End of Year Publishing Summary
Jan. 4th, 2012 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalSince starting my little experiment in self-publishing back in August, I think I can safely say it's been a moderate success. Counting royalty payments that are still due I've made close to $150, which isn't shabby given my near total lack of advertising and self-promotion. I'll do a detailed breakdown of the numbers once I get my end of quarter reports from Smashwords and Amazon, but I can at least make some general observations.
1. After an initial run of sales, my profits from Smashwords pretty much disappeared around October or so. I think this is a result of increasing awareness of the Amazon KDP program and the Kindle's current domination of the e-reader market.
2. Ignoring Good Landing, which being a freebie short story has managed nearly two thousand downloads at this point, my biggest sellers have been Captive of the Red Vixen and Unexpected Diversions, with The Dragon's Companion running a distant third.
3. Wierdly though, CotRV has remained a steady seller, averaging about ten sales a month, while Unexpected Diversions had an intial peak of sales the first couple of months after its release, then dropping off rapidly to the point where I didn't have any sales for it during the months of November and December.
4. So while intially my old adage of "ElfPrOn sells" seemed to hold true, it seems to have superseeded by "Furries sell". Initially I thought CotRV was going to be one of my marginal sellers, but it turns out there must be a much larger market for Furry genre stories than I initially thought. In particular, Amazon's "Customers who purchased this also bought..." recommendations for CotRV is huge, numbering almost 40 stories, compared to about one for Unexpected Diversions. It creates a synergy that drives the sales forward, which hasn't been matched my other works.
5. Of course the sexy (and mildly misleading) cover art for CotRV doesn't hurt either, but that doesn't explain why Diversions' equally sexy cover doesn't get the same attention.
Future Plans: My decision to concentrate my efforts on the sequel to CotRV still holds. It's my top seller and a followup seems to be my best bet for further sales. I'm also tempted to rework The Ship to fit into the CotRV universe, since that's where I first used the Wazagans. It would mean changing the premise considerably, but linking the stories might create further synergy.
Of course if I really wanted to get silly, I could rework Warbird into a furry story, even though there's no point given the initial premise.
1. After an initial run of sales, my profits from Smashwords pretty much disappeared around October or so. I think this is a result of increasing awareness of the Amazon KDP program and the Kindle's current domination of the e-reader market.
2. Ignoring Good Landing, which being a freebie short story has managed nearly two thousand downloads at this point, my biggest sellers have been Captive of the Red Vixen and Unexpected Diversions, with The Dragon's Companion running a distant third.
3. Wierdly though, CotRV has remained a steady seller, averaging about ten sales a month, while Unexpected Diversions had an intial peak of sales the first couple of months after its release, then dropping off rapidly to the point where I didn't have any sales for it during the months of November and December.
4. So while intially my old adage of "ElfPrOn sells" seemed to hold true, it seems to have superseeded by "Furries sell". Initially I thought CotRV was going to be one of my marginal sellers, but it turns out there must be a much larger market for Furry genre stories than I initially thought. In particular, Amazon's "Customers who purchased this also bought..." recommendations for CotRV is huge, numbering almost 40 stories, compared to about one for Unexpected Diversions. It creates a synergy that drives the sales forward, which hasn't been matched my other works.
5. Of course the sexy (and mildly misleading) cover art for CotRV doesn't hurt either, but that doesn't explain why Diversions' equally sexy cover doesn't get the same attention.
Future Plans: My decision to concentrate my efforts on the sequel to CotRV still holds. It's my top seller and a followup seems to be my best bet for further sales. I'm also tempted to rework The Ship to fit into the CotRV universe, since that's where I first used the Wazagans. It would mean changing the premise considerably, but linking the stories might create further synergy.
Of course if I really wanted to get silly, I could rework Warbird into a furry story, even though there's no point given the initial premise.
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Date: 2012-01-04 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-04 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-05 05:32 am (UTC)And I am going to do more promoting this year if it kills me. And if I can figure out how to do it without getting my hands slapped for a two-line sigfile in an otherwise informational post [sigh].