Business Post: The Hidden Wishes Series (Raw Numbers) (Patreon)

Been seeing a number of posts about sales and launches and what constitutes a success or not and the like. And, while everything is a matter of perspective, I wanted to clarify some things about short and long-term trends. 

The easiest way to do that is to showcase sales for a series, one that some people (and in some ways, I do too) would consider a failure. I say somewhat, but I'll explain later on.

The first post is going to be simple - just raw numbers.  I'll do analysis later.

The Charts

That's the sales for a Gamer's Wiish for its entire period until September 2020.

Here's A Squire's Wish (book 2) of the series. 

And here's A Jinn's Wish (book 3). The small blip in January is on Jan 31, 2020 since I did a pre-order and you get the pre-order sales registering on the 31st because of timezones.

One last document - the Hidden Wishes trilogy.

Some Clarifications

Firstly, and most importantly, it's worth noting that all these numbers are gross revenue from Amazon only. 

Secondly, the blue colour is Kindle Unlimited sales. By A Jinn's Wish time, I had switched the entire series to pure wide sales, but I'm not including my wide sales in here just for ease of analysis. It's not enough to shift the numbers.

Thirdly, this does NOT include audiobook sales. We're just going to analyse ebook sales for now and discuss audiobooks another time.

Fourthly, There are almost no (or in many cases, 0) print sales because until January 2020, I didn't have paperbacks for the series. That was a mistake (we'll discuss why later).

And lastly, again - this does not include expenses. Figure around $1500 per book in terms of expenses (editing & covers). So, net profit for the entire series is roughly -$6,000 if you include things like advertising expenses (AMS mostly, though some Facebook advertising and newsletters) over the course of the life of the work. 

So net income for this series is approximately $15k over 2.5 years.

Oh, and this is all in US$ by the way.

Next Week: Analysis!

We'll talk about analysing the book, the sales, timeline and profitability, etc as well as the things I did right and wrong. And why I hesitate to call it a failure, but did move on from writing more in that series.