of this morning has hit over 65K.  It just won't stop!  I'm expecting it to top out at about 75K, and I still hope to have it finished by Thanksgiving, although that's a lot less sure than it was a month ago.

OK, back to work!

September update: meh

So September's sales continued the downward slope that August started (and frankly, October is starting off to be even worse than that), so no great news there.  One day I'll figure out how to do graphs and put up a fancy jpg showing my sales trend, which will no doubt look like a mountain:  up, up, up and then down, down, down.

Oh well.  The novel is going great, so it's hard to get too worked up over sales of stuff I don't really care about.  I'm at about 56K words as of today, which is kind of amazing, since the longest thing I'd written previously was a 30K novella.  It's so long that I keep coming across stuff I'd even forgotten writing, which makes for an interesting experience.  I expect to have it largely completed in two or three weeks, which will put it at about 65K and three months of work.  Allowing time to edit, rewrite anything needed and so on, I'm still hoping that I can have it up for sale by Thanksgiving.

After that, I'm hoping to resuscitate something I started almost a year ago but haven't touched since.  It would be a shame to let this 5000-word seed just sit there without seeing if it could sprout into something more, however, so ideally I'd have another novel ready to go in late winter.