Saleswanking 2019, and Writing 2020

On December 31, 2019December 31, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn life, Writing2 Comments

Don’t worry, this will be brief, because there’s not a whole damn lot to talk about: I sold exactly 114 books in 2019, 91 of which were in person and a whopping 23 on Amazon. I had no new releases of any kind this year. I intended to spend most of the summer broadening the places where my books were available (I went off KDP forever ago, so I’ve been Amazon-exclusive with no real benefits for it since then) and working on a new novel (I have three in various stages of not-finished) but the Ongoing Medical Calamity derailed the fuck out of that. I’ve written some microfictions and maybe a couple of short stories this year over at Patreon and that’s it. I went to … three cons, I think? Four? Kokomo-Con, InConjunction, ConGlomeration, and Hall of Heroes con. So four. I know I canceled at least two because of the Calamity, and right now I’m only scheduled for one in 2020– Indy Popcon, which was one of the two I cancelled last summer.

I said this yesterday, and let me repeat it: there is no risk– none– of the blog going anywhere, because it’s too important to my ongoing mental health even before you get to the part where I like writing here. But for the first time in several years I’m thinking about deliberately hitting pause on calling myself an independent author for a while. I’ve mostly been ignoring my books on here except for the occasional Station Identification post on the weekends and the static links on the right; I may as well put them back on KDP if I’m not going to do the legwork necessary to have them available all over the place. I don’t write a lot of fiction any longer because with everything going on in my life I haven’t had the mental space for it, and I require an enormous amount of headspace to be able to write fiction. Nonfiction? Blog posts? Dead easy. But I don’t like writing fiction, and I never have– what I like is having written fiction, which is an amazing high that unfortunately requires me to spend hours pulling teeth first. I think about writing fiction all day, every day, I just don’t actually do it.

It might be time to put it away for a bit and not think about it at all. I’ll either get my mojo back, which would be good, or I won’t, which really won’t be any different from now except for the guilt. My family’s health situation isn’t getting better anytime soon– there is no silver lining to this cloud and no light at the end of the tunnel, and that’s not depression talking, it’s unfortunate and inevitable fact– so the only thing to do is decide what to do about it. I can make a serious effort to reprioritize my fiction, which means finding some other things to put away, or I can put it away. I just need to decide which one I’m going to do.

In which I change my mind again (#KDPSelect post)

On September 8, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

I think I’m going back to KDP Select again, y’all.

Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 hasn’t been on KDP Select for close to a year now, and Skylights and Sanctum of the Sphere were both removed from the program when their terms ran out in June and July, respectively. I wasn’t super pleased with the payment changes on Kindle Unlimited, and I wanted the flexibility back of having all of my books available on all the markets I could reach.

Months later, all the markets I can reach aren’t selling any books, and Amazon sales are suffering as well, since I know Amazon does more passive marketing for you on books that are in KDP Select than otherwise. I’ve come up with a solution for the folks who want my books in other formats: they can email me and ask for them. Having BA 1 available at Barnes and Noble and the iBookstore has resulted in one or two downloads a month (that’s across both) and Smashwords is generally good for about 30. Openbooks.com used to be a good source of downloads, but those have dried up recently, and I have good reason to suspect that they may never have been real in the first place.

So, screw it. I haven’t sold a single copy of Sanctum or Skylights in any other market since I made them available. And if you really want Skylights as a .epub I’m pretty sure you can figure out how to email me and ask for it and we can work something out. And the other thing? I did 200 free downloads of Benevolence Archives in a single day the last time I had it on Select. Smashwords has 324 total.

This… is not worth it. I’d originally thought to use BA 1 as my free book to drive sales to my others, and to not ever use free promotions for the other two books. Right now what I want is people reading and reviewing my books, and I think I may just need to focus on getting more copies out there and floating around regardless of how much money I make from it. That means Amazon, where I can push more downloads in a single day with a free promotion than months on another platform. And if I decide 90 days from now that I was wrong again, well, I’ll put them up everywhere again.

So, yeah. Expect all of my ebooks to be Amazon exclusives by this weekend. Note that print editions will still be available through Barnes and Noble’s website if that floats your boat, but we’re gonna take another long look at exclusivity and see if I can’t find a different way to make it work.

If you want to download something for Nook or through the iBookstore while you still can, check out the “My Books” link in the masthead for all the links you could possibly desire.

Snowgarok Sunday musings and some sales numbers

On February 1, 2015February 1, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Television, Writing4 Comments

I spent most of the day alternately clearing off the driveway, playing with my son and watching superhero-themed cartoons on Hulu and Netflix while burning up Twitter and making Gene’o’s life complicated on #SundayBlogShare. My kid has a weird approach to TV lately; he wants it on all the time but most of the time when it is on he’s actually doing something else. Weirdly, the second an episode is over he’ll still demand that another one be started even if he wasn’t paying any attention to the episode that just ended.

So, yeah: all in all, a good Sunday. I have no intention of watching the Super Bowl, which I think has already started, but it may well end up on the TV at some point this evening by accident and I’m not going to flee the room or anything like that. There’s no school tomorrow on account of what ended up being sixteen inches of snow in the deep part of the yard and twelve on the light side. And it hasn’t stopped, either, so we might be looking at 18-20″ by tomorrow morning once the blowing around is finished. We might lose Tuesday but at this point I doubt it; the snow should be done falling by tomorrow so the controlling factor will be getting all school lots and walkways cleared. That took an extra day when it happened last year. We’ll see.

Also: January is over, which means that it’s time to assess what a month of having Skylights on KDP Select has done for sales. Non-writer-folk, feel free to head for the door unless you enjoy my number nerdery. 🙂

That’s the 30 days since KDP Select. It doesn’t look like much, I know, but by my standards this is actually pretty damn good– two days of more than one sale, one place where there were actually sales two days in a row (!!!) and just that one stretch at the end where I went several days with no sales at all. A weird fact: I don’t know if Amazon has changed how they report their KDP sales away from the at least quasi real-time reporting they had before, but it’s been at least a couple of weeks since I made a sale, either on Amazon or Smashwords, while I was awake. I can’t explain that. Everything increments in the dead of night now.

Here, for the record, is what I’m comparing January to. This is the last 90 days:

You can see that the last 30 days represent a clear improvement over the previous 60 days even if I’m still not exactly burning up the charts. And, of course, this graph doesn’t represent all of my sales. I know this next bit is completely unreadable; click for actual legibility:

Note a couple of things: One, more days with sales than without, even counting the dry spell at Amazon during the end of the month. Two, an average of more than one sale a day. Well, okay, “download,” since Benevolence Archives is free at Smashwords. But moving copies of the books is still my focus here, not making money. That will come with time. And I did actually sell a few copies of Archives at Amazon, a fact that I attribute entirely to KDP Select juicing my sales. I just hope the trend continues through February; I did sell a book today, making it a very rare two-day-in-a-row sale. Woo!

ALSO! Two announcements: one, the ebook cover with finalized colors and text and everything will be debuting tomorrow. Also, Skylights will be going on sale (not free– on sale— next week. I’m trying out Amazon’s “Kindle Countdown Deal.” Details tomorrow.

Enjoy the footballery, y’all.

The effects of KDP Select in one graph: Saturday #saleswanking

On January 10, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing5 Comments

We can all agree that I’m still not lighting the world on fire or anything, but the difference is pretty stark. See if you can guess exactly when I put Skylights on Amazon exclusive. The interesting thing is that two of those sales are for Benevolence Archives, which not only isn’t Amazon-exclusive but is free elsewhere and sells very few copies as a result: