Past sale recaps: May 2026 | Oct. 2025 | May 2025
Sale Details
Cozy the Day Away is a cozy fantasy flash sale. This iteration ran on Oct. 3-4, 2026, the same weekend as the cozy fantasy online convention Hearthcon. Most books in it are 99c or free, though there are also other sale prices, especially for paperbacks, audiobooks and hardcovers.
Some ground rules before we start!
- Nothing here is complaining! It’s collecting data for my own use, and making it public in case it’s useful for anyone else. It’s very hard to compare apples-to-apples between any two authors anyway, because there are so many factors in play. I love transparency, I fight against comparisonitis.
- Thank you to everyone who checked out the sale and/or bought anyone’s books!
- Thank you to the sale organizers, Karryn Nagel, Alicia Warne, and Lynn Strong.
As a Reader
At a casual glance, I noticed a lot of titles I hadn’t seen in the sale before, along with returning authors (some with returning titles, some with new ones). The genre continues to grow in its fifth year! Some details that I took note of:
- 133 books total
- Cozy books: 108
- Cozy-adjacent books: 28
As with last time, I’m guessing there’s overlap with a few. The ratio is pretty similar to last time, tilting a little further toward cozy (which is, of course, the main focus). - Almost all fantasy (I didn’t write down the tag number, but I noticed maybe two science fiction books)
- 50 tagged as LGBTQIA+/Gender/Sexual Minority, about the same as last time (half-ish)
- 65 cozy+romance, a bit over half of the cozy books; 12 cozy-adjacent+romance, or a little less than half of those.
What I Ran and How I Ran It
I had three listings with a total of 5 books in the sale, or most of my catalog in some form or another. Both of the ebook sales were across all stores and in all areas.
- How I Became a Therapist in Another World Vol. 1, 2, 3 Omnibuses: Normally $4.99 as ebooks, I dropped these to 99c. I’ve offered Omnibus 1 on sale more often than any of my books, if we count all the various sales I’ve been in, but 2 and 3 are a lot more infrequent. In fact, this is the first time volume 3 has been on sale since it came out in May.
- The Strangers’ Sanctuary: Normally $4.99 as an ebook, on sale for 99c. I’m always a little nervous putting this in a cozy sale, because it’s a Big Feelings book, but I did my best in labeling it for what it is. It’s been in Cozy the Day Away once before and in another sale one other time.
- Paperbacks: The Healers’ Road and How I Became a Therapist in Another World Vol. 1 were on sale in paperback. The price varied from one store to another, because I aimed to set the price as close to the printing cost as I could, and the printing cost varies from store to store. I set all of them so that I’d make about 50c per copy. I think I’ve offered a paperback discount once before when I was only on Amazon, a few years ago, but it’s not a frequent offering. In the Takeaways section, we’ll see why…
Promotion (by me)
Lots of activity on Bluesky among the authors I follow; I split the difference between self-promo and other-promo and wrote up a plugging + recs thread. I also sent out my October newsletter early to coincide with the sale.
Results
This time (and maybe from now on), I’m going to save myself some work and count both of the sale days together, along with the day before and the day after. I always schedule my price changes with a buffer day before and after, although it isn’t promoted at that time.
I’m calling the info complete as of Oct. 5. Draft2Digital can be slow to report, so even that’s a bit hasty.
| Ther. Omni 1 | Ther. Omni 2 | Ther. Omni 3 | Sanctuary | Healers (PB) | Royalties | |
| Amazon | 19 | 22 | 10 | 5 | 0 | $19.35 |
| Draft2Digital (see details) | 9 | 10 | 9 | 4 | 0 | $17.15 |
| itch.io | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | n/a | $5 |
| Ko-fi | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1 | n/a | $20.97 |
| Totals | 34 (all ebooks) | 38 | 25 | 8 | 0 | 105 copies / $62.47 |
- D2D Details: 22 Kobo, 5 Smashwords, 3 Barnes & Noble, 1 Bookshop, 1 Tolino. (I appreciate you, Tolino/Thalia readers! I always have a few!)
- Itch.io notes: I haven’t filtered out itch’s cut, so the final amount will be a bit less than this. In addition, I offered everything in the sale as a bundle on itch, so “1 copy of each” actually equals 1 bundle.
- On Ko-fi, I also offered a bundle of the 3 Therapist books, which accounts for all of the sales of those books this time.
- Other notes: There were a few sales of books that weren’t part of the sale, so I hope folks weren’t confused!
Takeaways
A small horror story: A week before the sale, I gallivanted over to Draft2Digital, the service I use to publish to most ebook stores as well as non-Amazon print. Surely I was being excessive by setting my paperback prices to the sale price a week early! I’d pre-scheduled my ebook sale prices, but you can’t do that with print.
Draft2Digital informed me, in a nice big headline, that all changes could take 2-4 weeks to take effect.
Two to four WEEKS.
For a two-day sale.
Though I’m no fan of Amazon, to put it lightly, their price changes go into effect within 72 hours. I often see them go through in 1 hour or less. So at least the Amazon paperback prices were correct.
I’m deeply annoyed by this, at myself more than anything, for not taking note of that sooner. I likely won’t try to offer paperbacks on sale again. I’d thought it would be nice to offer another format, but not if it’s going to be this much of a hassle.
It’s almost a relief that I didn’t get any sales on paperbacks, since (aside from Amazon) I’d be worried that the prices weren’t right.
Another main takeaway is the proportionally strong showing of Omnibus 2 and 3, especially 2. I’d wondered whether it was worth the effort to list a book past Book 1 of any given series, because listing vol. 2+ kind of presumes that anyone has read Book 1. Plus, the usual strategy is to offer the first volume for sale, and hope people will read it and want to buy the rest at their regular price. There are other factors in the mix of my past reluctance, too, particularly the fact that vols. 2 and 3 haven’t yet earned back their costs (in that series, only the first omnibus and the first individual volume have).
But I went with offering volumes 2 and 3 out of curiosity, and in the spirit that a ~25c royalty is better than none at all. (And it’s better than 25c in some stores!)
I listed all three under the same entry on the sale page, wrote up shorter blurbs for each novella including brief content notes and some notes about representation, and waited to see what would happen. And it went quite well; I’m very happy with the outcome.
As with any situation, it’s hard to tell why something worked. Maybe it’s just a good deal for a lot of story; the series is now over 400,000 words, and you could get it all for ~$3 in this sale. (Hey, you can normally get it for ~$15, which IMHO isn’t bad.) Maybe the shorter blurbs clicked. Maybe some people bought Volume 1 in past sales and wanted to keep going. Who knows; I’m glad it worked out.
Another note is that this is the highest number of titles I’ve offered in any sale, I’m pretty sure, and that doesn’t seem to have diluted sales much.
So as with past sales, I’m happy with the results, and I plan to participate again if I can. Thanks again to everyone who participated!