Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 92

10,000 audiobooks!

I am pleased to report that as of this week, I have sold my 10,000th self-published audiobook! Thanks for listening, everyone!

To be fair, I don’t know exactly how many audiobooks I’ve sold, since there’s no good way to collate that data without taking a week or two off from writing to do it. For that matter, there are some definition questions – does a library checkout count as a sale? Or a Scribd listen? And I get 6x from a Chirp audiobook sale as I do from a Scribd listen, so does six Scribd listens equal one Chirp sale?

But I have officially sold 10,000 audiobooks through ACX, which is Audible, Apple, and Amazon. My bestselling individual audiobook is FROSTBORN: THE DARK WARDEN, and my bestselling collection edition is THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE.

I would like to thank the narrators I’ve worked with over the last four and a half years – Meghan Kelly, Hollis McCarthy, Madison Niederhauser, and Brad Wills – for all their excellent narration. Working with them to create great audiobooks has been an excellent experience.

That said, I should note that while creating the audiobooks is a great experience, selling them is an uphill slog. There’s no way around it – audiobooks are hard to sell! To put that into context, in the span of time it took me to get to 10,000 audiobook sales (starting in October 2018), I sold somewhere around 700,000 ebooks and had about 16.4 million Kindle Unlimited page reads from my various KU experiments.

But that’s okay. I’m good at uphill slogs. I’ve written 200,000 words so far this year. Last week I ran a total of 21 miles in hopes of losing weight. Uphill slog is my default mode of operation.

I should also note that across four and a half years, I’ve turned a very small profit on audiobooks – I haven’t lost money on them. That said, laying aside all artistic considerations and looking at it with cold-eyed business logic, the biggest advantage I get from audiobooks is that the production cost can be deducted as a business expense. Obviously I am not a CPA or a financial planner, and if you need financial advice, you should hire a qualified CPA or a financial planner versed in the laws of your nation, state/province, and municipality. For my situation, a legitimate business expense that also creates a revenue-producing asset is a great thing. I could spend more money on advertising or new covers for a deduction, but that’s less likely to generate revenue the way audiobooks do.

However, if you’re unprepared, it’s easy to lose a whole lot of money on audiobook production. I don’t want to puncture anyone’s artistic dreams, but it’s best to go into audiobook production with a clear-eyed grasp of the situation, or at the very least a solid business plan.

But I suppose if selling 10,000 audiobooks was easy, everyone would do it.

That is true of all endeavors. Selling 10,000 audiobooks sounds impressive, but there was a lot of time and effort behind it. Brandon Sanderson’s recent mega-Kickstarter ($17.3 million dollars as of when I’m writing this on March 2nd) is a much, much larger example of that phenomenon. On the surface, it sounds like “put up a Kickstarter link out of nowhere, get $17 million dollars!”, but there was a huge amount of effort behind it. From what I understand, Sanderson basically has a warehouse with a team of 30 people working on the Kickstarter, and they’ve spent years developing the infrastructure for this kind of thing. Granted, I don’t have a warehouse and a team of 30 people, and I really wouldn’t want them, either – thinking about the logistical and management challenges involved with fulfilling pledges for 68,000 backers makes my blood pressure spike.

Nevertheless, it was still a lot of work to reach the milestone of 10,000 audiobooks sold.

But it was enjoyable work! Thanks again for listening, everyone, and I’m excited that new audiobooks will be coming soon – FROSTBORN: THE DRAGON KNIGHT, CLOAK OF IRON, CLOAK MAGE OMNIBUS ONE, and GHOST EXILE OMNIBUS TWO.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES table of contents!

I am far enough along in DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES to share the table of contents, which you can see below!

If all goes well (always a dangerous assumption!), the book should be out next week. Be sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can get a free ebook copy of THE FIRST WARLOCK when BLADE OF THE ELVES comes out!

-JM

Prequels vs short stories

I had some nice comments about my podcast this week (thanks everyone!) and one of the commentors seemed puzzled at my dislike of prequels, pointing out that I had in fact written several prequels.

That is true – I have written a couple of prequel books. BLADE OF THE GHOSTS is a short prequel novel for Caina that I give away to my newsletter subscribers, and FROSTBORN: THE FIRST QUEST is a prequel for the entire FROSTBORN series. For that matter, FROSTBORN: THE SKULL QUEST is also a FROSTBORN prequel, and anyone who signs up for my newsletter gets that for free as well. That said, I wrote all those some years ago, and I doubt I would write another prequel book.

Why not?

Prequels always seem like a distraction from the main plot. Like, imagine you need to paint your front porch. So you go into the garage to get paint and brushes. But while you’re in there, you decide to reorganize the garage. Eventually, you get the garage organized, but the front porch remains unpainted.

Writing prequels when the main series remains unfinished feels a bit like that. At its worst, it can turn into an exercise in navel-gazing instead of advancing the main plot.

That said, I do write short stories fairly frequently that could count as prequels. THE FIRST SORCERESS is sort of a prequel that contains the origin story of Azalmora, the main villain of the DRAGONSKULL series. THE PROPHECY OF THE HIGH QUEEN is essentially a prequel for the entire CLOAK GAMES/MAGE series.

So why am I contradicting myself? What gives?!?

I view the short stories as sort of “bonus scenes on a DVD.” Like, sometimes you see bonus scenes on a DVD and you think, yeah, they made the right call to delete that. But a good bonus scene can give insight into the plot and characters you might not have had otherwise.

I once joked that the plot of all my short stories were basically “Caina Goes On A Side Quest, Sometimes With Friends”, which I think is fair. The short stories are intended as a nice bonus, one that you can read if you want, but you don’t have to in order to follow the main plot of the books.

And I do have a very practical reason for giving away short stories – newsletter engagement! Email marketing is hard because a lot of newsletters get marked as spam. But the more people who click on links in my newsletter, the higher its engagement score, and the less likely it will be marked as spam. Giving away free short stories is a great way to get link clicks.

So, I don’t like writing prequels, but I view short stories as free bonus material for newsletter subscribers that has the nice bonus of keeping my newsletter out of fewer spam folders.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 110: 3 Techniques For Starting Your Novel & Introducing The Conflict

In this week’s episode, we take a look at three different methods for starting your novel and introducing the central conflict.

And since it’s a new year (well, it was two months ago, anyway), it’s time for new cover art for the show!

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM

progress updates

It’s the last day of February, so let’s have a progress update!

I am working on the main edit of DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES. On track to have it out sometime in March!

If you subscribe to my newsletter, you’ll get a free ebook copy of THE FIRST WARLOCK when BLADE OF THE ELVES comes out, and you can see the cover below.

I’m on Chapter 2 of 23 of CLOAK OF SHARDS.

And some good audiobook news! I am listening to proof chapters of FROSTBORN: THE DRAGON KNIGHT. If all goes well that should be out before too much longer.

-JM

Free books follow-up

Following my free books blog post earlier this month, a few writers mentioned to me that they were hesitant to give away books for free.

I get that, I really do.

Like, yesterday I gave away free ebook copies of FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT, FROSTBORN: THE FIRST QUEST, CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, GHOST IN THE RING, CLOAK GAMES: THIEF TRAP, SILENT ORDER: IRON HAND, THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS, and SEVENFOLD SWORD: CHAMPION yesterday across the various ebook stores. Combined, that ads up to just about 613,000 words, which is like six months’ work for me if I don’t slack off too much.

So, I can give away six months’ worth of work in a single day. That kind of boggles the mind if you think about it too hard.

But, of course, the point of giving away the free books is that people buy the sequels. As of this morning, for the month of February 2022 I’ve actually sold 3.41 times as many ebooks as I’ve given away for free.

So, I think that shows free books work in indie publishing, especially if you write really long series like I do. Granted, I can see why people flinch from it, because while it’s a simple approach, it’s not an easy one – FROSTBORN took four years to write, and I started writing the first Caina books in 2007 – but it does work in the long run.

Thanks for reading, everyone! It’s always nice to see how many people started with one of the free books and are still hanging around years later.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES progress update

THE FIRST WARLOCK  rough draft is done (newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of the short story when the book comes out), and so now it’s full speed ahead on editing DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES.

If all goes well, the book should be out sometime in March.

In other news, I finished Chapter 1 of CLOAK OF SHARDS, and once BLADE OF THE ELVES is out, that will be my next main project.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES, a short excerpt

Let’s have a short excerpt from DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES!

“Sir Gareth, Sir Philip, Sir Crake, and Sir Jerome,” said Moriah. “They’re coming to see you, so there’s bound to be trouble.”

“There’s God’s own truth,” said Niall. “I suppose we should be grateful there are no taverns along the coast road where you can corrupt the Prince’s character further.”

Gareth suppressed a scowl, but Crake laughed. “Begging my lady’s pardon, but we don’t go looking for trouble. It just seems to find us very easily.”

Gareth found that he could not disagree.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 109: Reader Question About DRAGONSKULL

In this week’s episode, I answer a reader question about the DRAGONSKULL series. I also discuss novel length and new ways of sending free short stories to my newsletter subscribers.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES rough draft done!

I am pleased to report that the rough draft of DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES is done!

It turned out to be exactly the same length as DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE.

Next up is THE FIRST WARLOCK, which will be a short story I give away to my newsletter subscribers when DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES comes out. THE FIRST WARLOCK will be the origin story for one of the new villains who appears in BLADE OF THE ELVES.

Meanwhile, let’s see the cover for BLADE OF THE ELVES! The book should be out in March if all goes well (always a dangerous assumption).

-JM