There is an oft expressed view within both independent and traditional publishing circles, whence writers are encouraged to ‘fake it till they make it’. Or at least believe it is something they should do. The argument being something along the lines of ‘if you want to be successful you must first be considered successful or no one will take you seriously. It is a view I have on more than once occasion spoken in opposition of, because it creates a false concept of what success is, and what making it entails.

This leads to some authors thinking they are failures and there work has no value because everyone around them is telling them how successful they are being. People on occasion share sales figures on twitter, generally just after they have done a ‘free book ‘ promotion. Because ‘Look I sold all these books…’ that they gave away for free, makes them look more successful.

As an aside, because it is a subject I have spoken about before, free book promotions are the worst idea anyone has ever come up with. they devalue your work and the work of others. They also do not achieve the aim of getting more readers, or even more reviews. If anything it just makes the market for your books smaller, because readers who might of bought one of your books just got dozens of books for free. They tend to ascribe them little value and often just collect free books because they are available free, not because they have great intent of reading them.

In any regard, the main problem is one of expectation. New writers ‘expect’ to sell loads of books, this is often not the case. More often than not in fact. Less than 1% of authors could make a moderate living out of writing. and of those that do perhaps only the top 1% make a sizable living. Or about 1 in 10000. I may be being overly conservative with this estimate, but not by much.

In a bid for some kind of transparence I occasionally put up real figures of my own sales. And as the year has turned the figures for the last calendar year are available to me fully so it seems like a good time to do so.

Some notes by way of reference.

• I released no new books last year.
• The last book I released was a small anthology (the strange and the wonderful) two years ago.
• the last novel was over three years ago.
• I have 11 books in print

That is all to say this years sales are not bolstered by new releases this is all back catalogue only.

KENP

KENP is amazons kindle unlimited market, you have to opt into this as a writer and agree to exclusively publishing through kindle with a given book. All my books are listed for kindle unlimited simply because I have tried going wide to other markets (apple B&N etc) and it just doesn’t work, there is a reason apple has the kindle app on their phones despite it being in direct opposition to their own service and that is simply market share.

Unfortunately KENP is, and has always been, rife with scam merchants. There is a reason for all those annoying adverts on You Tube about making money via amazon by ‘writing books’ and it is all to do with how KENP is set up. However not to go off on another rant about KENP, here is the short version of how it works.

• Kindle unlimited subscribers read books
• Authors are paid by the number of pages read
• Kindle unlimited is a great way to find readers as kindle unlimited subscribers are naturally readers.

Unfortunately the ebook market in general has been swamped. It was swamped before AI now everything is far worse. Amazon to there credit are trying to manage AI books away from their platform but it is a bailing bucket in a storm. Despite this however my page reads for the last year are actually up despite the lack of new releases, Jan 1 – Dec 31 in 2023 they were 64,460

But as you can see in the lower graph it is still about half what KENP reads were before AI started to rear its hydra like head.

77,243 page reads in a year with no new releases is however not bad going, but you need to bare in mind I have a reasonable back catalogue of 6 novels, a compendium of the Hannibal novels, 2 anthologies and a nonfiction book on Lovecraft so while these are not bad figures this is not to say they couldn’t be better but it is actually better than expected. I would hazard a guess it has improved mainly because Amazon have been weeding out AI books from there kindle platform and actual authors are getting in fount of readers more often. Time will tell however how true this may be.

If you take the mean number of KENP ‘pages’ in my books as being about 400 (which is probably about right, but KENP page counts do not match print page counts) then I have sold around 193 worth of books through Kindle Unlimited

Books

In total, purely through amazon and not including direct sales at events, I sold 231 books last year, only 78 of which were print. The graph is also slightly misleading where it says ‘all 16 books’ as it is count from a list that includes two books that no longer exist, and a play I never expect to sell and only existed in print as I wanted print copies. It also double counts a couple of books as the kindle and paper versions list separately, in actuality I only have 10 books on the market and again, in a year of no new releases these are reasonably good numbers.

In total, KENP, kindle and paper if you add them together I sold around 424 books on amazon last year. Which is the figure I care about, it is also despite no new releases, up from last year.

What that equates to in money you can see below

Add to that direct sales at events ( I did not do many last year) and I probably made about £1000 last year in book sales. Clearly I am not packing in the day job any time soon… However this was a quiet year without any new releases. I sold books, I had nice feed back from readers, I am happy enough .

Of course to sell that number of books on amazon I did paid amazon marketing. On which I spent a little bit more than that £881.50 in sales, events all cost more to be at than I make in sales generally And if i wanted to figure out the actual figures I probably made a loss of around £500 minimum if not more in order to sell a few books and find a few readers. Had I done more events, baring local ones, that loss figure would of been a much bigger number.

To be clear, when it comes to my vocation as an author I do not care about money. I do events because I enjoy them, enjoy meeting readers, and enjoy getting out there among them. I do not care about losing money on what some might consider my hobby ( I do not consider it a hobby, I am not a hobbyist writer, I am a novelist, it is a vocation, it is who I am) I am lucky in that I have a day job that pays the bills, heats the house, buys gin, and allows me to invest in my joy.

Also to be clear, I am successful as a writer, at least within my own terms. The point of putting this blog post together is to be open and honest about what those terms are, what ‘success’ for me looks like. The only figure in all this I care about is readers found, the only aspect of this which is important is did those readers enjoy the books. And for the most part in a year without new releases I found a goodly number of new readers and as far as I know most of them enjoyed the books.

My advise to any author, be they starting out or a old hack like me, is write what you love and decide what success looks like on your own terms. Do not get drawn into the fake it till you make it culture so prevalent on social media, and don’t try to measure your success against others.

If you can write something, something that touches a persons soul, that makes them think, wonder, or consider the world anew, that makes them weep in that good way, or laugh , or frightened, chilled, or more importantly brings them a little joy, then you are a success. Even if you manage to do that with just one book sold to one person.