Self-Published: Monthiversary!

[rowyn]

As of today, it's been a full month since the public release of A Rational Arrangement.

Sales have far surpassed my (very modest) expectations. Checking the sales graphs and the Amazon rank is weirdly addictive; I am trying to cut back on the former to "once per day", and the latter to "only if sales levels are unusual." I do not presently DO anything with this information, and the sales data accumulates and I am not going to miss anything if I only check, oh, once a month I definitely don't need to be staring at it multiple times a day.

I plan to buy some advertising on Amazon at some point; I am curious what effect that'll have. Since the $4.99 sale ended, Amazon has been doing all the work of selling RA. iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble combined account for less than 5% of my sales.

My modest success thus far has been very motivational: after months of writing little-to-no fiction, I've spent the last three weeks working diligently on a novelette in the same setting as A Rational Arrangement. As I've noted in comments, I'll be putting out a collection of shorts in the setting. The collection will be much shorter than RA -- perhaps 50-80,000 words all together, instead of RA's 210,000+. I have this delightful fantasy in which I am able to release it this year. I am not convinced this will happen. But I do have about 30,000 words on it already (13,000 from this month and 17,000 that were written in 2013.) Of course, publishing a book has a whole lot more moving parts than just writing the first draft. But I am pretending this is the hard part (hint: it isn't) for the sake of keeping my motivation high.

I am tempted to write about specific numbers: how many books sold, royalties earned, what the patterns are like, etc. I am not sure if this is wise. I will do a poll! Vote in the comments if you like, and don't have an LJ. :)

[Poll #2018262]

Comments

[gnibbles.livejournal.com]

Oooh, clicky!

[rowyn]

The clicky compels you!

[gnibbles.livejournal.com]

*is compelled* ... *clicky clicky*

[vik_thor]

Terribly curious, because I enjoyed it so much. :) Would be neat to know how many other people have also.

Though information on royalties may be getting a bit to personal…

(I enjoyed it enough, that as of now, I am planning on including it on my Hugo nominating ballot next year. :)

[rowyn]

*squeees at final line* Ooooh, thank you! *roots for nothing else displacing RA in the coming months.* :)

[archangelbeth]

It is also of interest to me for professional reasons, but primarily I am incurably nosy. O:>

Edit: It's true that you don't need to do royalties -- unit sales at X price would be more than enough (and the valuable part, really), and if anyone cares about the royalties part, it's quite possible to do the math on one's own.

Patterns, however, and sales at given price-points? Interesting and potentially valuable!

[alinsa.livejournal.com]

Ooh, it would be kind of neat to show a graph of sales to date, with the sale price and non-sale price areas marked. You can remove the Y axis scale to keep some privacy, if so desired, while still providing a lot of useful data (especially if you pointed to a peak and said "this is X copies", which gives a sense of scale but without making it easy to get exact numbers)

[rowyn]

Information wants to be free. n_n

[rowyn]

I am not sure there's much point in not giving the royalties after giving all the information necessary to calculate the royalties, but eh. What the heck! *does it that way anyhow*

[archangelbeth]

It navigates the tricky areas of "how much financial data is uncomfortable for people from different microcultural upbringings," mostly. >_>

And we don't actually have all the information necessary to calculate the royalties. See, if Amazon.com is the site of purchase, the sale shows up there -- but if it's not to a "blessed" country, then your royalties will be 30% or 35% (I forget), not 70%-"Transmission Fees." We also don't know how much Amazon is chopping out for so-called transmission fees, though that can be estimated at 10 cents per copy.

So it would only be approximate anyway. O:>

[rowyn]

Hee!

RA's transmission fees are like $0.26, actually. Book's frickin' HY00GE. There's a reason $6.99 seemed reasonable!

[archangelbeth]

Most of that will be in the cover and interior illustrations... Ah, right, the interior illustrations, that's what's doing it. That will only grow as you add more; you may want to consider whether you can insert them in a fine-for-ebook resolution that's less of a memory hog.

[rowyn]

Nope, it's all from the text. There are no interior illustrations, just the cover and the title page. And those are like 100k of the 2+meg file size. (Since the image is so stylized, without interior shading, it compresses quite nicely). It's just really long. Alinsa looked into trying to compress it down more and there wasn't much she could do. Maybe shave a penny or two off it.

[wildcard-47.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested to see how it all goes!

[rowyn]

I have posted for the past month! I am terribly impatient to see how the next month goes. n_n

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

I am happy to hear that more stories set on this world may be available.

[rowyn]

Yay! Comments from folks who want more are also highly motivational. :)

[argonel.livejournal.com]

It was a tough call between terribly curious and ooh clicky.

[rowyn]

I have seen polls where "ooh clicky" was the winning choice. :D