How Much Money I Made My First Year As An Indie Author

let's talk about something you're not supposed to talk about money hey friends it's Rachel welcome back to my channel if you're new here my name is Rachel Terry and I am the author of three young adult fantasy novels information will be in the description box down below if you're interested today's video is going to be about money specifically how much I made and how much I spent my first year as an indie author and the reason that I'm making this video is transparency I know I can't be the only Indie author who looks around and sees all of these other success stories and feels like I'm not where I want to be and I don't know what I'm doing wrong they say that comparison is the thief of joy and it really is and I have become the queen of comparison I see all these other authors who seem to be thriving ones who have 6,000 pre-orders on their book that's not out for another few months ones that have way more ratings already on their first book that's not out yet yet and I can't even get that many on three books combined authors who were getting tread Pub deals because their debut novel sold so well authors who are getting multiple special editions of their books made and I just look at all of this and think what am I doing wrong when in reality I have a feeling that my circumstances are probably far more normal and common and we just don't see those things I think there's kind of a sense that talking about money and the fact that maybe you're struggling as a self-published author is kind of taboo and I don't think that it should be and I do think that no one wants to admit that they're struggling no one wants to admit that they're not where they want to be or where they hoped they'd be and it takes a lot of guts to admit that you didn't make it the way that you wanted now there is no expiry date on your dreams as long as you keep going you can still make it your books are still out there they can suddenly take off they can keep making money and getting sales throughout the years nobody's going to say that if you don't make x amount of money or sell enough copies by this date you're done that's the great thing about self-publishing so long as you have the money you need to publish another book the only person that can say yes or no is you it's completely up to you and that's what I like about it but it is not without its struggles of its own so for the sake of transparency in case anyone's curious or there are other aspiring authors out there or struggling in the authors this video is for you so let's start out with the Positive how much did I make so before we get into the nitty-gritty details I do have to say that this is from January 2023 to December 2023 in order to keep things simple but my first book lightbringer did not come out until May of 2023 so the months before that I wasn't making any money from my writing and then flame Seeker book two came out in September so for 2023 my gross income from my book books was $741 19 which sounds pretty good on the one hand for your first year I mean it's almost $1,000 it's not I'm suddenly Rich money or I can quit my day job money but it's almost $11,000 but if you know anything about gross you know that's not what you actually end up with and so my net from my book sales was actually $542 42 of this amount I made $123 from Amazon I looked up this information on my tax papers and Amazon was actually listed separately from my business income and expenses page because they pay me royalties and while so does Ingram spark the other publishing company that I use Amazon sends you a 1099 MC or 1099 miscellaneous which you're required to do in the United States if you pay somebody a certain amount of money in this case Amazon is just required to do that because they're paying me my royalties Ingram spark for some reason doesn't do this and I don't know how they really get away with it or what the reasoning behind this is but I just had to print out my statements throughout the month but I did get $123 worth of royalties through Amazon from Ingram spark I actually had $23. 75 but I only ended up with $58. 80 of that because Ingram spark takes a large percent of what I make it's rather depressing every time I look at it and it sucks but on the other hand every single website you see my books on that is not Amazon my books are there because of Ingram spark and so I do think it's kind of worth it for that reason but it is disheartening to see how many sales you made and how much money they brought in and then how little you actually get to keep because of print costs because of global distribution fees and yada yada yada inperson sales were by far my most successful way of selling my books and I got $386 54 from inperson sales but once I subtracted sales tax from that I only got to keep $359 182 and that's not including the cost of printing you have to pay the print cost of your book whenever you buy an author copy so that I still didn't get even that much of that money but because I am selling the book directly to the customer I do make a higher royalty rate per sale in person than I do online so inperson sales were the most successful for me and I think that that will probably continue moving forward now we get into the business expense section so looking at my gross sales I said I had $41.

99 worth but when it comes to my business expenses I had $ 5,213 worth of business expenses which means I am in the red I am in a hole and I did not make money I lost it so let's break down where some of those business expenses went to to I'm not going to break down every single thing I spent money on but it gives you a general idea where most of it went so $423 went to advertising $2,751 went to contract labor this was my biggest section by far and this is book covers and any character art that I may have had Commissioned I cannot remember if the character art that I did have commissioned happened in 2023 or slightly before but I do think it happened in 2023 I hope that my contract labor costs moving forward will not be this expensive but the Phoenix and the crowns cover was very much more expensive than either light brers or flame Seekers so I'm not sure that that will be the case moving ahead I would very much like to commission more character art but I cannot justify this cost because I can't sell it and it's mostly just a for me thing I would love to have it for me and yes I can post a social media with it but it doesn't justify the cost and artists are not cheap so I will hold off on the character art for now $190 went to legal and Professional Services I have a company that I paid to make my publishing business through and I have to renew that service every year $954,000 I don't have to collect or report that sales tax because whatever vendor you're purchasing the book from does that automatically but for in-person sales I do have to report the sales tax and you do have to register with your state for all of that but luckily that's all out of the way and $868 went to other expenses which were categorized as memberships education and licenses so let's break this down a little bit further into some specific expenses that I had for instance $540 went to the publish and Thrive course which I signed up for this is a one-time purchase so I will never have to buy this again I have lifetime access to this course so that won't be on next year's expense list $252 went to Wix which is where I host my website through $76 I have to pay the state where I live this annually it's an annual report of good standing which basically means that you check that all of the information regarding your business is still accurate and you pay the state $76 it's annoying but so is the state that I live in $142. 8 is my canvas subscription I probably need to just bite the bullet and go to an annual subscription instead of monthly because I do think they give you a break on that but canva is very much worth it for me to have a pro version of I have done so many Graphics Social Media stuff and then the chapter images that I use at the beginning of each of my chapters and my books also come from canva and if you have the pro subscription with them you are allowed to publish these things you can use them in your books and not get in trouble it's totally allowed so that's why I pay canva $575 went to purchase 100 ISBN from Baler Baler is the only company in America where you can buy your ISBN numbers from and I bought a 100 at a time because it's going to last me years again this is an expense that I'm not going to have next year which is very nice I use three isbns per book I use for every edition of the book so ebook paperback and hardback you technically don't need one for ebook but I do use one anyway because I think it looks more professional but even using six of these a year because I plan on using three per book and I publish two books a year at least so far that's still going to last me several years so I will not have to purchase ISBN anytime soon $119 went to Goodreads giveaways or a Goodreads give away I should say and this is something I have mixed feelings on I know that by doing this I got my book in front of a lot of people and some of the people that won the book on the giveaway did like it and I had this similar experience with the giveaway I just did with Phoenix but I also know that some of the people who won the book in the giveaway did not like it and the frustrating thing about good re giveaways is that even if you have people who do not like or flat out hate your genre they will still sign up for it because it's free and they could get a free book whereas me if I don't like horror for example I'm never going to enter a giveaway for a horror book because I don't like it but there are people who will enter giveaways for books they don't like the genre of simply because it's free so basically the frustration from this is that I pay good reads $119 to give away free copies to people who hate my book because that's what's happened both times I've done it there have been people that liked it there have also been people that hated it who were not a good fit for the book in the first place but entered anyway which is their right but it's frustrating to know that you paid them to hate on your book instead of them pay you but it is what it is $100 went to story origin which I have mixed feelings on I don't think at least for me that story origin is worth it and I don't anticipate that I will be renewing it again next year unfortunately the renewal date just came and went so I technically did renew it again I'm going to try to make the most of it this year and see if I use it more if it becomes worth it because I know I'm not using it for nearly hardly anything mostly just review copies at this point but for me so far this has not been an expense that's worth it and I don't see myself renewing story origin again 20 $410 went to Amazon ads we'll break that down a little bit here soon $37 went to a Tik Tok marketing blueprint booklet thing and fix the way that I wanted it to be luckily that I have more experience that hasn't happened yet I guess not happened again and I hope it will stay that way because I would prefer not to buy any more proof copies than I have to because that's really all they're there for and then you can't do anything with them afterwards with those proof and author copies you have a print cost associated with it and the longer or thicker the book is the more pages that it has the higher the print cost is so my print cost for a lightbringer is $5. 88 per book it used to be 18 cents cheaper than that but the price did go up and for flame Seeker it's $55.

24 and Phoenix which is not involved in this year but will be next year is even more expensive than that so that does eat into your profits as well especially when you're selling in person and lastly I want to break down the Amazon ads that I ran I stopped running ads because they weren't very successful for me at that point and I felt like it might be worth trying again once I have more exposure and more reviews but I don't know that I have enough to convince people to buy the book I certainly had people clicking on it and for those who don't know the way Amazon ads work is that you only pay for the ad if somebody clicks on it so if you click on a sponsored product and you don't buy that product you've actually just cost The Advertiser or the seller money not judging you if you don't buy it just something to keep in mind because I had no idea before I started this I did not know how this worked so my first ad run consisted of one campaign I had three clicks for 55 cents each for a total of $165 my second run I had three campaigns one had eight clicks for 72 cents a piece for a total of $5. 7 one had five clicks for 41 cents a piece for a total of $25 cents and one had two clicks for 39 cents each for a total of 78 cents and the grand total for this second ad run was $855 the third ad run had two campaigns one had 17 CLI CS for 78 cents a piece for a total of $13. 20 and the last one had three clicks for 23 a piece for a total of.

70 and the grand total for this third run was $13.