I thought it would be useful to do a sobering post analyzing the four year sales history of my first book for all you aspiring erotic authors out there.
When I embarked on the Kindle Author thing with my first book, I did it for love not money, but was hoping to raise enough money to at least pay for a fancy vacation or something (and somewhere in the back of my mind was "what if it goes huge?!"). Fact is, we don't need money from writing. David and I both have good jobs, mercifully unaffected by COVID. Thank goodness I was not counting on book revenues!
The topic today is entirely my first book.
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| Get it at your local Amazon |
It went on sale September 20, 2016 and I have data up to the end of August 2020. It has a rating of 4.6/5.0 from 14 reviews which were quite complimentary, 2/3 of them 5-star. It's 213 pages, so a good sized paperback-length book.
Julie Delmar (of "Strict Julie Spanks!" blog fame) and her husband david engage in a kinky scening-oriented female led relationship. This book of entirely original material not before seen on her blog is part instructional, part fact, part fiction, and all fun! At over 75,000 words and 18 chapters it's great value for your kinky dollar.
Total lifetime revenue from the book is $3,425 Canadian dollars (current conversion rate is $1.32 CAD to $1.00 USD - so $2600 USD). These are the royalties over time.
Excluding the partial 2020 year, it appears I am pulling in about $600 CAD ($450 USD) per year in steady-state royalties ($38 USD/month), and those seem to be holding up.
So, yes, disappointing revenues. But read on.
The original sale price of the book was $4.95 USD, and I had enabled KU (Kindle Unlimited) and KOLL (Kindle Owner's Lending Library). KU & KOLL are plans where the book is free to read so long as it was lent to you by an owner (KOLL) or the person subscribed to Kindle Unlimited (KU), which is an "all you can read" for a flat monthly fee. Authors get paid based on new KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) read. There is a global pool of money which varies month by month based on subscription revenue, and authors get a share of it based on your proportion of the KENP, which is exclusive based on pages, not book price at all.
I changed it up mid-March 2019, where I increased the price of the book to $7.95 USD, and then turned off KENP (which took effect in June 2019), to see if that changed anything. So higher price kicked in for 19Q2, and KENP kicked out in 19Q3.
The blue is royalties from units sold, the orange is royalties from KENP.
Below is the number of units sold (for KENP I divided the KENP by the 213 pages in the book to get a somewhat comparable "KENP Unit").
What are my conclusions from that experiment?
I'd say that the number of units sold did not change much based on the price of the book. Anyone willing to buy it at $4.95 was also willing to buy it at $7.95. On the other hand, my overall volume is quite low, and a certain Kindle analysis report is recommending a lower price point ($2.70 USD). I'm trying it out to go lower with the new book at $3.50 USD, and I matched the price change of the first book to that as well, and added KENP back on, so we'll see.
KENP I think is a good thing for my kind of book. The number of KENP Units sold outpaced the standard units sold, especially as the book aged (around 2.5x more units). Mind you, the effective royalty per KENP Unit worked out to only $0.90 USD as opposed to the $3.25 USD royalty I was pulling in for the $4.50 USD priced book. However, I think the KENP market is a totally different market than the standard book buyers. KENP on or off does not seem to impact standard book sales. i.e. a person who would read the book under KENP is unlikely to buy a copy when it's not available on KENP. So KENP is pure gravy and does not seem to cannibalize unit sales to the extent one might imagine (at least not for my kind of book - which is a universal caveat).
My mistake which I was warned about in advance from some blog readers who are also Kindle erotic authors, was that I made the book too long to maximize revenues. Rather than charging $4.50 for a 210 page book, I should have charged more like $2.99 for eight 25-page books (e.g., Bedtime Spankings: PJ's Down! by Rosie Hynds - 26 pages, $2.99; or Two Spanking Diaper Discipline Humiliation Stories by Rebecca Lawson - 14 pages, $2.99). Some also gather collections of previously published stories into larger bundles, and sell them in an alternative format, such as The Complete Strict Wife Reader: 17 Domestic Discipline Tales, also by Rebecca Lawson - 181 pages, $3.99. This is likely the way to maximize unit royalties, and probably the only way to survive if you intend to do this full-time. For my part, I want to publish more "works of art" and am not so concerned about the money.
Of course, for the KENP part of the royalties, that strategy is somewhat nullified, in that it is only the total number of new pages read that make a difference, which is independent of book size. But as I mention above, the KENP and the standard royalties seem to be two completely different markets, and the KENP royalties make up only 1/3 of the total even for my sub-optimal standard book strategy, so keeping the books short is the best way by far to maximize total royalties. And if you keep enrolled in KEMP, as many do, you have happy campers there who are not bothered by the shortness of the books.
If I'd taken the small book approach, I estimate I would have doubled revenues, so $5000 USD to-date (4 years) and $1000 USD per year run-rate. If you churn out a new book like mine every three months (i.e., 8 small ones every 3 months), and have been at it for 5 years, you're still only making about $25K/year. So hard to see how such a thing could ever be very lucrative in this genre... sorry. :-(
Maybe with better advertising and more social outreach you can get bigger revenues than I, so don't give up all hope. I wonder if any other authors might compare their experiences in the comments?
Oh, and while thinking about it, please go out and buy my NEW e-book. I switched it all up and went full female submissive, trad wife kind of thing, in keeping with my more recent interests!
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| Available at your local Amazon |
Sounds right that more shorter books would creat revenue. Maybe even a monthly subscription if you could do a few ahead of time and commit to keeping up.
ReplyDeleteI published some material in the mid 1980’s and have pretty consistently received $5000 per year ever since. Nice return.
Rosco
Yrs. P. F. Dee, linked in my blog roll, has a Patreon model. I wonder if that makes good money?
DeleteHa! ‘Good’ Money is all relative, I guess. It’s 4 years old, but I go through my own finances from writing here: http://pfdee.blogspot.com/2016/01/how-much-money-does-self-published.html
DeleteShort answer, I make about $100 USD/quarter now on my smashwords account (like Amazon but smaller) and 135 people on my Patreon pay $335/work I create (not monthly, only when I publish).
That’s like having 135 people pre-buy any book you write, so it’s nice to know I’ll always make $335 USD each time I publish something. My goal is to grow that to $500, then $1000, then publish consistently.
Like Julie said, only the top 0.001% in this field make a livable wage, and then it’s a job, writing 5-8 books a month, grinding things out, and that loses something, I think. Better to have a good-paying vanilla job and make art for art’s sake, and if some people want to encourage that with a few dollars to buy me dinner, that’s great!
It’s more fun to write when I want, what I want, and my Patreon supporters help me make stories that never would have been created otherwise, which is a win for everybody!
Thanks for the insights. Had not seen that blog entry before.
DeleteJulie, I am a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, and when I typed Julie Delmar into the search block, "Julie's Spankings" came up at the very top of the screen under "Kindle Unlimited." So I clicked on it and got the book for free (although technically it's only "on loan.") I guess I deserve to be spanked for getting your new book for free! Anyway, I agree that I would have certainly bought your new book for $7.95 or more if it hadn't been on Kindle Unlimited. Good luck on your book sales, you are a fabulous author! I would absolutely love to read a full length book by you on the "Marriage Counselor" short story or the CE47 story. Please keep writing!
ReplyDeleteNo, no. If you read it, you are contributing to royalties, so thank you for the $0.90!
DeleteTo write a book I need the inspiration, and recycling older stuff doesn't do it for me. I think I'll write another kinky book, but it will be nothing that you expect!
Very interesting. Kindle books based around maledom seem to be a lot more popular than femdom, so I expect that your new book would outperform your old one.
ReplyDeleteHarder for me to get the word out in that sphere. Brand extension :-)
DeleteLook at the brain on Julie! Having a fantasy that You are my boss at work and i am performing poorly.i must submit to an attitude adjustment or be terminated.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. I often find errors in subordinate's spreadsheets.
DeleteIs any of them spanko?
DeleteFinished reading.
ReplyDeleteA good sign, the closer I got to the end of the book the more I slowed down my reading, regretting that the end approaches so quickly.
In the second part of the book, the shift towards the normality of increasingly severe and humiliating family spankings is very successful. Mom and dad are amazing disciplinarians, and finally David too.
The book has a bit of the structure of a firework display with its crowning achievement (The double switching) and the latest rockets that go even higher.
The only downside, the character of Sue who seems, I don't know why, to have trouble fitting into the story.
Where and when is your book signing party?
Thank you! It was the boiling a frog thing, get you used to it a bit at a time!
DeleteI know what you mean about Sue. While she's an A-player in my r/l, everyone else's fictional antics outpaced her.
I'm writing too. My book, if I finish it, is not so much in the same genre as yours. I'm trying more of a sexy romance novel. Who knows if I will get any return. The audience for this may not exist.
ReplyDeleteWe will all read it!
DeleteIs there a way to get hard copies of your books
ReplyDeleteNot currently. I think there's a method on Amazon to enable it, but I would have to look into it.
Deletethis was a very thorough and useful post
ReplyDeletenice work
Thx!
DeleteShock, Jack here, my wife purchased your book, don't know why, but said it was very good, but not what she would do. I think she wanted to understand you more, and she states my spankings will continue. She did admit some females enjoy the spankings, and the man being in charge, she is not one of them. She reminds me that when we met I was enjoying F/m spanking magazines and masturbating, and tells me I should be very grateful that it was her and she understood. I tell her I love her, and accept the spankings, but, over time she has gotten very good at warming my bottom, and will not hesitate to spank me in front of her mother or best friends if I mess up. She enjoys seeing the little boy come out, knows I don't like being seen while spanked or all on display. She said females enjoy more the male being put in his place, and treated like a naughty little boy.
ReplyDeleteYes, that is your "female energy" coming out and her "male energy". Both biological sexes have some of each in various proportions.
DeleteI'm Very Thankful I found a woman who understood, does it her way, and behind every good man is a wife with a bath brush to insure he stays out of trouble, not mentioning the mother-in-law who states no in-law in this family.
DeleteAs an author who knows this all too well, the bottom line is unless you are Stephen King or one of a very small handful of writers, you don't make dick by writing. (I used the word dick because when in Rome...)
ReplyDeleteIf making money is why you write, knowing few make money, then one must write to provide enjoyment, escape from the real world. Money is not the end to all means. Jack
DeleteUnfortunately true, Jasmine. It's one of the reasons I favour a "Universal Basic income" sort of thing so that if your passion is writing, and you can make a bit of supplemental $s from it (with a small chance for more), you can still survive and thrive.
DeleteJack - I'm not speaking for myself. I'm fortunate that i don't need to make money from my writing. But I think the world is a little more poorly off if we can't bring ourselves to support the arts, such as writing, even kinky writing!
I agree with you, kinky writing, doesn't matter, but one must have the desire to write knowing the income might not be there or as much as you would like. Jack
DeleteWhat is your regular job? You seem incredibly organized and analytical. Just curious.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I am a manager in a big company in a technical field. Sometimes I feel like spreadsheets are my life!
DeleteSo you are used to bossing men around. :-)
DeleteAnyway the information was great and well presented, I have done a few paperbacks through Amazon and I have a client that does M/M erotica and his experience is about the same. Shorter books competitively priced. You can do it because you enjoy it but still need a day job.
And I thought the cartoon was great, I always wished I could draw.
Thanks,
And hey! Nobody commented on my leading mashup cartoon! I think it was cute...
ReplyDelete