My company tax year runs May – April and although I keep a tight rein on my accounts throughout the year, I only do management reporting annually when I break down my revenue in various ways to figure out what I need to change, stop doing or do more of.
Because I publish through so many sources, I don't actually track book sales numbers very often. Let's be honest – the money is more important anyway!
Total sales and income
I make money from multiple sources – book sales, affiliate sales, course sales, sponsorship and Patreon, and speaking fees. It's all documented in How to Make a Living with your Writing, available in all formats.
The business as a whole is up 34% on last year, and my book sales income is almost 3x the UK national salary for a man, up 12% on last year. Not a massive increase, but then, I didn't put out many books!
I make more money than most authors, based on the Guardian report that average earnings for British authors are just £12,500.
I also make significantly less than some authors I know – some indie, some traditionally published. But I am very happy with the way things are going – and I have never had a breakout success, so I continue to subscribe to the consistent hard-working author model! You don't need to be a household name to make a decent living with your writing 🙂
Here's the more detailed breakdown.
Amazon is still the dominant source of my book sales income, but at 61% in total (including Createspace and Audible), it is still less than a lot of authors and even publishers.
I'm particularly pleased that direct sales are now 9% of my revenue. I use selz.com and you can buy my non-fiction from me directly on each of the book pages here. That was almost zero last year, and now it's equal to Createspace. Selling direct means a higher % of royalty to the author, so I certainly intend to keep building that channel.
Translations are a tiny, tiny sliver of income and I made the decision to pull all my fiction translations, paying off the translators in order to concentrate on licensing rights through Curl Up Press. I'm getting my rights back from the German publisher this July, and then the only translations I'll have out are in French for non-fiction, which is going quite well. Basically, it is too early in the foreign language markets to make a decent return on translations and marketing is near impossible without a series, or if the translator has an existing market.
Considering how many reports there have been about the death of the ebook and the rise of print, it's important to note that most indies make most revenue from ebook sales.
And most indies don't use ISBNs for ebooks either, so none of this revenue is tracked by the ‘official' publishing industry reports. Since I don't use ISBNs for audio either, and most of my Createspace books have free ISBNs, you can see that the majority of my book sales revenue is not tracked by any industry reports.
I have started using my own ISBNs for a small number of print books through Ingram/Lightning Source, but most print sales happen on Amazon and they favor the Createspace version, so if you only measured my income as Curl Up Press sales on Nielsen BookScan, you would only see a drop in the bucket.
Breakdown of ebook sales by country
The future of book sales is global, digital and mobile – and I certainly want a piece of that action!
In the last year, 52% of my book sales income came from the US, with the main other countries being UK, Canada and Australia. I sold books in 49 countries in total in the last year (and have sold books in 83 countries in total).
Breakdown of fiction vs non-fiction
However, Kobo and iBooks are dominated by fiction sales, and that's because they have more merchandising opportunities for fiction than they do for non-fiction.
At Kobo, 77% of my fiction revenue is made up of box-sets.
In total, box-set sales make up 51% of my fiction revenue across the main 3 stores. If you're not using box-sets, you're missing out! Here's how you can set up your own box sets.
My Audible revenue is more heavily dominated by non-fiction, even though I only have 3 non-fiction up there right now. I think this is because:
- Non-fiction audio listeners are less price-sensitive so shorter books are still purchased or used in the subscription program
- I have an audio promotion platform through my podcast, so there is an ability to market the audiobooks
- I have gone with my own off-platform production so I get a higher royalty, instead of doing a revenue share as I have done for fiction
What will I do to increase book sales revenue in the next year?
(a) Put more books out 🙂 Simple, but it's not easy, as we all know. I now have 3 author brands, as I am co-writing sweet romance with my Mum. This is good in one way, as it gives me exposure to a bigger market, but it does dilute my attention from my other main brands, Joanna Penn for non-fiction, and J.F.Penn, for thrillers.
(b) Increase book specific marketing. I'll be using Amazon Marketing Services (Amazon Ads) to get more traffic to my ebooks in the US, and hopefully, they will be expanding the platform to other countries. I'll also be expanding my Facebook ads for more book sales and using my podcast to promote my own books more than I have been. We have decided to focus on one author brand per month, as opposed to scatter-gunning marketing whenever I remember to do it.
(c) Create more box-sets. Fiction box-sets work in sets of three, but I need to do more non-fiction box-sets as well, specifically for marketing on Kobo and iBooks. Hopefully, this will grow the sales there and make for a healthier split. I could consider going KDP Select for non-fiction, but that would mean I can't sell direct and my non-fiction direct sales are growing. So I'll be staying wide for my Joanna Penn books, and also my J.F.Penn series books.
(d) Expanding into Google Play. I've been saying this for a while, and I have looked at the various services, but I've been waiting for multi-currency pricing. I'm hoping PublishDrive will have it sorted this year and then I will use them for Play and some of the other European and Asian stores. This should also expand the countries I sell in.
(e) Licensing for foreign rights. One of the reasons for setting up Curl Up Press was to start investigating foreign rights and other rights licensing, so we'll be looking at these markets in the coming year.
How does this compare to your book sales revenue breakdown? I'd love to know what you think and also any questions. Please join the conversation by adding a comment below.
View Comments (38)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1 2 3 Next »What a great breakdown! :) ... I'm not out there yet, but I'm taking copious quantities of notes. :)
I wish these were $ numbers instead of %. It's kind of hard to follow. Thank you.
I think percentage is much easier as it's comparative to other authors - you can't compare dollars because people have different genres, different numbers of books etc. Just imagine it's $100,000 and go from there :)
Hi Joanna
I love what you are doing but I must agree with Anna , wish you would specify $ value or even number of books (units)
Percentages are misleading and without credible benchmarks it's difficult to establish credible reference points . I don't think you can imagine it's $100,000 unless that's actually the value of sales , else it's misleading !
I don't like sharing exact numbers - it brings the trolls out :) But you can work it out easily based on what I say in the first paragraph.
Agree with this; I have always come to regret telling anyone what my income is about anything. Giving this out will lead to: judgment by those who see it, either that we're too bad to be that good or too good to be that bad, having to fight off bottom-feeding donation seekers or distant relatives, or having to deal with a vast array of hucksters trying to get in on the feeding frenzy. It's easy to gauge this writer's success via the % statements and her "ball park" figure above the UK average.
Well done Joanna- another great year. Really good that you analyse your results and then use that to set plans and goals for the following year.
Also great idea to focus marketing on one specific author brand per month, I think that will definitely have more impact. Well done and thanks for sharing. It's already got me thinking about how I want to build my author business!
Thank you Joanna, awesome to see an actual breakdown of statistics of sales, seeing that the US is your largest market and e-books accounts for your biggest sales and that fiction is your majority seller, is enlightening for me as I distribute world wide on Kobo and Amazon in e-book and with createspace as well as on InUPress, in fiction genres. My sales are in serial series shorts and novels of fiction. I look forward to the day I can compare our numbers as you compare yours. I love your podcasts and YouTube and I also read your blogs. I started listening to your podcasts from the beginning at episode one and the quality is hugely different then from your current work. Great growth you've shown, keep producing Joanna. All I have the nerve to produce are blogs.
Joanna - I know you have huge sales in Amazon and Kobo, but for someone trying to getting into a larger array of market distributions, do you recommend using services such as Smashwords or Draft2Digital instead of doing all the footwork slogging to each vendor, such as Apple and google individually?
Yes, of course, many authors use Draft2Digital and Smashwords - I use D2D for Nook and other platforms but I go direct to Kobo and iBooks- you can get access to merchandising on Kobo if you go direct.
Dear Role Model (for many aspiring writers) -
I am certain I speak for most of us in wishing to know in real terms how much we can hope to earn if we succeed on a level similar to your annual achievements.
Frankly, £12,500 a year takes the wind right out of one's regime of producing our daily word count.
Please, Joanna, do tell.
Bruce
As above, you can work it out from what I've said in the first paragraph.
Thank you for sharing this! Very informative and illuminating!
Joanna, when I first heard about you 2 years ago on KDP, I couldn't believe how timely it felt to hear about you and how inspiration came after reading about you. You prove to me every day that writing is worth it. Today I have written 182,000 words, I keep feeling like I am nearly there and it is always down to a little encouragement from you that keeps me going. Thank you, Joanna, for all your e-mails, this topic and the hints and tips in your books, blogs and posts about writing. I hope very soon I will be getting to my final draft and that I can write to you and tell you that I completed it! I would credit you for this inspiration to write!
I'm so pleased to be useful on your author journey!
Great breakdown Joanna. I've started using AMS advertising (love it) but have not done much with Facebook advertising. Do you find FB advertising better for your fiction markets more so than your non-fiction? Or do you think it doesn't matter? Also, what are your primary social media outlets?
I use FB advertising for both, I haven't broken down whether it works better for either. I primarily use Twitter as my favorite social network.
This is really interesting. As I only write non-fiction (so far!) my breakdown is totally different. In a non-crowd-funding year, I make about 90% of my income from Amazon (much to my dismay- Kobo, iBooks etc just don't sell much; and neither do my direct sales other than when I run a crowd-funding campaign). And that 90% breaks down to about 70/20 print/ebook.
Geographically, it's about 80% USA, 10% Europe (mostly Finland and UK), 10% rest of the world (mostly Australia).
The one biggest chunk every month, by a margin, is print sales in the US. (I'm using Lightning Source, and have been since 2013.)
As yet, online courses (which I started creating a year ago) are adding about 20% to the total; they are getting to the point where they are bringing in about as much money on average as my Kindle sales, but that figure is growing.
I really should pay more attention to my stats and do a proper breakdown with spreadsheets and everything... but I'd much rather do push-ups!
That's great - and I've definitely seen higher non-fiction sales on Amazon, perhaps because of the addition of print and audio