Category: Money

Numbers for Q1, 2011

I was wrong about not posting another long post today; I forgot I needed to write up the numbers for Q1. A quick summary: Total eBook downloads were up, though that has a lot to do with my continuing to put out more books (and my putting the rest of my books up as free eBooks when the new year started), as downloads on a per-title basis were flat or dropping (except for Dragons’ Truth, which had about double the previous quarter’s downloads and 3x the year-ago-quarter’s… mostly in PDF formats). The same is true for podiobooks downloads; the total downloads were a tiny bit up, but each show was flat or down, and the difference comes from the two new books I’ve launched during the period.

What about paid eBook sales? I’ve been doing a price experiment, as you may recall; at the start of the year I dropped all my full-book eBook prices into the $2.99 to $4.99 range. After three months, how did sales change? Sales went down, actually. Fewer copies sold at the lower prices. The only title whose sales increased was Untrue Tales… Book One, which I had reduced down to $0.99 (with the rest of the series at $3.99/book), which sold a total of 5 copies in 3 months. (And no one went on to buy the rest of the series – only a single copy of Book Three sold, of all the books after One.) Seeing that sales had not improved (and in some cases had become much worse) with the lowered prices, rather than leaving them a full six months, or even a full three months, I put through price increases on all my full-book eBooks with about a week left in March – at the same time I pulled the individual Untrue Tales eBooks and uploaded them as two trilogies (for parity with the print version, and so they’d have more attractive pricing). My eBooks are now all in the $6.99 to $9.99 price range. I made half as much money in 1 week at the higher prices as I had in 12 weeks at the lower prices. Which is what I expected, and expect to continue to see over Q2.

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for the Q1 of 2011, 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: 302 / 2,684 / 126
  • Dragons’ Truth: 695 / 1,874 / 237
  • Forget What You Can’t Remember: 422 / 6,742 / 189
  • The First Untrue Trilogy: 59 (eBook, only available 7 days)
  • The Second Untrue Trilogy: 66 (eBook, only available 7 days)
  • Untrue Tales… Book One: 283 / 5,165 / 370
  • Untrue Tales… Book Two: 283 / 5,359 / 349
  • Untrue Tales… Book Three: 223 / 2,899 / 269
  • Untrue Tales… Book Four: 314 / 4,366 / 377
  • Untrue Tales… Book Five: 265 / 1,787 / N/A
  • Cheating, Death: 284 / 6,750 / 439
  • Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 245 / 610 / 114
  • More Lost Memories (full): 252 / 1,271 / 134
  • More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 10
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 248 / 1,201 / 68
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 6
  • Last Christmas: 4
  • Total Q1: 3,961 / 40,708 / 2,672
  • Total all-time: 19,654 / 433,070 / 28,125

So, there’s that. I’m approaching half a million episodes downloaded via Podiobooks.com, across my current 12 titles, with something in the range of 5.5k-28k listeners downloading at least one full book. (I’m guessing around 6k, but I have a lot of numbers to look at, here.) About seven one-hundredths of 1% (0.07%) of Podiobooks.com full-book-downloads resulted in a donation to one of my books. I’m also approaching 20k eBook downloads across 28 titles (half of the titles are short stories; I’ve only written 15 full books/trilogies available as eBooks), and about 1% of those are paid, rather than free, eBook downloads. In Q1 I sold ~40 eBooks for a net income (after Amazon / Apple / Smashwords take their cut) of ~$58, and I had 3 Podiobooks donations totaling $6.53 (again, net to me). I also gave away 14 paperback books (the Untrue Trilogies) in Q1 (which cost me over $100). Also during Q1 I opted my books out of Smashwords “Premium” distribution to Apple and Barnes & Noble, and I set up direct relationships with both, via iTunesConnect and Pubit, respectively. Apple is slow, and a bit opaque about their setup process, and the result is that most of my eBooks have been unavailable via the iBookstore for about 3 weeks (so far)… and a downside I didn’t take into account with B&N was that all the salesrank data for my eBooks would no longer be associated with my eBooks – when I set them up directly (even though it’s the same title/ISBN/eBook), B&N considers it a totally separate entity from the version they’d received from Smashwords. In fact, for a couple of days, both versions of each eBook were available in the B&N/nookbook store, side by side. So … I suspect that’s why my B&N sales also stopped completely after the changeover. We’ll see how that goes.

I currently project that I’ll sell about twice as many eBooks in 2011 as I did in 2010, and that I’ll earn up to 10x as much from eBook sales. Which would be nice, if it proved true, since that would cover the expense of having all those paper copies of the Untrue Trilogies printed. Actually, I was running the numbers, and for all versions of all the Untrue Tales books (2007-present; I don’t have solid numbers for prior to 2007), with all the expenses and all the income, I’m roughly $700 in the red for the Untrue Tales series. All I need to do is sell 50 more sets of the eBooks (at $9.99/trilogy & 70% net) or 14 sets of the paper books (at $25/trilogy, selling by hand… it’s over 50 sets if they sell through Amazon/other-bookseller) (or some combination therein) and the Untrue Tales series will have broken even. Have you bought your set?

New books, coming soon!

I used the covers as shown, so I’m not going to re-post them here. I worked hard, I found a lot of errors, I made a lot of small changes and tweaks and improvements, and I got 6 books ready for print publication last month. (The official release date isn’t until 4/1/2011.) I didn’t quite reach all my over-the-top goals; I didn’t finish recording & editing the Book Six audiobook in time to listen to it while doing a very-close-read through the text to find even more errors. Though I did use that technique with books one through five, and I did record 40% of Book Six. Plus, I got the books done in time to make the LSI deal for free setup and justified (in my mind) the cost of ordering 50 copies of each of the two trilogies. Continue reading New books, coming soon!

debt paydown update, 1/31/2011

This is a followup post on the subject of my family’s efforts to pay down our debt, which I blogged in detail here. As I said there, I have taken to looking at a snapshot of all our debt accounts at the end of January, so I can have a year-over-year comparison and see how much progress we’ve made in a consistent period. Before I get to the numbers, an exciting thing (which I already mentioned on Twitter) that happened this week is that we paid off one of our cars. Mandy is teaching a couple extra classes every day, this block, and the first paycheck with the extra income came in this weekend, and it was enough extra to pay off her car today. Within a month or two, between her extra income and our expected tax refunds (we haven’t got any of our W-2’s or 1099’s yet, so I don’t know precisely what they will be), we expect to be able to both buy ourselves a few nice things (like a kindle) and pay off another of our credit cards completely. Depending on a variety of other factors (including income at the Phoenix Comicon), we may possibly pay off a third or fourth account before the end of the year. We’re making excellent progress. To see how excellent, here are some numbers:

Last year at this time, we owed $43,571 in consumer debt (including auto loans) and $40,750 in student loans for a total of $84,321 in debt. When I posted in October, I estimated we’d be at $30,683 in consumer debt and $39,954 in student loans for a total of $70,637 in debt – we did better than that! We actually have $29,439 in consumer debt and $39,840 in student loans for a total of $69,279 in debt! We reduced our total debt by $15,041 in one year! That’s almost $1,400 more than we expected to be able to pay off!

If you noticed that the student loan debt went down by almost nothing, that’s partially because we’re only making the normal payments and it’s apparently set to be paid off in about never. But it’s only at 5.375% interest and the student loan interest (up to $2500/year) gives us a big tax deduction (in addition to the standard deduction), which is most of why we’re getting a refund from Federal this year (I finally got the withholding set about right, this year). We basically won’t be making headway on the student loans until after all the other debt is paid down. That’s alright. All the other debt is at higher interest rates.

That’s all for today, I think. Look! A short blog post!

Struggling; beginning writing again

I finally got back to writing Book Six after not making significant progress since … I don’t know… last year? I didn’t finish it in November, as you probably know. I meant to then finish it in December, but that didn’t work out well, either. I got ten or fifteen thousand words written in December, which was an alright start, but then I got stuck. I also ran out of cash for any further writing at Starbucks. As previously mentioned, my writing speed seems to slow way down when writing at home & without caffeine/sugar. And/or varies wildly with my depression. Which is pretty bad right now. …well, this paragraph got out from under me. I’ll try another:

Lightning Source, the printer/distributor of my paper books, is running a promotion I’d like to take advantage of, which ends February 28th. They’ll waive the $75/title setup fee if I order 50 or more copies of that new title. That’s a help toward reaching profitability on any title I can use it on, presuming I can sell more than a handful of copies. At the very least, I need to get the Untrue Tales… Books 4-6 combined trilogy paperback together and released on or before April 1st, in order to hit the release schedule I’ve got mapped out for these three books. If I can get it done before the end of February, that would be nice. If I could also re-do the Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 combined trilogy paperback in February, I’d like to. Both because I feel my ability to layout a book has improved since I put that one together four years ago, and because I’d like to have the opportunity to create a cohesive design that spans both paperbacks (and if it’s quite different, perhaps redesign all the eBook covers while I’m at it). Of course, that would mean ordering 50 copies each of two 400+ page books. Even without the $150 in setup fees, that’ll cost me close to $700. I’ll have to sell 28 books at $25 apiece to break even. Which feels like more than I expect to sell any time soon. I’m not doing the Art Walks any more; the only hand-selling I expect to do this year is at Phoenix Comicon, and last year, which I considered very successful, I only sold 27 books at Comicon, most of them at $14 or less apiece. On one hand: books don’t go bad, so I have forever to move that inventory. On another hand: if I order any fewer copies of each book, I pay the $75/title setup fee. 20 copies of each title would cost me almost $500, for both, or $250 for just the new one. 10 copies of just the one, which I’m pretty sure I could move this year, would cost me almost $200. The trick there being that, if I order 50 before the end of next month, the next 40 copies cost less than just the first 10.

That paragraph got away from me, too.

Getting done with editing the Book Five audiobook, with writing and editing Book Six, designing the book or books, inside and out, possibly doing a series of pieces of art (maybe eBook covers, maybe B/W illustrations, one per book, to put in the new editions) to sell to cover the cost of publishing, re-editing all six books for the new editions… it all seems to be looming, especially with the end of February coming up fast. It’s driving me a bit mad. Yesterday, when I sat down to try to get back to writing, it involved quite a bit of crazy and not a lot of actual writing. But the pressure of the deadline did manage to get my butt in the chair, in front of the typewriter.

Have I mentioned that I somewhat loathe the Untrue Tales… series, the last few years? When I’m actually sitting down working on it, I enjoy the work, but almost as soon as I stand up or switch tasks I’m right back to loathing it. Working on the audio version isn’t so bad, but for the last several thousand words of writing Book Six I’ve also been running up against a feeling/worry of not having enough words. I’m writing in the middle of a big blank spot in the structure/outline of the series. It’s roughly 10k words long, and until this week, I had roughly two sentences worth of idea how to fill it. I managed to write seven and a half pages of pretty good stuff over the last couple of days, but what I wrote was supposed to fill 14 pages. So now I’m in a position of when I’m not actively working on it, I don’t want to be, and when I am I’m half-frozen because I’m worried there won’t be enough words. (Self-fulfilling, that.)

And really, I know that if I can just get me to sit down and write, and keep writing, the words will come. They always do. In fact, another motivator for my getting back in front of the typewriter this week has been that my mind has already moved on to the next books; I’m developing ideas, characters, structure, themes, setting, et cetera for a dystopian/vampire duology. Almost every time I’ve tried to figure out how to fill in this blank in Book Six, my mind has rapidly moved on to work on the vampire books. And if I let my mind wander much further, it gets back to the alternate history / zombies series I still need to do a huge amount of research for. The words are there. When I actually set myself down before the blank page, the words came. Two and a half pages yesterday, twice as much today, and a few ideas about the next seven pages, along with them. All beautifully structured according to the same Euclidean geometry Abraham Lincoln used to win the Lincoln/Douglas debates and the White House (though, since I’ve just learned the structure/geometry, not anywhere near as beautiful as Lincoln’s later work), which I just read a good book about; I couldn’t have written those pages that way (or half as well) more than a few days ago – it’s a good thing, I now see, that I didn’t finish Book Six last year. Everything in its right place, at its right time.

…one struggle I have with these books, with this series, is the problem of spoilers. Most of you have not read these books. Even of those of you who have read or listened to one of them, or even the first three, almost none have read or heard Books Four and Five. So I can’t freely write about Book Six. At all. Every single thing in it is a spoiler if you haven’t read Book Five. Most of Book Five is a spoiler if you haven’t read Book Four to the end. I want to be able to tell you what it is I’ve been having trouble writing about, for example, but not only is this a spoiler if you haven’t read the first half of Book Six, but even being vague about it would spoil the end of Book Five. I want to be able to tell you about my super-vague/I-have-no-idea-how-I’ll-get-5k-words-out-of-it idea for the section after this, but I’m pretty sure that, in addition to potentially being a spoiler, it flat-out wouldn’t make any sense without your having read the end of Book Five and the beginning of Book Six. My own family, who have read them all, doesn’t like me discussing this stuff with them, because they don’t want anything spoiled. When the whole thing is done, and especially as I try to consider how to write copy for Book Six (for its eBook) and worse for the second trilogy, and worse still for the full series, I have no idea how to talk about Untrue Tales… without being totally misleading and/or totally spoiling half the series. You may be aware I have trouble concisely describing “what’s it about” re: even single books I’ve written. One of the things I’m struggling with re: the vampire duology right now is that I’d like to be able to actually have an answer to that question in mind both before and during the writing of them. I generally have no such idea in or near my mind with regard to any of my books or stories. For Untrue Tales… this is true on a title-by-title basis, but it is further compounded by the fact that in any way trying to explain what the series is about requires that nearly every single twist, turn, reveal, or character development be laid bare… which isn’t a great way to try to convince someone the series is worth reading. This also relates to the dwindling number of Beta Readers I can share Book Six with when, hopefully within the next week, I finish writing it; most people haven’t read the entire series. Sigh.

Alright, I think I’m finally getting drowsy. I’m to bed. Don’t know whether I’ll be able to sleep; I’m also getting a bit hungry, and I don’t easily fall asleep hungry. My schedule has been as off as I have, lately, regarding both food and sleep. This is depression. One way or another, I’ll make it through.

Numbers for 2010

As I’ve mentioned, starting in 2011, unless I notice something unusual in the numbers I feel is worth reporting, I’m going to be cutting these posts back to (probably) once a quarter. I’ll still be gathering all the data once a month and putting it into my spreadsheets and thinking about the numbers, but I’ve got an idea that the balance between total transparency and boring blog readers out of their minds lies somewhere closer to infrequent statistics-based posts. Plus, if I only post once per quarter, all the numbers will look bigger, right? Heh. Anyway, I’m not going to give you the exact numbers for December here. If you want to see all the numbers, email me and I can either tell you what you want to know or send you the huge spreadsheets. Here’s an overview:

For December, Podiobooks downloads were down across every title, roughly to where they were in September & October. I added a new row to my spreadsheet to divide the “number of people who finished downloading a book” (an estimate, based on the number of downloads of the final episode) by the number of finished Podiobooks I’d had available that month. As you know, my downloads have been gradually dropping off over the course of 2009 (they peaked in December 2009, when Cheating, Death was completed), and around that peak I was getting about 300 people listening to each book each month. My March 2010 it was below 200 people/book/month, by August 109 people/book/month, and in December (with 10 complete Podiobooks) only about 75 people listened to each book. (Close to 200 listening to Cheating, Death, 100-120 listening to each Untrue Tales book, and as low as dozens listening to books like the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut and More Lost Memories.) ((The finished/titles number for 2010 (sum of each month’s estimate) is 1,809 people/book.)) It’s a bit sad to see this number dropping off so precipitously, though it is nice to know that something in the vicinity of at least 5,200 people have listened to my free audiobooks in the last 3 years, and up to over 25,000 people. I know that’s a big range, but there’s no way to know how many people downloaded more than one of my books; if every listener has downloaded all my books, it’s closer to the lower number, and if most listeners only download one or two books, it’s closer to the higher number. I do know that, since starting Untrue Tales… Book Four on the Modern Evil Podcast, its subscription numbers have about doubled (from around 30-40 to around 60-80) … based on the number of people downloading new episodes from the feed within a week of being posted.

December’s eBooks numbers were interesting. They were roughly flat with October and November’s numbers, but here’s the interesting thing (to me): I put the new versions of the eBooks up less than 2 days before the end of the month/year (to be sure they were there before the new year), including 5 titles I’d never offered for free directly on modernevil.com before, and there was no hesitation in finding and downloading them. In fact, the 5 new titles, which I haven’t mentioned anywhere but here on this blog (and I’ve only mentioned the blog post about them on Twitter and facebook), were downloaded somewhat more than any of my other books. Untrue Tales… Book Four was downloaded almost 3 times faster/more than the other Untrue Tales books have been in the last 3 months. Also of note is that eBooks download numbers for 2010 were almost exactly double those of 2009; that’s pretty good growth. I look forward to seeing how my eBooks numbers look in 2011, both as more people begin reading eBooks and with the easy availability I’ve created for all my books.

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for the entire year of 2010, 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: 1,015 / 14,808 / 693
  • Dragons’ Truth: 1,574 / 11,766 / 1,277
  • Forget What You Can’t Remember: 1,316 / 39,767 / 1,152
  • Untrue Tales… Book One: 1,103 / 31,564 / 2,682
  • Untrue Tales… Book Two: 989 / 34,991 / 2,586
  • Untrue Tales… Book Three: 1,043 / 18,073 / 1,644
  • Untrue Tales… Book Four: 26 / 434 / N/A
  • Cheating, Death: 67 / 45,931 / 3,276
  • Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 20 / 3,641 / 439
  • More Lost Memories (full): 22 / 5,032 / 385
  • More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 67
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 15 / 6,254 / 200
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 6
  • Last Christmas: 8
  • Total YTD: 7,271 / 212,261 / 14,334
  • Total all-time: 15,693 / 392,362 / 25,453

Here are some year-over-year comparisons for you, in 2008 / 2009 / 2010 order:

  • Total eBook downloads: 4,849 / 3,573 / 7,271
  • Total Podiobook downloads: 14,364 / 165,737 / 212,261
  • Total Podiobooks finished: 1,351 / 9,768 / 14,334
  • Podiobooks donations: $0 / $22.49 / $59.78
  • # of eBooks sold (not free): 5 / 38 / 100
  • kindle eBooks income: $14.61 / $38.06 / $69.25
  • Smashwords eBooks income: N/A / $33.11 / $54.96
  • Total eBooks income: $14.61 / $71.17 / $124.21
  • # of paper books sold wholesale: 0 / 22 / 17
  • income from wholesale books: $0 / $56.35 / $52.16
  • # of paper books sold by hand: 21 / 39 / 51
  • income from hand-sold books: $292.91 / $383.97 / $534.99
  • Total # of paper books sold: 21 / 61 / 68
  • Total income from paper books: $292.91 / $440.32 / $587.15
  • Total income from all books sources: $307.52 / $533.98 / $771.14

I have growth in every area but selling paper books wholesale (ie: via Amazon.com, bn.com, or actual brick&mortar book stores), which is a segment that has consistently earned me less than eBooks (and insanely less than selling paper books by hand). I haven’t included my art sales numbers, though it might interest you to know that, despite only painting 2 things since “taking a break” in February 2010, I had $775 in art income in 2010 ($60 of that for crochet art)… Which actually means my art income has been falling off almost in lockstep with my books income ramping up. My total income from art+books for the last three years is: $1691.52 / $1607.98 / $1546.14. My net income after expenses is nowhere near those numbers; recall I’ve said that 2010 will be my company’s first profitable year, and by about $33. Next year should be better, just by doing more of the same things I’ve been doing. …Obviously art is more profitable than books. I already know that. If I cared about money, I’d put my focus for 2011 on making and selling art.

I also keep track of income and expenses on a per-title basis. (I heard it was what all the cool publishers were doing.) I’ve already added the cost of keeping each book in print for 2011 to these numbers ($12/title/year) though none of them have been billed yet. I also don’t track the number of hours I spend working on each book, or assign an arbitrary “value” to my time; I’m not getting paid hourly, so those hours don’t count as expenses right now. (In the event the “total income for year n” for my company ever reaches tens of thousands of dollars, maybe I’ll start paying me a salary.) Right now I’m tracking 15 titles, 12 of which are available for purchase as eBooks, 2 of which are poetry books only available in print, and 1 of which is a short story only available as an eBook. 5 of these titles are “profitable,” and 4 of those are only available as eBooks. (Okay, 3 of those are the first three Untrue Tales… books, which I made available individually in print via CafePress back in 2004-2006, and have no idea how much they cost me prior to 1/1/2007 (for the purposes of this calculation), so that as individual titles they’re effectively only available as eBooks.) Time, emiT, and Time Again is the only book I have in print which isn’t still in the red, and that’s because -through a Kickstarter fundraiser- I raised the money to pay for its printing before putting it in print. The combined paperback edition of Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 is about $40 away from breaking even, after strong sales at Phoenix Comicon in 2010. My poetry books are each down around $200 (though if their original journals sell, that’ll be covered… which is the idea behind selling them, and pricing them that way). Lost and Not Found, Forget What You Can’t Remember, and More Lost Memories are each down around $150, since they don’t sell well. Cheating, Death has had better sales, and is only down about $75. I miscalculated when I priced the cover art for the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, so while it’s not down $200, it is currently about $65 in the red. …and then there’s Dragons’ Truth, which is $400 in the red because back in 2008 I spent a couple hundred dollars on materials and equipment for putting together Audio CD and MP3 CD versions of the audiobook… and I think I’ve sold 1 copy of each in the last two and a half years… Yeah. So.

So… the eBook-only books cost me time (currently counted as free, since making these things is what I want to be doing with my time, anyway) and the cost of an ISBN (currently $9.15 apiece, since I bought them in 2007, well before the recent price drops plummets), then produce a gradual trickle of income. Getting out of $10 in red ink is much easier than getting out of $100 of red ink (just to get a book in print) or $350 in red ink (if I want to have copies for hand-selling). Last Christmas is one of my best stories (financially) to date: the only expense was the ISBN, but the original cover art sold before the eBook was even ready to go online, so it’ll be forever in the black. That’s more than most of my books can say.

Of course, only a handful of people have read or heard Last Christmas. I’m much happier to see that I’ve given away over 21,000 eBooks and audiobooks in the last year. I’ve got two new books coming out in the next few months (and who knows what I’ll do later in the year), both of which will be eBook/audiobook only at first, and then as part of a combined trilogy for print later… though if I didn’t expect them to do well at the Phoenix Comicon, I might have indefinitely put off printing the Untrue Tales books at all. I make more money hand-selling books than from any other income source, but not nearly enough to cover the cost of having those books printed in the first place. Not yet, anyway.

I think that’s all I have for now. I don’t think I intended to go on and on like this, but I feel I’ve included a fair amount of clear data. If there’s something you feel I’ve left out, don’t hesitate to ask. I’m not trying to hide anything; I’m trying to avoid overwhelming you.