Deirdre.net

For Authors Who Do/Want to Do Direct Digital Sales

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Please feel free to repost. Or, if you know of other, similar posts/threads, to link to them in comments.
If you’re an author doing direct digital sales from a web site you manage/control (meaning in addition to whatever you’re doing through Amazon, B&N, iTunes, Kobo, Smashwords, Direct2Digital—or whatever)…

Questions for Authors Already Selling Directly

  1. What method are you using? Gumroad? Shopify? Easy Digital Downloads (plus WordPress)? WooCommerce? Sellfy? Some other?
  2. How’s that working out for you, and why did you make the choice you did?
  3. If you’re willing to share this information, what percentage of your total sales are direct sales?
  4. Has it been worth the hassle for you?

Questions for Authors Considering Selling Directly

  1. What programs have you looked into?
  2. Do you have any questions about the process?

For those who wonder why one would do such a thing, there are two primary reasons:

  1. If you have more than one thing to sell, you can offer custom discounts.
  2. You can offer them subscriptions to your email list; third-party vendors are completely transparent to you.
  3. Higher pay and faster payment.

For example, selling via EDD on my own site for a $3.99 book, I’d take home $3.52 today. If I sold the same book on Amazon, I’d receive $2.79 sixty days after the end of the sales month. For Nook, I’d receive $2.39 sixty days after the end of the sales month. For iTunes, $3.52 45 days after the end of the month. For Kobo, if the amount owing is > $150, then they pay monthly, otherwise every six months.
Obviously, $3.52 today sounds better, but it does require a savvy enough customer to sideload the book (drag to their reading application).

More Author Earning Data: Making a Living or No?

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I haven’t updated the spreadsheet I pulled a few weeks ago, but here are the numbers from the last I pulled.
There are some data quality problems here. The low end of people who say they’re making a living writing? I don’t think $450 is a likely real response. Likewise, some of the higher numbers from people who say they’re not making a living writing would be perfectly respectable incomes for many. I’m not judging people’s responses here, just pointing out that there may have been some incorrect yes/no responses.
And, as always, this is self-reported data, so take it with a grain of salt.

Authors Saying they Make a Living Writing

Type # 25% 50% 75% 90% 95% 100%
Self 160 25,000 51,000 140,000 305,000 500,000 13,000,000
Hybrid 103 55,000 103,000 235,000 540,000 1,025,000 3,663,000
Trad 27 18,300 55,000 100,000 215,000 250,000 450,000

Authors Who Say They’re Not Make a Living Writing

Type # 25% 50% 75% 90% 95% 100%
Self 571 150 800 5000 15,000 24,000 113,000
Hybrid 78 2,300 10,200 20,000 40,008 50,000 89,150
Trad 54 500 4,000 17,500 35,000 50,000 60,000

Smashwords Self-Publishing Bestseller Genres

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Publishers Weekly has been publishing the top 25 bestselling self-published works on Smashwords each month. Here’s February’s list.
I’m not the least bit surprised that Romance is the top-selling category in terms of those top 25. What does surprise me, though, is the overwhelming percentage of those titles that are romance: 2/3 if you include the related genres of YA Romance and Paranormal Romance. I’m also surprised that Fantasy does as poorly as it has been.
smashwords-sales

Fun Data from the Author Earnings Spreadsheet

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This page is not affiliated with authorearnings.com. Rails app to generate this can be found on GitHub. Some earlier charts are here.
Table columns are percentiles: 25% means that, if you line everyone up in order, 25% made that or less.

Self-Published Earnings, 2013

# 25% 50% 75% 90% 95% 100%
914 300 3000 24000 91000 200000 13000000

Traditionally-Published Earnings, 2013

# 25% 50% 75% 90% 95% 100%
265 800 7000 38000 100000 200000 1200000

Self-Published Earnings by # Books Self-Published

# 25% 50% 75% 90% 95% 100%
0-2 100 500 3200 15000 30000 130000
3-5 200 1600 14000 46000 70000 500000
6-10 1000 10000 45000 140000 200000 500000
11-25 3000 19000 78000 270000 380000 3500000
26-50 3000 24000 100000 400000 1000000 13000000
51-9999 5000 20000 80000 102500 1000000 1000000

Traditional Earnings by # Books Traditionally Published

# 25% 50% 75% 90% 95% 100%
0-2 200 1000 7876 50000 100000 190000
3-5 2000 17500 40000 150000 380000 500000
6-10 1500 10000 40000 100000 100000 200000
11-25 4214 30000 70000 250000 450000 550000
26-50 2500 10000 60000 153000 200000 1000000
51-9999 35000 65000 100000 1200000 1200000 1200000

Self-Published Earnings by Cover Art Type

# 25% 50% 75% 90% 95% 100%
My Own 150 1500 15000 50000 104000 3500000
Pre-Made 100 500 2000 11500 60000 100000
Hire a Pro 500 5000 35000 113232 250000 13000000

Self-Published Earnings by Editor Type

# 25% 50% 75% 90% 95% 100%
None 200 3500 20000 38000 165000 1000000
Friends & Family 150 1200 12000 70000 100000 567000
Critique Group 125 800 6000 50000 64000 1000000
Freelance Editor 600 6000 40000 140000 300000 13000000

You Didn't Fail

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Context: this post from Cassie Alexander.
Cassie, I’ve known you for a long time. We’ve spent nights writing in chat, on Twitter, at conventions, all kinds of things. I remember you bringing your (impressively large) box of rejection letters to BayCon one year before you had a pro sale.
I love you so much I even set foot in a Scientology building for you (because I said I’d be there for you for Writers of the Future) even though I hadn’t done that in many years.
I’m sorry that St. Martin’s has dropped your series, which I’ve loved. (And I feel guilty that I didn’t do as much as I’d have liked to help promote it, and I’m a shitty friend that way. Sorry.)
I’ve never known anyone as dedicated to their art as you are. You’ve written nine novels in the same time I’ve written four (and a half). I keep getting novel ideas, though, and series ideas.
The early days of self-publishing (via POD) were fraught with peril. I remember when I worked at Kepler’s that we wouldn’t order them because they were often so poorly produced (and I’m not just talking badly edited, I mean the covers would fall off, etc.) that they were just too problematic.
The world has changed, though. The production values on POD are now indistinguishable from traditional printing, and e-books have available samples, so there’s little risk. Now you can look and determine if it really is something you want to buy.
There’s a very, very real market and some good strategies for reaching it. And, I’m finding out, that the strategies that work for that are those that don’t work for the traditional market at all.

The Dip

One of the problems with The Dip is that you tend to look at your failures, but not your successes. Losing a book contract is a hardcore dip point.
What’s easy to overlook is that you’ve had amazing success as a writer. You were contracted to write a five-book series—and you did. Four of the volumes are in print and one will be out soonish.

Moving on to Indie Publishing

A few thoughts:

  1. Out:think has some great resources. Read everything.
  2. Reading all the email I got from Out:think led me to start reading Write. Publish. Repeat. I haven’t finished it yet, but so far it’s an amazing book.

Many of the successful indie authors have an seasonal/episodic approach to books. It’s a familiar paradigm in this culture of TV viewers. Instead of one longer novel, the books are novella length, and released as episodes. A season is often six episodes. Because they’re novella length, three makes a nice size paperback.
So the marketing goes like this:

  1. Publish and sell episode 1.
  2. Temporarily drop the price (perhaps free) of episode 1 when episode 2 comes out.
  3. Temporarily drop the price (perhaps free) of episode 2 when episode 3 comes out.
  4. Create an omnibus of episodes 1-3. Create a print book to go with.
  5. Temporarily drop the price (perhaps free) of episodes 1-3 omnibus when episode 4 comes out.
  6. Temporarily drop the price (perhaps free) of episode 4 when episode 5 comes out.
  7. Temporarily drop the price (perhaps free) of episode 5 when episode 6 comes out.
  8. Create an omnibus of episodes 4-6. Create a print book to go with.
  9. Create an omnibus of episodes 1-6. Temporarily drop the price (perhaps free) of that when episode 7 (aka season 2, episode 1) comes out.

It’s rather brilliant, actually.
I was thinking about the whole idea of episodes, and, personally, I’m a fan of thirteen episodes to a season. Gives a great chance for reversals of fortune, too. Two six-episode arcs, a thirteen-episode arc, and a standalone in the middle.
The real point, though is to publish and market fairly consistently: have a predictable release schedule.

A Comment on “Real Writer”

But at the time, I thought, oh, no way, that’s too silly. I’m a Real Writer and I shouldn’t concern myself with smut…even though I happen to be perfectly good at writing it, heh!

Faruk Ateş raised the “real” issue on Twitter today, so I’m going to quote two of his tweets (the first not being aimed at you, obviously, it just gives context as he was wound up about someone’s writing):

“Real” as an attributive adjective has taken on the meaning of revealing that the author doesn’t know what they are talking about. link
“Real women” — meaningless; every woman is a real woman. “Real work” — no work is more “real” than any other. “Real game” — please shut up. link

It’s all real.
So do some cool stuff. I’ll be along for the ride.

New iTunes Connect Sales Charts

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E-mail from Apple:

We have released a new version of Sales and Trends on iTunes Connect that introduces interactive features to help you better understand your sales data.
You now have the the ability to:

  • View sales within a selected time period
  • Group your sales data (for example, by territory)
  • Filter sales by one or more values (for example, by book title and transaction type)
  • See your estimated proceeds (in U.S. dollars)
  • If you have any questions, contact us.

Regards,
The iBooks team

Woohoo!
I love charts and graphs.
So I log in.
itunes-recent-sales
Sad panda.
Wait, there’s now a lifetime tab….
itunes-lifetime-sales
So. There you go.
Love the update. Thanks, Apple!
This post has the iBooks numbers in context with other sales outlets. For context, this is a republication of a short story which I also sell directly.

Two Corrections for the E-Book Royalty Calcumatic

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Both are good news. I like good news.
First, Kobo payments are monthly if—and this is kinda confusing so I’m just going to quote them directly:

Payment will be issued on a monthly basis if your content has generated over $100.00 USD. If after 6 months, your content has not generated over $100.00 USD, we will deliver all of the earnings your content has generated at that point.

Hat tip to reader Jerry for that. Thank you!
I’m not sure what “content has generated” means here, though. Sales? Royalties? I have a cold and just don’t have the energy to read the other pages in the document right now.
Source: pp. 29-30 of their User Guide
Second, I’d had on my pages forever that Apple’s iBooks paid out only once you reached $150. Then I noticed I’d had a payout of a bit over $5 a few months back, so that’s not the case. Yay.
I have updated the notes page accordingly.

Author Earnings Survey: Initial Glance

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There’s a lot of interesting information in the Author Earnings survey that Hugh Howey and others are working on. Hugh’s posted a preliminary link on Twitter, and you can watch the live data coming in.
I decided to do some breakdowns of the really early data: self-reported 2013 income.
[fancy_table]

  Trad Self
Median 6,000 3,000
Mean 37,000 67,000

[/fancy_table]
Let’s look at the self-published percentile numbers a little more (and the clever plug for a forthcoming book that neatly echoes the graph’s shape). (Click to embiggen)
AuthorEarnings.001
Above 97.5%, everyone’s over $200k, and the top 5 reporters are over $1M, with the tippy top at $13M.
Me? I’m still at the “carryable number of lattes” phase and I haven’t yet entered my data. Soon.

2-1/2 Years of E-Book Sales Data

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In two charts.
I worked at Apple, so it’s not surprising to me that I sold more copies through iBooks than is generally true for other authors. What did surprise me was the relative number of Nook book sales.
Because this is a short story, here are the royalty percentages per sale: Amazon 35%, Nook 40%, and iBooks 70%.
As far as absolute amounts, let’s just say that it’s possible to carry the number of lattes I could order with the amount of money I’ve made, but it would be an awkward number to carry, even from expensive frou-frou coffee places like Blue Bottle and Chromatic.

Unit Sales to Date


Royalties to Date


I made, to the penny, identical amounts from Amazon and iBooks. Amazon includes foreign sales from Germany and UK; iBooks included Canadian, Australian, and UK sales. For Nook, I only have US sales, though I have enabled worldwide sales.

A Few Book Covers

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Things coming out Real Soon Now, in probable release order.

Coffee & Canopy

Coffee & Canopy is a forthcoming book about our experiences in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Monkeys! Crocodiles! Bats! Venomous sea snakes! Volcanoes! Cover photo is one I took of Nicaragua’s Masaya volcano.

The “travel diary” series will be novella length, have selected color photos (as well as the occasional black and white), and will be digital only. I’ll also have PDF as a format option for this series. Price will be $2.99.

So You Want to Travel the World

Would you like to travel more? See the world? Get discouraged by how many things there are to do and see? So You Want to Travel the World will help you divide and conquer the problems so you can get more of your travel goals accomplished. The cover photo was one I took in Venice, Italy in December, 2011.

This book will be in both digital and print. Pricing will depend upon final size, so I’m waiting to announce that.

Deep Pacific

Deep Pacific will chronicle our journey from San Francisco to Valparaiso, Chile to Easter Island, Pitcairn, Moorea, Tahiti, Bora Bora, and finally back to San Francisco. The cover photo is one I took on Easter Island.

This is also a digital-only member of the “travel diary” series. Price will be $2.99.

For more titles coming out later in the year, see my home page.