A few weeks ago, the November 2012 sales numbers for self-published books became available to the people who published them. Since I first published the Twenty Palaces prequel (cleverly title Twenty Palaces) in November of 2011, I thought it would be a good idea to post the sales figures. Why not?
Looking at this, you might be tempted to look at the price I’m charging and try to work out how much I’ve made. That won’t work. For one thing, not all of these sales came at Amazon’s 30% sales commission (I refuse to call them royalties; Amazon isn’t my publisher). Despite setting the price above $2.99, they charged me 65% on a surprisingly high number of them.
Which sucks, but that’s the price of doing business with a company like Amazon. So, if you think you can figure out what I earned, it’s actually quite a bit less than that.
Also, the first month’s sales were small because I posted it just in time for the last week. December was the first full month.
Anyway, the Smashwords sales cover Kobo, iBooks on Apple, Sony Reader, and Smashwords themselves, and since I didn’t start them until months later than Amazon and B&N, I didn’t break them out by month. I would have had to break out each seller and that was too much work. They’ve been small players for me anyway.
Here’s the table:
Month | Amazon US | Amazon non-US | B&N | Smashwords Group | Total All |
11-Nov | 83 | 6 | 0 | ||
11-Dec | 902 | 27 | 54 | ||
12-Jan | 430 | 25 | 55 | ||
12-Feb | 281 | 19 | 40 | ||
12-Mar | 211 | 13 | 42 | ||
12-Apr | 182 | 2 | 20 | ||
12-May | 131 | 16 | 31 | ||
12-Jun | 126 | 14 | 32 | ||
12-Jul | 98 | 8 | 27 | ||
12-Aug | 96 | 11 | 27 | ||
12-Sep | 71 | 8 | 17 | ||
12-Oct | 62 | 5 | 14 | ||
12-Nov | 44 | 0 | 11 | ||
Total | 2717 | 154 | 370 | 170 | 3411 |
Christmas! The Christmas season is worth a few sales, and that’s a fact. Checking the numbers for Giftmas ’12, there was another small bump not reflected above.
Anyway, the numbers aren’t terrible but they aren’t fabulous either. I’m certainly not going to be touring Europe by rail on this novel, and it doesn’t inspire me to Kickstart The Twisted Path, which would have been book number next. Still, for a book I’d already written, I’m happy enough with the results and grateful to everyone who bought a copy.
If you haven’t bought a copy, I put some handy links into the table above. Knock yourself out.
Finally, I know some authors post their numbers every year, but this was sort of a pain to do. I’m not seeing it becoming a tradition.