May Book Sales (Patreon)

We return to the revelation of numbers (I tremble) so that you can see that 1. I'm doing okay, but 2. I am not doing well enough to give up my day job. (I would one day like that sentence to read: 'so that you can see that 1. I'm doing great, but 2. I cannot yet afford a second house in the Cotswolds', but, you know, one thing at a time here.)

As you can see, we're continuing to drift down off the high from the ad in February. Free giveaways held pretty steady for Earthrise, and the numbers aren't that far off from April--that reflects a couple of minor ads I bought to prop up sales. I also ran a special on Morgan 1, which is why you see it jumping up there in the first column of the green section.

Finally, I released Only the Open which sold three times as many copies as I expected. Series sales for Princes' Game have now outrun Mindhealers and Alysha, though I expect that to change when I release Dreamhearth in a couple of months. Princes' Game has the benefit of being an all novel series, though; both Mindhealers and Alysha have short fiction installments, which make me less money. More PG units, on the whole, is better for me than more units of either of those two series.

On the whole, no real surprises. You can see the effects of advertising: ads do matter.

Very good thing: thanks to the Bookbub ad, I've finally qualified for NINC. I attended the NINC conference last year as a guest of Draft2Digital, and even the single day I went was stunningly useful. Their newsletter also has lots of interesting information. I'm looking forward to joining the organization... it's been one of my milestones for a while.

Back to numbers. This month I went ahead and tallied up the audiobook sales; since January those numbers have gone 37 - 724 (February was the promotion) - 146 - 103 - 56. I haven't even bothered with print because it's about the same every month: last month was 15 units, the month before 10, then 16, etc. Print just doesn't sell well for me.

Finally, new this month is this chart:

Books sold is the total number of books I was paid for (so freebies like Earthrise and "Stormfront" don't count). Avg per day tells me about how many books a day I sold that month.

This chart tells me how close I am to my "make enough money to support my family instead of just me" goal. I calculated it at one point and came up with 60 books moved a day. As you can see, February and March made that goal, but we've dropped back down again to "keep your part-time job, kid" territory. Which is fine... I'm in this for the long haul, after all. I'm grateful I make money at all, seeing how rough things are out there for so many people.

Anyway. That's a look into my accounting for May. As usual, I hope it proved interesting! And thank you all for your reviews and recs and your Goodreads activity. In the end, it's word of mouth that sells books, and you all are fantastic about it. :)