I pulled all these numbers on November 1st, but have been so busy, as I said, writing Untrue Tales… Book Five (which I finished the 1st draft of yesterday! Yay!) and getting Untrue Tales… Book Four ready to be published last week (it’s now available as an eBook and on the Modern Evil Podcast) that I haven’t had a chance to post them. Podiobooks downloads are again down, with an average of 8% fewer downloads than in September, and 14% fewer downloads of final episodes – one title was down 40%. On the other hand, eBook downloads are way up, with the total downloads up 80% vs. September and 66% higher than the (actually pretty flat) average of every month this year – 845 downloads vs. the average of 507/month. Dragons’ Truth and Forget What You Can’t Remember are the big winners for October, with increases in both eBook and Podiobook downloads – and I have no idea why.
Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers, as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB
- Lost and Not Found: 122 / 482 / 22
- Dragons’ Truth: 184 / 621 / 69
- Forget What You Can’t Remember: 163 / 2,114 / 55
- Untrue Tales… Book One: 116 / 1,190 / 86
- Untrue Tales… Book Two: 109 / 1,427 / 89
- Untrue Tales… Book Three: 113 / 524 / 44
- Cheating, Death: 6 / 2,677 / 182
- Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 4 / 199 / 24
- More Lost Memories (full): 2 / 506 / 77
- More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 22
- Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 0 / 1,053 / N/A
- Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 3
- Last Christmas: 1
- Total for all titles: 845 / 10,793 / 648
- Total YTD: 5,413 / 185,446 / 12,679
- Total all-time: 13,835 / 365,547 / 23,798
The 22 sales of individual stories from More Lost Memories come from the way I track Smashwords “Premium” sales: When I get paid for them, typically once a quarter. 21 of those 22 were sales of the zombie story Pay Attention, and I only had 30 paid eBook sales on the books in October. People like a $0.99 zombie story, I suppose… well, at least they’ll download it – none of them have actually bothered to review it, that I’ve found, so I have no idea what they think of it. From those 30 eBook sales, I earned $27.26, most of which was from 3 months worth of “Premium” sales at Smashwords, from some earlier quarter, of course. I also received $3.75 from donations made at Podiobooks.com toward my titles during Q3.
Oh, and in case you didn’t notice the new title on the list, it’s my short story Last Christmas, which I wrote to fill in an empty week on the podcast last holiday season. It’s now available as an eBook for $1.99, and has already sold a couple more copies this month. In a bit of serendipity, I was twitpic’ing photos of my progress painting the image I designed for the cover (which included about 6 hours of research on actual snowflake formation and selecting just the shapes I wanted to reproduce, before painstakingly re-creating them all by hand 3 times) and one of my loyal patrons fell in love with the painting and bought it! Last Christmas was more profitable than any of my other eBooks before I even put it online!
Plus, with that sale (and the sale of a signed paperback to another local supporter of the arts), plus the increase in eBooks sales, I think I’m on track to stay “profitable” through the end of the year, which was my goal this year! (For tax purposes.) That’s a very good thing.
Oh, and in case you read these every month & care – I never heard back from Eerie books, so I reduced the discount on Cheating, Death to 20%. It should take effect by the end of November, and any future sales will net me more than twice what they did during its first year in print.
