Monday Musings: Sales in UK

 

In 2011 I bought my first Kindle and started publishing on Amazon.  Amazon required a set amount and I set my price at .99. Then I went crazy writing short stories, took my first novel out of mothballs, updated it and it became my second published novel, originally written over twelve years earlier.

I bought the publishing rights from the vanity press and converted my first printed novel into e-book.

This was the early years of Kindle and e-books. What I wrote sold well for about three years. In that time, I earned $200.00 in royalties. At .39 per download fairly good. Then it dried up.

Publishers started converting better known author's books into e-format and no matter how many new novels I wrote only a few have sold since.

I had one short story that had 720 downloads, but Amazon put it out as free. Didn't get a dime, and only one review. It was shortly after this that they came out with Unlimited. 

 If someone downloads your work, you are paid per page read. I've received two dollars here or there from those royalties and it's disappointing how many people start to read the book and stop at ten or twenty pages and that's it. Hey, I try to write good hooks.

UK Amazon only paid in checks, and they wouldn't write one until it reached a hundred dollars. Around 2017 I received a check for twenty dollars, glad they realized it was unreasonable to expect small time writers to reach that standard. I also received a check from Amazon Australia for a buck ninety-eight.

The last few years I've started turning my e-books into paperbacks as the price of printing and buying them from Amazon has gone way down. I can set my own price and royalty. Also buy copies and sell them.

I compiled three of my short stories together into Three Medieval Battles: Crecy, Poitiers and Flodden.

Suddenly the last few months downloads and sales of this book have gone up. Mostly sales of e-books, but last month someone bought a paperback and on unlimited someone read the whole book. All in the UK.

I know this is a drop in the bucket to most authors, but I'm proud that an author from Albuquerque, New Mexico has in the last twelve years sold my words and wisdom not only in America, but in Australia, Canada, and the UK. It seems the UK likes my books the best. Most of that money from the check sent by them was for Vander's Magic Carpet.