It’s been slightly over a year since I started selling ebooks via the Amazon Kindle store and Smashwords. I thought I should share some information about the results with other writers.
I haven’t earned a lot of money doing this. I’ve sold 122 copies of four titles, with income so far of less than $100 (though there are some royalties that have accrued and not been paid yet). However, sales are increasing over time — more than a third of the last year’s sales (44 out of 122) were in the last month.
The sales by title break down thus:
| Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes | 27 copies |
| When Wasps Make Honey | 27 |
| A Notional Treason | 34 |
| The Weight of Silence and Other Stories | 32 |
I’m not sure what to make of that. Even though Wine Can’t be Pressed Into Grapes is the only one of those that’s also available for free (on BigCloset), it’s sold just as well as its sequel When Wasps Make Honey. A Notional Treason is shorter and stand-alone, and because it’s shorter I also priced it lower ($1.99 vs. $2.99 for all the others), which may account for its higher sales.
Anecdotally, short fiction collections sell much worse than novels by the same authors. But The Weight of Silence and Other Stories has sold more copies than my longer novels, and nearly as many as the shorter, lower-priced novel. And it’s the most recently published as well, which makes its sales more impressive — it sold far more copies in its first three weeks than A Notional Treason did.
I’ve been keeping a log showing when I posted new stories or chapters of stories to BigCloset, Fictionmania, Shifti, and the mailing lists, as well as of how many books I sell each week. Almost every time I post a new chapter or a whole new story, I sell one or more books; when I went five months without posting any new stories, I only sold nine books in that period. (Five of those nine sales were in a week when I had a new blog post on BigCloset, though most of my review or essay blog posts in that five-month period weren’t followed by new sales.) After offering A Notional Treason for sale in January this year, I serialized “The Manumission Game” on BigCloset and Twisted Throwback on the morpheuscabinet mailing list. I sold books pretty much every week while the serials were running, and none at all in the month after the Twisted Throwback serial ended. Sales picked up again after I offered The Weight of Silence and Other Stories for sale, and especially after I started the serial of “The Family that Plays Together.”
I can’t offer any hard data on which sites it’s most effective to post free stories to, in terms of generating ebook sales. I seem to sell more books while serializing stories on BigCloset than when posting stories to FM, but that may be because all the stories I’ve posted to FM lately had already been posted to BigCloset earlier. Posts of new stories to Shifti (which had already been posted to BC) haven’t resulted in any obvious short-term sales.
Some of this analysis may be flawed by the post hoc fallacy; when Amazon or Smashwords tells me I’ve sold X books in the last week, and I posted the first chapter of a new story to BigCloset a week ago, I naturally tend to assume that most or all of those X sales were to people following links from the new story to Amazon or Smashwords. Of course some of them might have been following a link from an older story they’re reading for the first time, or following up a link they bookmarked months ago when they read an earlier story, or they might have never heard of me before and just found my books on Amazon or Smashwords by a keyword search.
I’ve sold 20 books via Smashwords and 102 via the Kindle store. That makes me disinclined to use Amazon’s Kindle Select program, which requires you to give Amazon exclusive distribution rights to your book, in return for higher royalty rates in some territories. The territories where I’ve sold the most books — the U.S., UK, and Germany — are all territories where Amazon pays the same royalty whether your book is in the Kindle Select program or not. And Smashwords pays higher royalties — slightly higher for books at the $2.99 price point, and more than double for books at the $1.99 price point.
Another issue is that I don’t want to encourage Amazon’s dubious business practices, such as devising their own proprietary ebook format to lock customers in when there are perfectly good standard formats like ePub. I’m not boycotting Amazon, but I refuse to give them exclusive distribution rights to my books either.
Some other authors have said that if you use Microsoft Word it’s significantly easier to offer a book for sale via the Kindle Store than via Smashwords. I use OpenOffice/LibreOffice, with the writer2epub plugin, and I’ve found it equally easy either way. Both retailers accept .doc files or .epub files as uploads; Smashwords has more stringent formatting requirements than Amazon if you upload a .doc file, but that hasn’t been an issue for me since I export my .odt files to .epub via writer2epub rather than exporting to .doc. (I actually use Emacs for first-draft writing and most of the revision process, and LibreOffice only for final-draft formatting.)
The hard part is setting up new author accounts on Amazon and Smashwords, and learning how to format ebooks. Once that learning and setup overhead was out of the way with the first two books I offered, a year ago, I found it relatively quick and easy to offer A Notional Treason and The Weight of Silence and Other Stories for sale — only slightly more cumbersome than the submission process for a site like BigCloset or FM.
Comments
Nice job of putting
Nice job of putting information together.
My question is why not use an editor, instead of Emacs. I mean, that's an operating system that has everything _except_ an editor :)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration...
...and it’s perfectly possible to create a "real" editor entirely within emacs. In fact, they're readily available as extensions. Lots of programmers who worked in the olden days still use emacs, because it’s possible to do clever things with it that simply can't be done with most editors.
Real emacs users, of course, roll their own.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
To be perfectly fair...
Amazon didn’t invent the format. A French company called Mobipocket did quite some time ago, and actually used a then-standard format, the Open eBook standard. Amazon have recently extended the format, but to give then their due, they've extended the standard to allow things that epubs don’t do. In any event, both formats are simply structured collections of ‘zipped’ HTML files, so it’s fairly trivial to convert between the two formats. At the time, Mobipocket was one of the few companies offering books that could be read on Palm devices, so give them credit at least for being ‘ahead of the curve’ for the era. I think it was called the Palaeolithic, but all those names confuse me sometimes.
Even more confusing is the fact that Amazon supplies both the Mobipocket format and the new KF8 format in the same file. The KF8 format is simply ePub compiled into a slightly different total ‘package,’ so it’s even a little unfair to assume that it’s all that different to the ‘standard’ ePub, the primary difference being that they use their own DRM algorithm (if the author specifies DRM) and have their own kludgey Table of Contents hack tacked on to the bottom of the file, but that was inherited from the folks at Mobipocket, and fifty-million Frenchmen can't be wrong, right?
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
About Kindle Select ...
First of all, congratulations for getting your writing out there, and isn't it a lovely feeling to know that your words and people are out in the world?
I am a participant of Kindle Select but not a cheerleader; this is only after being on Smashwords, Lulu, iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and all the newer kids. As your figures reflect, my own sales in the Kindle format greatly outperformed the others. I discovered that one entire year of Everybody Not Amazon (those listed above and other ebook outlets) combined was less than one quarter-year's sales from Kindle.
While I might want to get on every Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader, and iPad out there (and I'd love to!), it was Select that spurred me to go exclusive with Amazon, and for two specific reasons. First, Select lets Amazon Prime customers (of which there are millions, no doubt) borrow my books for free. Barring those readers who are offended by TG--in which case I have no interest in them, either--I'm confident enough in my writing that readers will want more of my books and begin purchasing (I've got everything at $2.99, a comfortably-low price point). This seems to be the case.
The second and main reason for going Select is the Promotion policy; you can pick up to 5 days within every 90 to offer your book for free. You schedule the days and contact every "free and discount ebook" site you can find and announce your days. Yes, these are free downloads, but the point is to get your book(s) out there, to get them read, and to hopefully encourage future sales. I have had free weekends and moved between 4,000-10,000 books; that's a lot of Karin Bishop floating around out there!
The downside--and a very important one--is that compulsive downloaders are like hoarders; they may take months to get around to reading your book, if ever. Perhaps they downloaded fifty just that day, stockpiling away; I've been contacted by readers with thousands upon thousands on their Kindles. Since they paid nothing for your work, they don't have any personal investment in it--and that means not finishing it or perhaps not going beyond a chapter and going on to the next book. Yet they find the time to post a negative one-star review; "Didn't hold my interest" or "Couldn't finish it" or "I didn't understand it" or whatever. Those partially-read, dismissive reviews bring down your rating, and it's important to keep those four-and-five star reviews unsullied.
So the tradeoff with Select is wider marketing tools versus increased negative reviews. Don't forget; you can try Select for a time, try the Promotion tool, evaluate, and if you don't like it, pop your books out of Select and go back to listing with Smashwords or whoever. I'm being courted by BookBaby and am considering it, mostly for their whole packages.
Whatever you choose, best of luck and keep writing and keep selling and I'll keep reading!
Karin
Borrowing w/Amazon Prime
The book borrowing feature in Amazon Prime is useful for trying out books, but it is pretty restrictive in that individual Prime members can only borrow one book in a calendar month. If they happen to carry over a borrowed book from one month to the next, the borrowed book counts as the new month's book also (as I recall). The Prime video streaming is a much better benefit (though we don't use it much as Netflix Streaming has way more choices and a better interface). The driver to me is 2 day free shipping. I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. I can't tell you how many times they've 2nd day aired a $10. to $15. item to me. I don't see how they can make money doing that even at the new $100. a year Prime cost.
What really is slick is the Overdrive service my library has for borrowing ebooks. Books are available in Kindle, epub, and PDF formats. If you choose Kindle format, the actual download is done through Amazon. I don't know if an author needs to get Overdrive's attention or libraries' or both. My local library allows up to 10 e-checkouts at a time. Most books can be checked out for 21 days. There are also videos, audio books, and periodicals avaialble. My library uses Hoopla (videos) and Zinio (periodicals) in addition to Overdrive.
Results of free ebook day promotions?
What kind of results have you seen from your free ebook promotions? Do you see sales on other titles increasing after you give away copies of one of them? And if so, are those increases greater than your total sales from Smashwords etc. used to be? Or are your current sales through Amazon-only greater than your sales used to be through Amazon plus other sites? -- and if so, have they increased more than the annual increase you used to see before you switched to Kindle Select?
I've considered maybe trying out Kindle Select for one of my future books, but I doubt I'd switch to it for all my existing books. I'd have to take at least Wine Can't be Pressed Into Grapes and maybe, depending on the terms of service, all the stories from The Weight of Silence and Other Stories down from the free fiction sites like this one, and that would cause reader ill-will and deprive me of most of my existing marketing.
Another thing I've considered (because Smashwords pays higher royalties than Amazon) is releasing my next book *only* through Smashwords, at least for the first few months. The question is whether there are a significant number of people who can read ePubs as well as Kindle format books who would buy it from Smashwords though they might find it more convenient to buy it from the Kindle Store. Have other authors tried this?
It depends on what my next book actually is, of course. If it's the Nat Holcomb ebook collection, I can't use Kindle Select because that would require me to take down the earlier Nat Holcomb stories from Shifti and Fictionmania. If it's the third Kazmina & Launuru book, it would make sense to offer it through all the same places I used for the first two. If it's stand-alone, I might try Smashwords-only or Kindle Select.
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http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/trismegistusshandy
http://shifti.org/wiki/User:Trismegistus_Shandy