I’m going to be honest… this post is going to be a real contrast from the previous post. My numbers are very different, thanks to the fact that my move more or less stole all of my free time. I still maintained good numbers from where I previously imagined myself, but…
Well, you’ll see!
If you haven’t read my 2022 Q1 Author Stats Post, I recommend starting there!
Same format as before. Let’s do it.
2022 Q2 Overview:
- Audiobook for One Night in Garoureve completed (April)
- Began work on Book 4 (April)
- Trapped in Garoureve Released – Book 3 (April)
- Artwork Commissioned (April)
- Squashed Book 4 after receiving orders
- One Night in Garoureve Free Weekend (May)
- Sticker Shop Opened (May)
- Began Work on Owen – Bear Shifters (May)
- Movers, Cruisin’, and Covers, Oh My! (June)
So basically my life flipped upside down this quarter. Like, completely upside down. I went from writing full time to finding out I had to move everything overseas in a limited amount of time. All of my writing energy had to be channeled into other things… and so yeah! I’m figuring it out now, but things struggled. Hard. Yeah.
NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBERS
So basically, I set a goal to send out more newsletters, and I did well… until I didn’t. That stated, my open rate stayed high, and I can tell you for a fact that this has changed during July thanks to my PA. That stated, I also didn’t have a lot of big surprises and reasons for people to subscribe, other than the bonus epilogue for Book 2, which you can see jumped me from 459 to 510, thanks to landing pages.
We’ll talk about that in a hot minute, btw.
Let’s go onto the budget!
APRIL
A lot happened in April. Sooooo yeah. Let’s talk about it.
INCOME: Amazon pay for this month is from February, which was the release of Needed in Garoureve, and was a huge month for me. Thank goodness for that, because I spent a lot of money this month.
PAY OUT: This is also the first month I paid myself! I know that looking at this now, the budgeting throws it all off, but I actually didn’t pay myself from this check until mid May, but it was based on April numbers, and don’t worry we’re all clear, but yeah! I paid myself! And this is literally more than I used to make working full time. Fucking insane.
BILLS: (row by row)
Audiobook – This is how much my part of the per finished hour cost. I think it was about $45 an hour? We’re doing Royalty Share. Had to pay once the book was finished.
Moonstruck – I scheduled my cover design for June and had to put down a deposit. This was originally for a different project, but I ended up using it for Owen.
HanCorinne Art – HAVE YOU SEEN THE ART?! THE STICKERS?! I love them.
SHOP: I bought stickers. Also shipped books I already had. Also ordered paperbacks for Trapped.
MONTHLY: I added a monthly book fairy budget, because I want to book fairy people! I’m setting an even $50, and spending that amount I guess. ALSO I upgraded my bookfunnel account so I could do a landing page.
And uhh…. there we go! Next month!
MAY
INCOME: This is my March income, when I went viral on Tiktok again and hit number one with One Night again in a few categories, so it was a good amount of money. This was also my April pay for ACX. Both of these are paid at the end of the month. Oh, and then I sold a bunch of books, and, I finally pulled money from the Patreon. So uhh… I made money! Really crazy, but it does go down from here.
PAY OUT: I paid myself! Again! Holy crap!
BILLS: I paid for a bookspry promo this month. Also I screwed up and used the wrong card. Typical me.
MONTHLY: I opened my shopify sticker shop and tada that’s a new fee.
All in all, it was a solid month, and I had a little extra set aside, which is nice.
JUNE
April Amazon Income (Trapped Release) plus May ACX Income.
I was traveling this month. So… yeah.
I paid myself out a lot more this month, but again, we were on vacation. I also bought myself some books and I finished up paying Moonstruck.
What a time to be alive?
2022 Q2 Spending Overview:
I don’t know what to even say here?
Technically the totals are for the year but… I’m too tired to figure out how to calculate that? But still, you can see that I’m actually doing somehow good, which is…. amazing? I’m fully in the positive at this point, making more money than I did when I worked full time.
There’s nothing else really more to say, I guess. So long as I stay super green, I’m good!
Anywho, royalties!
PRE-ORDERS
… IT’S MORE THAN BOOK 2 SO I AM HAPPY
Literally my entire goal with pre-orders is to have more than my previous pre-order, so you know, I’ll take it!
ROYALTIES OVERALL
So for some stupid reason, it won’t let me include June 30th, so just… let’s pretend it’s there or whatever. Woo, go Amazon for setting a 90 day limit but ignoring that some months have more than 30 days.
Blue is One Night, Red is Needed in Garoureve, Yellow is Trapped in Garoureve. If you see a slight green line, that’s the paperback for Needed, which if you remember, I screwed up with last time. I’ve since fixed it, but it still exists on this stupid chart thing and counts as a book.
Anywho.
You can see the huge spike, where Trapped in Garoureve released, and then from there… it has sort of… evened out? My goal is over $50 a day, and if I make more than $100, we celebrate. This is numbers I can get behind and stick with.
Here’s the breakdown for those days. Woo?
The actual numbers per month for royalties are as follows:
April: $3,653.76 (pd end of June)
May: $2,592.69 (pd end of July)
June: $2,040.90 (pd end of August)
That stated, this is missing two things. The first is ACX, but we’ll talk about that in a bit. The second is… I HAD A FREEBIE DAY! And I want to show that off really quick!
FREE BOOK STATS
Over my birthday weekend, I made One Night in Garoureve FREE. It was May 7-9, and the numbers were interesting! So that you know, you can do a certain number of free days every year and still keep your book at 70%. I took advantage of this, but I also paired this with something called a bookspry promotion.
Basically, you pay money to get into their newsletter, and it’s sent out to their subscribers that your book is free. It’s an amazing resource, and I was nervous about paying it off, but wow did I!
For the sake of comparison, I’m going to show the next few graphics with May 1-14, so you can compare.
So obviously, units ordered! Without it, over this same time period, units ordered is 76, so that’s almost 3900 free books grabbed!
Now, since the book was free, you would assume that my royalties dipped over those days, right?
Except, they didn’t.
Of note, I did have more orders for Needed and Trapped in comparison, but you can still see that I MADE more money over those days!
And most fun of all… my page reads! I guess, beyond the fact my book was free, people with KU saw it and just went ahead and read it, so while the book was free, I STILL GOT PAID FOR PAGE READS, and if that’s not amazing, then idk what is.
All in all, I made more money over those days in surplus of my normal numbers than I spent on the promo itself.
KENP PAGE READS
Soooo here’s my page reads? My goal was to beat 1.5mil, and I only just barely missed. I’m okay with that.
The by book breakdown. Honestly, it could be better.
ORDERS
So obviously, this is with freebies removed, but otherwise, these are the numbers of orders. Again, could be better, but that’s okay!
LIFETIME
Insert here my pretty graphic showing you all of the numbers, but, Amazon won’t let me do a custom graphic of more than 90 days, so I’ll have to do the math below:
2021 + 2022 Q1 + Q2 Total Royalties: $20,787.99
Book 1 Royalties: $13,163.67
Book 2 Royalties: $5,008.42
Book 3 Royalties: $2,615.92
2021 + 2022 Q1 + Q2 Total Page Reads: 3,387,615
Book 1 Page Reads: 2,158,401
Book 2 Page Reads: 819,680
Book 3 Page Reads: 409,534
2021 + 2022 Q1 + Q2 Total Orders: 1,859
Book 1 Orders: 1,181
Book 2 Orders: 426
Book 3 Orders: 252
ACX
I’m… not even sure how to present the ACX information to be honest. I don’t really understand the royalty system? So, here’s the facts. I have split royalties with my narrator. It released in April. Pay is one month delayed. So, end of May, I was paid for April. End of June, paid for May. Etc.
Here’s the numbers for those months:
I can’t tell you how much my royalty payment is in total, as I don’t have the numbers of pay for June yet, but April and May totals to…
$261.85
Idk why I thought I had made more than that, but! I’m happy with it. I’m about halfway to paying off the audiobook, then. Idk why I thought had made more than that, but there we go.
IN CONCLUSION
I did better than I thought. Not as much as I wished, but better than I thought. So. I’ll take it. And I’ll keep pushing.
As always, if you have any questions… just ask!