May was tumultuous for me. A lot of things happened (like depressingly turning 30) and I had a lot of difficulty adjusting my writing schedule to deal with my husband’s sudden unemployment (he was laid off at the end of April). My writing nose-dived (as you’ll see from my stats below). I was just getting into the groove again and finding some momentum when I lost my Grandfather yesterday morning. I found out he was going rapidly downhill (he’d been sick, then was much better, then suddenly very sick again) on Sunday and managed to finish my novel but not much else this weekend. I feel sad and a little scattered. Hopefully I’ll be able to just write through this and keep momentum up (I didn’t write at all Monday or yesterday).
Anyway, here’s the stats for May. In the ebook world, it was a pretty good month. I sold over twice the number of copies in May as in April, though not for twice the monies. Here are the numbers:
Ebooks sold: 84
Stories sold (trad publishing): 1
Novels sold(trad publishing): 0
Writing monies earned: 80.11 (all from ebook sales)
Words written: 19879
Ebooks released: 3 short stories, 1 short story collection
Novels finished: 1
Race score: 39
It’s interesting to see the progression of sales as I get things up. I’m pretty much a total unknown, but if I held off from putting things online as some advise, I’d be missing out on hundreds of dollars. I’m broke enough that 20 bucks a month extra makes a difference. 50 bucks? That’s a week or more of groceries. 80 bucks? That’s groceries and the phone bill. My sales might be tiny when compared to people like Hocking, Locke, and Konrath, but they are growing. And it is money that comes from work that didn’t sell, for whatever reason, to magazines and trad publishers. Work that readers enjoy, but yet would have been tucked away in the proverbial trunk in the old world of publishing.
Want to see how sales build for an unknown? Here’s my stats so far:
July 2010- put up 3 literary short stories under a name that has no publishing history (not that I had any name with history anyway) and sold- 3 copies
Aug 2010- took down one of those 3 because I sold it to a magazine, so 2 stories up- 4 copies
Sept 2010- (2 short stories up)- 3 copies
Oct 2010- (2 short stories up)- 4 copies
Nov 2010- (2 short stories up)- 2 copies
Dec 2010- (Put the sold short back up when rights reverted)- 12 copies
Jan 2011- (released an sf collection under Bellet name, so collection + 3 shorts)- 17 copies
Feb 2011- (released an sf novella, so that plus collection + 3 literary shorts)- 18 copies
March 2011- (released fantasy novel, +collection, +novella, + 3 literary shorts)- 39 copies
April 2011- (novel + collection + novella + 3 literary shorts)- 34 copies
May 2011- (released 3 more shorts, 2 fantasy, 1 literary, + novel etc)- 84 copies
What will June hold? No idea. I just released a second short story collection, this time all fantasy stories. I might have some romance novellas ready under another name to go up by end of June, but that will depend. So far growth is steady and as long as that continues, I’m happy enough. After all, groceries and phone bills paid are nothing to sneeze at.
And in final bright news as I go into June, my Kickstarter project to help fund Clarion is now funded. It won’t cover all of Clarion, but it certainly helps take a lot of burden off me. I am super thankful to everyone who made the project funding happen and I will write you all amazing stories at Clarion, I swear. I hope that “Souvenirs from Other Worlds” will be my best work to date once I’m finished with it (and Clarion, after all, the whole point is to go learn to be an ever better writer). So thank you, all of you.
