This month

So, this month's results are better than any month I've had till now. I know this is true for a lot of indies-- sales were up for a lot of authors who post on Kindleboards. I unsurprisingly did best with my Christmas story (754 copies sold on Amazon in December), but every one of my Ellen Fisher books sold better on Amazon this month than last month, by quite a wide margin in most cases. Also, a pen-named short story took off on PubIt and sold close to 2000 copies over there-- nice sales for so short a work.

My total sales for the year jumped to slightly over 15,000. My total sales for the month came to about 4800-- my prior top sales number for a month having been 1951 back in June. My total sales on Amazon US were a bit over 2500. My sales on B&N were about 2000, most of which were that short story under a pen name (which sold with no promotion whatsoever).

In the Mood is very close to 3500 sold as an annual total; Isn't it Romantic? is at 2880 copies total; Unwrapped made it up to over 1600 total. (I expected Unwrapped to stop selling after Christmas, but to my surprise it sold somewhere around 150 copies in the week following Christmas. I guess people were still in the holiday mood!)

Overall, it was a nice month, for me as well as for a lot of other writers. I hope the increased sales continue for all of us!

2010 in review

2010 has had its ups and its downs. Physically and personally, it's kind of sucked. The Crohn's got way out of control in the summer, and I'm still dealing with it, to the point that I had to have a blood transfusion right before Christmas to help with the anemia. They keep sending me to new specialists, and I hope before long we'll hit on a combination of drugs that will get it under control. And toward the end of the year my dad got sick, and spent a lot of time in the hospital (though he's out now and back at home, which is wonderful and amazing considering his age). On the up side, my kids are doing great and seem very happy now, and that's what matters most.

Meanwhile, my writing career, which had been pretty much nonexistent for three years after my husband died, took off again. All of that is entirely due to self-publishing (I have sold quite a few of my Samhain books recently, but they were not selling at all till I started up with the indie publishing). I started on Amazon, and then expanded to B&N. I've been happy with my sales since March, but December was the first month in which I did very, very well. I'm hopeful this is the start of an upward trend for my sales, and not just a fluke, but of course there's no way of telling yet. I'll be interested to see what happens in 2011.

Borders, B&N

Link snagged from the comments of J.A. Konrath's blog: Borders has delayed paying some vendors. The article says, "Borders has been reporting losses for years, but its results worsened in recent quarters with heightened competition from Barnes & Noble and larger merchants including Amazon.com, Wal-Mart Stores and Target."

On the flip side, "Bookseller Barnes & Noble Inc. on Thursday said its line of Nook e-reading devices are the biggest-selling items in its history, and added it sold nearly 1 million e-books on Christmas Day."

Christmas break

Christmas break has been surprisingly fun, despite the snowstorm that stranded us in the house for a few days. The oldest kid got Firefly, watched it through, loved it, and is now making me watch two or three episodes a day. I don't love it as much as she does, but it's certainly very enjoyable. Meanwhile, we finished our Star Trek: DS9 watch and are most of the way through the first season of Star Trek Voyager, which is adequate, if no Deep Space Nine.

The other kids are busy with their new books and toys. The youngest got a Leapster from Santa, along with a Star Wars reading game, and I hear him playing it and sounding out words. He's really coming along as a reader. The older boy is immersed in World War II-- he got tanks, soldiers, books, and the Axis and Allies game. So he's very busily occupied creating an entire war zone in the game room. And the younger girl is reading and rereading the fantasy books she got.

So everyone's happy, and for once I'm not even particularly eager for school to start up again!

More Big Brother Amazon

An author reports that Amazon has deleted her titles simply because they have the word "rape" in the title (link lifted from Selena Kitt on the Amazon boards).

Mark Coker's predictions

Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, has ten predictions about ebook publishing in Media Bistro (link snagged obliquely from Moses Siregar III over on Kindleboards). Among his predictions: "Self publishing goes from option of last resort to option of first resort among unpublished authors," "Average ebook prices will decline, despite attempts by Agency 5 publishers to hold the line," "Readers will decide which books become hits, not publishers."

Cover update

Love Remembered has sold thirteen copies in less than a day, since its new cover went up. Prior to that it had only sold forty-eight copies the whole month. I believe the lovely new cover may indeed be helping:-).

More amazing indie sales figures

Once again, not mine... alas:-).

Amanda Hocking has now sold over 100,000 copies of her books.

Stephen Leather has sold over 33,000 copies of his books in a month on Amazon UK.

New cover

Love Remembered has been one of my more sluggish sellers, selling about fifty copies a month (In the Mood typically sells around three hundred per month). When a book doesn't do well, it's a good idea to play around with its selling points. It could just be that people don't like the sample, or that readers don't think of me as a historical writer. But it could also be that the cover isn't grabbing people. I never liked my self-designed LR cover all that much, so when I saw a really nice premade one on Hot Damn Designs, I decided to buy it. Here it is, by Kim of Hot Damn Designs:
This looks a lot more professional than my old cover. There's no guarantee that it'll sell more copies, of course, but there's something to be said for presenting a more professional face to the world in any event. If this does well, I may think about upgrading my other covers, too.

An article....

An interesting article here (link lifted from Lee Goldberg) on the shrinking role of publishers as gatekeepers. "Writers are bypassing the traditional route to bookstore shelves and self-publishing their works online. By selling directly to readers, authors get a larger slice of the sale price." Mentioned (inevitably) is J.A. Konrath: "'I doubt I'll ever have another traditional print deal,' said the author of 'Whiskey Sour,' 'Bloody Mary' and other titles. 'I can earn more money on my own.'"

Snow!

Got a ton of it here. Well, a ton for eastern Virginia. Six inches, maybe, and it's still falling briskly. It's beautiful, the more so because I have nowhere to go today and planned to relax and watch movies all day anyway!

Another bestseller (not me!)

Indie romance author H.P. Mallory broke into the top hundred on Amazon today with her book Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble.

Christmas is coming, and I'm not ready

I have a gazillion presents to wrap, and Christmas is only a few days away. Eeeek. Tomorrow is the last day the kids are in school, so I think I'll be doing a lot of wrapping tomorrow, before I have four nosy kids underfoot!

B&N

Barnes and Noble just did redid their sales reporting yesterday. Unfortunately in the process I've lost about ninety sales (I have one book selling really well over there right now, so I have a lot more sales this month than in previous months). Other people on Kindleboards are reporting they lost sales in the switch, too. I hope it gets fixed, but alas, I have no screenshot or proof of the higher number, and for all I know the higher number was incorrect anyway. So I have no real recourse if those sales never reappear, I suppose. But I hope they will, sooner or later.

Romance covers

If you write romance, there are some really nice-looking covers for sale here at Hot Damn Designs.

Slow growth

With traditionally published books, the book typically sells well its first month or two, then slows down. Indie books tend to be different-- they often don't do too well at first, then gain momentum. Victorine Lieske's Not What She Seems is a good example of this. It's been out there for months, slowly gathering steam, and as of this week it's broken into the top 100 in the Kindle store, which is quite an achievement.

Milestones

I've made it past 11,000 sold across all titles, and over 3000 overall for In the Mood.

Big Brother Amazon

Several erotica indie authors (including at least one who's popular and makes a ton of money as an indie) are reporting that they've had some books pulled from Amazon. Right now Amazon seems to be removing titles involving incest. (I'd guess maybe there are some readers clicking on the "report content as inappropriate" link in the wake of the pedophilia book controversy). But if you write anything with sex in it, this is worth paying attention to-- Amazon can, after all, pull anything they want, and it might not be much of a step from deleting incest to deleting anything with sexual content. This is one good reason not to have all your eggs in one basket as an author.

Another bestselling indie author

Here's an article about an indie author who earned $25,000 in three months (link lifted from the comments on J.A. Konrath's blog).

I am offended...

by authors who come onto the Amazon threads and try to ingratiate themselves with the anti-indie folks there by saying, "Oh, but I'm not a lousy little self-publisher! I agree self-pubbed books mostly suck, but look! I've also got REAL books with REAL publishers!"

Um, yeah. Some of the rest of us have worked with publishers too, but we don't go around denigrating other indies to try to make ourselves look better. Don't pull down others and stomp on them while you try to establish yourself on Amazon, 'k?

Amanda Hocking

Here's an interview with Amanda Hocking, who's sold more than 25,000 copies of her indie paranormal romances.

How others are doing

A glimpse at ebook sales figures for other authors:

J.A.Konrath

Selena Kitt

A Kindleboards thread with last month's sales for numerous authors

Of books and 78s

I grew up listening to 78s. Really. I'm only 43, so I would guess I am probably one of the youngest people around who spent her childhood listening to a steady diet of 78s. My dad, who's a jazz fan, had thousands of them, and every single night we listened to them (at painfully high volume-- it's no wonder the man is deaf now) from five to eight o'clock.

What is a 78, you ask? Or maybe you didn't ask. But in case you don't know, it's one of these:


Yes, it's a record, but not the LPs you probably remember from your youth. At ten inches, it was only a few inches smaller than an LP, but it spun very rapidly and contained about three minutes of music per side. (If you wanted to hear classical music back then, it came on twelve-inch discs, which provided you with four to five minutes of music per side. Imagine trying to get through a symphony that way.). It was made out of shellac, a brittle substance which shattered if you dropped it and developed hideously awful surface noise very quickly.

For fifty years, these were what you listened to if you wanted to hear music. And I'm sure they were a great improvement over the earlier technology, otherwise known as, "Hattie, I'd like to hear some music-- why don't you go play us a few tunes on the piano?" But once the LP was invented, the 78 died a rapid death, and rightfully so. (RCA Victor actually introduced an LP of a sort in 1931, but it only played ten minutes per side, and alas, no one had any money, so it was withdrawn from the market by 1933.) But when the LP as we know it was introduced in 1948-- well, three minutes vs. half an hour of playing time per side, less surface noise, and a record that doesn't shatter if you drop it. Which would you choose?

So the 78 is now dead (my Dad read somewhere that the last manufacturer of 78 styluses has discontinued making them, so it's not just merely dead, but really most sincerely dead), and with very good reason. It was the best technology available at the time, but once better technology was invented, there wasn't much need for it, especially once all those old songs were transferred into CD format and remastered to get rid of all the surface noise. (And even the obscurest of the obscure has been put into CD format now.) The LP died for similar reasons, and now the CD itself is on the way out, killed off by a more convenient technology.

So is the same thing going to happen to paper books? Are they a technology (so to speak) that will be rendered obsolete by ebooks? Well, paper books don't have a lot of INconveniences. Unlike the 78, with its dreadful surface noise and its too-short playing time, they fulfill their function fairly well. I do suspect, though, that as people get used to carrying a library in their purse, they may begin to find books rather 78-like... too bulky for the content, in other words. Also, paper books can't have their font increased in size (which can be a big deal for a lot of us), and they can't be bought in ten seconds as you're browsing online. So while there's nothing wildly inconvenient about the paper book that makes it clearly doomed, the newer technology definitely offers some significant improvements.

It's worth mentioning that the 78 was actually replaced by two different formats-- the LP and the 45. They existed together for quite a while. I wonder if eInk (Kindle, Nook) and LCD screens (NookColor, iPad) will continue to exist together? They might appeal to different enough segments of the reading audience that they can both continue. Like the LP and the 45, there may never be a clear "winner."

I have to add that the tendency of paper books to accumulate can be both an up side and a downside. I readily admit I have too many books cluttering up my house. Even so, I really can't imagine my house without books lining the walls. Maybe that's just a retro thought, left over from my childhood conditioning (along the same lines as the common plaint "but I love the way books smell!"). But I like the thought of my kids growing up surrounded by books. A thousand books on my Kindle doesn't seem like it would have quite the same impact on their psyche somehow.

At any rate, unlike the 78, I suspect paper books will be sticking around for a while. But ebooks are certainly going to take over a large portion of the market fairly soon. It's really only a question of how long it takes, IMHO.