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 All sold at least a few copies except for Slightly Off the Mark: The Unpublished Columns, which has the disadvantages of having been out for several years, and of being a humor book by someone who isn't already famous.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