Numbers for April, 2010

I don’t yet have final numbers from Amazon re: kindle eBook sales, but as of yesterday afternoon (ie: a few hours from the end of the month) I had sold two copies of Cheating, Death for a net of ~$3.50 (ignoring that someone bought & returned a copy of the Lost and Not Found eBook – how/why do you return an eBook? Seriously?). No sales via Smashwords (though apparently it can take several months to get numbers from sales through their distribution channels (ie: B&N, Sony, Kobo, Apple), so I may have made sales in the last several months of which I am unaware), no wholesale paperback sales. Sold 1 paperback copy of Dragons’ Truth directly (via modernevil.com) yesterday, for $12.99. Sold no art. Total income from sales for the period was thus $16.49 (on a cash basis).

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers (including above eBooks estimates), 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: 81 / 1488 / 71
  • Dragons’ Truth: 90 / 1149 / 111
  • Forget What You Can’t Remember: 96 / 3029 / 90
  • Untrue Tales… Book One: 69 / 3961 / 354
  • Untrue Tales… Book Two: 60 / 4241 / 327
  • Untrue Tales… Book Three: 70 / 2320 / 214
  • Cheating, Death: 2 / 4042 / 304
  • Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 0 / 806 / 97
  • Total for all titles: 468 / 20,230 / 1471
  • Total YTD: 2020 / 92,401 / 6580
  • Total all-time: 10,442 / 272,502 / 17,699

Starting late in the month, I put a code to download Cheating, Death for free from Smashwords on its eBook page at modernevil.com – for my other books, I’ve downloaded or created the various free versions of the eBook and put them right on the page, which is where the above download numbers come from; this is an experiment to see if people will go through the extra couple of steps to get the book from Smashwords for free. So far: no. None. Maybe next month. LaNF:DC eBook is still pay-only.

numbers for March 2010, Q1

I had most of these numbers a week ago, but there were some delays, between Lightning Source, Amazon, and other projects I’ve been working on (Hey! The paperback edition of the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut was approved by Lightning Source today and my order for 50 copies went through! Are you excited?) and … well, then I forgot I hadn’t posted anything yet. So first I’ll give you some of the numbers for March 2010, then for Q1 overall. Let’s start with free eBook & podiobook downloads. Podiobook numbers are listed as final-episode-downloads/total-episode-downloads:

  • Lost and Not Found: 74 eBooks, 85/1,695 Podiobooks
  • Dragons’ Truth: 96 eBooks, 150/1,393 Podiobooks
  • Forget What You Can’t Remember: 84 eBooks, 95/3,110 Podiobooks
  • Untrue Tales… Book One: 81 eBooks, 292/3,318 Podiobooks
  • Untrue Tales… Book Two: 70 eBooks, 268/3,529 Podiobooks
  • Untrue Tales… Book Three: 70 eBooks, 152/1,581 Podiobooks
  • Cheating, Death: 0 eBooks, 293/4,253 Podiobooks
  • Total FREE downloads: 475 eBooks, 1,335/18,879 Podiobooks

Note that Cheating, Death is not currently available as a free eBook. I’ll change that, soon, I think. Now paid digital downloads. I had zero smashwords sales in March.

  • Dragons’ Truth: 1 kindle
  • Cheating, Death: 1 kindle
  • More Lost Memories, individual stories: 3 kindle
  • Total paid eBooks: 5 downloads, $5.08 net

I also sold a few paper books (& some art) in March, at the First Friday Art Walk & wholesale via LSI:

  • Worth 1k — Volume 2: 2 copies by hand
  • Second Thoughts chapbook: 1 copy by hand
  • Cheating, Death: 1 copy wholesale
  • Art: 1 painting, 1 mini-painting, 1 crocheted item
  • Total (paper) book sales: 4 books, $24.44 net
  • Total art sales: 3 works of art, $125 net

The order I made today for paperback copies of Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut cost about $145. (ie: everything I just earned) This is intentional; even if they don’t sell right away, they’re already covered by income I’ve already earned. But hopefully they’ll sell, too.

So, for Quarter One of 2010, we have:

  • 1,535 free eBook dl’s, 17 paid eBook dl’s, for $22.51 net
  • 5,109 dl’s of final Podiobook episodes, 72,171 total episodes dl’d
  • Podiobooks donations for Q1 were $29.97, my cut was $22.48.
  • 4 paperbacks & 8 chapbooks by hand, 3 paperbacks wholesale, for $57.07
  • 1 painting, 5 mini-paintings, & 1 crocheted item sold, for $170
  • Gross income for Q1: $272.06

That’s about 4 cents per free download of one of my books, by the way, assuming you include the art income. (w/o art income, it’s about 1.5 cents per copy)

Podcasting pressures

So, I’ve recently passed my 150th episode of the Modern Evil Podcast, having posted 2 episodes a week almost entirely without fail (there was a week or two where the episodes were a few days late, but no actual gaps in content) since I started it. I’ve just put up the penultimate chapter of Dragons’ Truth, and the final chapter will go up on Friday. ((Yes, Dragons’ Truth was the first of my books I made available, through Podiobooks, almost two years ago – but since I didn’t start the Modern Evil Podcast until  several months later, it hadn’t yet been in the Modern Evil Podcast feed.)) Then, starting a week from today, I’ll be podcasting the short story ‘Second Thoughts’.  It comes from a short story collection I haven’t yet released (I feel I need at least one more story before I can put it out, possibly several more.  They’re long-ish stories, but right now I only have 4 of them, and it comes together as about 150 pages so far.) but this story is one I’ve made available as a limited edition chapbook.  I should put those online for sale…

Anyway, ‘Second Thoughts’ will run for 3 episodes. I’ve got it recorded but not yet edited. Then I had planned on alternating between episodes of the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut (on Fridays) and new poetry (on Tuesdays)… and when I drew up that schedule a couple of months ago, I’d expected to have been able to write the 5 new poems such a schedule calls for… but I haven’t written any new poetry.  I could grab 5+ more poems from my 3 existing collections. I could cut the podcast back to once a week. I could *quick* write some poetry in the next 2 weeks. I haven’t yet decided.

Regardless of what I do, after I finish podcasting ‘Second Thoughts’ and the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, I’m out. If I only do 1 episode of LaNF-DC per week, I’ll run out of content April 9th. Including the presumed mid-week poetry episodes, that’ll be episode 167. I don’t have anything ready for episode 168. Yet.

Theoretically I could podcast the remaining stories from More Lost Memories… though I have been reluctant to do so. I could podcast all the remaining poetry from both volumes of Worth 1k… I could edit and polish the other stories from my unfinished collection and podcast them. I could … write a new book. I could let my podcast go on ‘hiatus’ pending new content. I don’t know.

I should be able to write a new book between now and then, but I have a lot of other things going on. A major factor of which is that the book I’m currently researching for … I expect not to be one of the quick ones. I expect to spend at least the next month researching for it, actually (though I suppose if I cut back on crochet work, I could get through my reading faster), before I write word one. I expect it to come out to be one of my longest novels yet, if I want to do a good and thorough job with it. I suppose I could do what some other authors have done before, which is to podcast the unfinished, unedited work as-I-write-it. Or I could write some other book in between researching for it, and podcast that.  I don’t know.

What I don’t want to do is podfade. To stop podcasting. I really would prefer not to go on hiatus. I don’t want to lose my momentum. I also don’t want the quality to drop, or the nature of the feed to change – it’s a podcast of my writing. It isn’t some guy jabbering, it isn’t an interview show, it isn’t topical or political or humorous or informative – it’s a podcast of all the literature I write. Twice a week, every week. I’d like that to continue.

Podcast Numbers addendum (2008, 2009)

So, I put together that long post about numbers the other day, but I left out some of the numbers. Because I consider them to be less valid. But gosh, do they look more impressive! So, here are the TOTAL downloads for my various podcast novels. So for a book like Lost and Not Found, broken into 18 parts, the number is probably over 18x the number of actual listeners. And for books like Forget What You Can’t Remember and Cheating, Death where I intentionally made the episodes half as long (15min average, instead of 30), the numbers look even more impressive than that! And yet, still so much less impressive than the numbers for the actually popular podiobook authors, whose downloads are hundreds of thousands per book.

  • Dragons’ Truth – 11,458 downloads in 2008, 15,985 downloads in 2009: 27,443 total downloads
  • Lost and Not Found – 2,906 downloads in 2008, 18,251 downloads in 2009: 21,157 total downloads
  • Forget What You Can’t Remember – 43,218 downloads in 2009
  • Untrue Tales… Book One – 35,704 downloads in 2009 (~9 months)
  • Untrue Tales… Book Two – 27,178 downloads in 2009 (~6 months)
  • Untrue Tales… Book Three – 13,502 downloads in 2009 (~4 months)
  • Cheating, Death – 11,899 downloads in 2009 (~2 months)
  • Total downloads in 2008: 14,364
  • Total downloads in 2009: 165,737
  • Total of all my Podiobooks’ downloads as of 12/31/09: 180,101
  • Total downloads of MEPod as of 1/8/2010: 24,229
  • Grand total of Podiobooks + MEPod: 204,330

So there’s some bigger numbers. Still long-tail sized numbers. Even within podcast audiobooks, I’m a small fish. But 204,330 looks a lot better than the 11,119 downloads of just the final episodes of my podiobooks. Puts the donations in perspective; for every ~6005 downloads of my Podiobooks, $1 is donated. Podiobooks.com’s $0.25 cut wouldn’t cover the bandwidth cost of those 150Gb+ of downloads, so I suppose it’s a good thing they aren’t being charged for bandwidth.

Numbers for 2009 (and 2008)

I’ve spent the last few days gathering numbers and putting them into a spreadsheet. Now I’m going to take a few of them and try to communicate them to you here. The numbers come from several places, representing podcast downloads, eBook downloads, and sales of books and of art. Since I didn’t make a post about it for 2008’s numbers, I’ll probably include some of them as well, for comparison. I’ll try not to turn this post into a spreadsheet, just numbers, but will try to make it more like my usual rambles.

To begin, a snapshot of right now. As of 1/1/2010, I have 13 titles in some form of publication or other. 5 standalone novels, 2 poetry journals, 2 short story collections, 3 books in the Untrue Tales… series and a single edition containing those 3 books. One of the novels (the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut) is currently only available as an eBook. One of the short story collections (Time, emiT, and Time Again) isn’t yet finished, but I’ve released one of the short stories that will be contained in it as a standalone chapbook.  The 3 individual Untrue Tales… books aren’t technically “in print”, though I have a few copies, printed by Cafepress & sans ISBN. I am not counting The Vintage Collection, though it is another book I’ve put together, had printed, and sold at one time. (I plan to edit and re-release it at a later date.) Seven of my books are available as podcast audiobooks, and all but the poetry is available as eBooks. Continue reading Numbers for 2009 (and 2008)