#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.

Some book news

On June 28, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

All of my books other than Searching for Malumba have been re-submitted to Smashwords, and should be available there soon and propagating to the various other online bookstores soon afterwards. Malumba comes off of Kindle Select in late July and will be popping back up everywhere soon after that. This marks the third time, I think, that I’ve gone back and forth from “Amazon exclusivity” to “available everywhere,” and I will obviously let you know the next time I change my mind again.

What’s made the difference? Mostly that my books aren’t selling for shit on Amazon right now anyway, and so there’s no good reason not to broaden the number of places they can sell poorly at. 🙂 I feel like I’ve done enough free giveaways over the last six months or so of Amazon exclusivity that I’m reaching a saturation point with people I currently reach who might download them, so it’s time to spread my reach out again and see how well that works for me. At least BA Vol 1 will be showing up on OpenBooks again, and it is, notably, once again permanently free on Smashwords and the Smashwords affiliates if you haven’t checked it out yet.

Also: I’ve hinted around a bit at this, but it’s official now: I have a cover artist in the early stages of working on the cover for Tales from the Benevolence Archives, and the characters will be on the cover. I am so fucking stoked for this that I don’t even know what to do about it. Who’s the artist? His name is Jamie Noble Frier. This guy. I cannot wait to see what his early sketches of Brazel and Rhundi look like; we’ll see how much he’s willing to let me post of the early stuff.

I, uh, guess I ought to go work on getting the book finished now. 🙂

A couple notes

On July 29, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

I had a good idea for this morning’s blog post before I went to bed last night, but it’s completely gone now. So I’ll settle for pointing out that all of my books, including THE SANCTUM OF THE SPHERE, are now live at Smashwords as of this morning, and SANCTUM should be percolating out to Barnes and Noble and iBooks and everywhere else over the next few days. So if you use some sort of e-device other than a Kindle for your reading, you can get whatever format you like over there now!

Also, I have a comics piece up at Sourcerer this morning, so go check that out too. I have grouting to do this morning (after I’ve gone out and bought kneepads, which needs to happen first) and I’ll try and put up a post with actual words after that.

Hey, guess what?

On June 29, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

SKYLIGHTS is live on Smashwords again, if you’re into that.

ANNOUNCEMENT: A thing I might mention again soon

On June 7, 2015June 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing4 Comments

LUTHER SILER END-OF-THE-SCHOOL-YEAR BOOK SALE!

We’ll be celebrating the end of the school year by putting both of my novels on sale for a few days, assuming I’m still alive and not in jail at that time. Starting at 3:00 PM (roughly; Amazon’s not terribly diligent about punctuality on these matters) on Wednesday, June 10th, which should be right about the time my kids are leaving, and running through midnight Saturday night, we’re doing a Kindle Countdown Deal on both SKYLIGHTS and THE SANCTUM OF THE SPHERE.

Long story short: both books will be ninety-nine of your Americapennies basically all afternoon and evening Wednesday. They’ll go up a dollar roughly every twenty hours after that until the sale ends. More details to follow, but I thought I’d go ahead and announce it now.

BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, VOL. 1 remains 99 cents permanently at Amazon, or free at Openbooks.com or Smashwords.

First quarter book saleswanking

On March 31, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing7 Comments

Behold, the Spreadsheet of Doom! Clicking to enlarge is basically your only option.

I’m borrowing the quarterly roundup idea from Gene’O here; I’m doing book sales today and will do site traffic sometime later this week. As always, I’m not bragging (because tons of people do way, WAY better than this) or whining (because tons of people don’t do this well,) I’m presenting the information so that people who find it useful or interesting can look at it. I figure that I would find this really interesting if someone else posted it, so surely someone will find it interesting when I do.

Note, as always, that I’m going to be using the word “sales” a lot; as far as I’m concerned any download of my books is a sale even if it’s a free book. I have not made a lot of money this month, especially since a number of my Skylights sales were KOLL sales and I don’t even know the payout for that right now. I’m not worried about it.

tl;dr version: I’m pretty pleased with myself at the moment.

Some things about March:

I’m currently three books shy of tying January’s sales. As it is still March 31 for several hours it’s not unimaginable that I might tie it, but it doesn’t feel likely. I’d have to have the best day of the month two days in a row to pull off a tie.
March featured my longest string of days without a no-sale day since I started paying attention, from the eighteenth to the 28th. The 29th was a no-sale day, but the 30th was the best day of the month.
March also featured my longest string of multiple-sales days since I started paying attention, from the 21st to the 27th.
Probably related, March had the fewest 0-sale days since I started paying attention, at 7.

Skylights sales were a little disappointing this month; 7 ebooks and one print sale. The story this month was Benevolence Archives, which clocked 45 downloads between Amazon, Smashwords and OpenBooks.com. Actually, the real story of the month is OpenBooks.com– not only did BA 1 move 26 copies there in March after a total of four in January and February, it’s currently the top-selling science fiction book on the site and #10 in all fiction books. Now, granted, the site’s new, but that’s still awesome. Sales are down at Smashwords, but that’s probably because as I’ve noticed momentum over at OpenBooks I’ve been shifting my promotion over there accordingly.

Actually, this might be why Skylights is a bit down as well– with The Sanctum of the Sphere hitting next month, I’ve been pushing BA 1 harder than Skylights anyway. Preorders will show up with first sales next month; I can’t really calibrate how I feel about pre-order numbers until I see first-day sales. We’ll see what happens.

As far as the quarterly numbers:

In all of 2014, starting when BA 1 came out in May, I sold 477 copies of Benevolence Archives and 47 copies of Skylights.
In the first quarter of 2015 I’ve sold 119 copies of Benevolence Archives and 63 copies of Skylights, and those 119 copies of BA were without the benefit of any free promotions at Amazon. Nearly half of the 477 downloads at Amazon were in a single day.
There have been 90 days in 2015 so far, meaning that I’m averaging nearly exactly 2 sales a day. I was hoping to average one sale a day in 2015. I’m quite happy with that number.
This means that, total, I’ve sold 596 copies of Benevolence Archives and 110 copies of Skylights. I feel like that’s pretty damn good for someone who was a total unknown less than a year ago. Could it be better? Sure. But once Sanctum comes out, I’m going to start doing signings. So April and May are going to be real interesting.

Feel free to ask questions, if you’ve got them.

Someone explain this to me

On February 14, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing9 Comments

This graph.

Make it make sense.

‘Cuz I don’t get it.

In which this took all day: Sales n’ Spreadsheets #blogwanking

On January 24, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Writing8 Comments

This will be tiny and illegible, but those of you who care can click on it for a larger and actually readable edition. You still may have to scroll a bit, since I work with a 27″ monitor and this image is all sorts of horizontal:

Basically, a day of fiddling with Excel and every sales report I can get anyone to give me has convinced me that I need to start fresh and on my own with 2015, as not nearly enough of the data I have for 2014 can give me specific dates on which I made sales– or, at least, dates on which I made sales anywhere other than Amazon. Smashwords’ date data seems to fall into a black hole after 30 days, so I’ll have to keep track of that separately and on my own if I want to be able to see it. Thus, this Excel spreadsheet, which keeps track of each book and each venue the book is available at. I have to manually enter day-by-day sales and then it totals everything up for me; line graphs are on the next sheet.

Interesting fact: As of last night (I had six BA sales yesterday!) I’ve sold more books in January than there are days in January. That’s a first for me if you don’t count the couple of KDP Select free days that I gave Benevolence Archives 1 when it was on Select at Amazon; those garnered hundreds of downloads. If I was able to make BA free at Amazon I would get a lot more visibility for it. Select has been good for Skylights, hands down, no debate, and I suspect when BA 2 launches in April it will be on Select as well.

It remains to be seen if my nonsense is finally starting to catch on a bit, if Select is solely responsible for this, or if people just buy more books in January than they do in December. But it’s probably worth pointing out that my January check from Amazon will probably be at least a fourth of my income from writing in all of 2014. That’s gotta mean things are looking up, right?

And, just for the hell of it: