Which Paid Marketing Works (and Doesn't Work) for Books

Hi Folks,

See? We're not gone totally! In fact, I have a massive, crunchy, and highly informative blog post for you all today. This post was over a year (and more money than I'd like to admit) in the making. I do hope you all find it useful, we certainly have. Today's post is all about marketing, paid marketing in particular.

Which Paid Marketing Works for Books. (and which doesn't...)

This summer, we embarked on a massive marketing effort for No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished. I had the whole campaign planned out with something new and interesting happening every week or every other week. We had our target customers, channels, and funnels all setup. To complete the package, we tracked the crap out of everything we did.

For the important parts of this article, we ran Facebook ads, we used Amazon Marketing Services, we commissioned art, and dropped list bait. We did a LOT is what I'm saying.

We spent thousands of dollars on marketing and today I'm going to share our data with you. 

I cannot bold that enough. This was, at the end of the day, a grand experiment for Aaron/Bach, LLC. We put down serious cash and we hired a professional data-driven marketing firm, Proof Industries to help us put it all together. Additionally, the whole effort coincided during a time of the year (launch) when we had maximum leverage working for us.

Now, I'm going to show you what we actually did, how well it's worked, and compare it to past marketing efforts to show how it stacks up. This is going to be one hell of a post.

So, first...

I want to plug the good folks over at Proof Industries. We threw an entire multi-channel marketing campaign at them in May and they made it happen starting in June. I could not have set up all the tracking infrastructure and hundreds of Facebook ads myself. They also helped us monitor the whole shebang as it happened and ran the post-mortem. 

Big thanks to Zach, Josh, and Ansley for helping us pull it all off!

Let's Talk Numbers: How Long Should Your Series Be?

Hi Folks,

Travis here. I've been talking about career planning and such lately, so I felt that today would be a good day to provide another tool for ya'll to use in that regard with an in-dept look at how the length of a series affects you commercially.

Obviously from an artistic standpoint your series should be as long as it needs to be, but there's a lot of wiggle room within that band. The idea here is to give you the information about how different novel lengths and series structure affect your bottom line as an author so that when that choice does come up, you have the tools to make the best one!

There's a lot of topics in this post that I've been dying to get onto the blog, so I'm really excited about this one. Let's go!

Let's Talk Numbers: How Long Should Your Series Be?

Are you ready for some graphs and charts?! Cause I am. It's been a while since I've dug into the nitty gritty behaviors of book sales. Today though, we are going to look at the economics and math that power our mainstay fiction series. 

We do so in the attempt to answer the question of, "how long should your series be?" Really, I hope to provide you with the tools to help answer that question for yourself.

Let's start with the most common genre fiction method of publishing: writing a sequential series of books. These are books that are meant to be read in order and they are published one after the other as they are written. (Since it's so common, this is going to be my assumed definition for the word "series" throughout this post.)

As I've talked about before, not everyone who reads book 1 in a series will go on to read book 2,3,4, etc. in the series. Since the books are sequential, this creates a funnel effect whereby 99% of people who read book 5 are people who've also read all the books before it. Same goes for any length of series be it three books or a hundred.

This creates a bit of mathematical tyranny for authors. Let's look at the theoretical earnings of a well written series that sells 1000 copies of its book 1.

Writing Wednesday: Project Management for the Writing Business (with bonus Heartstrikers 3 sample chapter reveal!)

Hello everyone!

I'm up to my neck in work all of a sudden, so we're taking a quick break from Prose Summer Camp. Travis has come to the Writing Wednesday rescue with an AMAZING post about how to manage your writing schedule like the pros (or at least these pros) do.

Before we get into that, though, I've got a treat for you. As you know, the third Heartstrikers novels, No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished, comes out on August 5! I realize that's very far away, so I've put together a little something to tide you over. How about...sample chapters?!

That's right, you can read the prologue and first chapter of No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished right here, right now! What happened in China? Get ready to find out!

You can also preorder the book right now. You know, just to be safe. Bob says it's dangerous to go alone. Take this.

And with that, I have to go back to the word mines. I really hope you enjoy this sneak peek, and I know you're going to enjoy Trav's crazy awesome post about project management!

For real, if you want to be a writing professional with a reliable timeline (or any kind of development professional since we got all of this from our joint background in programming), this stuff is gold. I was really blown away.

And with that, take it away Travis! 

***

Hi Folks,

Rachel and I sit down from time to time to plan out the writing schedule. Today I'd like to talk about the process and tools we use to generate our calendar with. This is a non-trivial question for a writing business, so I hope you'll find this info handy. It's all methods that I've learned from years of working in the programming industry, which is surprisingly similar to the book writing business.

Bonus: I'm going to post a spreadsheet that you can download and use to do this for yourself!

Project Management for the Writing Business

How many days can a full time writer write if a full time writer can write full time?

It's not 365

This is a question that all managers in all businesses have to learn and, in my experience, end up learning the hard way. Why the hard way? Because it's a lot less than anyone ever thinks it is and it's not intuitive. For example,

there's not that many writing days per year!

Looking at this, a very diligent author can optimally cram in 234, eight-hour work days of writing. That's only 2/3rd of the year. This isn't the whole picture though, the number is actually much lower.

Toss in the overhead of full time work life as well as running an author blog and now we're down to basically half of the year for writing. I'm not done yet though! How much of this time is actually spent writing?

Later on, I'm going to link you to my Book Timeline Estimator spreadsheet. Right now though, I'm going to use it to give you an example of how much time goes into a sample Rachel Aaron novel.

Guest Post: Loss Leaders, or How I learned to Stop Being Poor and Love the $0.99 Book

Hi Folks,

Last Monday, I talked about why 99c should not be your go-to regular novel price. We got a lot of good feedback on this post! The best counter-point was from USA Today bestselling author Annie Bellet, who has graciously agreed to do today's guest post.

Annie Bellet is the USA Today bestselling author of The Twenty-Sided Sorceress, which Rachel loved and is free right now! So check it out.

Her other notable works include the Pyrrh Considerable Crimes Division and the Gryphonpike Chronicles series.

She holds a BA in English and a BA in Medieval Studies and thus can speak a smattering of useful languages such as Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Welsh. Which is pretty darned cool!

Her interests besides writing include rock climbing, reading, horse-back riding, video games, comic books, table-top RPGs and many other nerdy pursuits.  She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and a very demanding Bengal cat.

This is a great guest post ya'll as the comments on my anti-99c post were mostly all about loss leading. So today is going to be very on point!

(Just a quick word. I realize in hindsight, that maybe I didn't setup my post properly. Long and short, I was talking about people who do things like price entire series at 99c, price book 3 at 99c, or otherwise use it as a long-term, regular price for too many of their works. It wasn't meant to say, "never use 99c".)

But while I could have been clearer, I'm very happy it lead to such a great conversation! So, are you ready to look at the loss leader strategy and how you can rock out with well-done 99c pricing? Here's Annie Bellet!

Guest Post: Loss Leaders, or How I learned to Stop Being Poor and Love the $0.99 Book

Pricing. It’s a scary part of self-publishing. What is a book worth? You’ve put dozens or even hundreds of hours into a work. You’ve (hopefully) paid for editing and wow-factor cover art and smooth formatting and your book looks like a million bucks to you. It’s weeks and months or years of blood and sweat and tears.

I’m going to tell you something scary but first a little caveat. This is all my belief and based on my own experiences and what I’ve observed after six years of self-publishing and putting up over forty titles. It is not the last word nor a 100% script that everyone can or should follow. Nothing works for everyone all the time. Nothing. Anyone who says “this is the only way” is either deluded or selling something. The following is just my experience and based on my own data and data I’ve gathered. Take it as such.

Let's Talk Numbers: Why You Shouldn't Price Your Novel at $0.99

Hi Folks,

We're back from Colorado, so that means our more regular posts can resume. Thank you again to Kameron Hurley for filling in for us with her amazing gust post about hybrid authorship! (Seriously, go read it if you haven't! It's good!)

Today I have a short one about pricing. Let's talk about pricing a full length novel at 99c as a standard, not sale, price and the horrible problems that can create.

For this post, please keep in mind that I'm talking about full length novels. Short stories, serials, and novellas definitely have different pricing rules and this discussion may or may not apply to those arenas.

Why You Shouldn't Price Your Novel at $0.99

Every now and then, we see people doing this. They have a a shiny new book, a full length novel no less, and they release it for sale at a $0.99 cover price. Rachel and I cannot help but cringe when we see this happen, because we understand the faulty logic that's happening behind the scenes here.

Why would someone do this? There's basically three kinds of authors who put up full novels at what is a discount price.

1. Those who are part of the book mill brands who write a book a month, don't edit or copy edit it, and just go for quantity over quality as a publishing strategy.
2. People who are trying to build readership, often desperately so.
3. Folks who don't think their books are worth full price.

It should come as no surprise that Rachel and I disapprove of the book mill approach. We don't think that it's good for the industry in general. Worse, the people we've see who pursue this kind of business model often talk about how soul killing it is, so y'all can see why we dislike this practice on many levels.

Now, people who are pricing their books at 99c as a means of building readership faster, those people I want to talk to the most today. For insecure authors, I'll be hitting on that topic near the end of this post.

Most everything I have to say about pricing low to build readership can be summed up simply as,

Using $0.99 as your regular price point is trading long-term gains for short-term ones.

Starting out, new authors need to build readership. It's the first and last item on their agenda besides writing the next book. Additionally, most people understand that lower price = greater volume so pricing to move is the logical tactic.

"Tactics without strategy are the noise before defeat"
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Persistent bargain-basement pricing is engaging in grievously short term tactics without really considering their impact on the future (ie the strategy for a healthy long-term career). There's three major issues with using $0.99 as a regular price point for full length novels.

Let's Talk Numbers: Selling Books Sells Books

Trav has put together an amazing post for you guys looking at what factors make a book's sales rank go up once the initial release frenzy has ended, but first...

I'm the Kindle Daily Deal for BOTH of the books in my Heartstrikers series today!! That's right, both Nice Dragons Finish Last AND One Good Dragon Deserve Another are on sale today only for $1.99, so in other words I'm getting nothing done today due to massive Amazon sales rank stalking ヽ(^◇^*)/!

(Chelsie shows up behind me)

Um...maybe writing will be getting done after all! (types frantically)

Anyway, that's what's exciting in my life today. I'm still live answering writing questions on my NaNo thread, so if you have a burning question about writing, feel free to pop over and ask me anything! And now, as promised, here's Travis and his really impressive tea leaf reading of Amazon's sales rank charts, how they change over time, and what we as authors can do to make them move in our favor.

Take it away, Travis!

-------------------------

Hi Everyone,

I've got a treat for you all today! Serious usage of Rachel's author central sales rank graphs! Today I'm going to show you which events over the last several years have made the biggest differences in Rachel's book sales. But first,

I was originally expecting to talk about how the best thing to do to sell books is to write more books and how promo is over rated. I felt that we (and modern authors in general) focus on marketing a lot because its the one wheel we can crank outside of writing to help sell books... I even rounded up a lot of sales data for ya'll to show this. Except that, when I got our data together, this wasn't a black-and-white truth at all.

True, writing more books is a great way to sell more books. Really though, the truth is that,

Selling Books Sells Books

Turns out sales beget sales, and some promotions are almost as effective as releasing new books is. However, cross-promotion is key to maximizing the impact of your sales spikes.

Let's take Nice Dragons Finish Last for example,

Let's Talk Numbers: The Nice Dragons MEGA Fall promotion!

Hi folks, Travis here with another look at numbers!

After much talking about the benefits of The Kindle Big Deal vs BookBub, we finally lucked into a BookBub promotion for Nice Dragons Finish Last! Do you want to know what happened?

TL;DR - BookBub is awesome! (But you all knew that already.)

We also might have promoted it in a few other places as well. Ok, like 9 other places. Literally over a million emails were sent out and millions of web/social impressions were gathered. If you subscribe to a bargain book mailing list, you probably saw Nice Dragons up there at some point.

And how did all this promo work out? Splendidly!

Let's Talk Numbers: The Nice Dragons MEGA Fall promotion!

What did we do exactly?

1. Nice Dragons was on sale for $0.99 via a countdown deal from Sept 27th to Oct 3rd... plus or minus some hours here and there.
2. Sept 28th was the BIG DAY and we advertised the sale on the following places,
1. BookBub
2. FKBT.com
3. Booksends.com
4. Read Cheaply
5. ManyBooks.net
6. Genre Pulse
7. eBookSoda
8. BargainBooksy
9. Reading Deals
10. Choosy Bookworm
3. Total cost was about $500 total.

Once we'd locked in the BookBub promotion dates, I carpeted the town for marketers. Most indie book advertising services only accept books that are on sale and require at least 60 days of normal price prior to application, so I wanted as many as possible for this $0.99 'cause it'll be 2-3 months before we could do another one.

Why hit up so many sites at once? Well, as Derek mentioned in his guest post, A Salesman Is You, it often takes multiple interactions to get someone to buy. I figured that since many of these book sale email lists have overlap, that that overlap might work in our favor.

Anyway, I'll stop teasing you all and get to the fun stuff. Results!

Let's Talk Numbers: Do Pre-orders Help Sales?

It's that time again, folks! The second novel in my Heartstrikers series, One Good Dragon Deserves Another, has been out over a month now, so it's time to take a look at the numbers. This time around, we were specifically interested in pre-orders and how they helped or hindered our projected first month of sales.

There's been a lot of back and forth on this in the writing community with some authors swearing by pre-orders and others arguing that they poached from the vital first week sales that are so important to getting your book high on the Amazon lists (which gets you in front of those all important new readers who might not have seen your series before). Never having done a pre-order ourselves, we were super curious, so when we got the chance to try it ourselves with One Good Dragon Deserves Another, we dove right in, and this is what we found!

(Note: Today's post will be presented by extremely talented and handsome husband/business partner Travis, who did all the math, graphs, and analysis. As always, he did a great job! So, without further ado, I'll turn it over to him. Rachel out!)

Hi everyone! The numbers are officially in, and One Good Dragon Deserves Another has done well far beyond our hopes! As Rachel promised earlier in the month, I've put together a ton of numbers, charts, graphs, and analysis for what's been going on with it.

We have a lot to talk about, too! A lot of things happened this time around that Rachel and I have never done before. We had pre-orders, we found a great trick for leveraging the Kindle Big Deal, and we had the game-changer that was KU 2.0 happen right in the middle of it all!

Its going to be a lot so let's get to....

Let's Talk Numbers: Do Pre-orders Help Sales?

So how'd One Good Dragon do? See for yourself,

can you guess when the book went live?

There's a lot to unpack here and that's what we are mostly about today. Let's talk about these numbers. 

One Good Dragon Deserves Another (OGDDA) was available for pre-order from June 1st to July 30th. In total, it had 4565 pre-orders. It was released on August 1st, 2015 so everything on that date and beyond are not pre-orders, just er. orders.

The first thing to notice is that we have a double spike. Normally, there's only 1 spike on release day and then nothing until a promo or sale is done. Here we had two. Once for the announcement of pre-orders and another for launch day. Very cool!

I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen with pre-orders since we'd never done them before. Would they cannibalize our first month sales? Would they get us on a list? Turns out... neither (Though not for a lack of trying on that second one!).

Lists aside, these are really great numbers for us! Here's what I originally predicted for an August release with no pre-order.

Let's Talk (Someone Else's) Numbers! Is $500,000 the New Midlist?

Guys, this is going to be a crazy huge and awesome post. But first and quickly, some old business:

1. Nice Dragons Finish Last was the Audible Daily Deal last Saturday, and I hit #1 on all of Audible! I even out sold The Martian for, like, 5 hours, and it's all thanks to you guys. Thank you SO MUCH for being my readers/listeners! The sequel, One Good Dragon Deserves Another comes out in audio in October and is up for pre-order now. (Spoiler: I talked with the NDFL voice-actor Vikas Adam on the phone this weekend about all the voices and it's going to be awesome!) 


2. I wrote a guest post for Fantasy Book Critic about Julius and the entire point of writing a Nice Dragon! I talk a lot about the inner workings of the books, so if you're a fan of my Heartstriker series, you definitely don't want to miss out. Go read it!

Okay, announcements over. Let's get on with the show!

Let's Talk (Someone Else's) Numbers! Is $500,000 the New Mid-list?

Forgive the click-baity title. I tried really hard to think of something less sensationalistic, but I'm going to talk about today actually is pretty sensational, so I decided to go for broke!

So as someone who's in the book business up to her neck these days, I'm a semi-regular on KBoards, an old school message board for self-publishing writers to talk shop and share numbers on promotions and so forth. This last part is really why I go there. One of the things I've always loved about the indie community is how open its authors are to sharing their numbers--bad, good, and amazing--for the benefit of everyone. 

This last week, though, an author posted a detailed thread about her monthly earnings over the last three years that blew my mind called "How I Made $500,000.00 Self-Publishing Romance eBooks."

I'll admit, I was skeptical. I've seen a lot of "How I Made $X Self-Publishing!" threads that were nothing but pyramid scams using farmed-out writers from overseas to produce mountains of schlock. When I actually read the post, though, I didn't find a scam or even a new trick. I found a classic success story of an author who wrote what she loved and made smart business choices while thoroughly documenting her experiences so she and others in the community could learn from them.

That, my friends, is impressive, as were her numbers! So, naturally, I sent her a frantic message asking if she'd let me interview her about her success and how she achieved it on my blog, and she agreed! Before we get to the questions, though, here is her original numbers post in all its glory, (reposted from Kboards with her permission).

(Note: The author of these numbers has requested to remain anonymous since posting success is a fast way to get a lot of negative reviews. This is a very real and sad phenomenon in the Indie world, and it needs to stop. Authors posting numbers is for ALL our benefit, and the fact that so many feel they can't share their sales under their real names without bringing down the ire of the hater brigade is sad and shameful. We are better than this.

For now, though, it is how it is, so until this problem is fixed, I will respect the author's request and refer to her through this post by her KBoards handle "Sela.")

So, without further ado, here's Sela!

How I Made $500,000.00 Self-Publishing Romance eBooks

In the spirit of Annie B's post showing us the tale of two approaches to writing, I thought I'd share my story. I will likely pass the $500,000.00 in career income next month, unless Amazon implodes or an asteroid strikes. ;) (And I'm not really a big seller or big name author in my genre)

Here's my chart, chronicling my income from the start of my self publishing career in June 2012 (data for 2012 and 2013 are combined in the first row, with December 2013 average for comparison, because I didn't start keeping monthly income records until 2014):

(Click to enlarge)

How I did it:

Let's Talk Numbers: It's official! If you write novels, the new KU is AWESOME!

Apparently it's number numbers niz-umbers week here at Pretentious Title!! Yesterday we took a look at the top of the world by going over NY bestseller John Scalzi's numbers, and today (thanks to the Amazon announcement) we're back with a report on my own numbers for Amazon's "Netflix for books" reading service, Kindle Unlimited!

As you might remember, two months ago Amazon announced that, to try and stop the rampant abuse going on in the KU system, it was changing the way it paid authors whose books were borrowed as part of the Kindle Unlimited program. I actually did an entire post on the changes, Amazon's reasoning, and what it could all mean for us authors back when it was first announced in June.

But while it was clear Amazon would now be paying per page read instead of a flat rate per borrow for KU titles, due to Kindle Unlimited's "you don't know what you're getting paid until we pay you" system, no one actually knew what the payment per page would be until Amazon announced it on August 15, which is today!!

So how's the money in the new KU?

Pretty damn good.

Let's Talk (John Scalzi's) Numbers! The State of the Genre Title 2015

Travis here with another business post! (Warning, tables and spreadsheets ahoy!)

The other day, best selling SF author John Scalzi posted an article called "The State of the Genre Title in 2015" in which he revealed some fascinating sales data for his latest release, Lock In.

The fact that this got posted at all is extraordinary. You almost never see traditionally published authors posting real sales numbers of any sort, especially not a big bestseller like Scalzi. He's giving us a rare glimpse of what the top of the trad/NY world looks like here, and for that reason alone you should definitely check the post out.

But fascinating as all the numbers are, Scalzi uses them to draw some conclusions about modern book selling that we, with all respect to John Scalzi, don't think are correct for the majority of authors. Specifically, when he's talking about the percent of his sales that came from hardcover and audio, he says:

"This continues to be my major concern with digital-only self-publishing, incidentally: there’s money being left on the table if you can’t address all these sales channels. Most self-publishers (or micro publishers) don’t have access to bookstores, nearly all of which continue to operate on a “returns” basis. This is not about the ability to create a physical copy of a book; at this point that can easily be done with print-on-demand options. It’s about having the book already on the shelves, attractively packaged and ready to buy, when the customer walks into the store. If you don’t have that, you’ve largely lost out in that sales avenue. Likewise audio if you’re not there."  

(emphasis mine)

What Scalzi is essentially saying here is that, by not having their book in bookstores, the self-published author is leaving money on the table. But I professionally think that he has left a lot more money on the table by signing with a NY publishing house, and that's what I'd like to talk about today.

Let's Talk (John Scalzi's) Numbers: Which Table is More Money Being Left On?

Let's Talk Numbers: Wild Speculation on the New KU

I know I'm supposed to be on vacation, but this was too exciting not to talk about!!!

As I mentioned a week ago, Amazon has changed the way it calculates borrows for Kindle Unlimited, their book subscription service. In that post, I was pretty optimistic about the proposed changes, and now that new system is actually live...well...I'm not really sure what to think. It could be absolutely amazing, or it could be the death knell for my (and probably a lot of other authors) participation in the program.

For readers, of course, the program looks exactly the same, but for authors with books in Kindle Unlimited, we will now be payed per page read rather than just getting a single payout every time a KU user borrows our book and reads past the 10% mark. Of course, this leads to the question of how much Amazon will pay us per page, and what counts as a page anyway?

These two questions go hand in hand. Of course, due to the vagaries of Kindle Select Global Fund payment system, we won't know how much per page Amazon is going to shell out until they actually pay. That said, many authors are speculating that the KU payout will most likely be around $0.005 per page.

They arrived at this amount using the numbers presented in this email which Amazon sent out to all its KU participating authors last month. Here, Amazon reported that "KU and KOLL customers read nearly 1.9 billion Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENPs) of KDP Select books" and that, due to this high volume, the Global Fund for July and August would be set to $11 million. By working backwards, we see that $11 million divided by 1.9 billion pages read works out to about $0.0057 paid out per page that KU readers read.

Half a cent sounds pretty pathetic, and it would be if Amazon was using the print page count, which is the one we're all used to. But hey, this is Amazon we're talking about! And as always with the 'Zon, the reality of the situation is much, much weirder.

Let's Talk Numbers: Reader Retention Rates Across a Series

So today, completely of his own volition (and because he is a giant data geek), my husband, business partner, and far more sensible half, Travis Bach, is here to share some publishing numbers! Today, we're looking at reader retention rates across series, how many people who buy the first book in a series can be expected to buy the others.

Now, of course, this number will vary wildly between writers and even between series by the same author, but (as Travis is about to explain) looking at your book sales from a top down, data driven perspective can enable you to make some pretty sharp best guesses, or at least ballpark. If nothing else, it's an interesting topic to think about and I thought you guys would enjoy getting a peek behind the curtain for how we make our business decisions here at the Aaron/Bach book factory.

Writers and Money Part 3

Sorry for the long delay! I really meant to push these out in a series, but my writing's been going really well lately, so I was loathe to leave the writing cave. BUT, I'm back now, so let's talk mon-neh!

For those of you just tuning in, this is the final installment of a three part series about writers and money. In Part 1, I talked about how authors make money in the traditional, advance paying publishing system. In Part 2, I talked about self-publishing money. Now, for Part 3, we're going to talk about what you actually need to do with that income, wherever it comes from, in order to make a full time living as a writer. So, without further ado, here's

Writers and Money Part 3: Taxes, Quitting the Day Job, and the Realities of Making a Living as a Full Time Writer

As the meme dog would suggest, here are some DISCLAIMERS!

1) Everything below is written in the spirit of sharing information, not as iron clad rules. I'm not actually a financial adviser (or a dog), and as such I can only speak from my own experience, which is almost certainly going to be different from yours. With that in mind, PLEASE don't make any major financial, career, or tax decisions based purely off what you read here.

2) All the tax advice below is written from the American perspective, and as such might not be relevant in your country. That said, wherever you live, if you are making any sort of significant income off your creative work and you have a specific tax question, TALK TO AN ACCOUNTANT. Yes, they're expensive, but knowing this stuff is their job, and that's worth paying for.

Okay, now that we've established that you're not going to run off and reorder your financial future based off a single blog post, let's get to the good stuff.

Writers and Money Part 2

I didn't meant to take such a long break between these. Husband got out of the hospital unable to do much except lie in bed and look pathetic just in time for the holidays, so, naturally, life became a whirlpool of insanity. But now I'm back more or less, so let's talk money!

Writers and Money Part 2: Self Publishing

Writers and Money Part 1

Not to start this post off on a downer, but my husband (the Travis whom all my books are dedicated to) is in the hospital. It's no longer life threatening, but I'm spending most of my days this week waiting in hospital rooms with beeping machines and occasional massive interruptions. Naturally, this makes fiction writing challenging to nigh impossible, so, in the spirit of feeling like I'm still getting work done and to distract myself, I thought I'd do a series of posts on the non-writing author topic I get questions about the most: money.

Money is one of those gauche topics everyone is curious about but no one likes to discuss. I can understand why. In a culture where people are more likely to tell you about their sex life and medications in casual conversation than their financial situation, money talk, especially money talk in public, can feel almost obscene. At the same time, though, one of the most popular mantras in author circles is that, if you want to succeed, you have to treat your writing like a business, but how can you really do that if the most business-like aspect of the whole affair--the money--is couched behind euphemisms and shame?

So, in keeping with the open spirit of my blog, I'm going to spend the next three posts talk openly and candidly about my experiences with the money-side of being an author. Because this is such a broad topic, I'm going to be breaking the subject down into three parts: traditional, advance paying publishing, self-publishing, and how to manage taxes/writing income. For today, we're going to talk about the most obfuscated and confusing of the three, Traditional Publishing.

Enjoy, and please let me know if there's anything specific you'd like to know about money and authorship in the comments below.

Writers and Money Part 1: Traditional Publishing

Nice Dragons Deserve Numbers -- Sales Report, the Thirty Day Climb, and Kindle Unlimited

ETA: It has come to my attention that some of you hate reading white text on a black background, so I've also compiled this post into a normal, black text on white PDF to make reading easier if that's your thing.

My favorite thing about the indie publishing community is its transparency. I could not have made my decision to self-publish without the sales numbers and analysis posted by the authors who came before me. As all of you who read my blog regularly know, we are big big fans of paying it forward here at Casa de Aaron/Bach, and so it was a foregone conclusion that I would do the same once my own numbers started coming in.

Below, you will find the complete sales numbers/Kindle Universe borrows for Nice Dragons Finish Last followed by a few conclusions and observations I've drawn from my self pub results so far. Please know that I am not doing this to brag. While I did admittedly have a fantastic, amazing, beyond my wildest expectations two months, I'm still nowhere near the top of the publishing heap for either the traditional or self-pub side of the fence. These numbers are provided purely for the edification and benefit of the community of independent authors who have always been so generous with their information. Seriously, y'all rock.

Before we get going, though, a word of warning. I apparently had a lot more to say about this than I realized, because this post is one of the longest I've ever made (5400 words!). That's a lot to ask someone to read on the internet, and I seriously thought about splitting it up into multiple posts for easier consumption. After reading it again, though, I've decided to leave it intact. It was written to stand as one post, and that really is how it works best, so for those of you I'm about to give eyestrain, mea culpa.

I promise it'll be worth the long read! There's some pretty cool stuff in here if I do say so myself. That said, I totally understand if giant, numbers-heavy self-publishing analysis posts aren't your thing. So if picking apart Amazon algos sounds boring to you, why not go read about dragons instead? I won't be insulted!

And now, for those brave souls who are still here and ready to talk serious numbers, let's let this cat out of the box!