Almost Six Figures. My Breakdown Of One Year Of Book Sales By Format, Vendor, Genre, And Country

The publishing industry is awash with various sales figures from different sources, and a hell of a lot of smoke and mirrors.

AuthorEarnings.com does a great job of highlighting indie sales on the various stores, showing the indie share of ebook sales and income rising. Their latest report for May 2016 goes into the numbers of indie authors making income from Amazon specifically.

On the other end of the scale, the AAP has the data from traditional publishers showing that ebook sales are decreasing, although these numbers don't include the 30% of ebooks sold without ISBNs in the US.

Both of these sources are aggregated reports and they are difficult to equate with specific authors and specific books.

So I think it's important to be as transparent as we are able about our book sales and income in order to help each other make decisions. Obviously data from one author (me!) is only anecdotal, but it's all I have, so I offer it to you. Make of it what you will.

Here are my total sales and income figures based on book sales

My company, The Creative Penn Limited, has a financial year running May – April. Last year, I reported on my income breakdown and various reports on my books. It was the first year I cracked a six-figure income as an author-entrepreneur since leaving my day-job in Sept 2011.

As a comparison to the previous report, the company income has almost tripled, meaning that my husband was able to quit his job in October 2015 🙂 I make income through course sales, affiliate income, professional speaking, and podcast sponsorship, all of which stems from my writing. [More detail on all of this in How to Make a Living with your Writing.]

But most authors are only interested in book sales and what impacts them, so this report covers May 2015 – April 2016 and will go into more detail on book sales specifically.

Total book sales income: US$95,000 (approx £66,000)

Total book sales volume: 40,667 (does not include free books)

Price points range from $2.99 – $16.99 (the higher priced boxsets are not on Amazon because of the $9.99 cap), and I ran various price reduction promotions during the year.

I'm not a breakout success in any genre, and my books are rarely in the top sales ranking on Amazon, so this demonstrates what you can do with a long term approach of building a back-list that sells small numbers consistently on multiple platforms.

Some of you will think this is amazing … and some of you will think this is pathetic!

Such is the way of authorship, when there are always people to compare ourselves to. But the best comparison is to where we were last year, and this is essentially double what I made with my books 2014 – 2015. I'm also very happy with making (almost) six figures from book sales alone, especially as a practically unknown author writing cross-genre with no breakout success books.

And as Hugh Howey has repeatedly said, this is the real story of self-publishing. It's not the outliers who make 7-figures or get movie deals, it's the many many many authors who are making a decent living now. We are not top of the charts but we put out quality books that people read and we make good money on the way … happy times!

All the following calculations and graphs are based on income split, since ultimately, that's more important that sales volume. You can't eat sales figures but you can eat royalties!

Breakdown by vendor

It won't be a surprise to see that Amazon still dominates, making up 56% of my book sales income through KDP, Createspace and ACX (Audible).

But that is a LOT less than many authors, especially those in KDP Select, and a lot less than many traditional publishers. It is also down on last year's Amazon total percentage of 74%.

I'm gratified by this as I made a decision back in the days of the Amazon/Hachette price discussions in 2014 that I would not let one company have dominant control over my income.

I love Amazon but I'm thrilled that Apple and Kobo now make up 40% in total (up from 19% last year) and I intend to grow both in the coming year.

I've also just gone back to selling direct using Selz (and exempting EU buyers because of the VATMOSS pain – updated post on this here), so next year I will hopefully have a wedge of sales that are purely from my two websites.

[What's not included: I don't count Nook as my sales there are so dire. I'm not on Google Play as I'd like to use Draft2Digital for that to avoid tech pain and currently that's not possible. I'm also not counting translations or stores like Tolino, 24 Symbols, and any other small stores in this analysis as the sales are so tiny right now. I'm also not counting occasions when my books have been included in bundles or other boxsets when I don't have the direct sales data. So this is all conservative.]

Breakdown by format

Definitely no surprise here as ebooks are generally where indies make their money.

Let's also just emphasize again that this is over 36,000 ebooks and over US$86,000 that are NOT counted in any official publishing reports, as I don't use ISBNs on ebooks or audiobooks and I use free Createspace ISBNs for print.

(If you're wondering why, it's because I clearly don't need ISBNs to make a living and I don't focus on print sales as a core part of my business. If you want to, then consider purchasing your own ISBNs and using IngramSpark for extended distribution. More on that here.)

According to AuthorEarnings, over 30% of ebooks purchased in the US don't have ISBNs as indies have no need to use them, and this is the missing data that makes the traditional publishing industry think that ebook sales are dropping and print is rising in comparison. In reality, it's just that they are not counting all the data.

My own print sales (8%) have remained a similar percentage of income to last year (7%), but my audiobook sales have dropped from 5% to only 2% of income. Many indies have seen a similar drop in audiobook sales as the subscription model takes hold and listeners can get audiobooks for cheap if they own the ebook.

Breakdown by fiction vs non-fiction

This is better as a line chart as the split is so different by store.

The numbers are based upon:

FICTION: 9 full-length novels, 3 novellas and a short story series. Stone of Fire is permafree on all ebook platforms and is not therefore counted. I also have 4 boxsets at various price points including a 7 book box-set on Kobo

NON-FICTION: 4 full-length books, 3 shorter-length. Successful Self-Publishing is permafree on all stores and is not therefore counted.

The split is explainable thus:

• Apple and Kobo sales are based on merchandising opportunities, which come up for fiction more often than my particular type of non-fiction, so my fiction is more highly visible there.

• I am not in KDP Select, so my Amazon sales are based on driving my own traffic or people using Amazon as a search engine. My non-fiction books have SEO book titles and I also have traffic from this site, which drives sales, as I primarily use Amazon affiliate codes in blog posts. I'm happy to see that my fiction sales still outweigh the non-fiction, which they should be based on number of books available, but you'll find that my sales ranking is usually pretty low, so hopefully it's encouraging to see what you can make on a decent base of books over time, even without breakout success.

• ACX/Audible sales are dominated by my one non-fiction book, Business for Authors: How to be an Author Entrepreneur, which I narrated and produced myself, so I get higher royalties. I also push traffic to it from this site, and my fiction has a lot less visibility. I'm going to continue to narrate my own non-fiction but am probably more likely to sell it direct from this site in future until there are other options around audio.

• Overall, the split (70:30) is representative of my number of books across fiction and non-fiction, and is pretty similar to last year's split (60:40).

Breakdown of ebook sales by country where books are sold across Amazon, Kobo and iBooks

This will be the first year analyzing this data as I wanted to baseline it going forward. It's hard to get country specific data on all formats, on all stores, so this is only ebook sales data from Amazon, Kobo and iBooks. I'd like to urge the retailers to include this in data downloads so it's easier to manage!

Those who read this blog regularly or listen to my podcast will know how bullish I am on global sales and how I fully expect to see the majority of my income coming from outside the US over the next few years, especially as streaming internet speeds spread to the rest of the world.

But I didn't expect that to have happened already for ebooks!

You can see from the chart that only 46% of my ebook sales are now from the US. It may be even less since the Amazon.com sales may also come from other countries without their own specific stores.

The ‘Other' wedge is made up of 56 different countries, most of which have a few sales each, but I expect that to grow in coming years. Only Kobo provides a cool sales map as part of their reporting!

What accounts for sales doubling? How did I sell and market in 2015 – 2016?

The primary reason my book sales income has almost doubled is because I have published a number of books, thus increasing the volume of intellectual property assets and also giving readers a better chance to discover my work. In the 2015 – 2016 financial year, I wrote and published:

• Deviance, London Psychic crime thriller #3 (full-length)
• Risen Gods, co-written with J.Thorn, a dark fantasy thriller set in New Zealand (full-length)

• Destroyer of Worlds, ARKANE thriller #8 (full-length)

• How to Make a Living with your Writing (short non-fiction), which was listed on Inc.com as one of the top 100 business books in 2015

• Co-writing a Book: Collaboration and Co-creation for authors, co-written with J. Thorn (short non-fiction)
• Successful Self-Publishing: How to self-publish an ebook and print book. Free on all ebook stores and leads into my other books (short non-fiction)
• An English Country House & Garden Fine Art Coloring Book, co-produced with my print-maker Dad, Arthur J. Penn

• 4 single author box-sets, London Psychic box-set containing the trilogy, ARKANE Boxset 2 containing books 4-6, plus a 7 book ARKANE boxset, and also the Writer's Toolbox, with selected non-fiction.

In case you're wondering how I publish and market:

Publishing:

• I go direct to Amazon KDP, Kobo Writing Life and iBooks, as well as ACX for audio and Createspace for print. I use Draft2Digital for other ebook sales. I do have minor sales on other platforms but these are the dominant ones. More on how to self-publish here.
• I'm not in KDP Select and I actively promote books on the other platforms.
• I pursue merchandising on Kobo, iBooks and D2D and foster relationships by going to live events and actively promoting the other platforms as a vocal advocate for going wide, rather than staying exclusive.

Marketing:

• For non-fiction, I write books that my audience (you lot!) ask for or indicate by your interest that you would like. I also use SEO book titles.

• For non-fiction, I use content marketing i.e. putting out free useful information that brings people to my site. I have a weekly podcast and talk about my writing update every week, fostering interest and I'm also able to tell people when books are ready. I also blog on lessons learned here, plus I share on Twitter and Facebook and people mainly find my books this way. I've been doing this consistently for nearly 8 years.

• I have free email list signup offers and continue to build my email lists: Author Blueprint for this site and my non-fiction, and Day of the Vikings for my fiction.

• For fiction primarily, I use price promotions and associated advertising (paid e.g. Bookbub, Freebooksy) and also merchandising, which I apply for directly to Kobo and iBooks.

• I use permafree for fiction (Stone of Fire) and also for non-fiction (Successful Self-Publishing).

• I've started to use Facebook Advertising for the boxsets in particular and also video ads for the recent launch of Destroyer of Worlds. More on how I use Facebook Ads here.

These are the main ones, but I do dabble in many other marketing things. Check out How to Market a Book for more ideas.

Conclusion and decisions for financial year 2016 – 2017

Based on these numbers, I will:

• Write more books 🙂 More books make more money, even if they are not bestsellers. That's the magic of multiple streams of income based on intellectual property assets, selling in multiple formats and multiple countries. Oh yes, and creating is what I love doing with my life, so more books makes for a happier me!

• Focus on more fiction merchandizing and advertising at Kobo and Apple. I'll be finishing the ARKANE cycle of 9 books, so I will make that into a 9-book-boxset which I can sell for higher prices (as there's no royalty cap at $9.99). I've also got tons of other ideas.

• Write more non-fiction with SEO book titles for Amazon, in particular. Obviously my fiction will sell there too, but as I write cross-genre, I struggle to get traction and as I'm not KDP Select, fiction has less visibility overall.

• Record my own non-fiction audiobooks and sell direct from my website. I'm also intending to launch my next novel, End of Days, with the audiobook, print and ebook at the same time to try and boost audio sales. Fiction will continue to be done with pro narrators.

• Focus on growing the direct sales route to maximize revenue and collect email addresses. [To encourage this, you can get 10% off any books or audios you buy direct from me on this site by using promo code: CREATIVE on checkout. Click here to see all the books and on each page, you'll find a button to buy direct from the author on sales page.]

• Try some wild cards and maybe the lightning will strike. I'm always looking for ways to get my ideas into new markets. I'd definitely consider a traditional publishing deal if the right opportunity came along. I'm writing a screenplay. I'm working with an Indian company to get Destroyer of Worlds into Bollywood. I have a book I want to write and pitch for gaming companies. I'm dipping my toes into VR … we live in such exciting times!

OK, I hope you found that interesting or perhaps even useful for your own author journey. If you share your sales figures on your site, no matter how big or how small, then please do link it in the comments. Or you're welcome to leave a question or a comment below.

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