Book Sales Breakdown: First 1000 Sales

I love it when numbers work out nicely. I sold my 1,000th book on the last day of September 2014, so it made figuring out totals a lot easier for me. I figured I would do a short breakdown of the sales numbers including the Top 5 books that got me there. I'm going to try to take a while to put all of the info together because I really don't feel like starting on my homework yet.

My first 1000 book sales consisted of 687 e-books, 253 audio books, and 50 paperbacks. It's interesting the way book sales work in 2014. Go back a decade and e-books weren't even a thing. Here's a pie chart because pie sounds really good right now:

So around 2/3 of my first 1000 sales were e-books, around 1/4 were audio books, and around 1/20 were paperbacks. Most of the paperbacks were actually sold this year. I sold 1 paperback my first year and 11 my second year. As of right now, in just 2014, I've sold 48 paperbacks and that's not including the ones I bought and then gave away to people.



As for my best sellers, I have one book that has sold over 200 copies and two that have sold over 100. Here's the breakdown of my Top 5 Bestsellers:

Constantine: The Emperor of Tolerance
203 copies sold as of 9/30/2014

Caribbean Piracy: Pirates and Privateers
111 copies sold as of 9/30/2014

Horror Stories from a Computer Tech
103 copies sold as of 9/30/2014

Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate
87 copies sold as of 9/30/2014

Jehovah and Hades: Books 1-3
56 copies sold as of 9/30/2014






The book covers above are linked to the ebook version on Amazon. The Top 4 have gained a considerable boost because of the audio books they have sold. Jehovah and Hades: Books 1-3 has made it to 56 on nothing but e-book sales (also this is just the three book collection version. If I included individual sales of each title plus the collection, it would be over 100). The somewhat interesting thing is that three of these titles still have no reviews on Amazon. Horror Stories From A Computer Tech has 18 reviews and Explanations and Advice For The Tech Illiterate has 9 reviews, but the other three have none.

As of now, the most books I've sold in a single month is 70 (and that was October 2014 so those numbers are not included in my first 1000 sales). October broke down to 43 e-books, 17 audio books, and 10 paperbacks. It's really nice to be able to have a little extra side income while I'm in law school and working a part-time IT job. So to everyone who has purchased one of my books, left a nice review on one of my books, or shared one of my books with a friend... thank you! Writing fiction and non-fiction has been a very entertaining hobby and I still continue to write when I get small amounts of time in between homework and other things that are currently draining my life.

Reinvesting Author Royalties In The Books That Earned Them: History Articles

Since new covers added sales to my travel photo books (and then to my tech illiterate books), I decided to finish out my non-fiction book re-branding by having the covers for my history articles redone. I kept the original images and handed them over to Elizabeth Mackey (again) for more professional looking covers. Here are the six new book covers (and they're linked to their Amazon pages):



Constantine: The Emperor of Tolerance

Constantine has now sold over 200 copies if you combine sales from all formats. I considered buying a new image but ultimately decided that it sold pretty well as it was, so all I really needed was a better looking title and a more uniform location for my author name (you'll notice my author name is now in the same location and font on all of my non-fiction titles.) I decided to follow suit with all of my history articles.

Caribbean Piracy: Pirates and Privateers

Caribbean Piracy just broke into triple digit sales not that long ago, becoming my second history article to sell more than 100 copies. I still really like this image. It features a monkey mask I got in Hawaii, a shark-tooth dagger I got at the Polynesian cultural center, and a dagger I had made in the Philippines. The monkey mask was brightened up a bit for the current version of the cover.

The Mormon Theocracy

The Mormon Theocracy is unique among my history articles. It has no subtitle and it actually contains two history articles instead of one (one on the early Mormon theocracy in Utah and a second article on Gregory Palamas, the Orthodox monk, and his thoughts on God.) Since it was hit by a 1 star review from someone who never read it, it has recovered to become my most reviewed history article and has had a decent number of sales this year.

Luther Standing Bear: Assimilation

Luther Standing Bear features an Igorot shield and spear that I purchased in Maharlika (in Baguio when I was last in the Philippines.) I wanted it badly enough that I didn't negotiate very aggressively for it but it also slightly hurt my negotiating stance that I could only find it in one shop. This article received it's first five star review this year and has sold the second most paperbacks of any of my history articles for 2014 (the award for most paperbacks sold this year goes to Constantine as of right now.)

Prayer: Archangels and Intercessory Beings

Prayer was hit by a one star review at the same time The Mormon Theocracy was (by the same crazy lady who never bothered to read it.) I made it free for a while to get some more reviews and it currently has a 3 star rating overall with 6 reviews. The praying Mary and Joseph carvings are a part of a nativity set I purchased in Baguio. Now that it's back at an average rating, I've set it to eventually go back to it's original price. I'm not sure when exactly that will happen.

Gateway to the Vikings: L'Anse aux Meadows

After some decent sales in 2013, my article on the Vikings who explored North America was hit with a two star review. It's currently set to free through all major e-book retailers. Vikings has actually done better via Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and Apple as a freebie than it has through Amazon (which is unusual.) It still only has the one two star review on Amazon, claiming that this article doesn't tell you where L'Anse aux Meadows is and that all of the info in it is available for free. He's right about his first point (I assume people know how to use Google) but way off on his second point. Many of the articles I referenced in this article are only available via JSTOR (a paid subscription site for history articles.) If you're looking for an interesting read and grab this one as a freebie, please consider leaving a review if you learn from it or enjoy it.

I've also gone to a more uniform pricing format for my history articles. Making $0.70 per copy sold wasn't working very well and Amazon's new price analysis tool recommended that I change the price to $2.99 on all of my articles based on data collected from other non-fiction titles similar to mine (Constantine was already at that price and outselling all of the others.) I went with their data and moved the price to $2.99 on all of them except for Vikings, which is currently free. I still don't know what I'm going to do with the five article collection, so I've let it keep it's original cover for now and stay at a $4.99 price point until I figure out what to do with it.

2014 Book Sales (so far) Closing in on 2013 Final Numbers

I have to keep this brief because I'm going to Salt Lake early today to get my law school books (or at least as many of them as I can get.) July e-book numbers came through for Amazon yesterday so I was able to update my book sales numbers. I have final numbers on e-books (including Apple, B&N, Kobo, and Scribd) through July, paperbacks through July, and audio books through June (those tend to lag a little behind the other numbers updates.) All of those added up puts me at 341 book sales, which puts me only 31 sales away from matching last year's total of 372. I should be able to break that by the end of this month which means 500 sales for 2014 is a real possibility, but I'll beat last year's total for sure. Here are the top ten books that got me to this point in 2014 (and they're all linked to Amazon, so if any of them look interesting it would really help me out if you spend a few dollars and get one you don't have yet):



Horror Stories From A Computer Tech
53 sales (10 e-book, 43 audio book)

Traveling the U.S.: East Coast History
36 sales (32 e-book, 1 borrow, 3 paperback)

Jehovah and Hades: Books 1-3
35 sales (33 e-book, 2 borrows)

Constantine: The Emperor of Tolerance
29 sales (15 e-book, 4 borrows, 4 audio book, 6 paperback)

Geek of Legend: The Elvish Screwdriver
29 sales (7 e-book, 1 borrow, 21 audio book)

Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate
23 sales (13 e-book, 7 audio book, 3 paperback)

The Mormon Theocracy
19 sales (13 e-book, 4 audio book, 2 paperback)

Caribbean Piracy: Pirates and Privateers
17 sales (6 e-book, 2 borrows, 8 audio book, 1 paperback)

Minor Demons
16 sales (15 e-book, 1 paperback)

Luther Standing Bear: Assimilation
12 sales (7 e-book, 1 audio book, 4 paperback)

Thanks once again to anyone who has purchased or reviewed any of these for me. The small amount I make from selling books is about to become a lot more important as I take on massive debt to go to law school and drop my work hours to part time.

The Journals of Jacob and Hyde Audio Book is Now Live!

It spent nearly a year in production. My narrator, Tobias Ezra Queen, hired out three smaller character parts (out of his own pocket) so the audio book also features Jenn Henry, Rish Outfield, and Big Anklevich. It's probably the best fiction audio book I have available as of right now and at 2 hours and 22 minutes, it's definitely the longest.

As of today, the book is now available at Amazon, Audible.com, and iTunes. The e-book is a free download through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, and many other ebook retailers. If you have the e-book, the audio book is a great add-on. I promise. Links to the audio book below:

The Journals of Jacob and Hyde on Amazon

The Journals of Jacob and Hyde on Audible

The Journals of Jacob and Hyde on iTunes

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.

A General Technology Rule: The Weakest Link

It's been a while since I posted some tech advice on my blog, so I decided to take a chapter from Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate Volume II and post it here. I'm hoping this changes the way people think about how they set things up because even the salesmen at your local electronics store constantly mess up systems by allowing one piece of the video, audio, or wireless chain to be weaker than the others, resulting in a downgrade of the entire system.

A GENERAL TECHNOLOGY RULE: THE WEAKEST LINK

In Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate, I covered different cable types and what that means in terms of resolution. As a brief refresher, resolution is the number of pixels (or little dots) on a screen. It’s length x width. These can be expressed as different resolutions (480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p.) In order to achieve the maximum resolution possible, however, everything in the system must support that resolution. Let’s think of you watching a movie as a chain of events. In order to watch a movie in 1080p (roughly 2.1 million pixels), you’ll need the following:

-A blu-ray disc

-A blu-ray player

-A TV that supports 1080p

-An HDMI cable connected from the blu-ray player to the TV.

If I change any of the items listed above, the movie will be displayed in the lowest resolution of the items I listed. Our chain currently looks like this:

Blu-ray disc (1080p) > Blu-ray player (1080p) > HDMI cable (1080p) > 1080p TV (1080p)

Let’s say I don’t have an HDMI cable so I just use the composite cables (red, white, and yellow cables) that came in the box with the blu-ray player. Our chain now looks like this:

Blu-ray disc (1080p) > Blu-ray player (1080p) > Composite cables (480i) > 1080p TV (1080p)

That chain will result in a picture on the TV that’s 480i. I used to set up TVs for people and sometimes they bought all new equipment and no one told them to get a cable to support the high definition experience they wanted. Sometimes I would meet people who had a blu-ray player and an HDMI cable but their TV was 720p. Keep in mind that whatever the lowest resolution in your chain is, that’s what your picture is going to be.

Here’s another good example dealing with wireless internet speeds and range. A wireless internet network can be broadcast by a box called a wireless router. As technology has progressed, wireless routers have evolved through different types of wireless networks, each one having a greater range (you can be father from the router and still connect to the internet) and better speed than the wireless networks that came before it. It progressed like this (from oldest to most current):
A > B > G > N > AC

An AC wireless network currently is the fastest and has the greatest range. The thing that the salesmen in the stores didn’t seem to initially understand is that an AC router is only part of the chain. Your device has a wireless card that connects it to the router. So let’s say your laptop computer has a wireless G network card built in and you’re having issues with speed and with connecting to the internet when you’re in your backyard. If you went into the store, I know a lot of salesmen who would recommend that you buy a wireless AC router and assure you that would fix all of your problems. What they don’t understand is that:

Your laptop (wireless G) + AC wireless router (wireless AC) = wireless G

The AC router is going to operate as if it were a wireless G router, meaning you’ll get the speed and range of a wireless G network. To fix the chain above so that your network performs with AC range and speed, you would need a wireless AC USB adapter. Once you plug in a wireless AC USB adapter into a USB port on your computer and turn off your computer’s built in wireless G network card, the chain would be like this:
Your laptop with USB adapter (wireless AC) + AC wireless router (wireless AC) = wireless AC

So to break this down into its simplest terms, make sure everything you connect together in a system is capable of doing the same speed, resolution, or whatever else as all of the other components. The weakest link in your system will determine how the system performs overall. I know this sounds like common sense, but you would be surprised how many times even people who are supposed to know what they’re doing forget about one of the parts of the chain we talked about here.

For more technology advice and explanations, you can check out the two volumes in the Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate series on Amazon:
Volume I: Available in e-book, paperback, and audio book
Volume II: Available in e-book and paperback

Free Books: The Cost Of Doing Business For An Unknown Author

I had a lot of fun gathering all of the book sales numbers for 2012 and 2013. I track them throughout the year when the final numbers become available (so usually monthly.) Lately I've also been curious how many free books I've given away.

When I was a lot younger, I thought it would be the coolest thing ever to publish and sell books. Back in second and third grade I filled an entire notebook with short horror stories roughly based on The Nightmare Before Christmas. Back then, I never thought about money. I just thought it would be cool to have my books out there for other people to read.

Now I'm older and quite a bit more greedy than I was as a third grader. I need this author hobby thing to be making me some money. I still have a desire to have my books out there and being read worldwide but that's taking a backseat to the passive income I hope to generate from ebooks, audio books, and paperbacks. Still, my social media outreach is only so large and to get any kind of sales coming in from people I don't know, it makes sense to turn to free giveaways. Giving away my books for free generally expands my reach to new potential paying customers, gives me a chance to get reviews, and fulfills the wish I've had for a long time to just have my books read.

I decided I wanted to find out exactly how many free books I've given away since 2012. In 2012, I made one of my history articles permanently free in the hope that people would read it and maybe look at my other history articles. It had also been hit by a one star review, so I figured maybe it could get some better reviews if I offered it as a freebie. I added another permafree book, The Journals of Jacob and Hyde, later on and eventually turned The Mormon Theocracy back into a paid article and let another history article have a chance to be the permafreebie for a while.

Here are my free giveaway numbers for 2012:

So in order to sell the 157 books I sold and expand my reach, I gave away nearly 4,000 ebooks in 2012. That's just via Amazon. I gave away another couple hundred through the other ebook retailers as well. Caribbean Piracy: Pirates and Privateers and Constantine: The Emperor of Tolerance, the ebooks that had the largest giveaways, were also my best sellers for 2012.

Now for 2013:

In 2013, I sold 372 books. I gave away 8,246 ebooks for free via Amazon plus a few hundred through the other ebook retailers. Over half of them were The Journals of Jacob and Hyde which helps explain why my Jehovah and Hades series is doing a lot better this year.

By January 1, 2014, I had given away 12,245 free ebooks through Amazon worldwide. I doubt I'd be selling hundreds without those free copies. I know authors who pay to be featured in email blasts that give away tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands. It works really well for boosting sales if the first book in a series is free. From The Journals of Jacob and Hyde, I generally see about 2-3% of readers go on and purchase the rest of the series. Fortunately, that makes me more money than when I had The Journals of Jacob and Hyde priced at $1.99. For a series, free downloads of the first book are kind of like a funnel. You want to give away as many as you can if you can maintain a steady percentage of readers who go on and buy the rest of the series.

So for my old third grade wish of just wanting my books to be read, I added in the free numbers from the other outlets. As of January 1, 2014, I had given away 12,838 ebooks worldwide. If you add in my ebook, audio book, and paperback sales for 2012 and 2013 it becomes 13,367. Not bad for an unknown author who hasn't had a chance to use any of the email blast services yet. If I could go back in time and tell myself that I would have 13,000+ books out in the world by the time I'm 28, I'm not sure I would believe myself. :-P

If you have one or a few of those 13,367 books on your phone, tablet, in audio, or in paperback, please consider leaving a review after reading it (especially if you enjoyed it.) I've sold nearly 200 in 2014 so far and I've had to give away a lot less to reach that point because my name is starting to get out there. Reviews help me out a lot.

I guess the last thing I wanted to say is thank you to all of my readers. While I always dreamed about being an author, I thought it would stay a dream. Getting a contract in the traditional publishing world used to be a nightmare. Technology has brought us to a point where an ebook revolution can take place and knock the gatekeepers of books on their asses. I'd also like to thank Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, and all the other companies that give self-published authors like me a chance to compete. As long as the opportunity is available and I can make a little bit of money doing this, I'll keep writing.