April 26, 2023

Daily Diary, Day 967: Yesterday, if you remember, I said I might read with my couple of hours before dinner. I did read, some substack newsletters for about 30 minutes, but then I got a call from a young relative and we gabbed for about an hour and a half until it was my dinner time. Much fun!

Last evening we watched the next episode of Diplomat, which we are really, really enjoying, a great combination of humor and tension, and loving the acting. Then we watched the first 2-part PD James Dalgliesh police procedural for this second season on Acorn. Excellent!

Today I did clean, PT, and walk 36 minutes, but most of the day my time was taken up with what I call the business of being an indie author. This morning and much of this afternoon I went through 6 months of data (last September through February) on my monthly sales, looking at formats (ebook, print, audiobook) and retailers to see where sales were going up and going down, and matching these trends to promotional activities for the month. For example, if I had done a free or discounted promotion of a book, how many downloads or sales did I get as a result, how high in the Kindle rankings did the book get, and what sort of sell through (ie higher sales of the books before or after that free or discounted book.) I also will look at how much I spent for that promotion and whether or not it looked like I broke even, or actually made a profit.

Some of the conclusions: By-in-large, the most successful promotional strategies (cost effective) came from discounting audiobooks, in part because didn't cost anything upfront. The problem is that what works best was getting a featured deal on Chirp for a boxed set, and I only have 3 boxed sets, and Chirp isn't going to keep promoting these books over and over. So, going forward next year, I can't count on these for much revenue.

Second thing I discovered is that discounting an ebook (to 99 cents or 1.99) and promoting on Facebook, in my newsletter, seldom sell enough extra to even break even in terms of cost.

The free promotions I got from Bookbub, which used to get me a good sell-through profit, are also not lasting very long in terms of impact. I do make in sell through enough to break even (Bookbub's are very expensive) and I do hope that over time, as people decide to buy and read other books in the series, there will even be some profit, but there isn't a lot.

In fact, in 2022, it was the publication of Entangled Threads in January that brought me the most in revenue, and so I made 61% of my revenue in the first 6 months, and the only reason the second six months wasn't a great disappointment was the sales of the Mrs. Stein Solves a Crime novella in July, and two successful audiobook featured deals on Chirp in that last sixth month period.

So, not surprisingly going into the new year, the key to maintaining my revenue is writing and publishing books (and continuing to see if I can get more audiobooks sales.)

And of course, this is one of the reasons I am looking at if I can get fans of my writing who want me to spend more time on writing (including writing interesting posts) to be kind of patrons on substack, so I can jettison some of the work that I have been doing looking for promotional opportunities, scheduling promotions, looking at the data, etc. (smile.)

But, now time to take a break because I have been working very hard all day at not very exciting stuff (including figuring out what categories to put the new book in when I publish it), and it will be soon be dinner time.

Here are two roses from the same bush. And I was very excited to learn from one of you that then plant I put up yesterday and thought the leaves looked like sage, was actually something called a Jerusalem sage!!!