Geekus Maximus: The Value of a Pen Name

When I posted my total book sales numbers at the end of last year, I didn't include how much I made. The main reason is that after I spent all that time figuring out how much I sold, I didn't want to go back and do the same thing for monetary totals. As of right now, including permanently free books and collections, I have 22 titles under my main name. They also come in different money-making formats: ebook, paperback, and audio book. Some of them have two formats and some of them have all three. My pen name, Geekus Maximus, only has two short books. They each have an e-book version currently priced at $0.99 and an audio book version currently priced at $3.95. The money I've made from my pen name is much easier to figure out. You can check them both out here:

E-Books
With Geekus Maximus e-books, I generally make $0.35 per sale. Sometimes it's a little more and sometimes it's a little less depending on what country they sold in and the conversion rate to USD at the time. These e-books also didn't require a huge investment in money or time. I had Doug Beckstead do the cover for the Geek of Legend book and I made the cover for Horror Stories From A Computer Tech myself. They were each written as an eight hour challenge meaning they both took under eight hours to create as e-books. For the first six months of 2014, Geekus Maximus had 14 e-book sales between the two books for a total royalty of $4.88.

Audio Books
For the audio books, I worked out a deal with Timothy McKean, the narrator who did Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate. I did a royalty split with him, so my cut is 25% of the sale price. Horror Stories From A Computer Tech took off quickly with a bunch of audio book sales and currently has the third most audio books sold of all my audio book titles. The Geek of Legend audio book also did pretty well. It's now featured in Amazon's Whispersync program which means that if you buy the e-book, the audio book is sold at a discount (currently $1.99 I think) and you can have the audio narration read to you as you follow along in the e-book. For the first six months of 2014, Geekus Maximus had 56 audio book sales between the two books for a total royalty of $49.92.



Totals
For 2014 so far, my Geekus Maximus pen name has been worth 70 sales and $54.80 in revenue (which averages about $0.78 / book sold.) It probably won't make that much between the beginning of July and the end of December since audio book sales have now slowed to a few per month and the e-book versions have never really made much money. Horror Stories From A Computer Tech currently has 14 reviews with a 3.6 star average and Geek of Legend: The Elvish Screwdriver currently has 3 reviews with a 5 star average.

Future Projects
The last two five star reviews on Geek of Legend: The Elvish Screwdriver have asked for another book in the series. I'm working on writing it right now. The great thing about the Geek of Legend series is that I can get a book out a lot quicker since the stories are only around 8,000 words. The second in the series, Geek of Legend: The Goblin Anti-Virus, is currently at around 1,500 words. Yes, there will be another bridge troll that asks tech riddles for those of you who enjoyed the riddles of Org. The book will also feature Goblin pirates who write both viruses and anti-virus software, thus ensuring that they never go out of business. I promise the book will be entertaining and good for a few laughs, especially if you liked the first one.

Two Book Covers Revamped

Now that being a self-published author is bringing in some decent money, I've been slowly making my way through my books. I've edited a few, changed the formatting, and resubmitted updated versions. I've also been slowly making my way through the covers to have them updated to a more professional look (to see what I'm talking about, you can check out the change in my travel photo book covers here.)

I decided the next two on my list would be the short books in my Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate series. My homemade covers that I crafted with my digital camera, followed by Paint and Gimp, have done alright. I've sold some e-books and paperbacks of both books (and even a decent number of audio books on the first one; the second one is still being made into an audio book.) So here's what the old covers looked like:

I'll admit that my graphic altering skills are amateur at best. The font sizes are a little bit off because I generally forget to write down what size I used for my author name and for the title. I'm not a huge fan of how I had to cover the universal remote in the second one with text. They're a little hard to read as thumbnails. Even with all of those little issues, they've had double-digit sales for 2014.

So I hired Elizabeth Mackey (of Elizabeth Mackey Graphics) to make my tech illiterate covers look a little more professional. We went through a couple of different ideas and I almost went with some covers that used a more silver / grey text but ultimately these were easier to read as thumbnails. Here's the two new covers:

I like these two a lot better than my old covers. They still use the photos I took, but the titles are easier to read, everything is in the exact same place in both for the title and my author name, font sizes are identical, and she found a way to rotate the remote to get it to fit better. I've already replaced the old covers with the new ones and I think they'll help sales (sales of my travel photo series were more than double in the month following the launch of their new covers.)

As always, I'll provide links to both books in case any of you would like some general tech help / advice with computers, wireless networks, home theater, etc. If you know some people that could use some help in those areas, please let them know about my tech illiterate books. Thanks.

Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate E-Book
Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate Paperback

Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate Volume II E-Book
Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate Volume II Paperback

Author Mailing List

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