Tag Archives: smashwords

What does a self-published career look like?

Inspired by Jim C. Hines’s openness about his own writing income and Hugh Howey’s analysis of Amazon’s sales figures, I decided to do some analysis of my own books’ sales data. I got these data from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Program and Smashwords, a site that distributes e-books to just about every bookselling site that’s not Amazon. Both programs offer authors a wealth of statistics about how their books are doing.

I got into this game at the end of 2009. I aggregated all my data collected since then into the following two charts. One shows book sales per month and the other shows downloads of free books per month.

Click for full size!

Click for full size!

Click for full size!

Click for full size!

The first thing you’ll notice is that I’m not making a princely amount of money. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The next thing you’ll notice is that my books do way better on Barnes and Noble than anywhere else. This is a surprise to me, and while I don’t know exactly what’s going on, I have a few ideas.

I’ll walk you through some of the features of the figures. First of all, what happened in September of 2010? Well, I published my second novel, The Confederacy of Heaven. At the time, both The Confederacy of Heaven and Grizelda were free. (Grizelda was briefly $2.99 and I managed to sell one, which is why there’s a blip in the sales figure.) Why did I suddenly get a bunch of free downloads of both books once The Confederacy of Heaven went up? One idea I’ve got is that The Confederacy of Heaven was a hit in B&N’s free book category and pulled Grizelda up with it, all while I suspected nothing. Or maybe I signed up for Barnes and Noble distribution that month, or Smashwords added more distribution channels that month.

What happened in September of 2013? The free downloads drop off there and the sales spike up. For this one, I know what’s going on. In September 2013 I signed up with the Amazon Kindle program and switched my books from free to $3.99. It seems to be working well, but my B&N sales might be declining, just like the free downloads generally have declined since June 2011.

A couple other notes on the figure: Apple’s download data look pretty spiky because for a couple of years they would report all their downloads to Smashwords once a year in December. They started reporting once a month in 2013. My free downloads figures for Smashwords itself are underestimated because Smashwords only tells me when somebody redeems a 100% off coupon for one of my books. They don’t store data on other kinds of downloads for more than 90 days. I generally get 2 or 3 downloads of my free short stories per day.

You can see that little orange bump there when people redeemed coupons from my Kickstarter campaign.

So why do my books sell so much better on Barnes and Noble than anywhere else? I think there’s a couple of reasons. Barnes and Noble is bigger than any other channel except Amazon. And I had two novels distributed through Barnes and Noble free for a few years. This gave the books a chance to build up a stock of book reviews that convinced people to buy later on. I don’t have any free download data for Amazon because Amazon will only let you give away your book for two weeks per year, only if you agree to publish exclusively with them. But that’s a gripe for another day.

You can’t tell from these figures, but why does The Confederacy of Heaven consistently sell better than anything else, on every channel? I think it’s better than Grizelda but worse than Cannon Fodder, and it definitely has the worst cover art. But I sure appreciate the attention.

What do you guys think? Would you like to see another Confederacy of Heaven giveaway? Better cover art? Have you got any sales stats on your blog?

Smashwords announces new Library Direct feature

You can read the original blog post here: http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/08/new-smashwords-direct-enables-libraries.html

The upshot of this news is that Smashwords (a website that hosts and distributes self-published e-books) has just greatly expanded its ability to distribute its books with public libraries.  As a Smashwords author, I think this is great news.  Smashwords authors get to have their work in libraries, so one of the disadvantages of self-publishing (that you don’t get to be in libraries) is gone.  Libraries get to vastly expand their lists of titles.  And Smashwords, of course, gets to do more business 🙂 .

Ravensdaughter’s Tale is up

The Smashwords edition of “Ravensdaughter’s Tale” is complete and now up on the site.  Even if you weren’t a backer of the Kickstarter campaign, now’s your chance to get a copy.  It’s only 99 cents.

And check out the lovely cover art that Kelsey has made for it.  She’s awesome.

Updates of Two Kinds

First of all, the surviving lettuces on my balcony have set flower:

Secondly, my Kickstarter for “Ravensdaughter’s Tale” finished the other day, not only fully funded, but also having made its first reach goal of $300!  This means that I’ll be able to post “Ravensdaughter’s Tale” up on Smashwords as well as a new edition of Grizelda.  I’ll send links when there’s stuff to see.

Cannon Fodder is Coming … Eventually

Hello, everybody, and happy new year!

It’s 2012.  I’ve mentioned earlier that I was expecting Cannon Fodder, the book I’m working on right now, to come out in 2012.  I’m writing this post to explain that it might take longer than that, but I have a very good reason: I’m going to try to sell this one.

For the past … oh … many years, I’ve been sort of learning to write and sharing it with people.  If that short story about the mushroom alien was in sixth grade, that was 1999, so about thirteen years.  I’ve learned a lot from the experience, and I think it’s time to give it a shot.

That sort of thing takes a lot of time, no matter whether I try for traditional publishing or go Amanda Hocking style.  I’m going to run Cannon Fodder through critique group and get the thing seriously ironed out.  Then I’m going to go through the process of pitch to an agent, pitch to another agent, agent pitches to an editor, editor asks me to make revisions, editor go talks to a typesetter, which can take a couple of years.

But never fear!  There will still be regular updates on this blog, and I’ll let you know how it’s going.  Until then, I hope you all have a great year 2012.

Grizelda Is Now Up on Smashwords

After a few technical difficulties, Grizelda is now available online as an e-book.  You can sample the first third of the book for free, and if you e-mail me and mention this blog, you can get a discount.  As always, the Podiobooks version is free.

Check it out here: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/margarettaylor

Here’s the Podiobooks version: http://www.podiobooks.com/title/grizelda