how much I've made in self-publishing in 8 years // lifetime indie earnings deep dive

if you like data and you like that little ch-ching sound then this is the video for you I'm going to go through all of my ebooks published since 2016 which is when I started self-publishing and see how much each book has made since then I'm Lydia Fox Glove and I'm a fantasy author I started in traditional publishing in 2009 and moved into self-publishing in 2016 I've been full-time for most of those years and I've had a number of requests for a video about how much each book has made over the years so let's get into

it for starters it would probably be ideal if I'd put this all on like a spreadsheet or something that I could flash up on the screen but I really am a notebook girl so I wrote it all down in my notebook I'm sorry I also want to note that this is only my Amazon sales I did take my books wide onto the other retailers which is Apple Google cob Barnes Noble plus some other like Library distribution and so on I started taking my books wide I want to say it was around the beginning of 2021

I haven't made a massive amount of money on the other retailers and their reporting is just not as good as Amazon I have a lot of complaints about Amazon but I can at least say that they're reporting for your lifetime sales or sales per book Etc is much better than any of the other retailers since they're the bulk of my sales anyway way that is the only part that I'm going to report on today I also have a number of books in audio book one of them I paid for upfront myself that was Beauty and

the Goblin King and then I have the cursed Soul Trilogy guardians of sky and Shadow a witch Mong warlocks and paranormal house flippers were all purchased by tantor and made into audio books by them most of them have earned out and I do get royalties on them it usually ends up being I want to say about $1,600 per year while the one that I paid for still hasn't made back the $1,200 I want to say that I spent on it part of this might be because I put the Audi book out way after the initial

release of the book either way that hasn't really been very beneficial for me so those are kind of other revenue streams but we're mainly going to be looking at ebook sales as well as Kindle unlimited page reads revenue on Amazon over time again I did not break them down by ebooks and page reeven because there's only so much data you can fit into one video but I did pull out my two best performing books and noted how much they each made respectively we'll get to that so my Indie publishing career started in April of 2016

I had a book it was a young adult novel I was hoping that it would be my next novel to sell to a traditional publisher through my agent however my agent didn't really love the book she didn't really want to send it out I told her well I love this book so much I want to give it a try I had a great relationship with my agent really she was wonderful but I just was really attached to this book I wanted to give it a fair shake so I sent it out to agents none of

them took it on either and then I decided I'm going to self-publish it I did not know what I was doing whatsoever so this book The vengeful half came out in April of 2016 and it has made to date $476 another I wanted to know you have to factor in advertising costs and the costs of producing the book like the cover so I'm giving you the raw numbers here you have to subtract a pretty large chunk for advertising costs I'll talk about that a little bit more later in the video so even though the vental

halfed so poorly I had already started working on the sequel the stolen heart so in June I released the stolen heart I had also heard that book sales start to pick up when you release the second book in the series and the final book in the series but that did not end up being my experience the stolen heart made $129 and at this point the sales of the vengeful half were starting to drop off it was clear that this was not going to be a career path for me at this time I was waiting for

my final advance for my last traditionally published book which was going to be about $330,000 I was also selling postcards on eBay to stretch out my money like vintage postcards so this was a series ious low point in my career I was quite desperate financially and this was when for the first time I seriously started looking into Indie published romance I read a few of the fantasy romance that were on the charts at the time and then I tried to write my own without having a really great grasp of the romance genre but around June

or July of 2016 I published The Sorcerer's concubine this was a series that was set in my beloved fantasy world but I had come up with sort of a setup for it that sounded like a romance because I had been seeing that a lot of them were about you know forced proximity forced marriages and then the couple has to Wrangle with that this was about a girl named velsa who is an artificial sort of living doll girl who has been created to be a concubine that will be bought by a man but instead she's bought

by a sorcerer and he's kind of nice when people ask me what book to start with when reading my books this is one of the ones that I recommend the most because it's very me it's set in my main fantasy world and I love writing it this did actually end up being one of my most successful books to date it has made $2 29,35 I remember the first day that this book cracked $100 a day which is kind of what I needed to live on and I was just so excited I was supposed to go

antiquing with a friend I was feeling so good because it was the first time that I had ever been able to afford my life writing something that I truly loved obviously I immediately got to work on the next book in the series The Sorcerer's wife and in October I came out with that one the sorcerer's wife today has made $1,615 obviously there can be a big drop off between book one and two which I have seen with most of my books part of that might be that I don't really write the tropes the way you're

supposed to so I get a lot of drop off as people are disappointed that the book wasn't executed in the most standard way that is my best gu anyway nevertheless when you release the second book in a series if the series is doing fairly well it does usually bolster series of book one so even though book two made a lot less it still brought up the sales of book one so I was still doing better than when I just had one book out so 2016 in total I released four books as of the middle of

the year I started making like enough money to scrape by then we get to 2017 in January I released the final book in that series The Sorcerers equal to date that one has made $5,988 I was still doing well because the release of book three was still getting book one to sell better but pretty quickly things were starting to drop off again I started working on a new series set in the world and in April I released the vampires doll which was kind of a spin-off of one of the side characters in The Cursed Soul

Trilogy however whereas with the sorcerers concubine I had sort of stumbled into a proper execution of fantasy romance tropes for that time the vampire's doll I went back to my old ways of completely missing the mark in every way possible from the plotline to the cover that book has made to date $1,217 of which I probably netted less than a thousand sales of the first Trilogy were dropping off so I was getting kind of panicked very hastily I came up with my pen name and what that pen name would get up to which I decided

should be steamy fairy tale retellings I thought with steamy fairy tale retellings for one thing I actually really like steamy fairy tales and fairy tales in general they would be fairly easy to write because they already have a plot framework they could probably be fairly short and the Beauty and the Beast liveaction movie had just come out and seemed to be giving a little bump to any Beauty and the Beast fairy tale retelling so I thought this will at least pay my bills that April I released my first book as Lydia Fox Glove Beauty and

the Goblin King this has been my most successful book to date it still generally sells at least one copy every day even 7 years later to date has made $ [Music] 64,65 you can knock at least a third of that off for advertising nevertheless it is an astonishing return for something that I wrote and edited in like 2 weeks and I think the cover cost like $100 $200 I did very little advertising for beauty I wasn't established it was just kind of a pure luck thing in a lot of ways but I was very happily

surprised with how well it was selling I got to work on the sequel right away this was a retelling of the 12 Dancing Princesses called these Wicked Rebels I released that in May and to date these Wicked Rebels has made $ [Music] 23,63070 I published the vental half and the stolen heart I wanted to give them a second chance being more to Market so I tried to rewrite them as an adult urban fantasy and re-released those two books as Fortune's curse and once again the stolen heart Fortune's curse came out in June and it was

still a huge flop in fact it was worse than the vengful half that one made $346 which I think I was actually in the Hole by the time you factor the IAL advertising and the cost of the cover but never mind all that the fairy tales were cranking along in July I released Rapunzel and the Dark Prince to date that one has made [Music] $23,800 $91 and the Goblin Cinderella has made $15,856 and a quick reminder that these totals are spread across seven or almost seven years at the time I was probably netting like $6,000

or something like that in these early months of the fairy tale Heat series and I was absolutely thrilled I had never made this kind of money in my life I'm sure that's partly why I was writing much faster than I ever had before because the fire was in me to achieve some kind of financial stability I should also note that the goblin Cinderella was offered as a free book for signing up for my mailing list for years so the fact that it still made $15,856 only slightly less well like $2,000 less than the book before

it and in fact $ 700ish dollar more than the book that came after it was pretty good so next is the mermaid bride that came out in September and that has made 15, $174 and then in October tast and gredle $3,546 in October I also re-released the stolen heart I don't actually know how much each release of that one made because Amazon lumps them together because they have the same title so that one really made no money at that point I gave up on that series and pulled it from sale I also pretty much gave

up on publishing under my real name because I was writing very steamy books and I was just following the market wherever it seemed to be going no matter how much I didn't want to tell my family about it the one last gasp of my real name is that in December I published between the sea and sky this was a young adult book that had been published by Bloomsbury but it was no longer selling I got the rights back published the ebook myself I didn't expect a whole lot from it obviously because it had already been

around but you might as well and this book is one of my favorites it is about a mermaid who has a childhood best friend who is a winged boy they end up separating and remating years later when he is running a book store and she has a spell that allows her to walk on land but with caveats that one has made to date $690 in these final months of 2017 there was a trend that was starting to take off on Amazon in a huge way as in the most terrible book with like the cheapest looking

cover and the sloppiest writing anything would sell in this genre and this was reverse Harum which is when you have one girl and multiple guys sort of a polyamorous genre but it can range from kind of teen romance to very dark and steamy and it had kind of come over from anime and fanfic and now it was all over Amazon my closest writer friends were starting to write reverse Harum I wanted a little piece of that especially since I loved anime and manga and I figured that some of that audience would be the readers for

it so I started working on a reverse Harum called Priestess awakened and in January of 2018 oops I forgot to recap 2017 real quick 2017 I had 12 releases nine of them were new books and three of them were re-releases of older Works anyway 2018 I released Priestess awaken which was kind of a high fantasy reverse harm that was kind of lightharted and was a mashup of the Fushigi Yugi anime and Final Fantasy 4 but make it say sey I also released one more fairy tale heat book taming Red Riding Hood both of those in

the same month taming Red Riding Hood has made $1,410 Priestess awakened has made $14,100 been better if I had just written fairy tales but there's also only so long you can just keep writing Fairy Tales without a break so I was having a lot of fun writing Priestess awakened in March I released the sequel Priestess bound that one has made $1,290 pretty good read through although it's also been given away free a lot the first book but some of my friends were doing paranormal reverse Harum rather than high fantasy so I started to think I

need to do a paranormal if I really want to make the big money so I started working on a little light-hearted paranormal reverse harm that introduced a paranormal world I would end up going back to many times it was about a social media addicted girl who ends up going on an escape to a magical island with a magical house where technology doesn't work and there's some hot guys there it's just a fun little book tempted by demons came out in April of 2018 and has made $1,247 to date and then in May I released Priestess

unleashed the final book in the Guardians of sky and Shadow series which has made $ 7,399 in June I released a companion book to tempted by demons about one of the friends captured by dragons that one has made $6,196 I had originally intended a third book in that series but I started to think I need something that's a little bigger and more interconnected than just these very light-hearted books they didn't seem to be where the trend was going at that time I also started to think that maybe I needed to try something different with fairy

tale heat maybe I should try a longer story I wanted to try dipping my toe into dark romance I thought that Sleeping Beauty would be a great book for this obviously there was Ann Rice's Sleeping Beauty Trilogy which I was always kind of disappointed that it really had almost nothing to do with the Sleeping Beauty story whatsoever I also was on this huge Marie Antoinette kick so so I had this idea to combine Sleeping Beauty with Marie Antoinette and make it a dark romance I should note that I did a ridiculous amount of research on

Marie Antoinette for this book the historical parts of it are very accurate even though probably almost no one reading it cared about that part of it when you consider everything else that's going on in this story but in July I released prisoner of silk the first book in this series to date that book has made $653 this was a book where I could see two different ways of trying to Market it and the way that I chose was not the right one in August I came out with the sequel to that prisoner of mirrors that

one has made $3,614 to date really not doing great so then I started working on a second Trilogy set in the same world as the Guardians of sky and Shadow this was called kingdoms of sky and Shadow out and it got even deeper into some pretty serious fantasy there was a lot of World building there was a lot of very epic stuff going on I was really indulging what I prefer to write it's probably no surprise that this one didn't do fabulously it was keeping me going the first book in this series The Glass princess

has made $1,449 with the release of the glass princess I released a box set of the Guardians of sky and Shadow series and that box box set has made $24,105 to date so as you can see in this case the box set really ended up being a large chunk of the earnings almost as much as the original release made always very hard to say whether those books would have just continued to sell and make as much money or if releasing the box that was a good idea I have never been able to find a good

way to prove whether a boxa is beneficial personally so I've kind of been back and forth on them in November I released the shadowed crown that was the sequel to The Glass princess that one has made $677 also these books were getting long so these amounts were not seeming very great compared to how much fairy tale heat had been making when these books were twice as long in December I released a box set of the first four fairy tale heat books that one I left up until February of 2021 so it was for sale for

like 2 years and 2 months and it made $7,295 but ultimately I kind of felt like it was stealing sales from Beauty and the Goblin King and the other books in the series and I felt like they were selling pretty well without the box set already so I ended up just pulling the box set and never redoing it again so in 2018 I had 12 releases 10 of them were new novels two were box sets then we get to 2019 which ended up being a huge year for me in January I released the crystal Queen

the final book in the kingdoms of sky and Shadow series that one has made $4,350 we weren't off to a really great start here but I was working on my first more ambitious paranormal romance reverse Harum series I also had sort of neglected the Marie inet Sleeping Beauty mashup so I got that finished I released book three prisoner of Dreams in March that one has made $1,518 pretty bad but we're not done with that Series in March in anticipation of this new paranormal reverse herum that I was writing I wrote a novela that was in

a like collection that various authors were doing I want to say it was about 20,000 words and it was about the grandmother of the main character that was timed out to release right around the time is the first book at the time I didn't really make any money off of that or maybe there was a small payment for the Anthology that I don't really remember but I later offered it as a freebie and I also simultaneously had it up for a 99 cent book which you can only get 35 cents in royalties on a 99

cent book that one has still made $154.95 which not bad and in March I released the farer hex the first series in a witch among warlocks this series was conceived as a mashup between the Boys Over Flowers manga and Harry Potter but of course make it a sexy reverse Harum it was kind of playful but it also had some serious stuff and I had it on pre-order for like 3 months beforehand it was getting way more pre-orders than anything I'd ever put out before like I could feel that this book was going to end up

being big and there was an academy Trend that started to hit in Reverse Harum just around that time everybody suddenly started asking for Academy reverse Harum and I had already been working on the book so it was almost done and ready to drop right at that point when the interest for it built so a lot of its success was due to Pure walk but nevertheless I released it and to date it has made $ 4,945 in the long run it's made substantially less than Beauty and the Goblin King but it did give me my biggest

single sales month that I've ever had in my Peak month when book two released I made like $20,000 in one month which was insane to me if I thought that the money I was making when I released fairy tale he at first was good I could not fathom making $220,000 in one month because that was how much I made in an entire year for many years and this was a crazy year in my life we ended up kind of having to move hastily from Maryland to North Carolina and in fact this house came on the

market that seemed really perfect and fair hex was on pre-order so I didn't have the money to buy the house but I knew that I was about to release this book so I made an offer on the house with like the longest possible contingency thinking well if farx ends up bombing I'm going to have to pull out and lose the few hundred but I think it's going to do well and then I'll have the money to do this and it worked out so that was one of the most nerve-wracking years of my entire life and

I had to keep writing books during all of this which the whole year was crazy like we had to do all these Renovations on the house to make it accessible for my partner who has bad knees we were carrying two mortgages at once for many months and we had to pack everything very hastily so 2019 was complete chaos but I was making a lot of money I hope the lighting isn't too modeled at this time of day I got interrupted for a bit and now the light's kind of weird in April of 2019 I released

the sequel boys overpowers which is made $1,160 and then in July the third book a fine necromance which made $1,440 that same month month July also released a box set of the kingdoms of Sky Shadow series which has made $7,950 again not sure if the box set was beneficial or not but then in August I released the box set of the Marie antoinet Sleeping Beauty story I rebranded it in a big way changed the series name to the surrender of Sleeping Beauty kind of Riff Off of the Anne Rice Sleeping Beauty and this Rebrand really

worked to date that book has made 20 $5,490 which makes it my fourth most successful release ever and obviously it's three books so that was a fair bit of work but it's definitely my most successful box set and it definitely made up for the time that I spent writing it that's the most successful Rebrand that I've ever had I ended up making the Wich among warlock series 4 books because it was doing so well so in September I released Battle of the hex's the final book it has made $774 huge drop off however from book

one which has made $40,000 almost $41,000 so it was definitely time to pack it in with that series and also there were a lot of Academy reverse heram on the market at this point so mine was no longer like the hot thing but I still felt like it had gone well enough that I wanted to continue in that world one of the things about reverse Harum is that you have to come up with a lot of main characters for every series and if you have to come up with a whole other fantasy world every time

at the same time that is a lot lot to come up with and these books were not very formulaic they had a decent amount of like World building and a lot of characters these were not like the easiest books to do as a fast release so anything that I could kind of reuse or any World building work that had already been done definitely helped me so I took one of the characters from that series Daisy she was one of my favorites a little bit of a DEA which from Chicago just a really fun character and

I released the first book in her series is face worn it has made $9,995 almost that 10,000 Mark and in December I released the second book and that series Fay tempted which is made $455 I do kind of like to come up with the next thing and release it before all the momentum from the previous Series has died down so I often tend to release like a new book one before I wrap up the previous series or at least at this time when I was releasing so quickly but any anyway 2019 I had 11 releases

of which there were eight novels one Nolla and one box set or two box sets so January of 2020 kicked off with the first release that was another kind of spin-off from wi and one warlocks but whereas face horn was very light-hearted and funny I decided I would also try one that was like dark this was probably not the best idea because I wasn't really known for dark except for the Sleeping Beauty trilogy which was a very different genre and probably marketed to a different audience but I get bored easily so I went dark and

I did this Vampire series about a witch girl who has grown up in like a witch cult but she is The Reincarnation of a girl that this vampire has been looking for because she is his initial love and she can't be turned into a vampire so the only way that he can find her is to find her reincarnation if you watch my video about writing the broken Queen you can see that I kind kind of grabbed this reincarnation idea from my pre-existing World which also has some repeated reincarnation so take me slowly came out in

January it has made $3,126 then in February I wrapped up Daisy story with f bound that one made $4,375 and then in April I released love me madle which was the second vampire book and that one made $3,988 so as you can see that series was starting to drop off a lot and I think that a lot of people probably weren't happy with the dark tone of the first book especially because the main guy is kind of a jerk in the first book which is not what I usually write so I think I turned off

some of my audience even though that is popular in other books by other authors it wasn't really what I was known for I also released a witch among warlocks as a box set in April that one has made $1 15,841 not bad now there was something going on in April of 2020 that made the entire world depressed and I was in the middle of this dark and rather depressing well I don't want to say depressing but the vampire book is intense it has some parts that I really love I'm actually very proud of that story

the way that it really comes together it made me cry a little bit while I was writing it and I was very happy with the emotional arcs ultimately but it was not a book to be writing at the beginning of the pandemic so since the vampire book wasn't doing very well and I was getting depressed writing it I felt like I need to write something lighthearted and fun again I didn't know that the world was going to get so depressing so I started working on the Paranormal house flipper series which was an idea that just

kind of sprung to mind and as soon as it did I was like yeah that's going to be a blast I was watching a lot of house hunters and those house flipping shows at the this point seems like a real pandemic era activity so in May I released demons in the bedroom about a witch named Helena who comes from a very wealthy family but she wants to Branch out on her own and she loves flipping the houses of witches and finding the magical secrets that are inside this book was super fun it's gotten some of

my best reviews and it has made $8,885 and I was having so much fun with the series that I released the next one in June that one made 12214 that was Wolves at the door and then the very next month in July I released the final book Phantom of the library which made $9,100 so that series just kind of poured out it was kind of my Peak pandemic Escape but the vampire book was still hovering over me I really wanted to wrap it up I really wanted to do these characters Justice even though I wasn't

sure it would make very much money so I buckled down and I finished that kill me softly came out in September that one has made $2,000 $2,066 I wanted to go back to something lighthearted so I took one of the side characters from the Paranormal house flippers story and gave him his own story but the main character was actually a girl who was a familiar and the familiars in this world can take either a human or an animal form and they're bound to serve their witch or warlock but there are a few of them that

aren't super happy with this Arrangement or the warlock or witch doesn't treat them that well the main character was in this category and this was a fairly like light-hearted kind of rompy Series where she finds her her arm of men who were all kind of villains in a way but they're kind of a little bit humorous it seemed like there was a bit of a trend toward like funnier sweeter books at this time so I was hoping that this would hit that spot but that first book Sympathy for the demons came out in November and

it has made to date $3,625 now something I want to note about planning the costs of a series is that when I would release the first book particularly at this time because the main advertising I used was Amazon ads I would spend a lot of money in the beginning to push the book and get it like kind of in the algorithm and then I would hope that I would make money on it later so often I was losing money in the first month which means that like very roughly if a book makes $6,000 for a

book one $3,000 that's probably going straight back to advertising and then if you think half the audience has dropped off for books two and three you're not paying for advertising and you're maybe getting $3,000 a book for those something like that so really the minimum I want a book one to make is $6,000 and even then that's kind of dicey because it often takes a little more than a month maybe two months to write a book so then you're netting about maybe $8,000 for you know five months of work and then I'm also not factoring

the cost of the covers which could easily run you up to $1,200 at most or maybe even more if your budget is higher so needless to say Sympathy for the demons making only $3,600 was not a good performance at all in December I released a box set of Daisy story I rebranded it I made it look more kind of like like this really fun bright reality show Vibe although ultimately I wasn't really happy with how it turned out and this box that also did not do well but that one came out and has only made

[Music] $1,812 that's a book in some ways I would still love to Rebrand except I don't really do reverse Herm anymore but I love that story I kept up with the story of The Familiar girl I released the second book in December bat out of hell that one has made $1,315 definitely a big drop off from book one that was not going well I also released a box set of the vampire story and that one I also tried to do Rebrand and make it look a little like traditionally vampirey I was worried that the original

covers maybe the color palette didn't convey vampire enough that one has made $4,190 so more than double what the daisy box that Rebrand did so that wraps up 2020 I had nine novels and a total of 12 releases three of which were box sets so then things get a little more difficult in 2021 since the book about the familiar girl was really tanking I tried to come up with something that would excite me and would also be to Market so I thought I'm just going to go traditional it's takes place in our world it has

shifters cuz shifters are always popular the main character is going to be a girl who can you know definitely hold her own and have good banter with the main guy there's going to be a little bit of enemies to lovers thing going on basically I tried to load it with popular tropes but I also had pulled the characters from my main fantasy world and just like severely reworked them because I felt like that was the part that was going to keep me excited just feeling somewhat like I was writing about my real characters that I

miss very much at this point because for years I had not had time to write about them the last book that I had written about those characters was the rewrite of Fortune's curse and a stolen heart heart which had done so badly and that was back in 2017 and here we are in 2021 this whole time I had gotten detached from the fantasy world and the characters that I love so much so I tried to kind of rework them all into something very marketable some of them didn't really survived the transition While others seemed fairly

like themselves either way I was having fun with this series again and I was very excited about it I did a big push on social media more than I usually do so that for book came out in February it was called black queen stray I also invested a lot of money in these covers like more than I ever had before and black queen stray to date has made $3,865 only $40 more than the familiar book Terrible especially since I had planned the series to be nine books long I was that confident that I had included

really popular elements and then I'd gotten really good covers so there's a lesson for you that sometimes who who knows I wrapped up the familiar story with the Devil went down to Florida in March that book has made $835 also in March I released the second book in the shifter series black queen shadow that one has made $1,969 in April I released the third book black queen Sovereign $1,283 and in May the fourth book in the series White Queen fiend which has made brace yourself $766 so at this point as you might imagine I had

had many series that are making generally like five figures for at least the first book in the series if not the entire series suddenly I have these series that are barely clearing a profit of $2,000 and I've had two in a row like this that just done very poorly this was just a terrible year for me and it was coming off a few really great years and we were kind of still in the pandemic it was just very depressing so I knew that I was going to have to make some difficult decisions at this point

the first thing I did was work on a new book in the fairy tale Heat series I hadn't released one since January of 2018 but they had continued to sell the entire time and that was one thing that I just didn't know in the beginning is that fairy tale heat would keep selling and selling and selling whereas the reverse Harum would have like a big pop when they came out and then they would drop Dr off almost immediately so I thought it was worth writing another fairy tale it also had a very long break from

fairy tale so I was ready to get back into it so I wrote Captain Hook and the mermaid that one has made $6,250 so much better than what I had been doing especially since re-releasing another fairy tale helped the sales of the previous eight books in the series and that really kind of saved me that year I still kept giving the shifter series more time to pick up traction and I really released weight Queen flight in July that book has made $542 and at this point with great sadness I had to pull the plug on

the whole series I just had to stop writing it at this time I still thought I'm going to get back to it maybe I can wrap it up in like one book but this the plot that I had planned it was very difficult to think how I could do that and I was really struggling with it and avoiding It ultimately I ended up just pulling those books from sale so that people would stop discovering them and occasionally I'd get an email asking me where more of them were and I'd feel so terrible and so depressed

cuz I truly wanted to write this series but you know so I just got back to fairy tales cuz I needed money and fairy tales were doing it for me so in August I released the Giants captive which was a Jack in the beant stock kind of gender flip I think the cover of this one really had kind of a you know good steamy fairy tale Vibe this one did quite well 7,92 $4 which is great for a book 10 in a series it was much better than Captain Hook and the mermaid even which was

not a slouch itself and the success of that one really boosted the whole fairy tale Heat series also in September I decided I was going to re-release the sorcerer concubine which had originally come out under my own name was going to re-release it as Lydia Fox Glove cuz it was an adult fantasy romance that got a little sexy at times I thought that my readers would probably like it at like some of them I ended up read rewriting in a decent amount because I had learned so much about romance at this point I didn't want

to compromise the book it was part of my true fantasy world so I didn't want to do anything to make it so that it wouldn't fit in with the world as a whole but nevertheless there were things I felt I could improve so I rewrote it re-released it in September I don't know how much it's made because again Amazon doesn't separate out the amounts when you re-release a book I know it didn't make a ton of money but it also was not like writing a whole new book from scratch in October I did another fairy

tale blue Beard's curse that one has made $3,611 in November I re-released the sorcerer's wife again I don't know how much but it was you know a little bump in December I did the Goblins price which was a Rumple stilt skin retailing that one was $3,487 and these are not terrible totals for how late in the series they are because a lot of times you're getting people to pick up every book previously but at the of 2021 I was definitely very unsure as to what to do because I didn't just want to write fairy tales

and they also weren't making like big money they were just making like hang in their money and I would have to keep just doing fairy tales every month there's only so many fairy tales out there and only so long I can just only write fairy tales so I knew I needed a series that would do well but I was really doubting myself because I'd had two in a row that I really thought were hitting the market and they did not I left reverse Harum behind it felt like it was no longer a genre that I

really had my finger on the pulse of and I thought I'm just going to go back to just standard man and woman and I started working on a paranormal Monster Series that was set in the same fairy world that was in Daisy's story in fact Daisy appears in the beginning I wrote a little bit of that and then in January my father-in-law died and everything got thrown into upheaval I pretty much stopped writing entirely because we were selling off the contents of his estate which was a ton of stuff and a ton of work I

had two books on pre-order and I pushed them back as far as possible but those were the only books I wrote Because I just didn't want to not deliver on these pre-orders so in 2022 I only had two releases in May I had wed to the troll King which was a retelling of east of the Sun and west of the moon that one has made $ 4,051 and then in June I re-released the sorcerers equal which you know just made a smidge and that was it after not really writing for months I started to just

have like an absolutely burning desire to write something and I really just wanted to write something for myself at this point and the Cozy romances as well as like Paranormal romcoms were both kind of becoming big at this time I just thought I really want to do one of those so I wrote Doll Girl Meets dead guy and this book was really for me it kind of had that cozy cute goth vibe that I've mentioned before and it had characters that I had already written about in previous books but it stands on its own it's

just a very cute and Earnest and heartfelt Love Story SLC Coming of Age story that one came out in January of 2023 and I really had a hard time marketing this I was very preoccupied obviously with my father-in-law's stuff I wasn't sure if I should Market it as a cozy fantasy or if I should Market it as a paranormal romcom I kind of failed at both of those things so as doll girl made $878 I also briefly tried changing the title to a taste of magic and changing the cover under that title it made $317

basically a flop but I still adore this book I also didn't really need money at that particular point cuz we were selling off all my father-in-law's stuff so that one was for me then in June I released rescued by The Raven King I had a hard time writing that one because I was also still mired in this other work but I wanted to keep some thing out there I didn't want to go a whole year without like a fairy tale or something that my readers would get excited about so that one has made $1,494 not

great but I didn't really Market it I just kind of wrote it and so that's basically the end of what I have released 2021 was did I cover these years 2021 was 12 releases of which 10 were new 2022 was one new release and 2023 was two new releases all in all over the course of my whole career I've written 58 books that have been published even though some of them have been pulled am i counting that right 58 books and now I have an upcoming one the broken Queen so I'm not going to get

too deep into what I'm doing now and what my new strategy is because I've already talked about it in my first video but there's an overview of my entire Indie career to date and we'll see where things go from here hopefully I covered everything it was probably pretty long oh yeah I also was going to briefly just have a little note about wide releases and Amazon sales well it's really more about Amazon ebook sales versus Kindle unlimited sales so if you have a book that's really long and you're getting page reads for it you'll get

a pretty high rate in Kindle unlimited which is Amazon subscription service but if you have a shorter book you don't get a whole lot from kindall unlimited 40,000 words usually ends up being like a dollar I want to say so the fairy tales are all about 40,000 words if someone reads them I get paid a dollar if someone buys them I get paid like $2.70 so Beauty over the course of its lifetime has made $3 31,49 on ebooks and $30,000 819 in Kindle and limited they're pretty close so obviously a lot more people borrowed the

book than bought it however ever I started making a little more money with those when I took them wide and stopped offering them as a subscription because obviously you don't even have the numbers here for the ebook sales from the other retailers so you can add some more to that whereas fairer hex is a bit of a longer book and reverse Harum readers are very heavy and Kindle unlimited so that one has made 8,686 in ebooks and $32,000 in Kindle unlimited page reads huge difference there that's what four times as much revenue in Kindle unlimited

as I got for ebook sales so if I could go back in time would I have taken those books wide I'm not sure if it was a great idea it's hard to say because they had dropped off a lot they weren't really selling that much on Amazon anyway but then it's not like they sold super great wide either those can be kind of difficult decisions to make but ultimately part of the reason that I left Amazon Kindle unlimited exclusivity is simply because Amazon's policies were just making me feel kind of don't like that I will

talk more extensively about that decision in a future video cuz I know some people are going to ask anyway I think that's it I hope I covered everything but that's what the comments are for if you have any questions and I also have a substack and a patreon that have a free weekly Q&A as well as more in-depth writing stuff and behind the scenes of my books and a Discord if you join the $5 tier thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed this video please like And subscribe I talk about the creative life

in general and writing fantasy and World building in particular both the Practical and the emotional side along with sometimes just some nerdy stuff and I'll see you next time bye the sunlight is kind of weird and patchy at this time of day but there is a cat here and I don't want to lift the curtain up from under her and disturb her cuz she's very cute