Expenses: 8,000.00~
Revenue: 16,000.00~
Profit: 8,000.00 / 100% ROI
TL;DR Summary: Urban Fantasy author with 4 novels, 1 novella, and a preorder in my first book series. This is a reflection on my first year in self-publishing. Nothing is prescriptive advice.
On November 20th 2019, I self-published the first novel in my series after 3-4 months of building my newsletter and setting up my author platform. I did a soft launch to my 1875 subscribers and arranged a few dozen mailing list swaps. I made $278 that month with my second book ready to publish in the next month. It wasn't much, but it was a promising start to me. In the last year, I have made back 100% ROI on my product costs.
I'm a small lobster in the Kindle sea, but I'm happy with my results. I worked hard to stand out in a saturated genre. It's not the splashy overnight success, but I feel like this year, I built myself a foundation to grow on.
Now, if you have read my other case studies, you know that I have been very strategic in scaling my author business. My first three launches were done without FB/AMS ads, focused on book swaps, targeted newsletter promo, and social media, as I tried to 1) get indie also boughts in my genre and 2) gathered reader impressions on my product. I monitored my bookfunnel and story origin swaps to test covers and blurbs, utilized FB groups for market research, and virtually hand sold my book as much as I could. I also gave out 230 ARC copies and read all 93 reviews to earmark any book issues to fix. I learned in my previous business the importance of finetuning a product before adding paid ads. This was my beta test, essentially. In my July case study, I detailed how I took all the research and fine tuned my product before a big ad push on the series before the fourth book launch. I also scrubbed my newsletter.
From the 11th to the 15th of October, I ran a sale on my books and promoted with FB ads. Prime Days made things crazy and there was a weird FB glitch with rejecting amazon links, so it wasn't a flawless sale. Ad prices are going to get higher as the holidays come, so I will drop out of the ad game and concentrate on making the next book as good as it can be.
2020 was a year impossible to plan for, so instead, I am asking myself questions to guide my intentions for the next year.