Sales and Profit of an Indie Author

 So, you dream of becoming an independent (Indie) author, writing books and getting rich? I hope it happens for you, but don't count on it. I wanted to write this blog as a companion to my post about marketing. As with that blog, this is only my perspective. I don't speak for the Indie writing community. There will be many Indie authors who are far more successful than me and there will be those who are not as successful. We can't compare ourselves to each other because it's never an apples-to-apples comparison. 

Some Indie authors have multiple books for sale. Some write in different genres. Some have more money up front to start with and more resources for marketing. What I will present is my current situation, so you may get a glimpse into this world.

I published Relentless Blades on October 21, 2024. As I type this, I have sold 131 copies and have 3,110 KDP Page reads. 

Here is the breakdown:

Ebook: 84

Paperback: 30

Hardcover: 17

Here are the prices and Royalties I make for each:

Ebook: $.99/$2.99/4.99 (I've had the ebook at three price points so far) Royalties: $105 (includes KDP page reads)

Paperback: $16.99 and $19.99 (2 price points)  Royalties: $59.13

Hardback: $20.99 and $24.99 (2 price points) Royalties: $47.40 

Net Royalties: $212

Now, let's look at costs:

I did a BookBongo, Awesome Gang and Robin Reads promotion (1 each) and spent $100 total.

I have tried Amazon ads and spent $194

So, just on advertising and marketing I spent $294.

Between Royalties and what I spent I'm in the hole by -$82

But we must now factor in my upfront costs, the three biggest things being: Hiring a Developmental Editor, Hiring a Copy Editor/Proofreader and my cover design, among a few other things: $2,000.

Of course, this does not factor in my time spent actually researching/writing/editing the book. At this stage, almost four months in, I'm at a deficit of -$2,082 with 131 books sold. 

One last thing to consider, social media marketing. I'm talking about posting to the various social media sites like X, Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok, etc. I have not included any cost for those, but there is absolutely a cost in your own time to conduct your promoting and marketing. Trust me, my sales would be about half if I didn't do social media outreach. 

What does all this mean? Well, it means you're in it for the LONG haul. There is no making a lot of money in the short term, particularly when you only have one published book. You've got to get several books published and continue to build your brand until you can start getting some organic sales (the kind that comes without you plugging it on social media constantly or paying for ads). Once you get several books out there and have a following, sales will increase (hopefully). I say that because I'm not there yet.

What do I want to tell other indie authors? I've seen some post that they have been harassed online by people saying they charge too much for their books. Hogwash! Send them to this blog.

You know how much I make on a $24.99 hardcover?  About $4.00

You know how much I make on the $4.99 ebook? About $3.50.

When my ebook was on sale for $.99 (when I made a good chunk of sales) I made $.35 per book.  :(

How many activities can you pay $4.99 for and get hours of entertainment outside of buying a book?  Not many.

So, anyway, don't feel bad about how much you charge. Between all the blood, sweat, tears and hours spent writing/editing/marketing/advertising, it's fair for you to make $4-$6 a book. 

Oh, and one last thing. When those dirty marketers come spamming your door, send them to this when you tell them you don't have any money to pay them.  LOL!

Sales and Marketing

 As I type this, I'm sitting at 119 total sales for Relentless Blades. The book was released on October 21, 2024, so 11 weeks ago. As a debut, independent (indie) author, I'm thrilled with this number of sales! When I posted to social media my sales figures, I got several requests to provide my marketing tips. Well, the advice I have is far too lengthy to fit into a series of X/Bluesky posts so I'm putting them here in my blog. 

The most important thing is that you must have a quality product for any promotion to work. We all want to believe our books are outstanding, and most of them probably are. Do your best to have an attractive cover, and make sure you've spent the time and effort ensuring it's edited and presented professionally. 

I also think it's important to point out up front that we should never try to compare our sales to that of other authors. There are too many factors at play to ever make an accurate comparison. What genre of books does each author write? Is the author traditionally or indie published? Do they only have one book or multiple books? Have they built up a following already? 

My 119 sales in 11 weeks may be considered outstanding by one author, but dreadful for another. There is an author I follow on X right now who just announced she received 260 PRE-ORDERS for her latest book!!! She has a much larger following then I have and has a large catalog of published books to her credit. It would be ridiculous for me to compare my sales to her. 

I do only have one published book at the moment so take my advice with that perspective in mind. One thing I tried to do was start building my social media following well in advance of my book's release. I started this blog two years before the book was published and opened up my X account. I don't think I made much headway, but the point remains that it's never too early to start promoting and marketing your book. 

With that in mind, one thing you need to figure out your short and long-term goals. Are you wanting to get your book to as many readers as fast as you can? Do you want to make as much money, as fast as you can? As I only have the one book so far, I cannot attest to this with personal experience, but most of the authors I follow all seem unified in stating that your sales grow the more books you publish. It seems to be that by the time you publish your third book, things really start to take off. So, the best thing you can do is to write your next book!

My strategy so far has leaned more towards wanting to get my book out to as many people as possible. I have a full-time job so don't rely on these sales for my living, so I can afford not to generate much revenue. Keep that in mind as you read my tips.

1) As mentioned above, start your marketing and outreach early. Get your website/blog going. Start generating buzz in social media.

2) Well before the book release, reach out to book review bloggers and websites. Try to get your book in front of as many of these people as you can. See if you can get some blogs to partner with you to do a book cover reveal. I think I did okay at this but could have been better. I got about three or four bloggers to review my book, and I got SFFInsiders to do a cover reveal. Ideally, you'll get even more.

3) Get your book out to as many "Advanced Reader Copy" (ARC) reviewers as you can before release so you can hopefully get some reviews ready to go as soon as your book is published. Send the book to as many ARC readers as you can get because many of them will never finish the book or leave a review. 

4) Set your book release date and really start hyping it up. Post on X, Bluesky, Facebook, Goodreads, instagram, TikTok, etc. 

5) Do not be afraid to approach friends/family/co-workers to help you promote and to buy your book. Out of the 119 sales I've made so far, at least 50 have been from this group. Of course, be mindful of any rules you have in your workplace, but if you're able, don't be shy about letting your co-workers know you published a book. I checked with my supervisor first and got the okay, so I blasted my book out to our TEAMS message group. The reception was overwhelmingly positive. In fact people were so interested that I scheduled a 30-minute presentation where I went over my book and my publishing journey. 

6) I launched my book at my base prices and maintained those levels for the first month. As I headed into the holiday season (from Thanksgiving through now) I dropped the prices on all three formats to basically as low as Amazon would allow me to go. So, for me that was $.99 Kindle, $11.99 Paperback and $16.99 hardback. As I said, my goal was sales, not making money and trust me, I did not make much. In full transparency, a $.99 kindle sale netted me a whopping $.35, and that was the majority of my sales. 

7) Look for promotional opportunities. A fellow author let me know about the annual Holiday MegaSale. The requirement for this 2-day sale was to price your book at $.99 or free. I made about 9 sales from this event. Again, if making money is your goal, this may not be a great benefit to you. Part of the participation requirement was to donate a minimum of $10 to the Mary Cariola Center. If you do the math, you'll see I "lost" money in the deal, although the money I donated was to a worthy cause, so I did not mind it one bit. 

8) Network and support your fellow authors. It's great karma. I had a sweet lady named Sherry Frazier buy five copies of my book simply because she noticed me through a re-post I made supporting a fellow author. She had bought five copies of his book. I saw his post and I re-posted it and said something like "this is so great," not expecting anything more than to celebrate his success, and she responded to me saying she bought my book.   :)

9) Interact with others besides just promoting yourself. Respond to other posters. Pose interesting questions for people. Share your likes and hobbies. You are more than just your book, so let people see that.

10) Look for those who are specifically requesting books in your genre. I spend a few minutes every day scanning Bluesky/X to see if I find posts from people looking for a fantasy book. When I find one, I'm sure to respond with my book. 

11) On the subject of advertising. I've only tried a couple advertising approaches. The first is Amazon ads, and for me, they were not very helpful. The cost for click (at least in the fantasy genre) is usually fairly high and when you're only making $.35 from a $.99 kindle sale, and an ad click is usually more and it usually takes 10-20 clicks for a sale, you can see it's not a great money-maker. Some have phenomenal success with it, so feel free to try, but do not be surprised if it's not too helpful. I suspect those that are successful are those with a fairly large following already and at least several published books. 

I tried RobinReads and BookBongo promotions. While they both helped generate some sales, again the cost was much more than the sales generated. I will likely start branching out to try other options in the future like Facebook ads.

12) TikTok - My understanding is that TikTok can be great for marketing. I dabble in it a bit, but not enough to give any advice. If you've found a lot of success, I'd love to hear about it.

13) Promote yourself relentlessly. You are your biggest cheerleader. If you don't believe in yourself and promote yourself, nobody else will. Try to vary your postings and vary the media but do it.

Be prepared for some potential backlash. Envy is a poisonous emotion. There will be those who are jealous of any success you achieve. Some people may gripe that you post too much promoting your book. Some may see your posting about your achievements, as boasting. Some may disparage your success as not that great. It's the nature of social media unfortunately. On the positive side, I've not experienced much of this...yet. So far, the community has been very positive, and I've been most thankful. 

I'm taking my book off-sale today, so I suspect my sales figures will drop significantly. I'll have to adapt and evolve to keep making sales. I still have a lot to learn and there are many who do a far better job at promoting then I do. By no means should anything I've written be interpreted as the way you should promote and market your book. I'm only providing an account of what I've done so far. I hope you find some of it helpful. 

Now, I need to get back to writing my sequel. I just hit the 50,000-word mark, so about halfway done. :)

Outline Breakthrough!

 As detailed in my last post, I've really been struggling with the sequel for Relentless Blades. I'm very much a "plotter" so for me to feel comfortable writing the sequel I need to know where the story is going. I know this isn't the approach all authors take, but it's my approach. 

Not only do I need to know where the sequel is going, since this is a planned trilogy, I need to know how the full story ends. One of my major pet peeves is trilogies/series that don't fit logically together. Where you can tell the author or filmmaker had no clue where the story was going, so you have books/movies that don't fit well together. A prime example of this would be the Star Wars Sequel trilogy. I can't stand that. It's important to me that the whole story flows properly. This has caused me six months of frustration. I've felt like I'm staring at a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with an abundance of cool plot points, but without being able to put it all together in a satisfying way. 

I want to thank my sister for spending several sessions talking through my various plot points with me. She had some good insight, but beyond that, it was just good for me to talk through things to make myself understand what I was trying to do and where the story needed to go. 

I'm happy to say that I now have an outline for books two and three. Now that I do, I'm running the outline by my wife and a trusted friend to see if they point anything out that doesn't make sense. 

I already have roughly 30,000 words written on the sequel and I like most of it. I'm very optimistic that with an outline I like, I can really start hammering out the book. I finished the first full draft of Relentless Blades in about four months. I'm not sure if I can duplicate that, but am hopeful I'll have the first draft of Book 2 done by June 2025.

I have a title for Book 2 that I think I like, but am not ready to reveal that just yet. Stay tuned...

Frustration

I have a confession. I have only written about 1,000 words for the Relentless Blades sequel since July. I wish I could write that I'm almost finished with it, but I'm not. I'm finding it difficult to write despite having plenty of dangling plot threads to follow. 

I will attribute part of this to the stress of promoting and marketing Relentless Blades. I severely underestimated the amount of time and mental energy I'd spend trying to get the book noticed. I'm constantly wracking my brain for new and creative ways to entice people to read it. I've got posts on X, Bluesky, various Facebook groups, Instagram and I even opened a TikTok account. Many days I'm so drained promoting that I don't have the mental energy to focus on writing.

I've reached out to various bloggers and review websites to try to promote the book. I'm running Amazon ads that I check and update almost daily. I've run special promotions through various websites like BookBongo and Robin Reads. It's like pulling teeth to get people to give a new, self-published author a chance. Obviously, on top of that, there is just a lot of competition in the fantasy genre and heavy hitters, with large followings, like Brandon Sanderson, Ryan Cahill, John Gwynne seem to churn out great fantasy regularly.

I think part of the frustration I'm feeling is because I know Relentless Blades is good, great even! That may sound boastful, but this isn't just coming from me. All the reviews so far have been overwhelmingly positive. I have links to them pinned at the top of my blog if you're curious. Russell Carroll - Author of Relentless Blades: Consolidated Reviews Because I know the book is good, and that most readers will enjoy it, it's extra frustrating at how difficult it is to get people to buy and read it. I suspect many, most even, authors feel this frustration. 

To add to it, I had some scammer sending me, and some affiliates, threatening emails demanding that I stop promoting the book. They threatened to hack the book and steal it and even review bombed it on Goodreads. Thankfully, Goodreads acted quickly to remove the harmful posts. Still, this got me spiraling and focusing on that, instead of writing the sequel.

I have this overwhelming feeling like Relentless Blades is my child, and I need to see it stand on its own two feet before I can let it go and move to the next book. What I mean is I want some sense that it can get traction in the world and generate sales organically, without my constant attention. I do understand that at some point soon, I need to let it go and focus, but it's been difficult getting there. 

Many Indie writers I respect all say the same thing, that the best way to generate interest in your work is to get at least three books out into the world. The bigger your catalog of novels, the more it will snowball with readers. This makes sense to me, and I know the best thing I can do is get to work on the sequel, but I'm still languishing.

This brings me to the larger source of frustration; I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with the sequel. In some form or fashion, I spent two decades plotting out Relentless Blades, so even though it was hard work, I knew the story I wanted to tell. Additionally, as a first novel, I intentionally kept the story fairly small scale and linear. I was cognizant not to bite off more than I could chew. With the follow-up, I feel the pressure to go bigger in terms of the plots and characters. This isn't because I feel I need to, it's a want. I want to explore some of the other characters who didn't have PoV chapters in the original.  like the back of my hand, but I don't totally know Alyndra or Everleigh or Fralic. It's exciting to explore them, but also daunting.

I feel confident that I'll get in gear and get going, but I'm not sure when. Hopefully getting this down and out of my system helps. The Holiday season has snuck up on me and with it, even more distractions, but I believe by the New Year, I'll get it done!

Interview with Awesome Gang!

 I was thrilled to be interviewed by Awesome Gang! Check it out!  Russell Carroll

It's Alive!!!!

 After two long years, Relentless Blades is now available for purchase! I'm so excited for the world to finally get a chance to read my baby. To say this was a labor of love is an understatement. I'm so proud of this book and hope you all enjoy it. Thank you so much to my daughter, Isabel for creating this awesome book trailer. RELENTLESS BLADES: VOLUME I of THE PROPHECIES OF ZARUNE: Carroll, Russell: 9798335187640: Amazon.com: Books

Relentless Blades Acknowledgements

With the release of Relentless Blades only two days away, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank the people who helped make this a reality. Most people think of writing as a solidary activity, and in large part it is, but that doesn't mean it's done solo. There were many people who helped me along the journey.

Of course, I need to start by thanking my beautiful wife, Stefanie. She's fully supported me every step of the way. Self-publishing a novel is not cheap, and she never once balked when I told her I needed to spend money, whether that was to hire an editor, or cover designer or book formatter. Not every spouse would so thoroughly support their partner, and I don't take it for granted. 

Next, I'd like to thank my sister, Julia. Aside from my wife, she was my biggest champion along the way. She would be the first to tell you that fantasy, particularly gritty and dark fantasy, like Relentless Blades, is not her cup of tea, but like a trooper she read each draft chapter and offered me fantastic critiques. They say you shouldn't have friends and family critique your work because they won't give you honest, and tough feedback, but that wasn't the case with my sister. She let me know when something wasn't working, and I very much appreciate that. 

I was lucky enough to find two fantastic editors to work with as a fist-time author. Robin Connelly, with Saved by the Quill Saved By The Quill (wordpress.com) was my developmental editor and her insight and professionalism was fantastic. My first draft was over 122,000 words with many multiple points of view, and she helped me refine it down and get to the true essence of who my characters were, which is ironic in a way, since these characters had been with me for forty years.

Evelyn Cammon Home (readinkedits.com) was my copy/line editor and was incredible to work with. I probably drove her crazy as we debated whether to capitalize vragoth or not. She was patient and did an amazing job whipping my manuscript into a professional state. I owe both of them so much, and if you're looking for great editors, I can't recommend either of these ladies highly enough. 

To my beta readers (A.S Hardin, Dave Dolliver, Addie Olds, Dave Melbye and Randy Castro) I owe a huge thank you for taking their time to read my book, sometimes in a fairly rough state, and give me incredible feedback. I can honestly say that I found value in what every single one of them had to say. 

To my friends, Charles Garzoni (Vig), Jace Witman, Robert McKenzie and Forrest Latorre, thank you for all the nights we spent in the 1980s sitting around my parent’s dining room table drinking Mountain Dew, eating pizza, and playing Dungeons and Dragons. Our shared adventures inspired me. This one’s for all of you and the Stranger Things kids like us.

THANK YOU EVERYONE, FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART!