Saturday, June 18, 2011

A Slightly Fluffier Dose of Reality

Back here I blogged about receiving my first quarterly royalty cheque. It was for the earth-shattering amount of $84.

Well, everyone’s got to start from somewhere and 84 bucks is still 84 bucks.

A couple of weeks ago I got my quarterly cheque for the first three months of 2011. That was for $575.

Hello. That’s starting to feel like proper money. Okay, it’s beans to most people making a full-time living from writing and atoms (or maybe even sub-atomic particles) to someone like Stephen King. I’m not full-time. I still have a day job. So I don’t have to sweat over whether human beings can actually survive off a diet of hay. It’s a nice bit of extra income to go towards a new TV, trip to see the folks back home, etcetera, etcetera.

The first quarter was when my second collection came out and that definitely bumped sales of both. More books gives more chances for readers to find you. Both have sold about a hundred copies, which is also encouraging. Readers are buying the first and liking it enough to buy the second. Definitely a good sign!

A lot of my sales are for Amazon Kindle, but it isn’t the only game in town with over half of my sales coming from a wide range of other sources such as Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and eXcessica. This will be reassuring for anyone worried about Amazon becoming (more) evil and maybe slamming down the portcullis on this little self-publishing revolution at some point in the future.

Since then my sales have been steadily picking up (on Amazon at least). I guess the message is don’t be too disconcerted if your numbers don’t explode overnight. Sometimes these things take time.

M.E. Hydra

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