What's a self-published indie novel really worth?

I spent part of this weekend catching up on the last seven months' worth of statistics and sales, and number crunching to find out where I am in terms of an early retirement plan. Hmm. Sadly, I'm nowhere near it yet. I'll have to write a LOT more books before I can give up my day job. That's okay, because writing a lot more books is what I intend anyway. The question is, how many more will I need to write before I can retire?

I suppose first you have to ask yourself what you call a decent amount to retire on. Everyone will have a different opinion on this, and it will depend on several factors like whether your house is paid off, if your spouse works or not, what kind of lifestyle you lead, and so on. But let's just pluck a figure from the air. Let's say $25,000 a year from book sales. Okay, that's not enough for someone to quit his day job, but it's not that black and white for me, because I wouldn't just give up my website business all at once; I'd keep it going with existing clients but maybe stop taking on new work, and let it peter off over many years. So I'd have residual income from that and a few other things I have going on in the background. So $25,000 is not really a "give up your day job" target, but it works for me.

Currently, though, I'm a long way off. I've always appreciated when authors are transparent about their sales, whether they're earning hundreds of thousands a year, or just a few hundred. It's interesting to me to matter what. So here we go with mine. Look at the previous three years, 2013-2015:

2013 $11,920.00 -- Amazon Digital Services $191.54 -- Barnes & Noble $140.41 -- CreateSpace $418.91 -- Draft2Digital Total $12,670.86 2014 $11,290.52 -- Amazon Digital Services $522.78 -- Barnes & Noble $369.09 -- CreateSpace $828.27 -- Draft2Digital Total $13,010.66 2015 $9,976.00 -- Amazon Digital Services $368.42 -- Audible.com $377.97 -- Barnes & Noble $780.46 -- CreateSpace $1,263.52 -- Draft2Digital Total $12,766.37

Based on how books were selling, 2015 was actually looking to be more like $16,000 in total... but something happened around May that year. My sales dropped from an average of 280 per month to a puzzling 134 per month. It wasn't a gradual decline. If you looked a sales graph, you'd see a steady, horizontal line for several years, then a sudden drop in May 2015, then a new steady, horizontal line a little lower down. It's puzzling. What happened? I did a lot of googling at the time, and I found lots of authors had been affected, so I can only assume Amazon "did something." (It's always Amazon's fault, right?)

The previous horizontal sales line was so steady and consistent that I could look ahead to the future and figure out exactly how many more books I would need to replace the income from new website design business. Well, I guess I can still do that... only now the landscape is a little greyer. Here's the figures SO FAR from 2016 (as at the end of August):

2016 (Jan-Aug) $3,583.28 -- Amazon Digital Services $154.04 -- Audible.com $96.32 -- Barnes & Noble $539.52 -- CreateSpace $394.64 -- Draft2Digital Total $4,755.36

If you extrapolate from that, I would expect this year's total to be around $7,200.00, which is significantly lower than it might have been a couple of years ago. Slightly less than half by my reckoning. Ugh.

I can't complain, though. And if I did, where would it get me? According to statistics, 90-95% of authors make less than a $100 a year on their books, with the remaining few percent making hundreds of thousands. The market is saturated with new authors. I'm lucky to be making what I am, and I know it. The thing about a novel is that you pour months of hard work into creating it, and for what? A few hundred bucks a year? Maybe so. But it's potentially a few hundred bucks a year forever, and when you have a large library of books, that can make a significant difference in your old age.

And don't forget, there's always the chance that a series will suddenly find its footing and take off, and then a few hundred dollars per book might turn into something far greater. That's what authors strive and hope for.

In the meantime, anyone wanting to "earn a quick buck with a quick book"... forget it!

So, based on these recent sales figures, let's figure out how many more books I need to write to make that target of $25,000 a year. Well, since I'm probably less than a third of the way there, obviously I need to triple my library, right? I have 19 books out now, or 20 including the Island of Fog omnibus -- which means I need to write another 40 books or so.

Gulp.

If I publish 4 books a year, which is doable, that's another ten years of writing before I can stop taking on new website clients and just maintain my existing sites. If my sales hadn't halved the way they did last year, I could look forward to only five more years of writing instead of ten. But there you go.

Maybe I need to be smart about what I write going forward. Let's break this down and see what each book is actually worth:

Island of Fog -- $840 per year for each new book Sleep Writer -- $100 per year for each new book Island of Fog Chronicles -- $102 per year for each new book Island of Fog Legacies -- $363 per year for each new book

It's difficult to get calculations exactly right for a variety of reasons. Naturally, over the past 12 months, I've sold more Island of Fog Book 2 ($1236) than Books 2-9 ($953-$840 each), so I've based the above figures on the most recent book in the series, which will always logically be the lowest earner. Same with Sleep Writer and Island of Fog Legacies. The Chronicles are different, because they're independent, so I took a mean average of the two.

Still, you can clearly see which books are my bread-winners. The original Island of Fog books continue to earn the most by far. I think the Legacies books will pick up traction as the series grows, and I'm happy with the Chronicles books because they're fairly short and simple to create. But I'm disappointed with interest in the Sleep Writer series, which I had planned to write more of. I probably still will, but when you look at numbers like these and have to decide between writing a Legacies book for $363 a year or a Sleep Writer book for $100 a year... well, you know.

And as for the main Island of Fog series, I have to admit I'm tempted to write Book 10. Sales for those books is pretty consistent throughout the 9-book series, and it seems almost guaranteed that a Book 10 would be worth another $840 a year, and so on.

But should I write it simply because it earns more? Well, not if I couldn't do it justice -- except that I'm I know I could. I stopped writing those books only because I felt I'd told Hal's story and wanted a change of scene for a year or two. I've now had that change of scene, and I could go back to that series and continue with it, perhaps a year after Castle of Spells or something like that.

If I wrote ONLY Island of Fog books from now on, and they each earned the same amount of money as the others ($840 per year), then I'd need to write another 21 of them to reach my $25,000 a year. At 4 books a year, that would be five years of work. So that's a bit more promising!

Or I could continue with the Legacies books and also add a few Chronicles here and there.

Or all of the above.

Whichever way I look at it, at the current rate of sales I'd need to write part-time for at least another 5-10 years before I even think about turning away website work. Of course, it wouldn't happen that way. It'd be a gradual process, steadily more writing time versus less website design time, and more writing time would mean more books per year and more book sales, etc. And sales could increase or decrease at any time. It's all so unpredictable that this kind of number crunching only gives me the vaguest glimpse of what's around the corner.

But none of it really matters. I can't imagine life without writing.

What on earth would I do with my spare time?