In Search of Revenue - How I made money in 2009 as an indie writer
Friday, January 1, 2010 at 03:01PM Here at JoshCovington.com, we believe in total transparency. That's why I've decided to share my most and least successful revenue streams as an indie fiction writer for 2009. My hope is that others out there can use this information to better educate themselves on what works and what doesn't and focus their efforts accordingly. So here we go.
As expected, paperback sales of In Search of Monsters ruled the roost. It makes sense, since I pushed the paperback here and on other sites harder than anything else. Not too bad considering up until a week ago, the book was available exclusively on this site. Digital downloads in their various forms did pretty well for me too, though Smashwords has been a little bit of a let down so far. Those ebook listings are now up on BN.com and other premium sites though, so I expect those numbers will spike when I get my next quarterly sales report from them.
Biggest surprise
Kindle Sales
I didn't expect a lot from Kindle sales mostly because I wasn't sure how reader's would find my work in the giant haystack that is the Kindle store. But thanks to a post-Christmas surge, it didn't do too badly at all, especially considering I only launched the book and a few individual stories there a month or so ago. Because they're the early adopters and prosumers of the literature world, Kindle users are some of the best readers to reach, so every one that does stumble across my work is awesome. Now if only Amazon didn't take a 65% bite out of every sale...
Biggest disappointments
Direct downloads
I had hoped that more people would choose to download individual stories direct from this site to sample some of my work. So far, that hasn't really been the case. I use Ejunkie to host the downloads and handle the credit card transactions. They don't take a commission but charge a flat monthly fee instead. If those downloads don't pick up in the next few weeks to start covering that fee though, the download page may just go away completely. No huge loss since readers can still download those stories in almost every digital and ebook format imaginable over at Smashwords.
Scribd
I was really excited when I found and joined Scribd. The response to my writing was great and I immediately assumed that sales through their premium storefront would be significant. I turned out to be very wrong. To date, sales through Scribd have totaled exactly $0. I'm sure there's value there as a marketing and networking tool, but as a revenue stream, it's a big, smelly fail.
So there you go. Next week, I'll be posting my biggest driver's of blog traffic for 2009. Happy New Year!
Reader Comments (1)
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