Numbers for Q1 2012, Book Pricing update

Well, if I’ve learned anything about not looking at my numbers every month, it’s that I need to look at (at least some of) my numbers more frequently than once a quarter. Libsyn makes it significantly more difficult to get stats more than two months old, for example. It took me about eight hours of work to enter all my data into Quickbooks and my various spreadsheets, yesterday, since I hadn’t done any of it in about 3 months.

Big, vague observations: The spike in eBook downloads (remember, directly attributable to being linked by freeebooks.com) we saw in Q4 of 2011 really was just a spike. Most of the extra traffic had dissipated by January, then February was extra low and March was near the average for the first three quarters of last year. Podiobooks downloads were a little more interesting. Averaged across all 13 of my available titles, PB downloads were almost flat – but a couple of titles (FWYCR, Cheating, Death) saw a significant increase in downloads in March, and others (Untrue Tales… Book Four, Book Five, and Book Six) decreased by almost half in March. Since the only thing I’m doing differently is talking about Never Let the Right One Go, I’m not sure what would cause the increase in interest in my “zombie” books – the updated descriptions for Lost and Not Found and Forget What You Can’t Remember haven’t been applied to the Podiobooks (yet), so … I’m not sure.

As usual, most of the downloads of my eBooks and audiobooks were unpaid/free. Last year when I gave you updates I finagled the paid numbers to match the counting method I use for free downloads, but from now on I’ll just be giving you the numbers the way I track them for actual bookkeeping/accounting purposes – that is, because sites like Amazon and iTunes and Smashwords’ Premium channels don’t give me final numbers until at least the following month after the books were bought (in case of returns, but also because businesses follow all sorts of crazy rules about billing one another), I don’t count them as sales until my balances are updated (not paid, just updated). Anyway, so far this year (this includes a paper-book sale I made yesterday) I show I sold 4 paper books directly for a total of $57.99, I sold 39 eBooks for a total of $75.24, and 2 people donated to my Podiobooks (technically in Q4, so I may already have mentioned this) and my cut of their donations was $9.74. That’s a total of 45 “book sales” for $142.97 in revenue. So far in my name-your-own-price art sale I’ve found homes for 21 pieces of art for $970. (Note: There are still 27 pieces available at wretchedcreature.com – please take a look and see if there’s anything you’d like!)

Now, here are all the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for Q1 of 2012, 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: 318 / 945 / 93
  • Dragons’ Truth: 1,076 / 1,926 / 218
  • Forget What You Can’t Remember: 336 / 5,230 / 158
  • The First Untrue Trilogy: 798 (eBook only)
  • The Second Untrue Trilogy: 252 (eBook only)
  • Untrue Tales… Book One: 1 / 3,552 / 242
  • Untrue Tales… Book Two: N/A / 2,031 / 152
  • Untrue Tales… Book Three: N/A / 1,686 / 143
  • Untrue Tales… Book Four: N/A / 1,448 / 125
  • Untrue Tales… Book Five: N/A / 1,588 / 152
  • Untrue Tales… Book Six: N/A / 1,256 / 112
  • Cheating, Death: 448 / 5,843 / 364
  • Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 177 / 318 / 47
  • More Lost Memories (full): 194 / 545 / 58
  • More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 5
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 172 / 668 / 36
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 8
  • Last Christmas: 2
  • Unspecified: 1,204
  • Total Q1: 4,991 / 27,036 / 1,900
  • Total all-time: 39,723 / 570,631 / 37,137


So… people still don’t like short stories much, especially on the audio side. Yoshira’s poetry book is still doing really well – it had more downloads than any other eBook last quarter, including the ever-popular Dragons’ Truth. Dragons’ Truth has now been downloaded at least 13,750 times, which is almost 4k past my next-most-popular title (though still less than 10x my least-popular). I suppose I need to finally get around to posting eBook versions of my Worth 1k poetry books, at some point; people seem to like downloading (if not paying for) poetry.

The pay-what-you-can model isn’t making me a lot of money, yet, but that was never the point. The idea that 6,891 copies of my books were downloaded in Q1 and only 45 of them were paid for implies that 0.65% (one in 153 people) could both afford to pay and were honest about paying for my books. What portion of the 99.35% of people who didn’t pay (but had access to the technology to download an eBook or listen to a podcast) do you suppose were actually unable to afford the few dollars I’m asking per title, and what portion do you suppose are just dishonest people?

In related news, there were enough sales in March (including last night’s sale) to adjust the prices on several of the books. (It may take a few days to see the prices updated across all the sites/stores they’re available on.) Here are the new prices: paperback / ebook:

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Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

One thought on “Numbers for Q1 2012, Book Pricing update”

  1. Pingback: Audio production frustrations | less than this

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