As many of you know, I epublished my first novel two weeks ago, and three short stories a few months before that.\u00a0 How has it been going?<\/p>\n
First, let me point out that I have another guest post out as part of the Genesis Earth<\/em> blog tour, this one on my friend Gamila’s blog<\/a>.\u00a0 Gamila reviews YA and LDS fiction, and is a big proponent of clean reads.\u00a0 For my post, I wrote about the place of LDS writers in science fiction and fantasy and the unique things we have to offer these genres.\u00a0 Fun stuff; you should check it out<\/a>.<\/p>\n So now that that’s out of the way, how do the numbers look for my epublishing venture?\u00a0 Not bad, actually.\u00a0 In two weeks, I’ve sold twenty copies of Genesis Earth<\/em> and gotten two five star reviews on Amazon, only one of which was from someone I know.\u00a0 Not bad–I’m looking to get at least $50 from Amazon come September, which should be very nice.<\/p>\n The short stories have not sold nearly as well, however.\u00a0 Part of it probably has to do with the fact that I’m not a super stellar short story writer, but another part probably has to do with the lack of promotion.\u00a0 The review of “From the Ice Incarnate” by Red Adept Reviews did lead to a few extra sales for all my stories, but only about half a dozen or so.\u00a0 Nothing spectacular.<\/p>\n Part of it also has to do with the sampling system, I think.\u00a0 With ebooks, you can download a free sample (usually the first 10% of the text) and decide whether you want to buy it or not.\u00a0 For Genesis Earth<\/em>, that amounts to the first three chapters and then some; for the short stories, maybe a couple of paragraphs and that’s it.<\/p>\n So what’s the takeaway?\u00a0 I think that novels work out much better as ebooks than short stories.\u00a0 For one, you can justify charging more for them (I haven’t seen anyone selling short stories for more than $.99), and thus get the higher royalty rate. For another, they work much better with the sampling system; readers are much more likely to get hooked on the first 10% of a novel than the first 10% of a short story.\u00a0 And lastly, I’d say that you need to figure out some kind of way to promote yourself and get your work out there.\u00a0 Still working on that.<\/p>\n All in all, not too bad.\u00a0 But here’s the really cool part (and I mean really<\/em> cool): at my current cost of living, I estimate that I need to sell only 15 ebooks per day to break even financially.\u00a0 At a consistent average of 25 books per day, I could justify quitting my “day job” (150% of all monthly expenses).<\/p>\n How is that exciting?\u00a0 Well, get this: starting out the gate with very little platform or exposure, I’m averaging a little over 1 ebook sale per day.\u00a0 If I could boost that up to 3 sales per day for 5 books, I’d be breaking even.\u00a0 At 5 sales per day for 5 $2.99 books (~800 total ebook sales per month), I’ll be making a living.<\/p>\n See why I’m excited?<\/p>\n My goal now is to get up to 5 full length novels \/ novellas out before the end of the year.\u00a0 Believe it or not, that’s very achievable.<\/p>\n First, I’ll be epublishing Bringing Stella Home<\/em> sometime this summer, hopefully in time for worldcon.\u00a0 Shortly thereafter, I hope to publish Sholplan<\/em> as a $.99 novella.<\/p>\n My current WIP is the third draft of Desert Stars,<\/em> and I bet I can have that ready before Christmas.\u00a0 While I’ll put the whole thing out as its own novel, I like Emma’s idea of splitting it into two books as well.\u00a0 I’ll probably title them Dome and Desert<\/em> and Sand and Stars,<\/em> and make the first one available for free just to get more exposure.<\/p>\n And at some point in between all that, I’ll finish compiling all my travel journals from the 2008 BYU Jordan study abroad and put that out as its own work.\u00a0 That one should be fun, and a good way to experiment with in-text photos and illustrations.<\/p>\n That’s my plan.\u00a0 The more I put my work out there, the better my chances at making it big.\u00a0 And even if I don’t, if I have enough titles out and they all sell more or less consistently, I can still leverage that to make a full-time living.\u00a0 And that’s my dream.<\/p>\n So yeah, I’m extremely <\/em>excited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As many of you know, I epublished my first novel two weeks ago, and three short stories a few months before that.\u00a0 How has it been going? First, let me point out that I have another guest post out as part of the Genesis Earth blog tour, this one on my friend Gamila’s blog.\u00a0 Gamila… Continue reading Ebook update<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[68,44,32,541],"tags":[559,89,515,122,129,46,529,599,562],"class_list":["post-5223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsh","category-ds","category-ge","category-sholpan-novella","tag-blog-tour","tag-career-decisions","tag-ebooks","tag-friends","tag-gamila","tag-goals-and-plans","tag-indie-publishing","tag-thoughts-reflections","tag-worldcon-2011","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-1mf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5223"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5231,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5223\/revisions\/5231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}