Showing posts with label self-publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self-publishing. Show all posts

Free E-Book, Again

 Read An E-book Week is here! While I know it's no Arbor Day, it does afford us an opportunity to ... well, read an e-book. I don't know who invents these things, but on Smashwords a free e-book sale runs from March 2nd to March 8th.

I don't know if reading a print book is banned during this period. It's not a legal holiday, so probably not. However, the advantage is that you could get a free e-book from me and a whole lot of other people, from this Smashwords link:

 
https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos


This is the third time in a year Smashwords has had a similar promotion, but it's never a bad time to fill up the reading device of your choice--especially if you fill it with Coming Attractions, the only book of mine that's up on Smashwords. (Other than the two anthologies I have stories in.) The link to Coming Attractions, which you can get on various formats, is here:

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914


There's still plenty of bad weather yet to come, so grab the beverage of your choice, build a nest on the couch, and read on! It's way cheaper than most other hobbies.




Then you can read our other books:


·        Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

·        Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

·        Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

·        Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

·        Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

·        Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

·        Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

·        Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

·        Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

·        Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

·        Substack:  https://substack.com/@markrhunter

·        Tumblr:  https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

·        Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

·        Audible:  https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

 

Remember: When it comes to books, there's very little bad that can be said about "free".


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Book Sale Report, 2024, or: Don't Give Up My Day Job

 Well, it's time for a look at how I did in publishing last year or, as I like to put it, it's Black February.

Back in 2023, in an attempt to prime the pump, so to speak, I invested some money in advertising. You have to spend money to make money, the experts say.

There's a British term for what the experts say: bollocks.

Okay, maybe not fair. In 2022, including the anthologies I have short stories in, we sold 539 copies. This is give or take: Sales numbers are guarded by the publishing industry the way I guard my hoard of chocolate.

In 2023, the year of the great advertising experiment, we racked up 624 sales, again including the anthologies. Great, right? Except I also racked up great expenditures, which Emily would have stopped if I hadn't been so obsessed with the numbers that I didn't think to talk it over with her. (She found out. Boy, did she find out, and by the way our couch is very comfortable.)

The chair's nice, too.

 

Ahem. Long story short, I spent $11 for every dollar the book sales earned.

This is not a sustainable business model, except in Washington, D.C., and they have 341 million investors.

 So in 2024 I worked on reducing our advertising costs, while not reducing book sales. This didn't work. According to my calculations, I did indeed manage to reduce advertising costs by 2,180 percent, but ....

Wait a minute. That can't be right. Let me hit the calculator again.

Okay, for every five dollars I spent in 2023, I spent 3 dollars in 2024. I really need to apologize to my math teacher for telling him I'd never use this stuff. Once, around 1990, I even needed algebra. Of course, I'd forgotten it.

 On the one hand, total sales from last year were 492, down from 539 copies in 2023. On the other hand, I no long have access to sales numbers for the two anthologies. (Long story.) If the same number of those were sold in both years, our total numbers for 2024 would be 651, a slight increase. Yay?

Except I still spent more than we took in last year.

Business takes a lot of the fun out of writing.

 

Our biggest seller for 2024 was Coming Attractions, including one copy that went to Australia, and one to the UK. This is partially due to a really weird spike in sales through Amazon, which reported it was from searches using the keyword "ebooks". That makes as much sense as my math skills.

The second biggest seller was Hoosier Hysterical, including one copy that went to Germany, followed by Storm Chaser and The No-Campfire Girls. That pretty much matches the year before.

Still following the numbers? Me, neither. Here's the upshot: For every book sold, I still spent four and a half dollars. That doesn't include internet costs, or the fact that we had to buy a new laptop.

But now I've cut way down on my advertising, which so far this year led to a corresponding decrease in sales. We'll see if the release of The Notorious Ian Grant makes a difference, since we didn't put out any new product in 2024 or, as I like to call it, Year 4: Decade Of Hell.

My original plan for 2025 was to sell at least 1,000 copies. I've changed that: now the plan is to make more money then I spend. Otherwise, I might as well just be a Congressman.


 

You can help pad my numbers by buying our books here:

 

·        Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

·        Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

·        Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

·        Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

·        Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

·        Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

·        Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

·        Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

·        Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

·        Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

·        Substack:  https://substack.com/@markrhunter

·        Tumblr:  https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

·        Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

·        Audible:  https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

 

Remember: Sometimes the term “starving artist” is a little too close to literal.


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The State of My Writing Career

 I used to be a submitting machine ... but now I'm tired.

If a writer wants to be traditionally published, they must submit. Their short stories, novels, non-fiction books, must go out to those publications that accept un-agented submissions, or they must go through literary agents for the other publications. (Independent publishing is a different animal, which some writers swear by to bypass traditional gatekeepers.)

I have an Excel file I've used to track my submissions since 2009. (!) It has 418 entries. Some of those resulted in request for further materials, such as a synopsis and opening chapter that led to an agent wanting to read the entire manuscript. A very few led to publication.

In 2022 I submitted to magazines, agents, and book publishers 77 times. In 2023 I only made 45 submissions, and so far in 2024--zero.

What went wrong?

There are always distractions. This distraction lives next door, and likes to have her belly rubbed.

 

What went wrong is what went right: I got a "yes", and was contracted to write a book. It took me a year, during which time I was too busy to worry about my other projects. Now it's time to play catch up.

That stranded a lot of material, just waiting to go back into the wild, cruel publishing world. On the other hand, I have the advantage of considering most of it fair game again: If no one I submitted to has expressed interest for over a year, chances are pretty good I can move on. That includes, sadly, a couple of exciting requests for fulls.

So I have six completed short stories ready to go out. I'll probably polish them, and everything else, one more time before submitting, since they've grown "cold" and I can look at them with a more objective eye.

I'd really like to see all this done before I grow cold.

 

I have six completed novel manuscripts, and two more that need revisions before they're ready. Oh, and a novella: a Storm Chaser prequel that promises to be a lot of fun.

I have two books, one fiction and one non-fiction, that I started on and need to finish.

Then there's my sudden realization the other day that the nation's 250th anniversary is coming up in just a couple of years, and that might present the perfect opportunity for a Hoosier Hysterical sequel.

I'm thinking "Hoosier Hysterical II: Hoosier Hystericaller". No?

 

This is why sometimes it frustrates me that I could have retired from my full time job two years ago, but can't afford to. Imagine what progress I could make if I sold enough books to write full time!

Well, I guess that's what promotion and publicity are for. They're next on the list.


Remember: Every time you buy a book, you encourage an author to write another one. Enable those poor people.


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Book Selling Report For 2023, or: Why I Cry

 An interesting thing about the publishing industry is that it takes great pains to make sure an author never knows how many books he's selling.

Meanwhile, at certain points in the process, that's the only thing authors want to know.

Actually, the traditional publishers I've worked with have been good about giving me sales reports--every three or six months. But it can be hard to read their reports, in the same way it can be hard for the janitor at a college to understand a blackboard full of physics equations. Well, maybe they can sometimes. A better example would be someone giving me the full schematics on how to wire an electrical system into a house, then expecting me to actually do it.

"Gee, he seemed smart enough to manage. I'm gonna miss him."

When it comes to places that sell your work, such as Barnes and Noble or the elephant in the room, Amazon ... good luck. Most of my books are independently published, so there is no publisher trying to keep track of my sales. You'd think the bookselling websites would do that, but ... well, you'd think more people would read, too.

Maybe I could sell them like donuts. "I'll take a white one, and a blue one, and ...."

 

I'm telling you all this to explain why, while I've come up with an estimate of my 2023 sales, I have no idea how accurate it is.

Fairly accurate. I think. Within reason.

So, in 2023 we sold 624 books. I think. 482 were e-books, and 142 were print copies. (In 2022 I actually sold a hardcover copy of Images of America: Albion and Noble County. I mention that because, before then, I didn't think you even could buy hardcover copies of our books.)

Our 2022 total was 539 sales, so we're up by 85 books. It's a good number, considering we haven't done an author appearance since the beginning of Covid. Now that I've actually had Covid, I'm not thrilled about going out into crowds in the immediate future, either.

Our best sellers:

151 copies of Coming Attractions.

145 copies of Hoosier Hysterical: How the West Became the Midwest Without Moving At All.

104 copies of Storm Chaser (which was re-released with some fanfare early in the year).

51 copies of The No-Campfire Girls.

The other books were, shall we say, not great sellers. All sold at least a few copies except for Slightly Off the Mark: The Unpublished Columns, which has the disadvantages of having been out for several years, and of being a humor book by someone who isn't already famous.

 

"Dude, these are stale."
 

 

Still, good money, right?

Well ...

I also experimented with advertising all last year. Online ads did indeed increase our sales, but they didn't lead to a profit. For every dollar in gross sales we made, I spent about two dollars. ("I" because Emily wasn't involved in that pile of commercial misfortune.)

But wait--there's more. Depending on how they were published and where they were bought, our profit was between 60% and 6% of each book sold. The 60% ones were the books Emily slaved and sweated over.

Do that math, and for every dollar we made, I spent five dollars in advertising and promotion.

This is fine for a hobby. I could collect toy trains, or fix up antiques, or bend my elbow at the bar every night, for a similar amount of money. It is not, however, what anyone would call a sustainable business model. It's more like trying to sell your product by screaming out the brand name as you leap off a cliff.

"Losing the house is no big deal, I can write in the car."

 

So, I have two goals when it comes to selling books in 2024. One is to sell a thousand copies of our various books in the space of one year. There are a couple of years when I may have done that, but I'm too lazy to go back and do more math--I'd rather think of it as a new obtainable goal.

My second goal is to do that while making more money than we spend. I don't know ... maybe my goal should be to sell the same number as last year, but without taking a loss. Many authors manage to do this.

Not many manage to make a living at it, but if I wanted an easy job I'd be a physics professor.

 

 

Remember: Every time you buy a book, an author can buy a cup of coffee to keep him awake while he's writing his next book.

 


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