Revenue

To paraphrase a TV advert of many years ago concerning my current revenue, I ain’t never seen a year like this one and I never want to again neither. Based on previous years’ figures and the fact that my stock of books keeps increasing as I write more every year, in January, I was predicting a 140% rise in revenue over 2014.

A friend told me that that sounded high, but it didn’t to me, as I have been used to that sort of increase.

Normally, my best two months are November and December, followed by July and August. Everything was going to plan in June, so I was waiting for the revenue rush in July, but July sales were the worst for a year. August sales have always beaten July’s and have never been bettered by September. This year that nearly didn’t happen, but only because of Apple sales which were unusually high.

September’s revenue was awful, worse than July, much worse. July was down by 30+% and now we are in October. This month has always been better than September. However, September had fifteen zero sales days, and so far, over the last EIGHT DAYS, I have sold one book!

Not one book a day, that would be a huge drop-off, but ONE book in more than a week. Revenue is down by 95% ! To put this calamity into perspective, three years ago, I had only my first book for sale – one solitary, lonely book – but I have never, ever sold only one book in a week and now I have 140 on the shelves!

You can only guess how demoralizing it is to contemplate that only one person out of the world’s population of seven billion, wants to read one of your 140 books in eight days…

Pathetic, isn’t it?

I don’t ask how other writers are doing and they don’t say, so I don’t know what is happening across the board, but I did get a story from the Guardian on my paper.li account the day before yesterday, which stated that Waterstones has seen a 5% rise in print book sales and a massive fall in the Kindle ebook equivalent.

The fall is so massive, that their spokesperson said that they were removing Kindle from their stores and going back to only selling print books.

A rough quote was: ‘Kindle might prove to be the shortest-lived book category in history’.

Well, it is looking that way to me too, but it is not only Kindle. I am on all the ebook formats and none of them are selling, although if things keep going like this, Apple might outsell Kindle this month for the first time ever as far as I am concerned.

All of this is bad enough, but I can’t understand what is happening, and that bothers me. I started to put my books on Google Play yesterday, perhaps they have stolen all the ebook readers, but it is a long shot.

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My bookshop is here.

All the best.

Owen

Podcast: Revenue