Hugh Howie

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My Best Month Ever?

Posted by dougdandridge on September 1, 2015
Posted in: eBooks, Fantasy, Far Future, Kindle, Military, Movies, Plotting, science Fiction, self publishing, Writing. Tagged: , , , , . 5 Comments

Exodus9

September of 2012 was the first month I ever gained any traction on Amazon, the giveaway of the Deep Dark Well to the tune of 4,035 attracting the attention that started the sales rolling.  That month I sold 237 books.  In October, 2012 it was 538 books, then 1,558 in November and 4,615 that December.  January of 2013 was truly a monster month, with 8,560 eBooks going out.  That was my biggest month ever by volume, but I was selling most of my books for $2.99 at that time, so the profit was not as large per unit as it has grown to.  Still, I made over $16,000 that month, and decided then and there that my days at the State of Florida were numbered.   I left the state in March of 2013 and have never looked back.  In June of 2013  sold 6,998 books, in January of 2014 6,190, while May of 2014 saw my first $20,000+ month with 7,002 sales.  Not every month has been that good, of course.  In February of this year I sold a low of books since that breakout November of 2012, 1,210 units.   None of these figures include audiobooks, of which I have sold about 3,200 to date, and paperbacks, which have sold about 1,300.

August of 2015 sales totals were 6,045 eBooks and 51 paperbacks.  Again, this does not include audiobooks.  Now this is not a record month for unit sales, and in fact has been beat by four other months.  But it exceeded May of 2014 in revenue.   I will not really know how much until the payments come in at the end of October, but I am confident it will be by a good margin.  This month also saw my first sale to Mexico, and well as record sales to Germany and France.  Germany is tied with Canada on an alternating basis for my third largest market, after the US and UK.  France is my sixth largest market, which really isn’t saying much, though I really appreciate that small cadre of diehard fans in that country.  Australia is number five, and they were a little better than their average this month, while I had no sales at Amazon Japan or Netherlands.

I also had 338,110 page views for my books that are on Kindle Select, meaning people can borrow them through the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited.  My books average about 360 Kindle pages, including matter at the back, and run between 100-130K words.  That came out to the equivalent of 939 books, and under this new scheme I am making more per book in this program than I was when they were paying the same for a twenty page short read as they were for a novel.  Not as good for those short story writers who could attract readers, but much better for us novelists.

So, is the point of this post to brag about how well I’m doing.  Maybe a little.   I am human, I made the dream work, and I feel like crowing it from the rooftops.  More importantly though,  I am living the dream, have made a successful career without the aid of a publisher, and am an example to others of how it can be done.  I am by no means the most successful indie published science fiction or fantasy writer out there.  I personally know of three others, Hugh Howie, Chris Nuttall, and Evan Currie.   I still need to figure out what they have done to promote themselves.  And I am sure there are others out there just as successful that I haven’t heard of, yet.

Exodus: Empires at War: Book 9: Second Front was the driving force of the success of last month, selling 4,131 eBooks and probably 20 paperbacks.  It also garnered 49 reviews in the US (thirty-nine 5*, eight 4* and a single 3*)  and 12 in the UK (eleven 5* and one 3*, and the three star’s complaint was that the series was too long.  So I guess he will continue to be disappointed in the future, because it’s going to get longer.  Currently I am working on Exodus: Machine Wars: Book 2: Bolthole, and have 71,000 words down so far.  DragonCon is coming up, and I am planning on doing a little bit of work on something or other while I am there.  Of course that may not happen, because, well, DragonCon.

I want to finish by thanking all of the people who enjoy my books and especially those who leave reviews.   I realize I am not the best writer in the world, and I am grateful that you enjoy my sometimes overly complicated plot lines and long battle scenes.  Thanks for making my dream possible.

 

The Deep Dark Well hits 6K

Posted by dougdandridge on August 24, 2015
Posted in: eBooks, Fantasy, Far Future, science Fiction, self publishing, Writing. Tagged: , , , . 3 Comments

DeepDark4a

Something kind of cool happened this last week.   One of my eBooks recorded its six thousandth sale.  The Deep Dark Well was the first eBook I put up on Amazon.  It garnered my first review, a three star (due to formatting problems) that was later raised to a five star when said problems were corrected.  That and several other good reviews helped me to get over the initial fear of putting more stuff up.  Still, it probably sold twenty copies in its first eight months.  Not really ground breaking.  It was also my first giveaway on Amazon, 4,100 copies going in five days, and kick started the whole Exodus: Empires at War series, released two months later.  Still not my most successful book.  Seven of the nine Exodus books have outsold it, some by large margins.  Book 1 has sold over 23,000 copies, while three other books have gone over 10,000, with one more surely due to break that mark before the end of the year.  All this in a total of over 140K books in thirty-six months.

So what’s the big deal about this one book?  The Deep Dark Well was the first far future book I ever wrote.  It’s the story of a redheaded Kuiper Belt miner from Alabama, Pandora Latham, who escaped her domineering and abusive father by going into space and fueling the terraforming of the inner Solar System.  When her ship encounters a passenger vessel from the future, she leaps into a wormhole to escape the paradox destroying reaction of the Universe, and finds herself on an enormous station built around a black hole, forty thousand years in the future.  This was my first big concept novel as well, a tribute to people like Larry Niven and Poul Anderson.  It was also the first novel to garner not one, but two long personal rejections that gave me some hope I could actually do this writing thing.

So, again, what’s the big deal about this book selling 6K, when I have so many others that have done better.  It validates one of the main concepts of the Self-publishing Revolution.  You don’t have to sell all your eggs at the one day market.  What I have learned in several workshops is that, according to the old traditional model, you had to sell or die, quickly.  Under the traditional model there was a five thousand book run for most new authors.  The books went to the bookstores, and the clock started ticking.  Those that didn’t sell in a certain time span were sent back to the publisher.  Now an eBook, which really doesn’t take up any shelf space, can sit in the electronic bookstore forever, selling fifty copies this month, twenty the next, on and on.  As Hugh Howie said during a panel at DragonCon 2014, you don’t have to sell all of your books at one time.  You can sell as many as a traditionally published book has to sell in a couple of weeks over a period of years and still consider it a successful property.  The Deep Dark Well has sold thirty copies so far this month, about average for the last two years.   I expect it will continue selling about that much each month for years to come.  Not a great deal of revenue each month, but over time?  It all adds up.

When I wrote The Deep Dark Well, I considered it my finest effort to date, and I’m sure it was.  I have written so many more books since then, some much better that TDDW.  Practice may never make perfect, but it normally results in improvement.   It still holds a place in my heart as the book that started my self publishing career.   And, as I learned from Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, as a professional author, every little trickle of revenue helps to feed the rushing stream of your total income.  So today I celebrate the slow, quiet success of this novel which started the whole writing career going.