Sales

One of the questions I had when I started independent publishing with First last October was this: how many books am I going to sell? I did a little research (as can you) and found the consensus is that on average, an independently published book sells 250 copies. When I published my first three books on Amazon over ten years ago, I did it for fun and so friends and family members could read them. Since I wasn’t distributing to other booksellers, they went on Kindle Unlimited where people could read them for free with their KU subscription. I guarantee you that way less than 250 people read those books. I never advertised them and thus they languished on Amazon’s site, occasionally noticed by some solitary soul.

Fast forward to 2023-24. My aim with publishing First in late 2023 and now Next Time about seven weeks ago was to get readers. Both have sold reasonably well, considering I’m only doing ads and promotions. Way more than 250 each, which is gratifying. But as I mentioned in my previous post, that minor success comes at a pretty steep price. As I found a decade ago, it’s not enough to just put my books on Amazon and wait for people to notice them. That’s not going to happen and I never fooled myself that it would. This writing and publishing thing is a hobby, and hobbies cost money. I’d estimate that every book I’ve sold costs me about seven bucks a copy. Yes, you read that right. I’m not making that much per copy, all the expenses have added up to that much out of my pocket. Those sales are greater than 99% eBooks, so you can deduce the inflow is way less than the outflow. Let’s not consider all the time spent writing and editing. If I added in those hours at even a greatly reduced rate, the cost of this hobby would make me question my sanity. Has it been worth it? That’s a question for another day.