Bringing Receipts
Why should you care what I have to say about book sales?
As I mentioned in my first post, I’m not the best selling author ever. Nor were we the most successful publisher ever. But we did meet with some middling level of success. These screencaps are from my Amazon KDP reports page, and show Silver Empire’s lifetime of sales and Kindle Unlimited page reads. Across 90 individual SKUs (NOT unique books - but we’ll get into those details later), we sold more than 60,000 units and did almost four million page reads.
It’s worth noting that Amazon was not our only sales platform. During the life of the company, we tried pretty close to every publishing outlet available - Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Apple Books, Kobu, Smashwords, direct sales at conventions, direct sales via our web site. You name it, we tried it. We even did two separate attempts at monthly subscription services.
We did rather a lot of experimentation.
But I won’t include all of those charts here because Amazon was by far our largest source of sales - over 90% of all units sold, when all is said and done.
But surprisingly, it was a notably smaller portion of all dollars we earned. Over the seven years of the company’s life, we pulled in about $90,000. And Amazon accounted for less than half of that.
Over the course of this series, we’ll get into why that was. There are a lot of lessons to be learned there. And though at first glance, it may look like one of them is, “Don’t put all your eggs in the Amazon basket,” it’s not at all clear that that’s actually the right lesson here.
So there are my numbers. About 65,000-70,000 books actually moved. 3.8 million Kindle Unlimited page reads. Roughly $90,000 in gross revenue over 7 years.
On the one hand, many indie authors would kill for those kinds of numbers - even spread over a few dozen books. When you’re struggling to sell even a few dozen books, these are great numbers.
On the other hand, that was also split over 7 years and 14 different authors. And when you look at the numbers like that, it starts to become pretty clear why we shut down. That averages out to about $12,000 in revenue per year - and we had a lot of expenses that came out of that. Never fear, dear reader - I’ll be breaking those down in a future post.
But we also did have some fairly successful books and series, including a few that made several thousand dollars in profit each. We had 17 books that each grossed over $1,000 each and 5 that each grossed over $4,000 - just from Amazon sales. Keep in mind that that was only about half the gross revenue of each title. There are a lot of lessons I’ve learned from both the profitable and the unprofitable books, and I want to share those with you over the coming months.
For my wife Morgon’s next book, our plan is to do a crowdfunding campaign first followed by an Amazon launch. Or goal is to hit $5,000-10,000 on the crowdfunding campaign, and to do $2,000-5,000 on Amazon afterward. I’ll be diving into the specifics of how we’re launching it - and why we think we can do that well - very soon.
Stay tuned! There’s a lot more coming your way.