Posts Tagged by faerie blood: royalties
A quick self-pub status check
| April 2, 2013 | Posted by annathepiper under Faerie Blood |
By very rough estimations, I sold somewhere between 330 and 364 copies of Faerie Blood‘s Drollerie edition. I have to estimate this because in my first royalty report from Drollerie, I didn’t get individual sales numbers, and some of that report was covered by the Defiance anthology. So based on how my numbers for both titles were broken out later (i.e., it didn’t sell nearly as well as Faerie Blood did), I’m ballparking somewhere between 330 and 364 for Faerie Blood, with the remainder of that 364 going to Defiance. These numbers span a period running from the book’s original release in May of 2009 up through my last Drollerie statement, which covered up through June of 2011.
As of this writing I have sold a total of 211 copies of Faerie Blood‘s Kickstarter edition in just under a year. So while I haven’t actually surpassed the previous number, this 211 has happened in a shorter time frame.
Assuming that some who bought the Drollerie edition grabbed the Kickstarter version as well, I think it’s safe to say at this point that all told I’ve probably sold around 500 copies of the book. BUT! If you actually count my Kickstarter backers as sales, that runs the number up to more squarely compete with the Drollerie number, I think.
It’ll be amusing to see how this trend continues once Valor of the Healer drops!
Experiences with self-pub so far
| July 1, 2012 | Posted by annathepiper under Faerie Blood, Publishing |
So now that I’ve put Faerie Blood out on three different self-publishing platforms, I thought I’d take a moment to do a summary post of my experiences with those platforms so far. Granted, this is only across a week or so, but it’s at least enough to give me an initial impression. And I figured it’d be nice to share that with y’all so you can get an idea of what self-pubbing is like.
I’ve put the book out on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the Apple iTunes store so far. Here are my thoughts on each in a few different areas:
Speed of book deployment: Amazon wins here, with their promise of roughly a 12-hour window between when you deploy your book and when it shows up on the site. This is not entirely accurate; while my book did start showing up on Amazon sites around the end of that twelve hours, it started showing up on the sites in the Eurozone first (i.e., DE, ES, FR, and IT). It took until the next day before the book had fully deployed to the US and UK stores, and the next day before that before pricing information was available in Canada.
That said? Actually going through Amazon’s process of book deployment was still fastest. Barnes and Noble took a few days before they even approved my account for posting content. Apple took nearly a week for similar approval. Once I was actually cleared to post content to B&N, that did take only about a 24-hour turnaround time, but there was that buffer of approval time first. Ditto for Apple; once I was cleared with them, I had to go through another day or so before my book cleared “quality assurance” and went live on the four iBooks sites I deployed it to.
Ease of book deployment: Amazon and B&N are tied here. I’d already generated MOBI and EPUB files for my Kickstarter backers, so it was pretty much just a question of uploading each to the respective platforms. Amazon gets points for providing a Kindle simulator to let you sanity check how your book will look on different devices–that’s super-helpful. But both Amazon and B&N basically let me upload to them with only minimal conversion.
Apple by comparison was more difficult. For one thing, there’s an added layer of complexity with how you’re required to download a whole extra app in order to prepare your book for deployment to the iTunes store; Amazon and B&N have UI to do that right on their sites. For another, once I actually pulled down the app, it wouldn’t take the EPUB I’d already prepared and threw me several mysterious error messages. I had to Google to figure out why it was complaining, and eventually discovered that Calibre treated my blockquotes on the very first page of the book in a non-standard way. B&N didn’t care about this, but Apple did. Fixing the problem was easy–but finding the solution took some work. It didn’t help that the error messages were entirely non-intuitive, and that I had to spend some time debugging the EPUB file in a third program, the EPUB editor Sigil.
Ease of use of self-pub login: Amazon and B&N are tied for me here too. Both have very clean, very straightforward sites for self-pub authors to log into, and it’s very easy to find the data Most Relevant to Your Interests, i.e., how many books have you sold and how much money are you due? Apple’s site strikes me as cluttered and overly complex in comparison, to levels I historically have seen only out of Microsoft.
Actual sales: And now for that data that is, indeed, Most Relevant to My Interests. Amazon, with ten sales for me on the US site and one on the ES, is the clear winner here. For the small portion of June 2012 I’ve been live, this means I’ve made $39.45 in royalties from the US site and €3.28 from the ES one, which is about $4.15 in USD right now. So that gives me a total of $43.60 or so I’ll be expecting out of Amazon in 60 days.
Barnes and Noble has given me three sales so far, for a total due of $11.67. Again, I should see that in 60 days.
Nothing out of Apple yet.
So that means I should be seeing $55.27 at some point in September. Which is not a terribly impressive number by itself, but given that the book’s only been live for a week and that I’ve done minimal promotion on it, that’s not bad, I think! I could go out to sushi on that, or start the Buy Anna a Real Irish Flute Fund. 
Or maybe the Buy Anna a Macbook Air Fund. I dunno yet. Regardless, it’ll eventually buy me something shiny!
It’ll be interesting to see how the numbers behave the longer Faerie Blood is live, and what happens as well once I deploy Bone Walker and the other, shorter pieces involved with the Kickstarter.
Any questions? Anybody else out there want to share their self-pub experiences? Do so in the comments!
General news and also, word count
| September 6, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Faerie Blood, Valor of the Healer, Vengeance of the Hunter |
|
I’ve finally gotten my next round of royalties for Faerie Blood and Defiance, and I’m not terribly surprised that they are tiny. To all of you out there who have bought copies of these works this year, though, as always, I thank you for your support!
Along with the royalties, though, I have also gotten the news that Drollerie’s agreement for audio versions of our works has dissolved. So, sadly, this means that there will be no audio version of Faerie Blood for now. If I get any further updates about this, I will be sure to pass the word.
Over in the land of Lament of the Dove, there are still open queries on that. A couple are to agents, but the primary one of interest remains to Carina Press. I’m not expecting pings back from the agents at this point since it’s been long enough on those queries that either they’re not getting back to me, or else they’re so backed up that they’re not going to be able to do so in a timely fashion anyway.
My strategy for querying agents is, I think, going to have to change. I’ve been focusing on querying people who accept email submissions, but since I’ve pretty much exhausted the pool of people I’m interested in, I’m going to have to branch out to sending snailmail. And if Carina says no, print partials or fulls of Lament will be going out, too. But I’ll give it a little longer before Operation Paper Querying will have to go into effect.
Shadow of the Rook is the book that has my attention at the moment, just because Lament is the thing with the biggest active query. Like Lament, Shadow is taking its time organically growing in my brain; I’m only just now inching into Chapter 4, trying to figure out exactly how I’m going to have one of the characters who made it all the way through Book 1 survive for the bulk of Book 2. And I’m pleased to note that while I didn’t write nearly as much as I should have done this weekend, I have nonetheless accomplished some word count!
Written this weekend: 538
Chapter 4 total: 831
Shadow of the Rook total (first draft): 18,259
Never mind Amazon vs. Macmillan, let's talk authors!
| February 2, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Faerie Blood, Publishing |
|
So the whole Amazon vs. Macmillan fracas has accomplished three things for me, as of last night:
One, I have bought a nook. The cost of said nook as well as a loverly cover to put it in is roughly about the same as the amount of royalties I have now received for Faerie Blood, and to a tiny degree, Defiance.
(Which of course means that this is the Nook That Faerie Blood Bought, folks. That you all helped me buy. And for this, I thank you all! Watch this space for a forthcoming new poll on what exactly I should name the Nook, and a likely giveaway for a randomly selected winner!)
Two, I’ve also bought five, count ‘em, five ebooks by Macmillan authors, up on Fictionwise.
Three, and because I’m really in the mood to show some love directly to awesome authors, I have thrown ten bucks at the current efforts of to sell her commissioned novella “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”. It’s set in her Old Races universe and features Janx and Daisani, and she’s selling it directly off her site for ten bucks a pop this month. Hie ye over here and show her some support, y’all!
“But Anna,” I hear you cry, “ten bucks a pop for a novella? Isn’t that more than I’d be paying for a paperback?” Yes. Yes it is. But the beauty of this is, since Kit is selling it directly, she gets every last penny, and since she has an established track record of about a dozen books’ worth of awesome, I’m pretty damn sure $10 for a novella full of her words will be worth the price.
Also, she’s Kit. So go, my Internet armies! And tell her I sent you!
There goes my amateur standing
| January 30, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Defiance, Faerie Blood, Mirror's Gate |
|
Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to report that as of this evening, I have received royalties for my writing for the very first time in my writing career. Actual money for my actual words is now in my possession. It ain’t much, I grant you–I am, after all, a micropress ebook author–but it’s evidence that somebody out there has in fact cared to put down a few of their dollars in exchange for my work.
Roughly 217 somebodies, in fact. If you’re one of those 217 or so, I thank you wholeheartedly and hope you’ll have enjoyed what I provided. Most of these sales are indeed Faerie Blood, although Defiance does have a tiny blip of presence on the statement. Also, it is a point of interest that the reported sales are for Drollerie Press’s own site, Fictionwise (by far the majority of the sales), and Mobipocket. Amazon sales are not represented and hopefully this will be updated as of the next statement received. Clearly, though, Fictionwise loves me. <3
There are more words on the way! And tonight's addition to that "more", tapped out on the iPhone at Conflikt while listening to the inimitable Alexander James Adams belting out his best (and then more typed after), was a few hundred more words into Chapter 1 of Mirror’s Gate. I know now that the lead characters are Aleksandr and Yevanya Morokev, and that Yevanya’s cousin who’d really like nothing better than to step into the esteemed position of “husband” with her is Antoli. The names are of course Russian-influenced, although I’ll be playing around with this some and thinking about how the elves of Vreyland would have affected the language and the naming conventions. Plus, I just want to throw in a few character names that aren’t direct real-world analogues.
Tonight’s efforts got paused though as I got to a point where I need to mention the name of the city serving as the primary setting here, and I’m not sure yet whether I want a short terse name or a long exotic one. Spent some time mulling the list on Wikipedia of Russian cities, but so far none of them have served as inspiration for naming the Vreyish capital. Potential elven influence may be called for here.
Written tonight: 316
Chapter 1 total: 546
Mirror’s Gate total: 546
Drollerie Press giveaway, and also, a bit of sales data!
| December 29, 2009 | Posted by annathepiper under Drollerie Press, Faerie Blood |
|
So over at Drollerie Press we’re in the middle of a 12 Days of Christmas giveaway, featuring several free downloads by a lot of us DP authors–and which will culminate in the giveaway of a free ebook reader a bunch of us are chipping in for! It’s a jetBook Lite, and you can find out more about it and the giveaway in general here. Skim all the site’s recent entries for the downloads available so far!
Meanwhile, I’ve finally gotten a bit of sales data from my editor , who informs me that during 3rd Quarter 2009, I sold 148 copies at Fictionwise! This means I now have 165 confirmed sales so far–and this isn’t counting anything from Mobipocket or Amazon or other sites, not to mention Drollerie’s own store during that period. So when the royalty statement finally shows up, I’m hopeful it’ll have some interesting numbers indeed.
For the home audience–this means that by very rough estimation, I’d be getting somewhere in the vicinity of $375 for these confirmed sales. And if I can confirm another 335 or so, this gets me into the territory of Anna Can Buy a New Guitar. Y’all want me to have one of these lovely things, don’t you? 
Well, if you’ve bought Faerie Blood, this is exactly what you’ll be contributing to, and I have not forgotten my pledge in the earliest days of this blog of mine that if I do get that guitar, I will totally post video of myself playing it. And I’ll very likely also do another poll and giveaway, because let’s face it, folks, this will be a guitar you all helped me buy. Which means you totally should have a shot at helping me name it.
Ultimately, though, the really important thing to note here is that holy crap 165 of you out there have bought my book. I really hope you’re all enjoying it! And I thank you for your support.
Royalties!
| September 3, 2009 | Posted by annathepiper under Faerie Blood |
Ladies and gentlemen, I have received my very first statement of royalties for words I have written with my very own hands, on my very own computer. This is, I believe, another milestone at which I can be said to have leveled up in Writer.
As expected, the statement is very tiny–it only covers the month of June or so, since Faerie Blood was released over Memorial Day weekend, and this was before I showed up on Fictionwise and Amazon. But that said, it’s also a bit bigger than I was expecting. Its numbers say that 17 of you purchased copies of the book, and that my royalty share comes to $42.18.
I’m sharing the actual number for reference purposes–partly my own, just because I want to commemorate this, and partly for the reference of other aspiring writers out there just so you can know what to expect from a market that operates at Drollerie’s level. Note as well that this does not include numbers from Fictionwise, Mobipocket, or Amazon; these should be showing up hopefully on the next statement, and that number should be a bit more entertaining!
To those of you who fall into that group of 17, many, many thanks, and I hope you found the story well worth the purchase!
