I should probably give this a full 48 hours for all the numbers to come in (eyeing Draft2Digital here), but delayed gratification has never been my strong suit. These stats may not be fully complete, but they’re pretty close. [Edit: Called it! D2D reporting doubled after the second day. Updated below.]
First off, thanks to the organizers of the sale. It takes a lot of work to get this sale off the ground, and I appreciate it. Also, thanks to all the other authors for cross-promoting the sale. It wouldn’t work without both of those factors in action.
In posting all of this, I’m not complaining or gloating. I just like numbers and transparency. Plus, it’s a very weird and stressful time in the book world, so transparency seems like a good idea to me. Everyone is at a different spot in their journey, and it’s not helpful to compare directly in most cases — apples to oranges — but I can make comparisons to how I’ve done in the past.
Background / Context
I had 2 books in the sale:
- The Healers’ Road, which I’ve run every time the sale has run; this is its 5th outing. It’s my first book, first published in 2014 (yikes I’m old), and it’s the first book in a trilogy that I mean to continue someday once I get over my mental block about it. Another book in the same world / under the same pen name is in its almost-final stages and should (fingers crossed) be out within the next few months.
- How I Became a Therapist in Another World Vol. 1-4 Omnibus, a.k.a. Omnibus 1. This is a compilation from 2023 of 4 novellas that I originally put out in 2022-2023. I’ve run it in this sale at least once before, but no more than twice; I’d also noodled around with offering just one novella rather than the omnibus. This is either its second or third outing. It’s the first volume of two so far; the second one just came out in March, and I’m working on a third.
I started releasing my books “wide” (outside Amazon) in February for Healers and March for Therapist. So that aspect is still quite new for me. I’m still on Amazon, though not in Kindle Unlimited; on itch.io; and in every market Draft2Digital offers, which includes Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and a number of other online stores. All of my books are out in ebook and paperback; they haven’t recouped their costs, so let’s not talk about audiobooks yet. 🙂
Both ebooks were set at 99c, down from $3.99. I’m considering raising all my prices, TBH, but that’s where they were before the sale. Itch.io sets sale prices by percentage, and for some reason I can’t remember (potentially by mistake) I had Healers set to $2.99, so its sale price there was 74 cents. These were both set on sale in every region.
I used the landing pages on my site for each book as the sale links. Each has the cover, the blurb, a PDF sample, an itch.io widget/link, and links to all the other stores. Pretty basic, but it seems to work so far.
Who the hell am I: This is all under the asterisk that I am not a full-time author; I work elsewhere full time and write in my free time. I’ve taken reams of shit for that over the years, but I have finally come to take it as a neutral. I don’t have the prestige of a pro or all my waking hours to devote to writing… but even with the book-buying universe going haywire and indie sales figures tanking for many, I still have my main source of income. This isn’t to gloat, mind you. I’m lucky, is all.
And it’s also to put in perspective why I can seem so calm about fairly low sales numbers. I take my writing seriously and put as much work into it as I can, but my entire livelihood doesn’t rest on it. That’s a situation not everyone can be in or wants to be in, but it works for me at this point.
As a baseline, my “usual” sales figures are on the order of a few hundred copies a year. Pretty small potatoes, but not nothing. I have 5 books out, three in one series and two in another. The latter are compilations of novellas that were originally released separately (just on Amazon), but I’m moving toward an omnibus-only format for those.
Stat Post Parameters
The sale was officially 5/16 only. For this I’m including 5/15-5/17, because a few sales came through before the sale but after I’d dropped the prices* and some came through the day after, according to my time zone.
* I set my sale prices for a wider margin than the actual sale out of sheer “scared to be late to the party”, not as any kind of strategy.
Results
| By copy. | Healers | Therapist | Totals | Royalties (before tax) |
| Amazon | 25 | 67 | 92 | $36.37 |
| Draft2Digital (see details) | 10 | 16 | 26 [updated] | $15.19 |
| Itch.io | 4 | 9 | 13 | $33.96* |
| Grand Totals | 39 | 92 | 131 | $85.52 |
Edit: Twelve more sales came through D2D from Kobo on 5/18. The delay might have been from reporting or just sales coming in later. Either way, I’ll count them; the price change is still in effect.
D2D details: 19 Kobo; 2 each Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords; 1 Tolino/Thalia. D2D results seemed to come in slower than any of the others, which makes sense, as they’re a step removed from the stores themselves.
* Itch.io has a tip system built into its checkout: the minimum was 99c/74c for the two books, but most people added at least a dollar. Which is greatly appreciated. There are valid concerns about itch.io out there, though; more thoughts below.
I joked on Bluesky that I would spend more than I earned. That ended up being true, but mostly because I splashed out on a bunch of print books. No regrets! [edit: With the additional sales from Kobo, it’s now pretty close. But again, that’s OK with me.]
There’s also a bit of loss-leader strategy going on here: I ran the first-in-series and not the subsequent books intentionally. Some fraction of the folks who read the Books 1 will hopefully like them enough to buy another someday.
Conclusions
For me, this is a solid result. It’s about the same as the April and December 2024 sales; in October I sold about 150 copies, which was the biggest sale yet. (July was not good for me at all, but I think that was because of what I ran, not any fault of the sale itself.)
Considering the mess that book sales have been in all this year, that’s much better than I’d expected.
Other Thoughts
As a Reader/Buyer
Still a lot of Amazon-exclusive books in the sale, which I mostly expected. There were plenty of wide releases, too; I bought some directly from authors as well as on Barnes & Noble.
Personally, my preference is direct > itch > bookshop.org, which most indies can’t use yet for ebooks > B&N > baffled staring and then moving on, which happened just once this time. I ought to try Smashwords. For context, I decided to stop buying from Amazon in early March. So I did close a lot of tabs for books that sounded interesting, but were Amazon-exclusive. I hope they did well, and I understand the decision to stay exclusive. I just made my own decision as a consumer. I’m not gonna yell at anyone as long as you don’t yell at or attempt to guilt-trip me. We all have consequences for our decisions. You miss out on a couple of readers; I miss out on some books.
Lots of disclaimers about AI (i.e. “no AI used in this book”) scattered through the listings, including one that was right up in the first few words of the description (bold!). People used the listing space for a lot of different information besides the standard blurbs, which was interesting to see: reviews/testimonials, excerpts, etc.
The Itch-uation
It seems like the indie book world is turning on Itch because of a particular mismanaged bundle that happened to overlap on the calendar with CDAS but was not affiliated with it. It’s an awful situation. I fully understand why it’s pissing people off — the setup was a perfect storm of bad decisions and lack of communication, from what I can tell, which shorted authors a substantial amount of sales. (Note, this is not one of the ones I’m involved in. I’ve just been watching the situation from the sidelines.)
Overall I like the platform, and I’d hoped it would work out for other people as well. It seemed like the move to Itch had gained momentum, and that it could be a good indie-forward, queer-friendly home for books as well as games. Now, I’m not sure. Which is a bummer. I hold out hope that an understanding of best practices can take hold for future bundles, and that authors don’t all flee the platform. But I’d also understand if they did.
I’m staying, not as a commentary on what anyone else has gone through, but out of optimism. I hope things can turn around, as bad as this situation was.
Passing the Torch
A note that’s relevant to me and my future strategies: Therapist is pulling ahead of its older sibling by a wide margin. There are probably a multitude of reasons for this: Therapist is newer; it’s easier to explain in genre terms; I’ve run Healers five times now in this sale, and most people who would want to try it have had a chance to do so.
Overall, I’m fine with that. I’m happy to see Therapist finally find some readers, after it struggled for the first year or so. (Vindication for the decision to compile the novellas into omnibuses? Maybe.)
I had already planned to phase away from actively promoting Healers once Strangers came out, although that’s more iffy now with the black mark on Strangers‘ production. Even so, I’ll move ahead and see what happens.
I’m still fond of my janky firstborn, and I still love those characters. But this is backing up my hunch that this is a good time to move it into the back catalog rather than the main event.
Actually The End
Thanks again to everyone who participated in this sale, whether that was organizing, entering a book, or shopping. Happy reading, everyone!