2023 So Far, By the Numbers

Mpepper/ September 1, 2023/ Writing

Two thirds of the year are done, which feels like a fair benchmark for stopping to examine how this year has gone for me in terms of sales and page reads. Though, to be clear, I have to say that these numbers will only include Amazon (ebooks) and Ingram (print sales). I am slowly rolling content out to other sites as I leave Kindle Unlimited, but we’ll talk about that in a bit.

First, I’ll discuss my best-to-worst months based on Amazon data. I’m looking at royalties, orders, and pages read. There is some correlation, naturally, but it doesn’t 100% sync up.

Because I have a perma-free story, orders are typically not indicative of how much money I actually make each month from those orders. (Most orders are for the free story.) That said, I’ve had 661 total Amazon orders so far in 2023, with 284 of those coming in March and another 154 in April. This is likely due to having released new stories in my popular Drew & Rayze series in February and April. Considering I only had 427 orders in ALL of 2022, the fact that I’ve bested that already in 2023 is heartening.

As for page reads on Kindle, I’ve had 5,380 thus far this year. February accounts of 1,311 of those, and even my worst month (August) netted me 328. That’s not bad considering that I have been phasing my works out of KU and only about three remain enrolled. In short, a decline in page reads was to be expected because I’m starting to take my work wide. Which means I won’t get anywhere near the 13,518 page reads I got last year. Whether going wide will be worth it remains to be seen.

As for print books, I’ve only sold 18 this year (per Ingram). My best month was February with eight print books sold, followed by three each in June and July, two in April, and one each in January and March. May and August saw zero print sales.

I typically blame the school year for June and August slumps. People getting out of and going back to school can disrupt reading and leisure. I suppose whether or not an author does well over summer depends on the types of books they write; The Switchgrass Crown should have been a summer book, and certainly “One Day of Sun & Sugar” should have been as well, but… ::shrug::

Likewise, Switchgrass having won a couple awards and been semi-finalist in another contest should possibly have boosted it, but again… ::shrug::

Will any of these books do better on other sites? I can certainly hope so. In the meantime, I’m looking at a fairly desolate end of the year considering I have nothing else close to publication ready. I put out two pieces last December, then the stories in February and April, but I am not a fast writer, so it is difficult for me to produce content as regularly as the industry seems to feel is necessary to stay on readers’ radars. Assuming I’ve ever been on any radars to begin with.

Numbers help me as an author decide what to pursue. I’ve been playing with a Switchgrass sequel, but the lack of demand for the first book leads me to believe a sequel is possibly a waste of time and effort. I’ve tried to write more Drew & Rayze, but that seems to be tapering off as well. The successes of The Ghosts of Marshley Park and Brynnde make me think I should do more along those lines? (In fact, more than one person has asked for stories about secondary characters in GoMP, so… Maybe that?)

I realize, too, that my numbers are very small compared to some of the majorly successful self-published authors. I have modest goals, but I continue to fail to meet them, which is part of what steals my momentum and motivation when writing. “Do it for you,” so many people say, and then in the next breath, “but keep in mind who your audience is.” Writing is a complicated dance of finding joy in your story and characters and still somehow delivering those things—and the joy—to readers. Who may or may not be waiting for them.