Previous sale posts: Narratess Aug. 2025; Cozy Up with Fantasy July 2025; CDAS May 2025
The usual disclaimer: These posts are not complaining in any way. I’m comparing data for myself from different sales and different books I’m putting in those sales, and sharing that info in case it’s useful to anyone else. It’s difficult to compare two authors or books directly because there are so many factors in play, but it’s at least useful to me. Besides, very few authors share sales data because they don’t want to be shamed or accused of either bragging or complaining.
Well, I don’t care, because I like sharing data. Deal with your own emotions about that as you will.
Let’s get into it.
The Basics (About the Sale)
Cozy the Day Away is a group flash sale for the cozy fantasy genre, which also includes a category for “cozy-adjacent”. It’s hosted at https://cozyfantasysale.promisepress.org and ran twice this year, in May and October. It was open to any authors, but tends to feature indie authors. The designation of “cozy fantasy” is on the honor system, and the definition is subjective across readers, authors, and sites/forums in any case.
This particular version of the sale was 2 days long, Oct. 11 and 12, 2025, to coincide with the official online cozy fantasy convention, HearthCon. The sale and con are not exactly/directly linked in that they’re run by different people and not all books/authors were involved in both, but it seems like they were lined up to take advantage of excitement around the genre and to cross-promote. Which seems like a good idea.
This sale allows authors a great amount of freedom in setting up their listings — it is set up on WordPress, and each author can craft their landing page however they want (within reason) and make edits before the sale is live. In addition to the cozy / cozy-adjacent division, it uses subgenre categories [BISAC, I think?] such as high fantasy, low fantasy, romance, etc. to categorize the list. Entries are also tagged by format (ebook, paperback, etc.), with representation in various ways, and with a tag for 99c-or-below if applicable.
All of this helps to navigate the long list of books, which is otherwise listed in what looks like an arbitrary order. [Behind the scenes, it’s the order in which the authors set up their posts, which may as well be arbitrary to the reader. 😉 ]
Thanks to the organizers and moderators of the sale, Karryn Nagel, Alicia Warne, and Lynn Strong, as well as all the other authors for promoting the sale!
Context
I am a small-time indie author with 6 books out — a trilogy (The Healers, 2014 / 2016 / 2022) and a standalone (The Strangers’ Sanctuary, 2025) linked to it, then two novella compilations in another series (Therapist for short, 2023 & 2025). I write queer fantasy with a near-obsessive focus on character and a tone that aims for optimistic and empathetic, but not utopian or perfectly fluffy. It shares some of the external hallmarks of cozy, like cooking and domesticity, but does not take on all the plot beats and tropes of cozy fantasy (no conflict or stress at all, starting a business, focus on romance, high whimsy, talking animal sidekicks, etc.).
As such, some cozy fantasy readers enjoy my work, and some find it too dark or not escapist enough. I try to keep that distinction in mind when describing and publicizing my books.
As for “small-time,” I average about $50 in royalties in a month without a promotion or group sale, which is very small. Because of this, I’m not even considering writing full-time, and don’t depend on it to survive. If I seem oddly upbeat about small sales numbers, that’s why: it isn’t a catastrophic situation for me. It’s easier to celebrate small wins when you have the privilege of a steady income outside the writing world!
Since March 2025, all of my books except for the uncollected novellas are available in ebook and paperback across a variety of retailers (“wide”). I no longer use Kindle Unlimited; the novellas are only exclusive to Amazon because it’s too much of a hassle to update all of them in multiple places. At any rate, I only included ebooks in this sale. Other formats, such as paperbacks and audiobooks, are welcome in the sale — which is nice, not every sale includes them — but I found it hard to fit in a discount between the usual sale price and the printing costs of my paperbacks, so I did not include them this time.
As a Reader
This sale’s slate was overall similar to previous sales, with some new authors on board and some books/authors returning from past sales. The final count was around 130 books: almost all 99c-or-below, the majority as ebooks, with some paperbacks and audiobooks and just a few hardbacks. Since I’ve shopped past versions of this sale many times, my scroll through it was focused more on picking out recommendations of books I’d already read, but I did pick up some new ones!
I didn’t get a clear picture of the balance between KU/non-KU offerings, which aren’t tagged here and take further digging to identify. Romance continues to be strongly represented, with 78 books out of the 130. Contemporary fantasy (fantasy elements in the modern world) seems to outnumber non-contemporary fantasy (D&D style or any other premodern world), but not to an overwhelming degree.
What I Ran and How I Ran It
I had two listings in this sale, including four books total. I ran the first Therapist omnibus as I have in many sales before, normally $4.99 USD down to $0.99. This is a 4-novella compilation, about 160k words total, which adds up to about a medium-length fantasy novel.
New to this sale (partly), I also ran the whole Healers trilogy for $0.99 each, down from $4.99 as well. I’ve run the first book in several past sales, but on my spouse’s suggestion, I decided to try running the rest of the trilogy for the first time. In one early sale I’d had books 2 and 3 on stealth-sale (not listed, but with the prices dropped to match the first), but this was the first intentional outing for all three.
All of these were on sale at all stores where they’re available, in all regions, ebook only. “All stores” in particular meant Amazon, itch.io (where I had an all-in-one package as well), direct through ko-fi (with an all-in-one too), and the affiliates of Draft2Digital: Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Smashwords, Tolino, and several other sites.
Promotion (by me)
I remain lackluster at promotion in general. I had an announcement on my site, moved up my October newsletter to the first day of the sale, and posted on Bluesky a few times. That’s about all I have. In some amusing timing, I was also out of cell service for much of the first sale day, and I used my precious scraps of connectivity to check my sales numbers rather than promote. I’m only human. 😉
Results
My sale prices covered a day before and a day after the sale (Oct. 10-13), because I’m always paranoid about opening too late or closing too early for various time zones. As such, I’m counting those extra days in these totals. Draft2Digital took an extra day to update as it tends to do, so the numbers are final as of Oct. 14.
| By copy. | Healers 1 (Road) | Healers 2 (Home) | Healers 3 (Purpose) | Therapist | Totals | Royalties (before tax/fees), USD |
| Amazon | 18 | 16 | 20 | 23 | 77 | $26.94 |
| D2D | 5 | 4 | 4 | 15 | 28 | $15.24 |
| Itch.io | 5 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 18 | $21.30 |
| Ko-fi | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 6 | $5.97 |
| Grand Totals | 30 | 27 | 31 | 41 | 129 | $69.45 |
Notes:
- Why the dollar values aren’t proportional to the number of sales in the same way: Ko-fi and itch.io pay out close to 100%, compared to 30% on Amazon (for a 99c book outside KU) and ~60% on D2D. They also allow for tips. Of course, every store has its pluses and minuses.
- Breakdown of stores within the Draft2Digital list: 19 Kobo, 4 Barnes & Noble, 3 Tolino, 1 each Smashwords and Apple Books.
Takeaways
This sale has been a go-to for me for the last few years — specific subgenre sales have had better results for me than wide-scope sales, even if my work doesn’t fit exactly into the subgenre. It won’t appeal to everyone, but the “interested in not-quite-cozy” subset of cozy fantasy readers ends up being a larger group than the “interested in not-quite-cozy” subset of all SFF readers in general. It’s hard to prove a negative or figure out why people don’t buy a book. But in a wide-scope sale, I feel like I’m winding my way toward my pitch from further away: it’s fantasy; it’s not epic fantasy; have you heard of cozy fantasy? Well, it’s like that, but not exactly.
With a subgenre sale, we’re starting on the last step. Readers aren’t going in expecting the Battle of the Pelennor Fields; they’re expecting the Shire already. We’re closer to the same page.
The final total was very close to the Cozy the Day Away sale in May (129 vs. 131 last time). However, all four books I ran this time were close to even with one another, which is interesting. In the two venues where I sold the Healers books as packages (itch and ko-fi), they sold only in package form, so that seems to have been a useful way to set them up. But even on Amazon, where all four books were listed separately, they were all about neck and neck.
2025 has been The Year of Writing Off The Healers Series as a Failure, after a thoroughly eviscerating review for the first book, Therapist surpassing it by 3x in the May CDAS sale, and a lackluster launch for the continuation/spinoff. Running the trilogy in this sale was a “why not” move; I didn’t expect any results. Yet I got more than I expected. I’m not sure how to explain it, but I’m happy it happened.
Conversely, Therapist is way down! But that series has been chugging along this year overall, so I’m not too worried. Plus, I’ve run the same book at the same price several times this year (CDAS in May, Cozy Up with Fantasy in July, Narratess in August), so maybe it’s just a little tapped out. That said, I’m planning on joining at least one more sale with it this year, so we’ll see how that goes!
Zooming out, I’ve become out of touch with the cozy fantasy world, but it seems like the subgenre continues to grow and thrive. Even my not-quite-cozy series had a pretty good showing. I wish I’d had more time/energy to promote it, but I’m pleased (if a bit confused) with the results. Considering that it’s free to join, I’m happy with whatever sales I get.
If you picked up any of my books or my spouse’s book, Tales of a Stranger Sister, thank you! I hope you enjoy them.