Sales Report for 2019

[jeriendhal]

 

I had a really good year, and I'm not exactly sure why.

To put things in perspective, I made $333.15 this year on overall sales. But I can't even claim that it's because I had a really good publishing year. I didn't publish anything new in 2019, except in anthologies with other authors.

I can't claim it's been my social media presence either. I tweet occasionally, but I don't have many followers. I'd like to think it was from Armoured Fox Press' featuring my paperbacks at Fur, Eh except that was held in mid-June and my biggest month for sales was in April (34 units) and May (26 units), though there was another bump in August (21 units). It wasn't any glowing reviews either. I had a grand total of two, one of which while nice, also wasn't  terribly articulate. If my success was from word of mouth, I don't know whose mouth has been doing the talking.

Overall my best seller was Rise of the Ring at 29 units total. That I can at least make a guess at its popularity, given it's got a glowing blurb on the front cover courtesy of Ryk Spoor.  In terms of profitability, my most successful book was The Complete Red Vixen Adventures, which is my most expensive ebook and paperback. After that was Rise of the Ring, Prisoners of War, and Prisoner of Midnight.The latter two are both pR0n (hey, sex sells #captainobvious) and also available in paperback, though oddly PoM didn't sell any paperback copies through Amazon (more on that later) even though it had great physical sales last year. Honorable mention goes to Captive of the Red Vixen, which actually sold twice as many audiobooks (8) as ebooks (4), though sales of the various sequels was anemic. My best guess is people who enjoyed Captive decided to go for the best deal possible and read all the followups in the CRVA.

Aside from sales, I also did my best to spread my wings by submitting stories to various furry anthologies published by Armoured Fox Press and Furplanet. There I had a lot of success. Out of four tries I got three hits, two of which were published this December and the other (plus one I'd sold in 2017) should be coming out in 2020. The big one is probably Silence and Sword for John Robey's Reclamation Project Year One anthology, which was published by Furplanet, one of the biggest of the Furry genre of publishers.

Also, as I mentioned earlier I had paperback books purchased by Tarl Hoch's Armoured Fox Press imprint for sale at the Fur, Eh convention in Edmonton, Canada. This was an experiment for us both. I'd never sold my books to a dealer before, and Tarl didn't know how well my books would do. In terms of profit I think it was a wash for both of us overall. The cost for me to print the books and ship to Canada meant I lost about $80. Meanwhile Tarl unloaded most of the two Prisoners books, but only had a few sales for the CRVA. Overall I'm not surprised by the latter. It's a thick book, and expensive enough not to be a quick impulse purchase. So I guess we'll both have to live and learn (and stick to the cheaper novellas).

In the pipeline for 2020: I'm on the home stretch with my long gestating First Contact novella "The Visitors", which I hope to publish in the first quarter this year, editing gods and Neziha's art schedule willing. After that it'll be time to work on my other First Contact novel set in my Groupmind 'verse, which has been stalled for some time. I'm also going to continue to submit to anthologies as the opportunity arises.

So, some good sales and some experimentation led to a pretty solid year for me sales wise, even though I didn't publish anything directly. We'll have to see what 2020 will bring.