I am absolutely terrible at keeping up with my blog. This is known. There’s always so much else to be done, I kind of forget about staying up on my progress posts. That’s what this is about though, so let’s dig in.
Since my last sales update in December 2015, I’ve written a serial and two novels. I have a backlog of work building, but more on that later. First, I’m going to be reviewing sales for the first three months of 2016. These are Amazon-only sales numbers, as my sales through Createspace and other sites distributed by Smashwords are negligible enough that I don’t bother with them most months – these amount to maybe $20-30 per month on average.
In January 2016, I sold 56 books on Amazon.
In February, I had a new release (Driftmetal V) and sold 64 books.
In March, I also had a new release – a steampunk serial called Skyjackers, which I released in six weekly episodes throughout March and early April for 0.99c an episode. I decided to release the serial in KDP Select to take advantage of page reads, but it didn’t really work out as expected. I ended up with 1,348 page reads of those books, and 84 total sales among all my books.
My total income has been hovering between $120-150/mo. for the past several months.
All that being said, I’m sitting on a growing stockpile of manuscripts. This is because I can’t seem to stop writing long enough to sit down and spend the days or weeks required to review and edit them.
Children of the Wastes, which I finished back in November, is the second book in its series and has a word count of 234k. The first book in that series ended up at 220k after editing (a process which took more than a month and saw me strip out over 10,000 words).
Warcaster, which I finished two months prior (late September) clocks in at a more modest 92k. Its sequel – Reclaimer, which I’m currently writing – should end up around the same length.
I just finished another (secret) pen name book in a new genre which is a much shorter 61k. That one needs some fleshing out, though, and will probably be closer to 70-80k in its finished form.
I’ve promised myself that as soon as I finish this book, I’m going to buckle down, take a break from writing, and edit/beta/release all four of these books in a row. Until then, it’s looking like my writing income and sales won’t likely change very much. Thanks for reading, and best of luck to you in all your endeavors!