julesjones

This morning's post included the cheque for my short story in the Mammoth anthology. Yes, an actual cheque. This may not be of great interest to those of you who spell it "check" but here in the UK, the banks were making a determined effort to make the cheque an extinct species, on the grounds that nobody used them anyway and all the cheques that people weren't using cost too much money to process.

It's quite true that cheque usage has dropped drastically, but that's not the same thing as either a) they are no longer used, or b) that there are no situations where cheques are more convenient. I suspect that were I trying to handle the logistics of an anthology with over 100 stories, I would much rather deal with a list of names and addresses than a list of names, address and bank transfer details.

The anthology in question is officially released in the UK tomorrow. So far I have only read a handful of the other stories in my trib copy, but the ones I've read, I've liked. They didn't all do it for me as porn, for Not My Kink reasons, but they were still good *stories*.

Number-crunching updated to include 2011. The numbers here are the total sales from when the book first went on sale to the end of the calendar year cited. Which means you can also get the sales per year figures for 2009 onwards with a bit of subtracting, if you're so inclined.

This does not include sales over the Christmas period, as the publisher account period runs to the third week of the month. Next month is when I start to get an idea if the big push on selling ereaders this Christmas will show up in my sales figures.

from 1st day on sale until end of	2008	2009	2010	2011
Black Leather Rose	774	922	995	1024
Buildup 1: Mindscan	1304	1466	1554	1629
Buildup 2: Pulling Strings	711	857	918	967
Dolphin Dreams	1739	2151	2352	2725
Lord and Master	1510	1839	2057	2390
L&M 2: Taking Work Home	648	1020	1201	1408
Promises To Keep	1002	1119	1200	1242
Spindrift	659	801	858	924
Spindrift 2: Ship to Shore	419	480	510	516

The pattern I was seeing last year continues -- sales direct from the publisher's website are a trickle (which is not surprising as all of these books have been out for at least three years, with my last release in August 2008). The bulk of the sales are coming from third party resellers, and the bulk of those are coming from Amazon. Second place now seems to go to ARe overall, although there's also a showing from Fictionwise and Barnes & Noble. Not much from Sony, although even there there's a handful of sales.

I made just over $2k in royalties, which given that I have no exposure from new releases for over three years, and have been doing no promotion, isn't too bad. It's certainly an incentive to keep working on the new book. :-)

And this shows very clearly why there will be no third Spindrift book, even though I know what the plot would be. The first Spindrift book is available on third party sites but has still sold fewer copies than two titles which are only available direct from Loose Id. If I were still writing full time and able to put out 2 or 3 books a year without risking quality, I might gamble on it, but I'm writing around a day job as and when my health is up to it. Not happening. I have more books I want to write than time to write them in, and sales are something I take into account when picking which one of them to put at the head of the queue.

Just putting my December royalty figures into the spread sheet -- the statement arrived just before Christmas but this is the first chance I've had to do more than glance at it. Time to throw out a few numbers that might be of interest.

My best-selling book is still Dolphin Dreams, which has now reached 2151 copies sold since it went on sale. Yes, very much small press numbers, but not bad going for a small press book. For the curious, around a thousand of those came from direct sales from the publisher's website before it went made available through the distributors, and about 3/4 of the total number since release is from direct sales. For distributor sales, Fictionwise has around double the numbers going through All Romance eBooks.

Second best is the first Lord and Master book, which has sold 1829 copies. Again, around 3/4 through the publisher website, but this time three times as many from Fictionwise as from ARe.

That's the general pattern on my books -- major share is through Loose Id, with the largest chunk of distributor sales coming through Fictionwise, but a significant fraction of distributor sales through ARe, and a tiny trickle through others. (My ebook titles aren't on Amazon, so I have nothing to report one way or the other there.) That's one author, through one publisher; other authors report different experiences.

The second Lord and Master book has now sold 1020 copies, almost as many as the first book had after the same number of months on release. That's pretty pleasing for a sequel, as it suggests that a lot of people liked the first one.

Promises To Keep is the oldest of my titles which are still in print at Loose Id, having been released for Halloween 2004. Yes, more than five years ago, not long after Loose Id opened. It still sells half a dozen copies a month -- not a great deal of money, but rather gratifying nevertheless that people are still interested in buying an old backlist title.

A couple of points to note here: a) my books typically sell 500-1500 copies in the initial 2 year contract, b) that's a two year contract taking only the rights the publisher has a reasonable chance of using, not a life-of-copyright contract grabbing all rights, c) I get a detailed monthly royalty statement, on time, that breaks down exactly which titles sold through which venues, and how much money I got for each venue and title. Now, obviously I'd like to be in mass market paperback and looking at numbers with another zero or two on the end -- but even in the small press market, there are good and bad publishers. Anyone with a zero fewer on the end of their sales numbers should be asking themselves if there are better options. Ditto if your publisher claims that it's too difficult to provide detailed royalty statements so that you know what they owe you. As for life-of-copyright, that's not automatically bad, but they had better be offering something worthwhile in return.

But... even someone who can sell ebooks consistently at that level can have the occasional "sink without trace" title. I've got one that barely scraped past 200 after two years. I have an idea as to why, but no hard evidence. There are no guarantees in this game, just ways to improve the odds in your favour.

Back to work on the accounts. One of the joys of wandering from country to country is that one ends up having to file tax returns in more than one of them, and they have different rules. Blech...

{Note: all numbers in this assume me not cocking up entering the data into 1-2-3...)