Royalty analysis

I got my royalty statement yesterday, and it's interesting. As I hoped, NEVER LOVE A STRANGER did the best of all my books up front, although not as well as I would have liked. My backlist also shows a spike for the quarter that STRANGER was released, which suggests people liked the book and bought some of my others. But LOVE REMEMBERED, ALL I EVER WANTED, and ISN'T IT ROMANTIC? are now all available on Fictionwise, and their sales there in the fourth quarter brought them all close to STRANGER's sales. (I'm talking about units sold-- I get paid substantially less for sales through Fictionwise, so I've actually made much more money for STRANGER.) I *wish* STRANGER would get listed to Fictionwise-- I think it would do well there-- but NCP seems to have stopped listing to Fictionwise for the time being, probably because of the effort they're putting into releasing paperbacks. Bummer.

Anyway, the good news is that my royalties for the second half of 2004 were double my royalties for the first half of 2004. The bad news is that two times not much is still not much. Or as DH bluntly put it: "Yeah, that's damned good in percentage terms, but in absolute terms it's still diddly squat." Maybe someone's getting rich in e-publishing, but it ain't me:-). The results do suggest that if I want to make more money in e-publishing, I should try to produce futuristics on a regular basis, which I had pretty much suspected.

So... heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work on FARTHEST SPACE I go!