Farewell 2012, Howdy 2013!

Well, I failed to even make a quarterly blog entry, which really raises the question of why I’m even bothering anymore.  Honestly, for me this blog is more a convenient way to keep tabs on new entries in the blogroll than anything else!  Oh well.  Perhaps I’ll keep it up for a little while longer, though I’m shortly planning to take things to the next level, as the cliché goes, and get my own domain along with my soon-to-be-formed LLC.  At that point I suspect that any time I spend on the web will be pretty much consumed by that.  Until then, however, here’s my 2012 in review!

Overall, I am very happy with how things are going now that I’ve finished my second full year of self-publishing.  I’m beginning to feel like I have things coming together more and more professionally; I have to laugh at how I started things out back in January 2011, when I uploaded my first title to KDP (I can’t remember what it was called back then, but whatever).  The errors I overlooked and didn’t even realize I was making have largely disappeared, and I’ve got the formatting/uploading process down to a near-science.  I’ve added Kobo to the retailers I’m working with directly (I’d had it on my to-do list, but it wasn’t until JE Medrick wrote about her experiences that I decided to give it a shot) and I've been fairly pleased overall; if nothing else, I’ve replaced Smashwords’ messy files with nicer-looking ones, which may explain why it seems I’m doing better with Kobo working directly.  Fall, frankly, was very slow—no different from lots of grumbling around the web, although it was still better than the first half of the year for me.

Since I never wrote my entry explaining why July was such an amazing month, allow me to fill in some details.  After a lot of research and soul-searching, I decided to make some major changes with my erotica titles.  I tried to make the covers and titles more tasteful—not that I was all that explicit in that way to begin with; I’m not one of those writers whose titles must exactly summarize the stories; e.g., “Sally F----s the Neighbor and Her Stepfather On the Porch”.  Most importantly, I raised my prices.  I’ve nearly eradicated the 99-cent price from my titles now; there are a handful left but everything else is 2.99 and higher.  That one change blew the roof off my Barnes and Noble sales, which have consistently and soundly beaten my Amazon sales.  Although I don’t discuss money often, I will say that in July I made over a thousand dollars just on B/N.  I was as surprised as anybody else, believe me.  The rest of the year was a slow decline, although as if by clockwork, December 26 started excellent sales on B/N again.  In any case, even a drop from that summer high point still had me earning significantly more than I’d been doing only a few months ago, so I can’t complain.  Strangely, my sales at Amazon have remained remarkably consistent.  In a way I guess that’s good, since I’m making the same money I had been before, but it is frustrating.  I can’t seem to crack that nut at all.  One unusual thing I’ve noticed is that my romance novels sell far, far better on Amazon than on Barnes and Noble, whereas erotica sells better on B/N.  Not that I’m burning up the charts, but I sell a novel nearly every day on Amazon, while weeks can pass between sales on B/N.

Overall, I’m still at about seven percent of what I’d need to do this full time, which has held fairly steady for several months now due to improving sales through Smashwords (Apple in particular has been warming up).  My royalties increased by over 600% this year, though I recognize that that's an artificially high number since I was starting from so little last year.  I'll have a better idea of growth after 2013, of course.  I didn’t meet every goal I set last year, but after two years of self-publishing I remain as committed to this as I was at the beginning.

So what’s in store for 2013?  I have several things planned.  First of all, I want to try and grow my Amazon business, and it appears that novels remain the way to do that.  Although I’m hoping to release three novels next year (all romance), I am going to restrain myself and only plan for two.  I also have a novella nearing completion which I’m planning to publish in January, as well as another one planned for the spring and a smattering of stories along the way as well.  In addition, I’m slowly working on a couple of nonfiction titles, though I have no specific date in mind for those.  In 2012 I released 12 titles and I doubt I’ll be able to match that this next year, but you never know.  I’m also going to take a stab at a translation and see how it sells; I’m fluent in Spanish so I feel pretty capable as far as that goes.  The hard part is deciding what would sell best to a Spanish-speaking market.  I’d also like to get off my lazy ass and publish through Omnilit/All Romance.  I’ve heard good things about the site, so it can’t hurt to try it out.  I can’t say the same about Google Play, which still looks like it would be far more trouble than it’s worth.  Finally, I’m also going to be instituting a new process for my novels which begins with getting the print version formatted before the e-book.  Of the two novels I’ve released so far, only one is in print, but I found that it was easier to catch errors in the paper copy than onscreen, so since I wanted to expand my print offerings anyway, this will kill two birds.  Overall, I expect 2013 to be very, very busy but quite satisfying as well.

Here’s to a happy, healthy and prosperous 2013 for us all!

Three things

1. I've come to the conclusion that social media--or rather, using social media to promote your writing--is about the biggest waste of time ever.  Seriously, even playing a video game would be better than Twittering or whatever; at least then you'd be giving your mind a break from your work.  When I was growing up, authors didn't have all the tools available nowadays, but that didn't keep me from reading a ton.  What kept me reading?  Good stories.

2. Google Docs, which I've just started using recently, is awesome.

3. I've quit my secure, high-paying government job for one halfway across the country which pays much less.  I did it for many reasons, but it has to be said that one of them is to make sure that I have enough time to devote to growing my business.  After making some significant changes this month, July has turned out to be amazing, but that will have to wait for another blog post.

Latest update

So, it’s been over three months since I last posted, which makes this a quarterly update, I guess!  Sales have continued well, if unevenly; I can’t seem to make any significant impression at Amazon although Barnes and Noble has continued to make up for it.  May, in fact, was by far my best month at B/N, giving me 20% higher royalties than the previous record.

Not surprisingly, the porn—I mean, erotica—still makes the most money overall, but that’s just due to the fact that I have more titles that are straight erotica (so to speak!).  The romance novels are still bringing in the most money per title, however, with one exception—last month I released an “erotic romance” which has been by far my best seller in the last several weeks.  That might be because it’s new, or it might be just because people like a spicy romance now and again, or both, most likely.  Considering it’s only a novella (about 22K words), I wasn’t sure what to charge for it, but I decided to try out 3.99, and sales have been doing well at a bit under 2 a day.  Of course I’m not going to get rich selling two copies a day, but if I had several of those all selling two copies a day (or perhaps more by benefiting from increased visibility via more titles) then it could add up nicely.  At this point I see no reason to drop the price to 2.99, and I’m certainly not going lower than that.  One thing I’ve become sure of over the last year is that the .99 price point is useless, coincidentally, 99% of the time.  Anyhoo, my thrillers/suspense are at the bottom of the ladder (not surprising since I only have a pair of stories from a yet-to-be-concluded novella), only surpassed (subpassed?) in their low sales by a paranormal novella from another series I haven’t finished.
 
The more I study what sells and what doesn’t, the surer I am that the future (for me) lies in writing romance.  I make no bones about wanting to make money writing, preferably a lot of it!  Thus it seems only common sense to concentrate on the best-selling genre.  I honestly never—and I mean NEVER—expected to write a romance, let alone a pair of them, but once I began, it turned out to be a lot of fun.  Right now I have one more historical novel that I’m planning in sort of a half-assed way which I hope to begin later this fall.  I’m just about finished with a follow-up erotic romance and have a few more in the hopper, and then finally I have a series of contemporary romances that I’ve been working on as well.  The biggest frustration is finding a decent cover artist.  If you want to find somebody who can design a thriller, paranormal or suspense cover, they crawl out of the woodwork.  I’ve found it a hell of a lot harder to find somebody who has done anything for romance—especially historical romance—that can match those from the so-called Big 6, however.
 
I’ve mentioned before my admiration for Ruth Ann Nordin, and I just have to say how wowed I was to watch the success of her first Regency romance over at Barnes and Noble.  So here was a book that was her first try at the genre, she did the cover herself, and one day I checked its ranking to see it at #16.  That’s right, SIXTEEN.  On the first page of results for Nook bestsellers.  Effing amazing.  It’s since dropped down, but last I checked it was still well below 1000.  And that’s the sort of thing I’d like to see for myself someday.

Gmail, italicized text and romance

So around a year ago Google froze my account (along with several hundred thousand other people, if memory serves) for about a week.  Last Sunday my Gmail account froze up and it's still out of order a week later.  Fortunately, last year I got smart and backed everything up on Hotmail, so this has been less of a problem than it might have been, but I think I've pretty much had enough of Gmail.  Too bad; it worked beautifully for years.

March has been fairly blah; sales are down from February although I really can't complain as I'm still headed for several hundred dollars at the end of the month.  Nowhere near many of the indie authors out there, but it's still amazing for me considering what I was pulling in a year ago.  And it's simple economics that things like this only go up, never down, right? :)

My breakthrough for the month--hell, the year--was that yesterday I found out how to set up a macro in Word to go through and replace all my italicized text with html markers.  Previously I had to go through the Word doc page by page and insert the markers myself (truth be told, until very recently I was doing so in a text document until I realized that I could do it much easier working directly in Word), but invariably I would forget to insert an end tag and thus screw up my formattting--something I wouldn't see until I was using the Kindle previewer.  So for my second novel, just this process of formatting my italicized text took hours.  Now, however, I should be able to have it done automatically, error-free, in literally seconds.  Huge improvement.

I released my second novel last month and I can see what Konrath, et al. have said: there's more money in novels than in other lengths of work.  Of course, the majority of my sales have come from my other works simply because I have more of them (I only have two novels up, versus over twenty shorts, novellas and collections), but looking at the income per title, the novels are clearly way ahead.  So far in March I've been selling two per day (not two each yet, unfortunately, but a total of two novels daily) from all channels combined.

2nd novel finished!

So at 5:59 AM, I finished the first draft of my second novel.  Things went differently for this one than the first one; for one, it took a lot less time.  The first one took around four months of actual writing, but this one I completed in under three months.  Also, I wrote this one entirely in order; on the first one I wrote whatever appealed to me at the time, which was nice in a way since if I felt blocked in a certain part I just went and wrote somewhere else.  However, it was much harder to remember where I was in the overall story, so things went more smoothly this time.

I was planning to do a formal update of how January went, but then I saw an email from Amazon this morning indicating that the "prior month" report may not be accurate.  I sure hope it was, because when I looked at it yesterday it showed that I had blown away December and that January was my best month yet by far.  Guess I'll have to wait to find out....

Partial update

So it’s frankly a real pain to try and figure out how well I did on Amazon in January; my monthly update will wait a few more days until they release the reports.  However, I can say with some confidence that January was very, very close to December, and that was my best month ever in terms of royalties.  February has started out more slowly, though still nothing to sneeze at.

Most significantly, however, I am thrilled to report that I sold 35 copies of the romance novel in January, and I’ve continued to see around one a day since then as well.  The followup should be finished in a week, so barring major misfortune I should have my second novel up for sale by March.  The two are standalone novels although they share the same location and some minor characters, so I’ll be selling them as part of a series (which eventually will have 4 books).  I’ll be extremely curious to see how the release of the second book—not to mention pushing them as books in a series—will affect sales.

More to come!

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!