Okay, yes, distributing through Draft2Digital makes our e-books available worldwide on Kobo, Nook, Apple Books, Smashwords, and a dizzying variety of other e-book platforms, but this wide distribution concept continues to remain more theoretical than real. At the end of the day—actually, at the end of several years of trying different strategies to push this particular strand of overcooked spaghetti—we’re left with the same truth we discovered the first time we tried to sell e-books on Nook and iBooks: a good sales month on all the other platforms combined rarely adds up to a slow sales day on Kindle.
Yeah, sure, if you’re in Australia you can buy the e-book of THE FUGITIVE HEIR directly from Angus & Robertson—
But no one does. No one ever has. If someone in Australia wants to buy this book, they buy it through Amazon.com.au.
Sifting through years of accumulated sales data, then, here’s what we’ve learned. In descending order, we sell books—
1. On Kindle, in the US, UK, Australia, and for some reason, Germany. We sell very few e-books in Canada.
2. In paperback, in the US and UK. For some reason our print books are insanely expensive in Australia. Again, see THE FUGITIVE HEIR on Amazon.com.au for an example.
3. In hardcover, in the US.
4. In e-pub, worldwide, on all the other platforms combined.
5. As audio books.
Got that? We sell more print copies than all other non-Kindle e-books combined. Our audio book sales are barely a drop in the bucket.
Meanwhile, the Kindle edition of THE MIDNIGHT GROUND keeps chugging along, generating income every day.
Why? Is THE MIDNIGHT GROUND so vastly superior to everything else we’ve ever published? Should we forget science fiction completely and focus on publishing more paranormal thrillers?
No.
What sets THE MIDNIGHT GROUND apart is that, through an administrative oversight, it ended up being the only full-length novel we have that we didn’t convert to e-pub and offer up for wide platform distribution on Draft2Digital. THE MIDNIGHT GROUND e-book remains available exclusively on Amazon Kindle.
Which means it’s the only title we have that’s currently enrolled in Amazon’s KDP Select program. Which means it’s free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
Which means, people are reading this book. Every day we get the KENP numbers to prove it.
So consider this an experiment. When we took books from being exclusively on Kindle and put them into wider distribution, sales of those titles softened. Meanwhile, the one book that stayed exclusively on Kindle, and therefore enrolled in the KDP Select program—well, people aren’t buying that many whole copies of it. But they’re reading the book, and we also make money that way, one page at a time.
Ergo, what have we learned? Well, first, that we’d better get PRIVATEERS OF MARS re-enrolled in KDP Select pronto! By the time you read this, it should already be available free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers!
Second: that having our books enrolled in KDP Select, and thus available to Kindle Unlimited subscribers, generates income. True, Amazon insists that KDP Select titles be exclusive to Kindle, so doing that means we need to give up distributing e-books on Nook, Kobo, et al and distribute our e-books only on Kindle; but as the sales data proves, that’s no great loss. By July 1st we should have all our e-books pulled from all non-Kindle platforms. (It’s a slow process. Some of the non-Kindle platforms, i.e., Hoopla, make tree sloths look fast.)
Third: this is the tricky one. Our previous experience with Kindle Unlimited showed us that having books on Kindle Unlimited spurred readership of novels, yes, but cannibalized the readership of short story collections. KU readers would download entire issues of Stupefying Stories but then read only one or two stories in each issue. Kindle Unlimited made it really hard for us to make money publishing Stupefying Stories.
Our original novels make money. Our short story collections don’t.
We love short stories. Short stories are the hit singles of science fiction. Short stories are the reason why we’re here. But if we can’t at least not lose money by publishing full-length issues of Stupefying Stories…
Going forward, we’ll be bringing short stories to market in new ways: ways that play to the strengths of Kindle Unlimited, rather than trying to fight against it. Fighting against KU is a lost cause. It’s Amazon’s world. We just rent space in it.
§
Ah yes, “Going forward.” That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To find out what we’re planning to do going forward?
First: We have the funding secured for three more issues of Stupefying Stories. We are targeting them for release as follows:
#27, July 1st
#28, September 1st
#29, November 1st
We are in talks about doing a #30, but those plans are still in development. Barring some catastrophic event external to Rampant Loon Media, we expect to hit these dates. These issues will be released in paperback and e-book, and the e-books will be exclusively on Kindle, at least for the first 90 days. (Amazon requires that titles be exclusive to Amazon for at least 90 days in order to qualify for KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited.) After 90 days, we will reevaluate sales and decide whether to keep them on KU or opt for wider distribution. At present, “stay on KU” seems the smarter choice.
Second: We will be scaling back SHOWCASE. The idea of crowd-funding a daily flash fiction site was a nice idea, but naïve. We are grateful to everyone who has stepped up to support Stupefying Stories, and every dollar donated to the support Stupefying Stories fund has gone directly to our contributing authors, but we just plain don’t have enough donors to keep this going. Rather than continue to publish SHOWCASE in this form and to constantly beg for more donors and more donations, we will be reducing the number of stories we publish weekly, and phasing out free online flash fiction entirely by the end of August. Lots of people love to read it. Not enough people want to help pay for it.
SHOWCASE has always been our experimental test bed. It’s gone through many incarnations since our first “webzine” issue in 2013. It’s time for it to change again. In the now out-of-print 2020 version we tried to integrate SHOWCASE with the planned Stupefying Stories Presents line of chapbooks and novellas, but weren’t able to develop the idea fully then because of external constraints. We’re now revisiting this concept, with the idea of developing a chapbook series that exploits the Kindle Unlimited program’s strengths. Details are not finalized, but we’re targeting the first issue of the reborn SHOWCASE for release in late Q3.
Third: What? That’s not ambitious enough. You want a third item?
Okay, how about this? THE ODIN CHRONICLES, SEASON TWO, debuts tomorrow! Watch for it!
And thanks for reading.
~brb
3 comments:
You, sir, rock.
There's some great news in here! Will issues 27 and 28 both be Cyberpunk, or will 28 be the originally-planned "Clankalog" issue?
@AndrewAkers --
We got so many good cyberpunk stories, we were planning to make #27 a double-issue. But then #26 (the all-horror double-issue) was such an enormous budget-busting flop, it nearly put us out of business.
In retrospect, putting out a horror issue a week before October 7th was just plain bad luck. Why read horror for entertainment when it's in the news on TV? One of writers was living in Jerusalem at the time, and we were very worried for her sake until we finally made contact with her and learned she was okay.
Right now the plan is that #27 will be all-cyberpunk, #28 will be "Clankalog," and #29 will be all cyberpunk again. We may end up reshuffling the TOCs of #28 and #29, though. The membrane between cyberpunk and hard SF is more permeable than Amazon seems to think.
At least, *I* think it is!
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