Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 119

DEMONSOULED now back in hardcover!

It’s taken me sixteen years, but DEMONSOULED is back in hardcover!

You can see the new print-on-demand hardcover edition sitting next to the old one in the attached picture.

One of my writing goals for 2021 was to bring more of my books out in hardcover, and I decided to do DEMONSOULED first because occasionally I get questions from people trying to track down the old hardcovers from 2005. I think there were only like a thousand of them printed, so sometimes they’re hard to find. I don’t want people to have to pay ridiculous prices for them, so that’s why I made a new DEMONSOULED hardcover edition.

Eventually, I would like to have all seven DEMONSOULED books in hardcover, but one step at a time.

Right now the hardcover edition is available on Amazon only. I do want to expand so it’s available to be order in local bookstores, but they’re all closed anyway because of the virus, so I’ll probably work on that later in the year.

-JM

GHOST IN THE TALISMAN progress update

Now 81,000 words into the rough draft of GHOST IN THE TALISMAN.

Unless something really goes wrong, I should finish the rough draft next week.

I had basically envisioned this as a “heist” novel, but there are definitely more epic fantasy and thriller elements than I had expected. Looking forward to sharing it with you!

-JM

10,000 words of GHOST IN THE TALISMAN!

Wrote 10,000 words of GHOST IN THE TALISMAN yesterday, for my first 10k word day of 2021.

In 2020 I had twenty-three 10k word days, so we’ll see how many I end up with in 2021!

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 64: Indie Author Ad Strategies For 2021

In this week’s episode, I describe my advertising strategies for 2021.

I also answer reader questions and comments about the FROSTBORN, CLOAK GAMES, and DRAGONTIARNA series.

-JM

Bestselling books of 2020

I thought it would be interesting to go through and look at my bestselling books of 2020. I’ll have to split this post into two categories – first my bestselling individual titles, and then my bestselling Kindle Unlimited books, since they’re essentially exclusive of one another. It will also be interesting to see what percentage of the total the titles reached.

First, my overall bestselling title of 2020 was MALISON: THE COMPLETE SERIES, which came in at 5.67% percentage of the total unit sales.

But that was a box set, so let’s look at individual titles:

1.) DRAGONTIARNA: WRAITHS, 3.3%

2.) DRAGONTIARNA: LEGIONS, 2.87%

3.) DRAGONTIARNA: DEFENDERS, 2.51%

4.) DRAGONTIARNA: GATES, 2.25%

5.) DRAGONTIARNA: CROWNS, 2.18%

6.) DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS, 2.08%

7.) DRAGONTIARNA: THIEVES, 1.83%

8.) GHOST IN THE COUNCIL, 1.58%

9.) SEVENFOLD SWORD: SOVEREIGN, 1.33%

10.) CLOAK OF ASHES, 1.28%

Other high performers were THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE at 2.33%, SEVENFOLD SWORD OMNIBUS ONE at 2.74%, FROSTBORN OMNIBUS ONE at 2.87%, and THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE at 1.44%.

So in 2020, six of my ten bestselling titles were new books, for a total of 13.78% of my book sales coming from titles published in 2020. Clearly I will need to write more books in DRAGONTIARNA, GHOST NIGHT, and CLOAK MAGE in 2021, so it’s just as well that was my plan. It’s also good to have a big backlist, and regular sales on various box sets.

Next up, let’s look at my best-read Kindle Unlimited titles in 2020. KU, as you may know, works on “pages read” rather than units sold. 2020 was my best year ever for KU, and here are my most-read KU titles and their percentages of the KU total:

1.) THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE, 10.2%

2.) DEMONSOULED OMNIBUS ONE, 8%

3.) WRAITHSHARD: SWORD & FLAME, 6.25%

4.) WRAITHSHARD: SIEGE & STORM, 5.1%

5.) WRAITHSHARD: MAGE & KNIGHT, 4.13%

6.) MASK OF THE DEMONSOULED: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY, 3.62%

7.) WRAITHSHARD: PYRE & FORGE, 3.42%

8.) SOUL OF SORCERY, 2.96%

9.) THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS TWO, 2.87%

10.) GHOST EXILE OMNIBUS ONE, 2.71%

Four of the five WRAITHSHARD books, which were released into KU, made the list. WRAITHSHARD: WRATH & BATTLE only came out in the last three weeks of December 2020, so it didn’t really have a lot of time to rack of page reads.

From this, we can learn that 1.) KU really likes new books, since all the WRAITHSHARD books were new in 2020, and 2.) KU really, really likes big box sets like GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE. It helps that GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE has a massive 39 hour long audiobook linked to it, which helped drive page reads and borrows.

I don’t think I will release anything new into KU in 2021, and I’ve started the process of phasing out of it. The biggest problem with KU is that it’s really expensive to advertise in it, whether on Facebook or Amazon ads. It is much more cost effective to advertise permafree first-in-series books and gradually pull people into the series that way. So by the midpoint of 2021, I hope to be entirely out of KU (with WRAITHSHARD available on all ebook platforms) and have more permafree first-in-series books than I previously did.

That said, there might be two exceptions to this plan. First, WRAITHSHARD: SWORD & FLAME is currently in Prime Reading, and the series is firing along nicely. If that doesn’t drop off by the end of its KU term, I might keep it there for longer. The second exception could be something I learn from my bonus 11th writing goal in 2021, PROJECT UPDATE. That will be ready to go in the first week of February, so by the end of February I will know whether or not that would work better in KU or not.

Once again, thanks for reading!

-JM

Sign up for my newsletter and get a free GHOSTS story!

A little preview for February.  As you know, I regularly give away a bonus short story for free to my newsletter subscribers when I publish a new book.  The short story that will accompany GHOST IN THE TALISMAN will be called GHOST EYE, and will be set a few decades before Caina’s birth and describe the necromancer Maglarion’s attempt to seize the Ring of Rasarion Yagar for himself.  Spoiler alert: it really doesn’t go well.  Sign up for my newsletter, and you’ll get GHOST EYE for free when GHOST IN THE TALISMAN comes out!-JM

paperback updates

One of my writing goals for 2021 is to update some of my older paperbacks to a new interior format. The older paperbacks use the default CreateSpace template, which worked well, but CreateSpace no longer exists and better options are now available.

I got the first couple of improved ones today, and I’m very pleased with how they turned out. You can see the difference in the attached picture. The page on the left is from the CreateSpace version, and the page on the right is the new layout. The new version as many improvements – the font is larger, the kerning is better, the spacing is better.

It used to take me the better part of two hours to set up a paperback, but now I can do it in about 5 to 10 minutes. Improvements in technology aren’t always for the worse.

-JM

GHOSTS audiobooks coming to Kobo, Google Play, and libraries

Some interesting news in the world of audiobooks this week – it seems that ACX is revising its exclusivity requirements for audiobooks. Key quote from the announcement:

“We are also making other changes to our ACX policies to provide more flexibility, which we know is important to you. Effective February 1, ACX Rights Holders of DIY or Pay-for-Production titles that have been on sale for 90 or more days can convert their distribution type from exclusive to non-exclusive.”

What that means is that previously ACX required exclusive audiobooks to remain exclusive with them for 7 years, which meant they only showed up on Audible, iTunes, and Amazon. That made sense in the last decade, but there’s a much bigger audio ecosystem than there was even two years ago, and ACX was having Big Problems throughout 2020.

So, starting on February 1, if all goes well I will begin taking the GHOSTS audiobooks wide, which means if you listen on Kobo, Google Play, Chirp, Scribd, certain public library services, and a bunch of other sites, the GHOSTS audiobooks will appear there before much longer. Watch this space for news!

-JM

ebook sales for 2020

It’s January, which means it’s time to look back at ebook sales for 2020.

Overall, ebook sales were down about 9.5% from 2019. Given how many small businesses were wrecked in 2020, I am not going to complain! But my expenses were also down 9.5%, largely because Facebook fell apart before the election, so that balanced out.

Here is how things break down by percentage:

Traditionally Published Audio: 1.85%

Self-Published Audio: 3.85%

Barnes & Noble: 5.35%

Kobo: 7.95%

Apple Books: 10.46%

Google Play: 12.56%

Amazon: 57.98% (9.7% KU, 48.28% direct sales)

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Kobo were all lower than last year. Traditionally published audio, self-published audio, and Apple Books were all up. Barnes & Noble was down slightly, but I think that was only because of the problems with their site getting hacked earlier in the year. Otherwise it would have been almost tied.

Next week I think I’ll do a post about my ten bestselling titles of 2020 and my top 10 Kindle Unlimited titles of 2020.

Thanks for reading, everyone! Hope to have more books to read soon!

-JM

Episode 63: Ebook Sales For 2020

It’s time for Episode 63 of The Pulp Writer Show! In this week’s episode, I take a look back at ebook sales for 2020, and see which platforms sold the most books.

I also answer reader questions, and this is the first episode to use the new cover image for 2021!

-JM