One Year In - data for Indie Authors

Hello Dear Reader!

September 17th marked exactly one year since I published my debut novel A Songbird’s Tale! I was curious how much money I had made on my book so far, and thought I might share the data. This would be the kind of thing I would be interested in seeing. I think this kind of thing can be great in terms of lessons learned (how can another Independent Author learn from what I did) and managing expectations for someone starting out. So hopefully this will help someone, or maybe just be insightful?

I published A Songbird’s Tale Sept 17th 2023.
Here is what my advertising looked like over the last year:
- I posted on my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. (I will admit I’m not great at social media, and I have MAYBE 100 followers per platform. Mostly friends and family.)
- I ran two Goodreads giveaways, one of which was 100 e-book copies, the other was 5 paperback copies. (As a side note, There was an error in the Amazon accounting system and they accidentally paid me for the copies of my ebooks that were distributed through the Goodreads giveaway, which will affect my profit numbers, which I will explain more below.)
- I also ran a promotion through Freebooksy and made the ebook free for 5 days and they included my book in their e-mail campaign. (This got me the most downloads, but I did not get paid for any of them. Which is fine since I am just trying to gain exposure at this point.)
- I paid for a review through Reedsy. (I, personally, did not have a great experience with Reedsy and would not recommend it.)

And that was mostly it. I worked with a publishing coach to help get me through the publishing process, and after publishing worked with an advertising coach to help discuss strategy and some other points for making my book more marketable and building a fan base. It was recommended to not do anything in terms of paid advertising until I have at least three items on the market. So I pretty much backed off from any kind of advertising after that and focused on trying to write the next few books. Much more recently I worked with a social media coach to get some up-to-date photos and discuss social media strategy so I can start posting more regularly and trying to grow my audience there. I also started saving money to have my novel recorded as an audiobook because I cannot even begin to count the number of times I was asked the question “Will there be an audiobook?” (The answer, by the way, is YES. It’ll be out in December.)

There are a lot of classes that have been recommended to me like Amazon Ads and/or Facebook Ads classes and whatnot to help new authors get started, but I haven’t really had the time or desire to dive in and get involved in any of that. So I simply have not done any of it. To be totally honest, I would rather just pay someone to promote my book than me promote it myself. I would much, much rather write more books, do my own interior layout, do cover text placement, make stickers and products, make artwork, and a whole host of other things that take up a surprising amount of time, than sit through a class on how to market my book. But alas, no marketing, no sale, and no sales means no future career as a writer. I’ll get around to it at some point… but until then, we shall return to the topic at hand.

So, my first year, with doing minimal advertising, what does that look like for a brand new author with no social media following, no street team to help promote their book, and whose writing group consists of one Snap Chat Legend and one incredibly Anti-Social Media Friend?

That huge spike in December was due to a giveaway, not Christmas sales. *cue sad trombone sound

As of today I’ve had exactly 2500 purchases or downloads of my book.

However that number doesn’t quite tell the whole story as it also includes author copies that I’ve purchased for myself to give away as promotional items or to sell at events. But it’s pretty close. That HUGE spike in December was when I tried out the Freebooksy campaign. I got over 2300 downloads of my book that week.

What I have had some trouble with, and what I think many independent authors will agree with me on, is having these numbers translate into reviews and into more sales. Having sold or given away 2500 copies of my book, on Amazon I currently have 25 ratings, and not all of those come with reviews. A lot of times people just click the star rating, which I am happy to have. On Goodreads it’s even less with only 19 ratings/reviews. So that means approximately 1% of people who read my book left me a review. (THANK YOU SO MUCH 1%, YOU MEAN THE WORLD TO ME!!!) This is why it is so so so important and so helpful to leave a rating and hopefully a review as well for books that you read. Especially for independent authors.

Some of the advertising options I did look into would not let you solicit their services unless you had at least 50 reviews on either Amazon or Goodreads.

Just for kicks and giggles I wanted to see where I was selling books, because I assumed it would only be in the U.S. I was wrong!

I did not expect to sell books in Europe, much less Australia or India. Thanks friends! ^_^

Now, that question I’m sure everyone has been waiting for… what did I make as an author this first year???

According to my Amazon report for the year, I made $713.15. But remember $500 of that was an error in my favor where Amazon paid for me a Goodreads giveaway that I should not have been paid for. (Feels like landing on chance in Monopoly…). So technically I should have only made $213.15. And of course by the time you factor in all of the money I paid for advertising and giveaways (Because Goodreads giveaways and Freebooksy giveaways are not free for the author), which really wasn’t even that many things, as well as the coaching, professional editing, cover art, that number starts to get even smaller. Looking at ONLY things I consider true advertising spending:

Goodreads Giveaway will run you about $120.
The Freebooksy giveaway was somewhere around $350 IIRC… I don’t feel like digging out my receipts just now to double check.
Reedsy review was $50. (The intent with the Reedsy review was to be able to get a review and pull quotes from it for advertising. Unfortunately the reviewer who chose my book did not like it. You win some, you lose some I guess.)

As you can see, I am very much in the hole.

If I had to choose which of those things to spend money on again, it would absolutely be the Freebooksy campaign. It got the most amount of activity on my book out of everything I spent money on last year.

All that said I learned an absolute metric ton of stuff and was able to provide some help and guidance to both my writing mentors who also self published. Even if I didn’t make any money, I wasn’t prepared to. Everyone says you lose money on your first book, which while I don’t agree with the sentiment entirely, it does help manage expectations.

I’ve got some more things happening before the end of the year, Dragonsteel Con, my Audiobook release, and hopefully the release of two shorter works related to A Songbird’s Tale. I may dip my toe back into a little bit of advertising after I’ve paid for my audiobook. We’ll see. Either way, I can’t wait to look at my numbers next year and see how things change and how many more copies of my book I can get out into the world.

I’m honestly kind of glad I haven’t sold thousands and thousands of copies at this point because as I’m going through the narration with the audiobook narrator, there are definitely some typos that somehow made it through a great many rounds of editing. Despite what it may look like, I swear this book went through at least 9 rounds of editing, with two different professional paid editors, but that’s a story for another post. Suffice to say, I’m thankful that I have a chance to clean some of those up before I start promoting my book again.

Till next time dear reader, hopefully you found something helpful in the data. Catch you all soon! <3 Tiff