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.

Kokomo-Con 2019 Wrapup

On October 13, 2019October 13, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

The following things are all true; I am finding that I’m terrible at evaluating how these shows actually go, and this one was more mixed than most:

Attendance was pretty good; they announced about a thousand people through the door at the end of the show, which was a couple hundred more than last year, I think.
Weirdly, there were a lot of empty booths, which I don’t think was the case in previous years– any booth that was empty had a placard on it for someone, which means there was a last-minute cancellation. This time it looks like a lot of them just didn’t sell for some reason.
I sold half as many books as I’ve sold in previous years.
I paid for the table, which is always the goal, and there’s $150 in my pocket that wasn’t there on Friday.
Despite the poorer-than-usual sales, there were three other authors there who I’m friends with and know from previous shows, and I outsold all three of them, and in two cases pretty considerably.
Damn near every single person who came up and bought a book mentioned that they’d bought books from me at previous shows and were back for more, which is always an awesome feeling. One person came over to apologize for not having gotten to my book yet, but he wanted me to know he was still going to read it. Dude, I left a Salman Rushdie book on my unread shelf for a year once. You can make me wait. The book ain’t going anywhere.
The exception to the above was a guy who I talked to for five minutes who then bought every book I had except for Searching for Malumba.
Unrelated to the con, but fun: there was some sort of car show in central Indiana somewhere on Saturday, and the whole way down we were surrounded by Corvettes and classic cars driven by people who almost certainly didn’t know each other but figured out that they were all going to the same place and so fell into caravans. It was pretty cool. Also cool: passing six Corvettes in a row on the highway when you’re driving a Kia Soul. 🙂

So, yeah, pretty spectacularly mixed, yeah?

I was planning on taking a year off from this show– I love Kokomo-Con, and I’ve been three years in a row, but there’s a more writing-focused three-day con in Louisville on the same weekend that I’ve heard all kinds of good things about and I was planning on checking that one out in 2020. However, next year the Kokomo-Con is moving a weekend deeper into October, so it’s possible that the shows won’t overlap with each other next year, in which case I’ll need to decide if I want to/am able to do two shows in two weekends. So I’m not reserving my 2020 table just yet, and we’ll see what weekend the Imaginarium ends up being next year.

Blech.

On July 6, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

Day two of the show, and … this isn’t going well. My panels today were fun (in general, I’m finding I really like doing panels) but just like the last time I did this con, all of the vendors are unhappy and attendance seems really low. I mean, I’ve already sold more books than I did in 2015 with all of Sunday left to go (and I spent several hours away from my booth doing panels today) but “better than the show where I sold no books the first day” isn’t a high mark.

It’s 8:09 and I’m ready to be asleep. I’ve got a big-ass book to work my way through but I wouldn’t be surprised if I was asleep by nine.

#Saleswanking for 2018 and more

On December 29, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

This is going to be a very short post, considering the amount of work that went into it, because Amazon and Square don’t play nice with each other and neither of them makes it especially easy to get these numbers in a format that I like. HOWEVER! I haven’t looked at book sales in a systematic way in a while, so this kinda needed to happen. And, frankly, included some nice surprises.

Note that “Amazon” includes both paid sales and free downloads, and I’ve smushed together both physical and digital copies as well; nearly all of them are digital. The Square sales are sales in person; some of those are going to be free giveaways for one reason or another but all of them involve physical books given or sold to people by me. This is 2018 only:

Eight hundred and fifty-seven books seems like a lot, honestly. The little discrepancy you see with Click from 2018 to the total includes the 14 people who got free copies through Patreon, which is one of the only ways you can get the book (pledge more than $2 a month!) and the 9 on the Square set were sold in person at conventions, which is the other way to get it.

As of right now, my books are starting to drop off of KDP Select, which means I’m about to lose the ability to give them away on Amazon. I am either trying to get all six of them (Click isn’t on Amazon) on the same schedule or about to broaden back out and put my books on other sites again. I haven’t decided. As of January 2nd, everything will be off KDP select, so I’ve got a few more days to think about it.

The overall numbers really surprised me. I didn’t think I’d moved this many books.

So, basically, if you include the occasional sale that isn’t captured here (Barnes and Noble, Apple, non-convention personal sales that I didn’t bother recording in Square,) I’m probably at right around five thousand books sold or downloaded since I started doing this.

Which, on the one hand, is a larger number than I thought it was going to be, and on the other hand, if I look at actual money earned from this … yeesh. I’m not going to share that because Amazon accepts currencies from all over the world and I’m not about to start digging through my tax returns, but suffice it to say that I’ve absolutely lost money at playing author since 2014. Cons and hotel rooms and book printings and all that cost money, and again, a lot of those Amazon numbers are from giveaways, not sales.

The totals for in-person sales, which are included in the above– this is just a summation of the “Square” lines:

Which, again, this isn’t nothing. Every one of these represents an actual human standing in front of me who bought books from me. Am I J.K. Rowling? Hell no. But this is a lot larger of a number than zero, which is what it would have been when I started doing this.

I should probably set some hard and fast goals for 2019. Not yet; I need to absorb these numbers first. But maybe that post is coming. Tomorrow, the 10 best books of the year.

Good old-fashioned blog- and saleswanking, plus some whining

On September 22, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

First day of fall today, supposedly. Not that I could tell; it was goddamn near 90 outside, the hottest day in weeks. We’ve had a couple of mild summers in a row around here, which is good since I’m incapable of handling heat.

Trying to decide what I ought to do next. Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3 is out next Tuesday, and can still be pre-ordered digitally for $2.99 or– sssh, don’t tell anyone— bought in print for $8.99. Unless you’re a Prime member, the book’s not getting to you before the 26th, so we’ll call it day-and-date and not worry about it. In general, presale numbers have not been making me happy. My presales have gone up with every book until this one, but with four days until release BA 3 has fewer presales than anything else I’ve released so far. I’ll take the blame for a good chunk of that; I haven’t had the time or energy to invest into properly marketing the thing, and it doesn’t help that blog traffic has looked like this for a while now:

Screen Shot 2017-09-22 at 7.16.13 PM

Now, 2015 is a little unrepresentative– a single post was good for over a hundred thousand of those hits, and there’s still a few months left in 2017, but the overall downward trend is pretty evident. My twitter feed has been locked in at about 10K followers for over a year now, and nothing I can do will move the numbers. And the books aren’t selling very well, and aren’t getting reviews at all. I just fiddled around in KNP’s sales dashboard to generate a useful graph, but just picture a line dwindling to near-zero several months ago and staying there, other than a brief blip when Balremesh came out. Presales on that were good, but it appears that everyone who wanted it pre-ordered it. I’d blame the occasional free weekend, but my sales were shit before I put everything back on Kindle Select again, so nothing’s changed in that regard.

This is starting to sound like a Goodbye Cruel World sort of post, and maybe it should be, but it’s mostly me casting around trying to figure out how to shake things up in my life. Being an author is important to me, but I don’t think I can really go back to doing that until I figure out a way to not be a furniture salesman anymore– I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all these sales downturns started hitting when I stopped teaching, and got seriously bad when I started at my current job. The blog traffic predates that, yeah, but it’s kinda tough to surpass a year where you have a single post get 39,000 shares on Facebook.

And then there’s the question of the Next Book, and whether I should even try to start the next book right now, or focus on fixing everything else before I worry about that. It’ll probably be me going back to the Skylights universe and trying to nail the sequel to that book properly, but there’s another book bouncing around in my head trying to get out that doesn’t fit in with any of my established universes and might be fun to write. But I’ve kind of liked the last few weekends where I’m not stressing about whether I’m writing all the time, so maybe I need a break. I dunno.

In which this duck is my entire life

On July 4, 2017July 4, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

anigif_enhanced-buzz-2410-1369939749-19 It’s been an exhausting few days, both at work and elsewhere, to the point where all I’ve really got in my head is fog and hell if I can think of anything worth talking about. My 4th of July celebration involved eating buttered noodles with my wife and now we’re watching an episode of last season’s Fear the Walking Dead. At least I think I’m only a season behind; I’m losing faith in the entire franchise, if you want complete honesty.

(Other than Nick, who is the smartest character in either this show or its parent show’s history, and is actually interesting to watch.)

Balremesh and Other Stories is still available for pre-order, for a few more hours at least before the birthday launch tomorrow. Surprisingly, it was my most successful pre-order yet– by 50%!– despite only being available for about a week and a half. The project for the next couple of days is to get the print edition ready, and then polish off Tales from the Benevolence Archives, which I’m still projecting for late August or early September. It’s close.

And then, in October… well, I’ll hold off on that announcement for a bit yet.

I need some sleep, y’all.

Saleswanking 2015

On December 31, 2015December 31, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

Screen Shot 2015-12-31 at 11.03.47 AM These are December’s numbers; I just spent an hour and a half or so getting my 2016 spreadsheet set up. December was down from the last couple of months, but that’s not a surprise, and I sold three times as many books in December 2015 as I did in 2014 so I’m calling it a win. As always, click to make that legible.

I had a goal for 2015: I wanted other human beings to give me one thousand dollars of American money in return for things I wrote. And I have good news! By certain measurements, I beat that number by over fifty percent.

Unfortunately, by other measurements, I spent a lot more money playing author than I earned, mostly because of my insistence on attending a couple of conventions this year and paying early for one of the ones that I’m going to next year. Conventions have yet to be a profit center, is what I’m saying. Not even close. But I think they’re useful, and I’m doing at least two of them in 2016 and may be doing as many as four or five. If they bankrupt me, I’ll try something else for 2017. This needs to turn some sort of profit soon, even if it’s just a tiny one.

My books were downloaded or purchased 2350 times in 2015, up from 524 in 2014, an increase that is frankly outstanding even if a lot of those were giveaways. During that time I released two new books, The Sanctum of the Sphere and Searching for Malum ba. I plan on two more new releases in 2016, a sequel to Skylights in (hopefully, although the window to get this done is closing) March and a second fiction book late in the year that I haven’t definitely decided on. Other goals for 2016 include being published at least once by someone who isn’t me. I’ve been lucky enough to have stories published in both extant volumes of the World Unknown Review, but I think 2016 needs to be the year where I break into traditional publishing somehow. Note that I’ll count it as good if the contract is signed next year; the story itself doesn’t actually have to come out, but I want a traditional publishing sale next year. I would also like to see at least 4000 more books in the hands of readers. That’s a pretty ambitious increase over this year; we’ll see if I make it.

And I kinda want to write a screenplay and a comic book, just for the hell of it. I have no plans to try and sell either of them, and this isn’t the first year I’ve said “write a screenplay,” but they’d be fun to try and do.

(Oh, and audiobooks. Audiobooks, dammit! At least of BA 1!)

I am sticking with Kindle Select for the foreseeable future, as well. My ebooks will remain exclusive to Amazon, as I have better sales when exclusive to Amazon than I do when I make my books available everywhere. Sooner or later Amazon will piss me off again and I’ll diversify again, but for now, Amazon’s where you’re going to have to go to get one of my ebooks.

Or, y’know, email me, and we’ll work something out for your other device. You can always do that.

But yeah. In April of 2014, I had no books available at all. As of now, I have this:

I dunno about you, but I feel pretty damn good about that.

Thank you, genuinely, so, so, so much to everyone who has helped me on this; I hope the stories have been worth it.

Now go review them!

Saleswanking extravaganza! (Saleswankstravaganza?)

On November 1, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized8 Comments

Sure.

I have had an immensely productive day; it’s almost like I have to go back to teaching tomorrow and I’m trying to keep myself from going crazy. I disassembled and reassembled (correctly!) two different sinks today, for fuck’s sake. I’m like some sort of freakish monster.

Anyway, the two of you who are big number nerds like I am, click for large:

While I didn’t have a 300-download day like I did last month, at least I can be certain that all of those represent actual downloads to actual humans. I broke away from the Siler Saturday formula a bit this month and sprinkled some free book days on various days of the week to see if anything made a difference, and given that my level of promotion on the day where I had 300 downloads in September was just about exactly the same as the two 25-download days in October, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the main factors in a free promo are 1) how generically busy Amazon is on that day, and 2) how highly ranked the book is as paid the day before the free promo starts. In other words, it’s good to do a free promo right after you have a day with a couple of sales for that book, because that’ll push you into the low six figures if not the high five figures just on the strength of those couple of sales, and I think it gives the book a bit of a bump. Again, though, this is all theory; I don’t have a lot of data.

Here’s how actual paid sales went, by the way. This will easily be my most lucrative month from Amazon, especially once I work KENP money in there– more on that in a minute:

In other news, I’m immensely pleased at how well Searching for Malumba has done. It’s had 24 sales in its first five days since official release, half of which were in print, which is outstanding, at least by my standards. It’s moved twice as many copies as The Sanctum of the Sphere did in its first five days, and it already has more reviews than Sanctum does, although that required an email to my beta readers a couple days after the book came out that I’ll characterize as “pushy” and which reasonable humans would probably call “fuckin’ rude.”

I still love you guys, I swear.

Sanctum continues to be my redheaded stepchild, and I’m not sure why. It’s my only sequel, but it’s a sequel to my most popular work and it’s good, goddammit. I gotta figure out how to market it better. Weirdly, it does just fine when I’m selling it in person– it just struggles online.

Anyway. Let’s talk about KENP. I am fascinated by this. I just started seeing KENP reads recently– note that these are pages read by people who downloaded my books for free through Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, and that I get paid about half a cent per page:

Here’s the same range of dates, only it’s just KENP pages for Skylights:

I swear those are two different graphs. Look carefully, you’ll find the differences!

There are 13 pages for BA Vol. 1 in there somewhere, and that little blip at the end is about 80 pages for Malumba. Every single other KENP read I’ve had is for Skylights. Now, Skylights, cover-to-cover, is 535 “Kindle Edition Normalized Pages” long, which is what KENP stands for. Note that that means that on October 26 two different people read the book goddamn near cover-to-cover, or at least a lot of people read smaller chunks of it.

KENP doesn’t pay well– those thousand pages in a day of reading earned me less than six bucks– but overall for October I’m looking at about another $20something on top of what I made from sales. Which isn’t nothing, I guess? And I’ll freely admit that, while I love selling books, it’s actually even neater to log in and discover hey, someone’s reading one of my books RIGHT NOW, because that number was smaller than that earlier today.

I’d love to know why Skylights is the only one getting any love, though.