Selling books is harder than writing them...

Trying to make it as an author is hard. Bloody hard!
 
But what do I mean by making it as an author? In my head, it means earning more from selling your books than marketing them.
 
Sure, there’s loads of costs involved in getting your books out there in the first place, but these are fixed costs. Once you’ve published your book, what you’ve spent on editing and cover design never changes.
 
I make no secret of the fact that I’ve spent thousands of pounds getting by books publishing ready. The biggest chunk of that cost has gone to editors: circa £1500-£2000 a book, plus what I spent on editors who did a sub-standard job—whose work had to be re-done. I also spent a lot on a cover designer who produced a load of covers that I have since replaced—they just weren’t good enough. My latest designer is far cheaper and far better.
 
I’ve spent lots of money and wasted a big chunk of it. And now I have 6 books ready to release this year. If you want to know how I ended up with 6 books written before I published any of them, I wrote a blog post about it here. Two of them are now out, and I’ve already spent more on marketing them than they’ve earned back in profits from sales and pages read on Kindle Unlimited.
 
Curious about my stats?
 
I’m happy to share. First, here’s my sales figures:

£112.41 earned so far. Path to Power was out on 20th February, Masters of Magic was out on 3rd April. Clash of Crowns is not out until 15th May – so the £1.67 is a pre-order figure.
 
Where have these sales come from?
 
The spike on 20th Feb was mostly down to pre-orders. I’d collected 9 of them by release date. A few others around that date will be from people who might have pre-ordered, except that they wanted a paperback, and pre-orders only work for ebooks. But who were these people? I don’t know for sure, but I’d suggest they’re a mix of people who I’ve engaged with on Twitter, newsletter subscribers, with a few friends in the mix too. But as you can see, sales faded to almost zero until 25th March. A few of my Twitter posts had a lot of hits around that date—there could be a correlation. But I’m actually unsure exactly where they came from, TBH.
 
I know I got 6-9 sales in late March because I attended a Royal Engineers Army Reserves conference, went to a function in the evening, had a few drinks, and managed to persuade quite a few people to buy my book on the spot—they got their phones out an ordered then and there! When you’re at a Sapper conference and you say, “I wrote a book where I send a Sapper to a magical planet!” It seems to get a bit of traction. (Sapper is a term used to describe someone in the Royal Engineers, if you’re wondering).
 
What about ads?
 
As for ads – I kicked off my Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram) on 6th April and have sold 6 copies of Path to Power and one copy of Masters of Magic since. I’d suggest the sequel sale is probably from someone who bought Path to Power earlier. So if we attribute all the Path to Power sales to my ads, that gives £10.05 in royalties, plus another £1.75 in pages read in Kindle Unlimited. A total of £11.80.
 
How much have I spent on ads since then? At the time of writing, £88.85. And here is where my money is going. 

Over 20,000 people have seen one of my two ads. 487 people have clicked on the “Shop now” button. And of those people who have perused my book on Amazon, a maximum of 5 of them bought it. How cheery do those figures make you?
 
It’s possible that some people will have downloaded it to Kindle Unlimited. I won’t see any evidence of that until they start reading. It’s possible that some people have saved the post for later or logged the name of the book to come back to. It’s possible. But I doubt that will get me another £80 worth of sales to cover the cost of the ads.
 
Do I have money to burn?
 
Um, no. I’m lucky in that I’m in a stable financial position. Years of slaving away bashing houses to bits, renovating them, selling them and climbing the property ladder means I pay little on my mortgage and I have a bit of rental income besides. I earn a bit from the Army Reserves and from some occasional building surveying. I also have a husband with a decent wage. But can I afford to just throw money away on ads forever? No.
 
So why the hell am I still running them?
 
Er, insanity? Blind faith? A strange desire to impoverish myself? Probably all of these, to an extent. But the real reason is that I’m hanging onto that promise that both Meta and lots of established authors have repeated: that the ads don’t work right away. They take time to find their audience, and people need to see the same ad a few times before they buy.
 
There’s also the potential of read-through. If 50% of buyers of book one go on to buy book two, and of those, 75% buy book three, then for every copy of book one I sell, I get almost the same value again from read-through sales (I did the maths, it’s an extra 87.5% of a sale, to be precise). So that nearly doubles my profits. Then there’s the second trilogy. Then there’s the people my readers might recommend my book to. And so it ripples on—at least, that’s the theory.
 
Chances are I’ll lose money.
 
But chances are, I’ll never make a profit from my books either. Not for a while, at least.
 
I was recently sent an article by Written Word Media. It did a survey of 2000 authors—most of them indie authors—and the answers to one of the questions it asked is below.

This graph kind of made me feel better. I’ll have 6 books out soon. The median earnings for authors with 1-5 books out is £0-$250. For those with 6-10 out, it's just $250-$500. If you say you need to earn at least $2500 a month to earn a living, then the median writer would need to have over 26 books out just to survive of writing alone!
 
That’s a hell of a lot of writing, a hell of a lot of editing, and a hell of a lot of expense—assuming all authors pay for editing and covers.
 
This all sounds terribly gloomy.
 
It does, doesn’t it? But it’s still early days. I’m going to hold my nerve on the ads a little longer and see if they start paying off. I’m going to attend some more in-person events—I went to PASCIFY last Saturday. Another very expensive marketing failure. See this post on Twitter. But the next ones I have planned will be cheaper to attend, and maybe I’ll sell more books? You don’t know unless you try. I’m going to try some promos with websites like Bargain Booksy and Book Barbarian. I’ll give Amazon Ads a go. I’ll write more books and keep trying. I’ve invested too much of my life in my books so far to give up now!