The Kingfisher Has Landed

RedWombat

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Two weeks in, closing in on seven hundred copies sold. I haven't done any more promotion, beyond a single mention on my blog.

Kindle sales have radically outstripped Smashwords, at nearly five hundred copies to Smashwords' two hundred, but from this vantage point, Smashwords still looks very worthwhile. We've found a few more typos (oh god, it never ends) and I hope to correct those this week.

Overall, it's pretty neat. Not gonna quit my day job, but neat.

(Somewhat ironically, I was actually excited to get a four-star review--yay! Now it looks like a real book and not like my friends are being nice to me or I'm out begging for five-star reviews!)

The desire to do it again is rising. It's sort of like tattoos, I guess--you get one and it's excruciating and a few months later you're going "I should totally do that again."
 

RedWombat

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Update: Success!

So, at not quite a month in, we've moved around 860 copies and that gets me to the SFWA rate of .05 a word, which is where I said I'd call it successful.

So--er--yay! Success! Victory for goblins!

Not gonna quit my day job, mind you. Even my twice-orphaned died-in-flames wildly-unsuccessful first book from a trade publisher ultimately moved over 9K hardback copies, so we're talking vast differences in scale here. As an author who makes a pretty good living in trade publishing, I don't see this being a viable alternative for me, at least as things currently stand.

Nevertheless, as a way to do SOMETHING with weird little not-easily-categorized pieces that a bunch of my readers would probably enjoy if I can just find a way to get it to them, this was a rousing success.

Now, the real question is whether or not people would buy more from me--most of my existing fans probably picked it up on the assumption it'd at least be readable, and for all I know, some of them were gravely disappointed. *grin* So sales on another book might do awesome or might tank. Only one way to find out!

At the risk of repeating myself, now I REALLY think that self-publishing is like getting a tattoo. You slave over the design, you fret, it's excruciating and expensive and has lots of fiddly bits and you think "Can I live with this?" and "Cripes, I didn't realize how much this would hurt!" and "Please, god, don't let it look like one of those crappy things that people get when they're drunk."

Then a month later you're all "You know, I could go for another one of those."
 

Literateparakeet

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At the risk of repeating myself, now I REALLY think that self-publishing is like getting a tattoo. You slave over the design, you fret, it's excruciating and expensive and has lots of fiddly bits and you think "Can I live with this?" and "Cripes, I didn't realize how much this would hurt!" and "Please, god, don't let it look like one of those crappy things that people get when they're drunk."

Then a month later you're all "You know, I could go for another one of those."

LOL! Yes, this sums it up perfectly. That is just how it has been for me too!
 

RedWombat

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We've sold about a thousand copies now (woo!) and things have settled down--averaging 7 copies a day on Kindle for the last couple weeks, with maybe two or three a week on Smashwords. I imagine that will drift down slowly until I manage to publish something else (still working on writing the next one!)

I would like to stress again, results not typical. I had an established fanbase of terribly awesome, tech-savvy people and was not merely winging the novella into the void. My position might be more akin to self-pubbing backlist than to a new author starting out.

Still, this is pretty cool stuff.
 

Spell-it-out

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Great news Red, delighted for you. What is the plan for the next release?
 

RedWombat

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Well, more of the same really--see if there's some other weird little thing in the files that people might like, work on a sequel to this one, etc. I've had people asking for a short story anthology, so I'd like to do that, although I want to have a novella to anchor it if I go that route.

I'm probably four months minimum out from either of those things, mind you...
 

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So far, so good...

Just received my first check from Amazon a few days ago, so I thought I'd check in and post an update!

Sales are actually rather stronger than I expected them to be at this point. From the initial burst, I thought we'd get a fairly steep decline until I released something else, as my existing readers all picked up the book, and then maybe the occasional random sale. (And in fact, this is exactly what happened on Smashwords!)

Kindle sales, though, remained more robust than I expected.

October (all 3 days of it): 285
November: 483
December: 291
January-to-date: 174

These are US Kindle sales. International Kindle sales are negligible for me. (I can actually pretty much put a name to each sale outside the US--I'm very glad they can get the book, because I love my international fans, but it's not a financially significant number.)

Smashwords, after a strong initial burst, dropped in the predicted curve into single digits per month and is currently at around 250 total sales. Kindle sales, though, continue to truck along--if anything, they've actually picked up a little in January.

Totaling all sales, including the occasional international one, we're looking at right around 1500 copies moved. At 3.99 apiece, after expenses I've made (or will hopefully make, when the checks arrive!) around $4K.

Still nowhere near my current earnings on trade published work, but we're starting to creep into the outskirts of "first-time advance for unagented genre fiction" territory. (And let's face it--for a novella to pay the rent for four months is pretty darn good! The lowly novella has never gotten much love.)

My advertising consisted of mentioning it on my blog and Twitter a couple times, two review copies, and my sig file here at Absolute Write. Have done no free offerings or jiggerings of price.

And that's what's happening here...
 

RedWombat

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Taper down is definitely in force!

Kindle sales:

January: 296
February: 148
March (as of today): 71

This is about what I expected, for not having released anything new. I've got a novella out for editing, which will be the backbone of a short story anthology I've been threatening for years, and hope to have that done in the next three or four months. (I suspect there will be a small bounce in Nine Goblins sales when it hits--we'll find out!)

Smashwords sales have plummeted--I get maybe one a week--but I've moved 70+ copies via their Apple, Kobo, and B&N distribution, as well as 260 via the site itself, so while it's a small chunk of the overall pie, it seems worth the hassle--that's nearly a thousand dollars worth of sales, at my current royalty rate, and some of my readers will only read via those formats.

We're at about 1900 copies sold, all told, and that's pretty neat. Subtracting editing fees, that's about $5200 profit, which is better than I expected. My calculator informs me that's .13 a word, which is way over SFWA qualifying rates and starting to get into the unagented-genre-advance-for-a-novel range.

So that's where I'm at. As it slides from "paying the rent" status to "buying a round of groceries," I'm pretty content with how it turned out. I'd say it's successful, and I have plans to do more. It's certainly a good way to find a home for your novellas, and the long tail being what it is, I imagine it'll at least buy me coffee for a year or so to come.
 

RedWombat

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March Totals

Kindle:
140 (including international)

Smashwords:
8 (including all platforms)

Not exactly burning up the charts, but not much of a decline on last month, either.

The really exciting thing for me this month was hearing from a fan who had bought the book without knowing I was the author.

Nine Goblins is under a pen-name, but I had assumed that 99% of the buyers knew it was me--I made no secret of it, it's just to keep minor fans of my MG series from buying it by mistake. So having somebody who knew me in passing buy the book without knowing the real name behind it was actually very exciting--it's getting out beyond me!
 

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I bought this yesterday, and finished it before I went to bed. Absolutely adored it. :) I was reading passages aloud to my husband (a longtime tabletop nerd) and he kept doing this laugh-snort thing, which is high praise indeed. I posted in the SFF subforum about it, so I hope that leads more forumites to it!
 

Ann Joyce

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Those are still pretty awesome numbers, RedWombat! Congrats!
 

RedWombat

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I bought this yesterday, and finished it before I went to bed. Absolutely adored it. :) I was reading passages aloud to my husband (a longtime tabletop nerd) and he kept doing this laugh-snort thing, which is high praise indeed. I posted in the SFF subforum about it, so I hope that leads more forumites to it!

Oh, holy mackerel! Thank you! I'm so glad you enjoyed it!
 

RedWombat

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Small Amusements

So I had the great good fortune of having a short story of mine linked from io9, metafilter, the AV Club and Neatorama a couple days ago--it was a short bit of silliness from the POV of the Sea Witch in the Little Mermaid, and the recent Maleficent movie got interest in villains going.

11K hits on the page! Which had, at the top of the blog-post, a direct Amazon link to Nine Goblins! Which translated to...(drumroll please)...

35 sales!

I am not complaining, mind you--that's a hundred bucks and hopefully 35 new readers, and a lot of nice things said about the short story! And I'm very touched that people liked it enough to write and link it! (Plus you can never really quantify some of these things--I might someday get an anthology invite or whatever because somebody remembered that story. Not everything can get reduced to sales numbers.)

But this sort of thing is why I place little emphasis on advertising--that's a lot of traffic for my site (I average around 300 page views a day) all directly from people self-selected to enjoy this sort of thing, and it's still not an enormous bump in sales. Page hits are not enough to move books.

But hey, I get a grocery run out of it, so I'm happy!
 

HistorySleuth

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Awesome reports. I'd say your doing well and getting some exposure which is great! And you have a nice stack of reviews on Amazon, impressive. That's one of the hardest parts.
 
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Norman D Gutter

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RW: Those are sales numbers to die for for most of us self-publishing bottom dwellers. Congratulations. Hope book two is as successful, and boosts book one in the process.

NDG
 

RedWombat

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Aww, thanks, guys!

I'm a little irked at myself for not having finished another book by now--you'd think with all this flailing, I'd have accomplished more! :p But hopefully I'll finally get the anthology I've been planning out either next month or in August...
 

RedWombat

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Good lord, where does the time go? Last totals I posted were March!

Kindle:

April: 111
May: 86
June: 74

It's difficult to decipher Smashwords numbers by month, but it appears we moved 6 copies in June (and the effort to spelunk backwards in time is beyond me this morning, but I doubt it's much more than that.)

Taper down is still in full effect, but we seem to be at around 2250 copies sold, all told.

Getting antsy for the next one, but still waiting on editorial notes...*chews nails*