Sales report update

Royalty statement from Entangled came today and I am both a bit disappointed and quite encouraged.

The Christmas story sold 230 copies in just over 10 weeks in Dec, Jan and Feb. The Valentines story sold 293 copies in the last 2 weeks of Feb. I haven’t got the sales figures for March, April and May yet, but I’m pretty sure that the Valentine story sold well throughout March and April. So for the payment period to the end of February, I sold 527 books, which is at the lower end of the ballpark I’d been hoping for, but not too far off. What’s really encouraging, obviously, is the sales for the Valentines story, and I’d love to know how many of those I’ve sold in total.

The contract for these short stories has two royalty rates, depending on where the book is bought, because of the high cut that some retailers take for low priced items. At Amazon, for instance, 70c of the 99c purchase price goes to Amazon. I get 20c from sales made there. For sales at some other retailers I get 40c. I had been hoping for a fairly even split between the 20c and 40c purchases, but in fact only a small handful (about 20 copies in total) got the 40c rate. So the total royalty amount is less than I’d been hoping for, but now I know to only expect the 20c royalties and count any 40c royalties as a bonus. With the title coming out in July, the price point is $2.99 which means that Amazon take only 30% cut, so all the copies sold will be at the 40% rate for me, i.e. $1.20 per copy.

I am not yet ready to retire on my royalties, but I’m excited to see real money appearing and I’m confident that the amounts involved will only continue to grow.