The thing about electronic publishing that drives me crazy is the silliness of believing that Kindle is the only source of sales.
My attitude as an indie publisher is that I want to get to 100% of the available English language readers in the world. Period.
Now, to do that, I need as an indie publisher to have both electronic books and paper books, and the electronic books need to be in all available stores I can get them into. And the paper books must be available to get into all stores as well. And I hope, in very short order, I will also be selling electronic books on book cards out of bookstores, increasing that market as well.
So it drives me nuts when someone tells me “I only sold ten copies last month.”
My instant response, and not very useful, is “How do you know?”
That always gets people puzzled at my question. But the truth is, that person doesn’t know how many copies of their book they actually sold. Not a clue, unless the only place they put the story was up on Kindle.
Simple Math
What happens if you only look at Kindle for your sales?
— Kindle right at the moment has about 40% of the US market in electronic sales. Give or take depending on the survey you read. But that trend is going downward as other devices (especially different pad devices) are climbing.
— Electronic books are about 15% of all books sold at this moment in August, 2011. (That is logically going up and will spike once again next January and February after the Christmas device sales. Most “experts” think in three years the number will level around 50%…I tend to agree.)
So take those two basic facts and do the math. As an indie publisher, you only put your book up on Kindle. You are reaching (at the moment) 40% of 15% of all readers. (.15 x .4 = .06) So your book is getting into the hands of 6% of all readers. That’s still a lot of market and a great number of readers, sure, but it is only 6% of all possible readers…
…IN THIS COUNTRY.
Kindle has gone into Germany and UK, but they are a minor player in both countries and even smaller in other countries. Kobo and iBooks are the big players for the rest of the world. So to really get your books out to the entire world you also need to be on B&N, Kobo, iBooks, Sony, and Smashwords, plus Overstreet for library sales and so on.
There are two ways to get to many of these sites.
—First you can go direct to them. I go direct to B&N because they have made it simple. It is also very possible to go direct as a publisher to iBooks, Sony, Kobo, Diesel, and Overstreet. It takes a little work and set-up, but very possible for any indie publisher. (Not authors, you must be an indie publisher…read my Think Like a Publisher series under the tab at the top to understand how to do that.)
However, Smashwords has stepped into the distributor role and made it simple for indie publishers and indie authors to go to most of these international stores. Simply by uploading for no cost a file, you can get your books into all the international stores except Overstreet. All for a 10% distribution fee when something sells. Well worth the costs early on.
So for an indie publisher to get to almost all of the 15% of sales of electronic books in this country, plus a bunch of the rest of the planet, you need to get your story onto Kindle, Pubit (B&N), and Smashwords. And get through the premium distribution program at Smashwords. Pretty darned simple.
Tracking Sales
A few months ago I put out a call to try to get some program that would allow us non-spreadsheet people to get information easily and quickly from all the spreadsheets given to us by these bookstores and distributors.
I simply wanted to be able to load in the data, then ask how many books sold in a month of a certain title and how much I made on that book.
A lot of programmers said, “Oh, that will be easy.” And then they discovered it wasn’t easy. The old Smashwords spreadsheet stops most logical data sorting, but Smashwords is trying to fix that problem. The Smashwords Beta test is still not working well, at least for me. But I admire the fact that they are trying. (You can find it right above your publisher spreadsheet. Try it and give them your feedback.)
And I want to thank those of you who did try to come up with a program and spent the hours running into this crazy problem. If any of you actually have made it work and just haven’t told me, please let us know here. But remember, I don’t just want another spreadsheet. I need a user interface that I can upload all the spreadsheets to and simply ask logical questions and get numbers that are clear and not out in some spreadsheet somewhere thirty rows deep. (I do not know how to use Excel and have no intention of learning at the moment.)
So that said, unless you do a lot of data entry in standard inventory business programs, and I do mean a lot, as a couple people suggested I do, there is no way for a normal indie publisher to know exactly how many books we sold total say in December from around the world. Or how much money we made on any single title, unless you only have a few titles.
There is no way to know the exact number. NONE, ZERO ZIP, without a ton of data entry or very few products and few sales.
Right now WMG Publishing has over 200 titles. And they are all selling at one level or another. And we are gaining about 15-20 new titles per month.
WMG Publishing knows how much cash comes in every month from all the different sources. That’s how they keep track for taxes of course. But without huge data entry or a great sorting program that works, they have no idea how many copies of a certain novel WMG Publishing had published in December sold. Or exactly how much money that novel made.
(This problem is a huge problem for all of us traditionally-published writers. Traditional publishers are understaffed and do a lot more books and have no idea how to break all this apart either. They will get a report in one form from iBooks, another in another form from Kindle, and so on and all have to be sorted and done data entry by hand at the moment. Ugly doesn’t begin to describe it. But that’s another topic.)
Known Information
I do know (through a lot of data entry on some books) that Kindle for WMG sticks pretty close to the average of 35% -40% for our books.
In other words, if we sell ten copies of a story or book on Kindle in a month, than we sold about 25 total that month through all sites.
(I have done a bunch of sampling on stories and novels we had up in December and January since all the data is in on those months. Hours of data entry.)
How did I get that 25 number? 10 copies is about 40% of 25.
So if we sold 10 copies of a novel at $4.95 on Kindle in January, I know we actually sold around 25 copies over all the sites.
Give or take.
At the moment.
(And that percentage did hold after the data entry experiment.)
One More Time Into The Income Fight
Let me do this one more time to show how amazing not thinking of a book as an event can be, but instead change your thinking to cover years. If you think of a book as an event, ten copies sold looks horrid. If you get out of that thinking, ten copies sold on Kindle looks pretty good over time.
Two Details:
—This math is for numbers at the moment. Electronic sales are going up and I am not counting trade paper or book card sales at all. Just income from electronic publishing.
—This is at 10 sales on Kindle per month, 25 sales total around the world which you won’t know about for at least 6 months.
Do the Math Again
—Sell your novel for $4.99. You will make on average $3.50 per sale. 25 sales x $3.50 = $87.50 per month.
$87.50 x 12 = $1,050.00 per year.
Now doesn’t seem like much, but let’s compare that to traditional publishing.
A contract now with traditional publishing will last for a very long time, but let’s just pretend you have a good lawyer and can hold the sunset clause to ten years and get the book back in your hands again.
That means if your book is selling 10 copies on Kindle per month, you will make in those ten years about $10,000 assuming nothing goes up.
So you really shouldn’t sell your book to traditional publishing for under a $10,000 advance. Or maybe $8,000 if you count the value of having the money in the first three years instead of over eight or ten years. (Expect your book to not earn out, only money is for advance.)
BUT WHAT IF????
I have heard indie publishers complain about only selling one copy of their book per day on Kindle. I damn near choke.
30 copies per month on Kindle means you are selling 75 copies per month around the world.
$3.50 per book profit times 75 = $262.50 per month or $3,150.00 per year.
Figure the book is gone at least ten years into traditional publishing, that’s equal to $31,500.00 in expected income on that book IF EVERYTHING REMAINS AT THIS 15% LEVEL.
Now thirty grand in ten years is a nice amount of money, and I see no reason why it wouldn’t continue earning after that.
But, of course, nothing is going to remain the same. It’s going up.
And, of course, that’s not counting any trade paperback sales or other future device sales.
Have I said how much I love this new world?
Why Did I Do This Math Again?
Honestly, I wanted to have something to point to when someone complained to me about only selling ten copies a month to show them what that number really means. Right after I ask them “How do they know?”
Wow, I sure hope one of you wonderful programmers out there would hurry up and develop the program that spits out real numbers. I would love to load in the spreadsheets and find out exactly how my books and stories sold in December or January. I just can’t read spreadsheets.
I would pay decent money for that program.
Okay, now I have a place to link to when someone complains, “I only sold ten copies last month.”
Perspective is everything. Ten copies of a book as event sucks. Ten copies on Kindle in one month is some really nice money over time.
Keep the perspective, go for more writing and more product up and selling and let the numbers add up slowly.
That’s exactly how New York built those huge buildings.
I do hope you are going to change your mind about Excel (or OpenOffice Calc) someday. It is one of the most powerful programs in existence and can easily do everything you want and more. (And it is not that difficult to learn. TRUST ME.)
You can do all sorts of gedankenexperiments with that one. Put all the formulas into place, change some of the numbers and the results and all the results depending on that result change on the whole table. The only real difficult part about Excel is the math, which you obviously got down.
A program you ask logical questions to… How?
There is Excel. There are databases which all have their own languages, which are way harder to learn. A logical language processor is science fiction right now. Unless you can formulate a set of very specific questions you want to ask, I doubt anyone is going to be able to help you with this.
Oh and btw: Einstein would have murdered people for Excel. He had to do all his calculations per hand. Hours and hours of calculating and checking for mistakes. The things he would have been able to do with something as simple as Excel blow most physicists minds, even today.
Eric,
When I have the next five or six hundred books and stories up and selling and no one has come to my rescue on this program, I will learn Excel. I even started one night on Lynda.com and decided I was better writing a few new stories than doing that.
I agree, it would be better if I learned it, but I’m asking this question for all us indie publishers. Trust me, most of us will not bother to learn a program just to try to make sense of a spreadsheet. That’s why someone who does this with a simple program could make some money from all of us. As long as the output isn’t another spread sheet.
Hey Dean, I believe I solved the problem with my software TrackerBox (http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/index.htm#TrackerBox), but it’s for Windows. It supports multiple authors/pen names, Smashwords, Kindle, CreateSpace, PubIt, and All Romance. I’ll add anything else that people need if they send me a sample report.
If you look at this screenshot, http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/images/tb/multi_select.jpg
you will see that you can quickly select any combination of vendors, authors, date ranges and titles, and the report will be updated without having to click a refresh button. You can also see that you can group the items in the report by the columns just by dragging the column headers to the top.
You might also notice the tabs across the top. You can have multiple reports open at once, and can even drag them by the tab to dock them so you can compare them side by side.
So, to get the data you wanted above, you could choose the “Net Income By Month and Title”, then set the date range for the month you want (if you only want to see one month), and select the title. If you don’t set the date range, you can group them by month. Here’s a screenshot of what I’m describing, though I didn’t select a date range: http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/images/tb/netsalesbymonthandtitle_groupedbymonth.jpg
Anyway, if I didn’t hit the mark, let me know.
Mark, those look great. Wish I could use them, but they sure look perfect for what I was looking for. I can even understand the output. (grin)
Mac anytime soon? I’d hate to buy a computer for just using your program but if I have to I will. I need it that much. (grin)
You selling it yet?
Yes Dean, it’s for sale. Unfortunately, the bit that allows me to do the grouping is not portable.
Now, you don’t necessarily have to buy a computer to use it. You could use bootcamp to install Windows on one of your Macs (depending on which version of OSX you’re running), which works great for me. Parallels might also work, but I haven’t tried that at all, so I wouldn’t recommend it unless someone who owns and uses Parallels can verify that it works.
Great article Dean. As always your insights into publishing are invaluable to us newbies, and if I ever manage to get some place close to turning professional it’s advice I’ll definitely take.
Can I just point out that this way of looking at things doesn’t work out for everybody (based on what your goals are). I’m learning a lot for the future but right now the $4.99 or $2.99 thing doesn’t work for me.
My books are on all of the retail outlets that you speak about (Print included), but my sales on amazon.co.uk far outweigh everywhere else (They literally account for about 95%). Smashwords itself does quite well for me too, but the distributed copies to ibooks and the other shops are pretty dead for sales, as is amazon.com.
Also, the moment I try raising my prices my sales bomb into nothingness and it’s okay to sit with just 10 or so sales every month if you are an author who is either well known / has a fan base or has a whole heap of books out, but I have 4 (working on more) and I’m pretty much unknown at the moment.
If I drop my prices, my books drop out of the top 100 categories charts and the sales stop dead.
I experimented. I was selling roughly 20 books per day by pricing them at 99c, so $6 per day ish, which will add up very nicely over time. When priced at $2.99 my books gradually dropped out of all the lists and stopped selling. I mean stopped completely.
I don’t think it’s because they are bad and only being bought because they are cheap. I get enough good reviews not to worry about that, but I do think that each and every sale I make is by someone who doesn’t know who am. I’m yet to build a good sized fan base (I have a small one) that I can depend on, and the only thing that will get me there is a lot of sales, even if I don’t make a lot of money.
I suppose it really depends on goals, doesn’t it? You are an established professional author who wants to make the income. I’m an unknown who wants to find fans in the hope of one day being able to turn professional. I figure at some point If I keep publishing books and make sure I write good quality entertainment, I’ll eventually have enough of an audience to able to use all of your advice!
Glynn,
(What you hear are the sounds of writers all over the planet ducking for fear of how I am going to answer you. You clearly have not read anything I have done here before this post, have you?)
Have I said lately, right along with Joe Konrath and Barry and many others, how much I hate that “Oh, you’re a big name so you can do anything.” Glynn, when you become a big name, I hope you get that every damn day because it will piss you off just as much as it pisses off the rest of us. It makes light of how hard we “established professionals” work. And trust me, I work harder than most everyone on the planet. Plus, to be honest, it’s just insulting.
I’m not getting into arguing discounting AGAIN here. I have a dozen posts where that topic is beat to death. Just scan back because you clearly haven’t read how I feel or you would have never made that comment. Let alone think that the Dean Wesley Smith name gives me an advantage. Yeah, when was the last time you read one of my novels??? (Snort, trick question…I don’t write novels under this name and haven’t for eight or nine years.)
If you want to toss your books into a discount bin and have so little respect for your writing that you sell it for next to nothing, I’m glad you are having success for a time. But I have more respect for my work and value it more, even the work I do under pen names that don’t have my “huge advantage.” And I am willing to let books just sell along and slowly gain speed instead of rushing them out into the discount bin because I am in a hurry.
Sigh… That 99 cent silliness is becoming one of the worst publishing myths around. I’m going to have to do a Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing on that myth. I hate that. I thought indie publishers would be smarter. Sigh.
Good luck to you, Glynn. Glad it’s working for you now. But if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just keep selling novels for $4.99 and up and short stories for 99 cents. (Actually I have electronic novels under my pen names at $8.99 and they are doing just fine even though they don’t have my huge advantage of being under the name of an established professional.)
You know why I can write and sell books under any name at any price? I’m a good storyteller. I can write stories under any name and readers will find them without discounting. It really is the writing that matters to readers. Honest. When you have twenty or fifty novels under your belt in practice, then come and talk to me about discounting.
I need to erase all this and just ignore this silliness, but screw it, it’s Saturday night and I’ve been struggling over a novel segment and I’m tired and if I was as good as every beginning writer thinks I am, as Glynn before this letter thought I was, shouldn’t I not have to struggle after over a hundred novels now?
Damn, Glynn, I wish the myth that all the problems vanish when you become a name was true. I wish it was. I really, really wish it was.
And there is yet another Killing the Sacred Cows chapter. The myth that once you have a name, you have it made and can sell anything. Truth: You are only as good as your last book, and a name can often hurt you more than help you in most instances.
But I guess beginning writers need that dream to be true so they keep working. I imagine I believed it as well at one point. A hundred plus novels and years of editing ago. Now I’m just a jaded old fool wondering why I still have to work so damn hard and where are the dancing girls bringing me my late-night snacks. They’re late again.
Mark:
Awesome. I am so going to buy that.
Dean:
Try finding your local computer geek. The magic words are “Wine” and “Mono”. Not guaranteed to work, but worth a try.
All for a 10% distribution fee when something sells. Well worth the costs early on.
Isn’t one of the Commandments of Dean Wesley Smith “Thou Shalt Not Give A Percentage For Work Thine Can Do Thyself (or pay someone a flat fee to do)”?
Blarkon,
If that was the case I wouldn’t give Kindle 30% and so on and so on. There is a difference, a HUGE difference between giving a share of your copyright to an agent or a per-sale distribution fee to a bookstore.
Go ahead, take your book into a bookstore, tell them you’ll let them sell it for full price as long as you get full price. Of course they won’t sell it. You are being silly and you know it.
But if you want to give away 15% of your work forever to an agent, go ahead. It’s your copyright, do what you want with it. I keep 100% of my copyright. I do pay people to help me sell my work through stores.
Dean, I was one of the writers who ducked after Glynn posted.
A couple of tangent things about your return post:
“Yeah, when was the last time you read one of my novels??? (Snort, trick question…I don’t write novels under this name and haven’t for eight or nine years.)”
Which bugs the hell out of me. I want to read your novels, damn it. The only one I could get my hands on was All Eve’s Hallows. Loved it. Me want more. Got that?
“…but screw it, it’s Saturday night and I’ve been struggling over a novel segment and I’m tired…”
You struggle with novel segments? Do you know how much better that makes me feel? Next time I get a little stuck, I can stop beating myself up about it.
“Now I’m just a jaded old fool wondering why I still have to work so damn hard and where are the dancing girls bringing me my late-night snacks. They’re late again.”
I was up very late last night finished my latest novel. I believe those dancing girls were here, but I can’t be sure. I was a bit bleary-eyed.
I agree with all of that. Discounting a novel to $.99 just devalues the work. No one is going to put a higher value on your book than you do. If you tell the market it’s only worth a dollar, why should anyone think it’s worth more?
That said, I’m completely unknown and need readers more than I need the royalties, so I too have gone the $.99 route on my first book. After two months it’s sold 100 copies and I’ve got 19 reviews on Amazon, averaging about 4.5 stars. I’m going to keep the book at $.99 throu the end of the summer when I’ll be the Kindle Nation eBook of the Day. By then, I’ll have my second book available. Rest assured, that second one will never be available at the $.99 price point, and the first book will be going up too.
So I do think there’s some value in that $.99 price, but only if you have a clear idea what you’re trying to do with it. I wanted reviews and got them. Now when I raise the price it’s going to have the look and feel of a book that a lot of people have read and liked and therefore must be a safe bet. Because it is.
Those new readers are never going to know that the book used to sell for much cheaper.
@Mark – I’m with Eric: so going to buy that! Thank you for creating such a useful program.
Just to clarify, since it was my comment that triggered this post, my novels are selling around 3 copies a month on all sites (Amazon, Amazon.uk, Amazon.de, B&N, Smashwords) EXCEPT for the Smashwords expanded distribution. I’m just starting to see sales info for Kobo, Diesel, et al, coming in now for the first two books I put up.
I only have 3 novels up, and one just went up 2 weeks ago, so I’m hoping that’s the reason I’m selling “only” 3 copies. I do have my mind focused on the long term, however it gets kind of demoralizing when I read about other newbies selling tons of books. OTOH, my novels — which are full-length 70,000 – 90,000 words — are priced at $4.99. I have one at $2.99 as a loss leader.
I’ve just started to get into POD, and currently don’t have the funds for expanded distribution. I hope to do that within the next six months. I’m operating on a quarter-shoestring budget, so growth will be slow. But the business is growing and I made about 10 times in July what I made in January. It’s still pocket change, but the fact is it’s a lot more pocket change than what I made previously. So I guess the plan is working.
P.S. I write romance, which is mostly a novel-length form. There doesn’t seem to be much market for romance shorts, except for erotic romance. My ero-rom under a pen name sells at a much higher rate than my other stuff.
Tori,
Actually, it wasn’t your comment that started this post. It was a couple from three or four days back. But you added in and got me to finish the post. (grin…thanks…I think) And I agree, it does sound like your plan is working great.
I tried to break down the money that came in for WMG Publishing in July. (Now understand we now have 200 stories, books, and collections and nonfiction titles selling so the math was rough.) It broke down like this sort of:
July Income:
29% of total income from Kindle April sales
14% of total income from B&N April sales
12% of total income from CreateSpace book sales in April
21% of total income Apple sales from March-May (as best as I can figure on dates)
12% of total income from Kobo sales from Feb-April (as best I can figure on dates)
6% of total income from Smashwords total sales March-May
6% (the rest) from Sony, Diesel, and some early B&N through Smashwords
We are adding in web site sales and Overstreet in the next few months. Plus the book sales through CreateSpace and direct to bookstores I expect to go up dramatically in the next few months as well. No book card sales yet as that is also just starting.
Has anyone done anything with Access or Open Office Base?
Dean, Dean, Dean. Stop speaking common sense. You’ll confuse people.
As a non-American, Smashwords allows me to get into B&N, which I couldn’t without them. Likewise, the vast majority of people I know do not own Kindles, so they want epubs and pdfs for their own devices. Smashwords and Kobo is outstanding for my friends who want to buy my stuff (crazy people that they are).
Re: Discounting
/begin rant
None of you know who I am. Let’s me honest. You’ve never seen my titles, never read my books, and have never been at a convention where I’ve spoken.
My books are not discounted.
I currently have 2 self-published titles: a blogging book for authors ($3.99) and a 3000 words short story ($0.99). I have a short story through a publisher ($0.99 thru the pub, $2.99 everywhere else), and a novelette through them at $2.50. I have two small press novels coming out late this year, early next. They will both be priced $4.99 (from 2 different houses). I am self-publishing a novella in Dec and pricing it $3.99.
I sell.
Sure, I don’t own a jet and I don’t make a lot of money, but I make money. What’s more is that I continue to make money, every royalty statement. And, I suspect when my novels come out, I’ll continue to sell a bit more of everything as I find new readers.
Again, I am unknown. My mother barely remembers my name. And, yet, people buy my stuff. I’m not focused on Kindle sales ranking, or on trying to be a best seller on Kindle. I’m focused on finding new readers, new fans, and people who want to read my work. Huge difference.
/end rant
I appreciate the math. I tend not to obsess about sales with one exception. I uploaded my first self-pubbed book to Smashwords and I am in the premium catalog. Because they were out of free ISBNs, I bought one from the site they recommended – Bowker – for $125.00. Thus far, I’ve sold a single copy (at $2.99) via any of the Smashwords’ distribution channels. At this rate, it’s going to take me a very long time to recoup that $125.00.
I would ask myself if this is because the book is poorly written, but that’s not the case. It’s a good book and it’s been well-received on Amazon.
So, I’m up in the air about using Smashwords for any additional works.
Actually what I meant by professional author was one who earns a living from writing (which I don’t, having only been selling for 4 months) . And no I haven’t read any of of your novels, and yes I’ve read pretty much all of your blog posts.
I find it all priceless advice from someone who is experienced in the writing business (I never said bestseller) – hence the $10 donate a few weeks ago – That doesn’t mean I have to agree with all of it. You and Konrath etc etc can repeat it over and over again, but if it works for me, then it simply works. For now.
The discount price is suiting my aims at the moment, but I fully intend to up the prices in the next few months, maybe weeks. because it pisses me off making 35 cents on each book as well.
But I still believe that you are only devaluing it when your price doesn’t have an aim. Loss leader and giveways work for every other product (ish), so why not books?
I wanted reviews and I wanted to hit a few top 100 genre categories for a while, so that fans of my genre(s) might know I exist. I’m currently getting all that and wouldn’t be if I was priced higher.
(Yes I have tried it last month – when I said stopped selling I mean I spent a month waiting for a single sale at 2.99 and it didn’t come. No one knew the book was even there.)
Anyway, I really didn’t post here to dredge up an old argument that obviously gets on your nerves. I’ll go back to just visiting and reading your posts and keep my gob shut. Keep myself out of trouble!
Glynn,
Thanks for coming back and I hope you keep making comments. Great fun and actually any discussion is a good discussion. More after lunch.
My indie publishing career started last summer after I came across the “Killing the Sacred Cows” posts, as well as the “Freelancer’s Survival Guide”. (I had sold a dozen or so short stories to traditional publishers.) Small beginnings, greater ends. You gotta start somewhere. It was encouraging when the sales stats started trickling in. But even more encouraging has been recently when the royalty payments have started to trickle in. That’s what I call real progress. No dancing girls yet, though. Am I missing something?
Not only is every writer different in their experiences, but every book is different. And worse, every month is different.
So if you’re only judging on 3-4 books, even a price test of a few month really doesn’t give you any info at all.
I do think it helps, though, to share data. And always take everybody’s data with a grain of salt.
My sales are what many people would consider abysmal. While I’m not excited about that, I also feel it’s to be expected (and here’s a post on my first, unexciting year of progress).
Where my books sell best varies widely. My most commercial book gets maybe 80% of its sales from Amazon. My short stuff sells best on Barnes & Noble. The novella I wrote as a quick adaptation of a screenplay is my most popular book on Apple’s iBookstore. My screenplay has a sale once in a blue moon, which may come from any venue and it did not do much better when it was free. And that’s the same for my off-genre novels (though I haven’t offered them free — because they don’t lead in to any other books).
I’ve offered my short stuff for free, and got three of them free on Amazon this summer. One of those freebies immediately shot up, and also clearly led to a boost in related titles. One of the freebies had a little bump, and now sells a little better itself at full price…. but didn’t have an observable effect on anything else. One of the freebies is downloaded in a steady trickle, but not all that exciting. Other freebies have been more like the middle one.
After all this, and also looking at other people’s results, here are my conclusions: some books sell themselves. They don’t need word of mouth or an author’s reputation — they’ve got a cool title or concept that just hits people right. Those books are partly kismet – the right time, the right people, the right idea.
Most books require some word of mouth to get traction. They benefit from time, and from being a companion book to one of the books which sell themselves. Which is one of the reasons why writing a lot of books helps – one of those books is going to have a little more/better kismet than others, and it will create word of mouth.
Some books (mine, I fear) are kind of the anti-kismet books. People take a glance at them and aren’t quite sure what they are. My most commercial book is a humorous mystery western. Just about every single review of that book starts with the phrase “I don’t like westerns, but…” and then they go on to give it a great review. People are really reluctant to try it, and lowering the price (or even offering for free) doesn’t really make a difference with that.
That kind of book needs to be “hand sold” for a while. People need to see more of my writing, hear more from friends, hear others talk about it, before they’d even be willing to sample. And this is probably why it sells better on Amazon than anywhere else — because of Amazon’s associates program. People who get convinced then follow links to purchase or sample.
The good news is, though… all of my books are like that. I’m building my own brand. It’s the slowest way there is, but each book builds trust for the other books.
Another point about sales reporting and one Dean and others have made before is that Smashwords’ outlets report at different rates than Kindle sales. I started selling in January 2011, and while sales were low to start, I knew that was par for the course and kept writing and putting stuff up (sl-o-w-ly).
In April/May, I was pleasantly surprised to see Smashwords report that I’d sold stories in those early months through Apple and Sony…but again, I found months later. Some of that money still hasn’t showed up, btw, but now I know I won’t have a complete picture of sales numbers and money for at least 1-2 quarters for non-Kindle and non-Pubit sales. It’s fine by me; I’m signed up for the long-term career building plan.
I’m tickled pink that my last story is selling at a happy little pace; there’s no difference in author name recognition (aka NONE) but my short story craft has improved some since I first started pubbing due to practice and I think it shows on this story, or something. (bg)
Super post, Dean!
I just read on one forum where a kindle published author was too loyal to publish his books on any other venue. Why would anyone not want to have their books available at as many outlets as they can? I also have mine on ARe, because fans oftentimes have certain online book stores they buy from. I might not make a whole lot of sales there, but every single sale counts in my book.
For me, I price my books based on length. Short stories are priced lower. They draw in new readers. But my full length novels are priced higher, between $2.99-$4.99 based on word count. I see authors reducing their novels to 99-cent reads to make more sales. At the higher volume of book sales but lower % and actual dollar sales, it doesn’t make any sense to me. The author has to work so much harder to churn out a bunch of new books, which is not something most writers can do with a flick of a magic wand, just to make the same profit as a higher priced book would make.
In the first month, I uploaded some shorts that had already been published, the rights returned, and the books revised, and sold 216 on Amazon. Might sound impressive. But the next month, I uploaded longer books, and sold them for the higher dollar amount. I sold a fraction of the number that I did with the 99-cent reads, of course, but I made much more money. To me, it’s not the number of books sold as much as the amount you’re actually making–dollar-wise–at the end of the month.
Since March, I’ve sold 11,000 books (and that’s not including the off-site sales I don’t have access to like Kobo, Sony, Apple, Diesel etc, for a delayed period), which may not be a lot of sales to some, but considering I would never have published these stories and earned a dime off them before, I’m thrilled. Because my best sellers happen to be a couple of YA $2.99 books, the dollar amount adds up.
The key for me is to keep writing new books and keep sharing them with fans, and learn more ways to offer the books to markets I haven’t accessed yet (print, mainly).
Terry, wow, 11,000 books. That’s fantastic. And you are right, it does add up quickly.
Hmm, got to go figure out how many books WMG sold in March. That will be interesting.
Great work, Terry.
Dean,
Well you don’t `have` to buy a PC just to run storyboxsoftware’s product. You could get a virtualization product called Parallels for the Mac that will permit you to run Windows inside it. Parallels has a bundle deal for $199, home edition. You can set it up so that the only thing that you see is Mark’s software in a window.
Mark have you tested your software in a virtual environment?
Thanks for clearing that up, Dean. I was wondering at the power of my comment.
All these figures made me curious, so I did mine for April. Full disclosure: I’m just like Dean with spreadsheets, which is why I can’t divide out the SW sales without manually counting them, which is why they’re lumped.
90% Kindle
03% Create Space
01% Kindle UK
06% Smashwords
Also full disclosure, I’ve done nothing to promote anywhere except Amazon and darn little there. In fact lately my darn little has fallen to nothing and I’m trying to talk myself into more darn little. What I want, though, is the just write more theory to work so I don’t have to. I suspect it will work since when I released my third novel last November – my 3rd novel but the first in a same genre – it gave the other same genre book a boost to higher sales than it had ever had and the new one matched it the first months. I’m going to have 2 more chances to see if that is duplicated this fall.
@Mark – I’m going to take a look at your software as soon as I can make time. I’d happily pay for something that would make sense out of the SW spreadsheets. Maybe that’s the wrong way to put it. The spreadsheets do make sense, but getting the data out of them in a form I can use for keeping track of sales is tedious beyond belief. I’ll pay for something that does that for me and I only have 3 books and 1 short story.
“That said, I’m completely unknown and need readers more than I need the royalties, so I too have gone the $.99 route on my first book.”
Does that work though? The more money I pay for a book the more likely I am to read it; I’ve probably started 10% of the free ebooks I’ve downloaded, 50% of those I paid $0.99 for and 90% of those I’ve paid $2.99+ for. I’m guessing an awful lot of those $0.99 downloads are never read.
Also, will people who mostly buy $0.99 novels buy your next at $2.99 or $4.99 if they like the cheap one? Or will they only buy another if it’s also $0.99?
I have a suspicion there are are least three markets in ebooks at the moment — free, $0.99 and everything else — and readers don’t necessarily cross from one to another.
Edward, that’s the way it works in traditional publishing as well. There are readers who only buy used or discount store or discount bin books. They seldom if ever pay full price. They just can’t. So they miss a ton of good books.
One way to cross the boundaries to get the discount audience is holding a sale. A lot of us who can’t afford full price for all or even most books keep a look out for books offered temporarily cheaper.
If you simply price low, then everybody pays the lower price, even those who would gladly pay more. If you price higher most of the time, and have short “sale” periods, those who are not price sensitive don’t bother to look for sales, but those who are price sensitive do.
But you have to take the time to establish yourself (at the higher price) before the discounters will be watching for you.
I think lower price is a valid sales tool IF you use it for the first book in a series, and IF you have the other books in the series up. And IF you don’t keep it at that price forever. I tend to think that a series selling for $4.99 or higher can have a first book in the series sell at $2.99 to bring in more readers. And those readers will move on if they like the writing. But it only works if you have other products for your readers to read. Where I find it silly is thinking in this modern world that a reader will remember a writer after buying their book for 99 cents. The chance of that is slim and none. Unless the writer has a ton of other work up as well.
Now back to the regular topic of this blog and that’s understanding how small sales can add up to huge sales if a writer is patient and just keeps writing.
I thought I made that point clearly, but guess I didn’t. Sigh… Book as event is deadly thinking in this new world of electronic publishing. It had to be that way in traditional publishing due to shelf space, but now we have unlimited shelf space and unlimited time for a book to be available, thus no need for the “book as event” thinking. Put the book or story up and let it alone. Focus on writing the next book. Worrying about pricing and sales can only drive a person nuts.
Okay, I went and got basic sales counts for May for WMG Publishing.
We had up 175 books, stories, and collections by the end of May.
We sold 1,266 copies electronically total, all sites. (Not counting CreateSpace)
That means we averaged 7.23 copies sold per title in May.
Luckily I understand what that means. (grin)
@Terry: Seriously? Someone was loyal to the Kindle shop?
I’m… wow. Wasn’t the whole point of selling via Kindle is because loyalty in publishing is a one way street?
Color me confused.
Dean, I think the 40% number you’re giving for Kindle sales must be for world-wide and not the US market. I just can’t find that anywhere after some searching, and I’ve never seen a percent of US market given for Kindle that’s lower than 50%, even in B&N’s marketing materials. (Usually they just fudge their number at the expense of the non-Amazon crowed.)
This is from February, and the numbers may have shifted a little since then: “The Kindle has a market share of 67 percent in the U.S., followed by the Nook at 22 percent, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Amazon.com also generates 58 percent of e-book sales, followed by Barnes & Noble’s 27 percent, Apple Inc. at 9 percent and Borders with 7 percent.”
Mind you, I’m not saying you’re wrong about selling on all the platforms.
Your meaning is 100% spot-on!
Authors need to grab every market they can get.
For example, I just came out with my second book. It’s selling on B&N but not Amazon, which is the exact reverse of my first book. And two months in, I’m still waiting on some sales figures from Smashwords for the first book. (Don’t have the second one up with them yet because… Well, this isn’t the place for my Smashwords gripes.)
David, let me see if I can go back and find those studies I got the information from. Of course, Kindle gives out no sales figures, so it’s tough. And when I looked at the percentage WMG was selling on Kindle US compared to the others, I figured my numbers were too low. (grin) Let’s just say they are in a range where Kindle is the biggest, but not the only one. (grin)
Thanks, Dean! That’s super on your sales! And yes, the point about writing the next book, and the next is the best promotional tool we can use!
And yes, Kathleen. Actually it was more than one who said that, but the majority of us said the same, why would you rely on only one site to sell all your books?
Ah I misunderstood – I thought you were suggesting a 10% off the top for them to just for them to submit it to all the the ebook stores – not the standard cut the ebook stores actually took from selling the work.
The other thing to remember is that the Kindle _platform_ is larger than Amazon sales — because you can buy mobi files from elsewhere to read on your Kindle. (Smashwords, Fictionwise, etc.)
Plus there is also the whole “lying with statistics” thing, in terms of whether they’re talking about unit sales or gross income or something else.
I honestly hope that Mark can sell his program… because I managed to sell exactly ONE copy of it
[Thanks Terry!] I am quite sure the “no sales” thing is because I have no clue about marketing (and I hate spam)… but so far this was a bust for me.
I’ve even offered free licenses in exchange for reviews… which also bombed. Oh well, it’s not like it was a big loss, it was just disappointing.
Marcel, I didn’t realize your system was up and running. Is it for Windows or Macs and can I try it? If it works I’ll spread the word just fine.
Sheesh, I’m not even selling a copy a week. (Note: I’m not worried about it, at this point. My reviews are few but good. If sales are still this low when I have my full high fantasy quartet up—which I’m hoping will be by Christmas next year—then I’ll be concerned.)
I also agree about the price points. I’ve noticed with my own e-book buying methods: I’ll collect free e-books, but I’m far more likely to quickly read something I’ve paid for. If I’m interested enough in a novel to pay $3.99+, I’ll probably read it immediately. (One exception: an e-book I bought from FictionWise a few years ago that I keep forgetting I own and that the DRM makes difficult to read.)
I’ll sometimes go browsing for a free short story or a serial novel, to find a new author. Unless I can find some sampling of the author’s personality and/or plotting online, I’m highly unlikely to pay more than $0.99 to try ‘em.
Thank you for this post! Your posts always inspire me, not because they’re filled with fantasy bullshit of “if you just do XYZ your book will sell!” but because it’s realistic. Most of your major points simplify down to “you must work hard” which in this case means writing more… and since we’re all writers here (supposed to be, at least) that’s a challenge I can handle.
This is for Julia Rachel Barrett above and others who find out that Smashwords has run out of free ISBNs. It’s happened to me a couple of times. Don’t pay for them. Just wait a week or two at the most and they always have more. A delay in getting your ISBNs delays your entry into the premium channel, but it’s just a temporary setback, nothing to be concerned about and better than paying those exorbitant prices.
Those pricing at 99 cents to get people to try them who otherwise wouldn’t — consider this:
I am a cheapskate. I won’t pay above $5 for an ebook unless I am really anticipating that ebook. (And then, frankly, I will usually wait around because I expect it to get cheaper eventually.)
I also, however, won’t spend 99 cents to “take a chance” on a new author. If I want to try you out, I’ll sample. Duh. It’s free to sample. Why should I spend 99 cents?
I’m not one who would turn against a book just because it’s 99 cents, I’m just saying that the price doesn’t make a difference in purchase resistance for me — and from what I’ve seen in areas where Kindle readers congregate, free sampling is replacing the way of experiencing new authors.
Which isn’t to say that going after the 99 cent discount crowd isn’t a strategy of its own — it’s just a very different strategy than many people think it is, and it’s going after a very different audience than many think they’re going after.
I think the math on how much gets sold where can also shift tremendously if you have a book that gets “visible” with one of the retailers. For me, it happened on amazon – I now get help from their algorithms that I don’t get on other sites. I personally think amazon’s methods to help readers discover less-known authors are superior to any of the other vendors, so I expect my sales to stay kindle-centric – but I’m smart enough to be other places in case I’m wrong
.
One other comment – I applied to Overdrive to be in libraries. I was rejected for having too small a catalog. So WMG with 175 titles might get in, and I think Konrath is in, but other than that, I think the libraries door is pretty closed to indies right now, at least those with smaller numbers of titles.
Tough for smaller indie publishers under ten or twenty titles, yup. But over that they tend to be open. Also, you can do POD trade paper through CreateSpace and just use their free ISBN and get into their library distribution system, which is pretty strong in some areas.
Dean, it’s available at the http://indietracking.com site but, unfortunately, it’s Windows only
I know that Macs can have Windows installed too (my boss has a Mac) but I don’t know how to do it.
I would very much appreciate any feedback, of course. I am somewhat proud of the result, but I realize that – not being a writer myself (yet!) – I might not understand what such an application needs.
Hey, you know how you’re always going on about word of mouth? Well, after reading Camille’s description of her book here, I just went and bought a copy. Full price, no problem. It’s right up my alley, just the kind of thing I like to read.
As for discounts, I’m planning to hand out discount cards at WorldCon for my latest book. Ten percent off until August 24, for the e-edition. It normally sells for $4.99 (it’s a short YA novel), and I figure even if I lose money on it I may garner some reviews. To that end, I’m willing to sacrifice a few bucks. It’s not a long term strategy, though.
I believe you get what you pay for: if a book has a really low price, I assume it’s either not very good or not very long. When I price my books, I go look at what comparable books are selling for and price mine accordingly. It’s called market research, and it’s much more reliable, IMO, than gut feelings mixed with an inferiority complex.
Thanks, Sarah!
Of course, technically, “word of mouth” is supposed to be words from the mouth of somebody other than the author.
But it is an example of “hand selling” — which leads to regular word of mouth as people who were personally convinced to try a book tell others about it. It’s slow, but it does work. Eventually.
I’m just not sure that Amazon is 40% of most indies income. I believe that Amazon algorithms are friendlier to indie ebooks. They’re designed to pick up stuff that’s selling well and make it sell really, really well.
So, when I had a first book in a series that got popped into lots of also bought lists on Amazon this year, my Amazon sales soared. My sales everywhere else seem to be about the same.
Perhaps there will be a slow trickle down effect as the 1000 or so people who bought the book and its sequels during its “also-bought” ride talk to other people who don’t have kindles, and maybe my sales in other places will eventually go up as well. I sure hope so.
But right now, the difference between the money I’m making from Amazon and the money I’m making from everywhere else combined is vastly in Amazon’s favor.
V.J, yup, everyone is different and every book and series is different. I honestly was surprised to find that WMG Publishing sales numbers over 175 books was so low on Kindle, under the estimated 40%. So my books and my wife’s books are the flip side of that. And we do very well in Australia through iBooks.
Everyone is different.
Okay. I’m eating my words.
I put my prices back up to 2.99 and watched my sales plummet. Except they didn’t plummet very far and then most of them bounced back up again, so about half the amount of sales but 3 x the revenue (ish).
Okay, it’s only 3 days (a mere moment in book sale terms), so this means not a lot at all.
I’ve come to a conclusion though, and that conclusion is…
HUH?
Glynn, write more books, stop watching the numbers. (grin)
For the Mac and Linux (and Windows, if so inclined) users who want to obsess over sales tracking (grin), there’s MagicBakeshop tracking software.
Unfortunately I lost a few weeks of development time because of some unrelated emergencies. It does all the basics. I just wish I had more of my own sales to track
. I’ll have it (with some dummy data) on my laptop at Worldcon; if anyone wants a demo or walk-through, track me down.
Dean – sorry if this has been asked and answered in the 55 or so responses already, but are all of these spreadsheets either excel (doubt apple would give you excel) or as a .csv? I know Amazon is (yes, guilty as charged!), I’ve never bothered exporting Smashwords, but I’m guessing it’s one of the two. As long as they don’t change the structure of .xls/.csv reports, this shouldn’t be a problem for an Excel VBA programmer. At least a personalized one shouldn’t be a problem – I guess an off the shelf on that you and I could each use might be more difficult.
Ann,
Yup, they are, and yup, it is a huge problem. Give it a try and see for yourself. To make these things spit out simple information for non-spreadsheet people is very tough.
I want to go to a page, load in all the data from the different sources, then without using a spread sheet, type in a book title, a month, and know how many copies I sold and how much I made on that title that month. Seems like it should be easy. Nope.
And yes, they are all excel spreadsheets, which does a person who doesn’t use or want to use spreadsheets no good at all.
And yes, I could buy any off-the-shelf business program that has inventory control and do data entry. With ten books I could do that. Right now WMG has over 200 titles and growing. Data entry is a week of work every month.
And thus you see the problem.
Dean – are you saying you’re ok with uploading those spreadsheets to a website? I didn’t want to write the program as an web app because I thought you wouldn’t want to upload the data. (I don’t plan on doing anything with it, of course, except for generating reports… but you’d have to trust that.)
If you are ok with uploading it, I can make it a web app, it would probably take me a couple of weeks. Please let me know
Marcel, I can’t upload my stuff at all because it’s mixed with so many other authors and the publishers (WMG) has it all coming in under one account. And thus why I am hoping to get something like this idea working. Without data entry I would love to be able to sort out my stuff without also being an expert at Excel. Some day I’m just going to go learn that program and be done with all this. But most indie writers won’t. Thanks!
Ann, to amplify on Dean’s point, while they’re all files that can be opened by Excel (or other spreadsheet program, like OpenOffice Calc), they are a mix of .csv, .xls, and .txt files, some comma-delimited, some tab-delimited. All have different formats, sometimes wildly so. But it gets worse.
At least one reseller only does quarterly, not monthly, reports (although a monthly total is given, it isn’t broken out by title.) Another has changed formats between 2010 and 2011. A couple do regional (country) sales breakdowns without repeating the title on each row. One reports list-price in customer currency (including NZ dollars and Norwegian krone) but (thankfully) gives the royalty in USD regardless of country. (Which is fine unless you want to check the seller’s math.) Some don’t include critical information (like date ranges, or country) in the data, it has to determined from the file name.
In other words, like almost all programming tasks, the easy 80% takes 20% of the effort, but the remaining 20% corner-cases take 80%. At first glance, all you see is the easy part.
That’s not even getting into details like titles not reported exactly the same on different sites (possibly caused when uploading), or wanting to break it down by pen name, or … but you get the idea.
I write children’s books and I don’t think they work so well on Kindle. Maybe I’m wrong. But I worry about illustrations. I do have two novels which may work well but I feel technically inept about making them ebooks.
Thanks for your details here.
Jane, the children’s books just take more formatting and a natural place for them is on the iPads and other tablets with the graphics. But they are more difficult, no doubt. Good luck and have fun.
Dean, Can you email (rgrivera1113@gmail.com) me a sample of the spreadsheets (I don’t need the actual numbers, just the spreadsheet formats.) and I’ll see what I can do. I’m a software engineer dabbling outside my specialty (avionics). It may take a while based on the demands of my day job, but I should be able to come up with something.
Thanks, Rob, maybe others here can help. I can’t because it’s not all my stuff. There are a few others here who have already got web sites up and running. Shout out again, folks. Tell us what the problems are. And how far you are along in the process. Thanks!