I’m in this phase right now where I’ve decided to dive back into all of my notes and books from my MBA program to see how I would apply all of that teaching (I had a concentration in Entrepreneurship after all) to self-publishing.
It’s been interesting, because most of the materials address larger corporations and they assume that people have bigger goals than I actually do. I view writing as a lifestyle business not a scalable enterprise. (Although it could be and rumor has it a lot of the top romance writers have turned it into one.) If I could earn $100K a year without getting out of my pajamas or having to work in a team, I’d be ecstatically happy.
So I’m trying to take materials written for managers and corporate executives or the type of entrepreneurs that might seek outside funding and adapt it to self-publishing. Which means I’ve been looking at my writing from a number of different angles.
To give you some perspective, as of the end of October I had earned income on sixty-seven different titles this year. (That number is higher now.) The titles range from fantasy novels to romance novels to romance short stories to non-fiction books about Excel, finances, raising a puppy, dating, grief, cooking, and who knows what else. So I have a large variety of titles to look at. And my question is, which are my best performers? What should I do more of?
The most basic but incredibly flawed approach is to just look at gross revenue. How much money have I earned on each of those titles? It’s the one I tend to do the most often and the one I really shouldn’t do ever. If you focus on gross revenue you may bring in a lot of money and bankrupt yourself at the same time.
In terms of cash-in-hand, my romance and fantasy novels are at the top by a hefty amount.
The next step would be to look at what I’ve earned after accounting for advertising costs and production costs. My fantasy series has very nice covers that cost a pretty penny. My romance series has covers I made myself. I’ve spent roughly the same amount on advertising both series.
When I account for advertising costs (which I do at a series level not a book level), my romance novels drop to third place and my fantasy novels are the worst performing of all of my titles. The number one spot goes to a written-to-market series of short stories that basically sold themselves.
But I can’t stop there. Because this is a flawed approach, too.
I’m still not properly applying costs to each title, because I’m only thinking about direct costs. Covers, ads, etc. But what about the cost of this blog? Or of other expenses related to writing like conferences or my computer or electricity, etc.? (I haven’t done this yet, but the way to do it would be using activity-based costing, probably based on wordcount or hours spent writing each title.)
Also, I’m comparing titles that were published in 2013 to titles that were published in 2017. It’s a little unfair to say, “that’s the better title because it’s made me more money” when the title has been out for four years longer than the next best title that’s been out six months.
Which is why this week I went through and compared month 1, month 1 & 2, and months 1-6 sales for my titles. When I did that I could see that for months 1 & 2 the first in that written-to-market series dominated the list, but one of my Excel guides also made an appearance and the fantasy and romance novels did, too, particularly the ones that were later in the series.
Another interesting thing to look at was the percentage of sales that occurred in the first two months and first six months versus lifetime sales. That written-to-market series where the title was published three years ago? 71% of its lifetime sales were in the first six months. (It’s now permafree but still gets audio sales.) My first-in-series fantasy novel on the other hand? 10%.
Finally, last night I ran across another way to approach things: profit margin. Now, the number I calculated isn’t actually profit margin because I used what I receive from the distributors, which means this is after I’ve paid the 30-65% that they charge to sell my books. But having said that, I have a series with a 95% margin. For every $50 spent, I’ve earned $1000 on it.
This analysis moves a lot more of the non-fiction up to the top and drops the romance novels down because contemporary romance is so competitive you have to fight for visibility.
Of course, it’s never that simple. Because then you have to look at what you can write. It turns out I suck at writing to market, not because I can’t do it but because I can’t do it consistently. At least not the market I wrote to that did so well.
And the trick with fiction is that most writers (not all) need a sort of critical mass of titles to really start seeing results. (My estimate is twelve novels. I’ve heard five in a series from trade publishers.) So looking at the performance of one novel against three related non-fiction titles may not be a fair comparison. You have to figure that you can expand on a fictional world with much more ease than you can expand on a non-fiction area. I’ve written three books about dating for men. I maybe have one more I could write, but that’s it. Whereas novels? I could write those for eternity.
And I also have to consider how replicable those results are. Being in the NaNo StoryBundle has seriously skewed the numbers for those series and titles so everytime I look at them I have to do so with a big asterisk next to the results or back out the bundle portion of the sales.
Also there’s how much time it takes to write each title. If you’re three times faster at writing X than Y then you need to consider that in terms of what you get back when you sell X and Y.
Anyway. I find it fun to think about these things. But, really, the best thing to do is write the next damned book. Product is key. And we as writers never have enough of it because even if someone loves what you do, they’re only going to pay you for that title once. (Or maybe three times at most? Ebook, print, audio.) You have to give them more so they’ll give you more money.
So quit reading this and go write. Like I’m going to do.
Theoretically.
M.L. Humphrey 