From Rags to Riches on the Kindle: Monthly sales and earnings breakdown from June 2010-January 2011.
By Mike Jastrzebski
It has been a little over seven months since I began my journey to self-publication on the Kindle. When I decided to self-publish my books as e-books I figured that if I could sell 10 books a week I'd make around $1000.00 a year (my e-books sell at $2.99 each). It's not much but Mary is retiring next month and I will begin collecting my social security in June. We are going to fulfill our dream of going cruising on our sailboat and I figured an extra thousand a year would be a nice little supplement to what we will have coming in.
My first book, The Storm Killer, went live on June 27th, 2010. I sold 2 copies in those final days of June and it looked like my initial estimates might be right on. Then July came and a funny thing happened, I sold 94 books and made $185.15. I thought, hey, if I could do that every month it would be like having a small pension to supplement our retirement. I was starting to get excited about the whole e-book thing.
I wasn't quite sure what to expect in August because I was adding a second book to the mix. On August
10th, Key Lime Blues (A Wes Darling Mystery)
went live. In August I sold 381 copies of The Storm Killer and 166 copies of Key Lime Blues (A Wes Darling Mystery) and earned $1059.57. Now I figured if I could keep doing this it would be a real boost to our retirement–but it wasn't quite that easy. Here's a breakdown of my sales and earnings for the last five months. For the sake of convenience I will refer to The Storm Killer as SK and Key Lime Blues as KLB.
September sales- SK sold 263 copies and KLB sold 199 copies, (462 total) and earned $826.72.
October sales- SK sold 336 copies and KLB sold 152 copies, (488 total) and earned $933.23.
November sales- SK sold 179 copies and KLB sold 152 copies, (293 total) and earned $561.05.
Decenber sales- SK sold 168 copies and KLB sold 203 copies, (371 total) and earned $721.70.
January sales- SK sold 329 copies and KLB sold 449 copies, (778 total) and earned $1540.31.
Over this time period I also sold 10 e-books on Smashwords, 8 on the Barnes and Noble site, plus 3 copies of KLB and 2 copies of SK in paperback. That's right. In January I made both books available as trade paperbacks and they can be ordered at Amazon for $12.95. Here are the links: Order The Storm Killer in paperback
or Order Key Lime Blues in paperback.
If you're curious I've sold 70 copies of SK and 118 copies of KLB already in February plus 2 SK and 1 KLB in paperback. So if you're wondering if self-publishing on the Kindle works, I'm here to tell you it does, and not just for me. There are dozens of authors out there who are selling five or ten times as many books as I'm selling right now.
Keep in mind that prior to self-publishing on the Kindle I had never published a book. In fact, if you had Googled my name back in March of 2010 before I started the blog http://www.writeonthewater.com, you would not have found me. So if you're unpublished and have a good, well-edited book you want to publish, or a published author thinking of putting up your backlist, I'm here to tell you that there's gold in them there hills.
So if you're thinking of e-publishing, what's really holding you back? I'd like to hear your reasons for waiting.
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