I realize I forgot to post numbers for June/Q2/1st-half during the last month. I partially blame this on Amazon, whose drastic changes to their reporting of kindle sales cause some headaches during the first half of last month, but I mostly blame it on my own depression. So. I’m not going to bore you with ALL the numbers. If you’re actually interested, email me or comment and ask and I’ll be glad to give you the full infodump. eBook downloads were down significantly in June, an average of 22% (up to 50% down for specific titles) but were back to “normal” for July. Podiobooks downloads were about as low in June as they were in May, but the dropped another 10% in July. Net drop in Podiobooks downloads since their peak in Dec’09/Jan’10 is roughly 50%, both in terms of total downloads and of ‘finished’ books.
Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for the full Year-To-Date, 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: 498 / 11,843 / 550
- Dragons’ Truth: 755 / 8,785 / 965
- Forget What You Can’t Remember: 648 / 28,446 / 828
- More Lost Memories: 2 / 1,909 / n/a
- *MLM/individual stories: 32 (24: Pay Attention)
- Untrue Tales… Book One: 569 / 23,594 / 2,040
- Untrue Tales… Book Two: 480 / 25,962 / 2,009
- Untrue Tales… Book Three: 539 / 14,053 / 1,278
- Cheating, Death: 13 / 31,773 / 2,340
- Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 1 / 2,526 / 297
- Time, emiT, and Time Again: 1 / n/a
- *TeaTA/individual stories: 1
- Total for all titles: 3,537 / 148,891 / 10,307
- Total, all time: 11,959 / 328,992 / 21,426
The two items marked with a * are for the short stories, from my two short story collections, which I have released as individual eBooks for $0.99-$1.99. Though they are also available on the podcasts, I have chosen to only count their audio downloads as part of the whole collections. Also, More Lost Memories wasn’t entirely available on Podiobooks.com until today, so there are no ‘finished’ numbers available yet. Time, emiT, and Time Again was available as an eBook in July, but does not start on Podiobooks.com until August 9th.
Overall, these numbers look good. Podiobooks downloads have been dropping all year, but are already passing last year’s numbers (with 5 months & a couple books to go in 2010). eBooks numbers are holding reasonably steady and have also just passed 2009’s totals – they’re not up to where eBook downloads were in 2008, but it’s still about 75-100 copies of each book available for free on modernevil.com, every month. The only books without huge download numbers are the ones I haven’t posted directly to modernevil.com – and even Cheating, Death (which only requires you to download from Smashwords to get the free eBook) has only had about 8 free downloads all year.
On the money side, I’m doing reasonably well. My goal for this year, financially, is to have Modern Evil Press operating at a profit. Any profit. I’ve reported a loss on my taxes the last two years, and would prefer not to have to deal with reporting a loss for a third year in a row. Due to a slight miscalculation or two, I’m currently about $20 in the red, year-to-date. Which is pretty close to a profit. If I sell a few copies of my new book, I’ll be there. If I decide to participate in the Art Walk again this fall, I just need to ensure I make more money than it costs to show. ((I haven’t been working on art at all, in months, so maybe I’ll just bring books. Or maybe I’ll start working on art again this month. Who knows?))
On a related note, I’ve just gone through modernevil.com and updated all the ‘Add to cart’ buttons with a new model for sales, based on the idea of ‘pay what you can’. I’ve always believed that this was the model I was trying to use, but I have the feeling people didn’t see it very clearly on the site, so I’ve tried to make it more clear. If you like my work and want to support its further creation, you can do things like buy the original art I’ve created for some of the covers (or in the case of my poetry journals, the original hand-written journals themselves), becoming a patron of the arts by spending hundreds of dollars. For $25 each (or $50 for the Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 combined edition), you can buy a signed paperback copy of any of my books; this flat rate is still based on the idea that you would like to offer your patronage, but that perhaps your budget cannot afford to invest $100-$500 right now. If that’s out of your price range, rather than personally selling my unsigned paperbacks and eBooks at list price, I’ve simply linked to several online stores where you can order them for list or less, typically from $5-$14. Then, of course, I also make my eBooks and audiobooks available for free, creating a spectrum from full patronage at one end to the ability to try my work for free at the other end, encouraging people to ‘pay what they can’ on nearly every page of the site. Your feedback/comments/suggestions on this change are welcome/encouraged.