Just a quick post to post my July 2012 book sales numbers. Compared to June it was a disappointing month. Compared to all months before June it was stellar.

I’m not any further along on understanding how to work with digital graphic files than I was last time I wrote about it. I consulted with some people who are in the know, and the consensus was that CreateSpace was being overly picky on the requirement of 300 dpi when the graphics were not photographs. So I went ahead and ordered the proof copy. I’m hoping it will be here today, and I can finalize the book within two days.

But beyond the graphics issue, I’m still traveling the learning curve on all this self-publishing stuff, not just the mechanics of layout and publishing but also the necessity and tasks of promotion. I have a similar situation at work. We use two different computer programs in our floodplain simulations. One we use on every project; the other we use infrequently. The one we use all the time had a steep learning curve. If I used it in 2002 then didn’t have another project with it until 2003, I had to learn the program all over again. Finally, after a project every year, I think I have mastered the basic use of it, though I don’t think anyone would call me a power user.

The other program I’ve used three times since 2009. If I had to use it now, I wouldn’t be able to without some significant re-study of how to do it. It wouldn’t be as bad as the first time, when I learned how to use it from reading manuals and trial and error, but it would still be a slow process.

Right now it’s the same with the three self-publishing platforms I’m dealing with: Kindle, Smashwords, and CreateSpace (for print). The interior formatting requirements are so different for e-books and print books that I still have difficulty switching between them. I’ve now uploaded six items to both Kindle and Smashwords, and am starting to feel comfortable with them. Next time I upload something, which I hope will be in less than two weeks, I think it will go smoothly.

But with the print layout I’m still far down on the learning curve. I’ve done the layout of three books, two uploaded and one ready to go once I get the cover. I have one more to do: Doctor Luke’s Assistant. That’s so big at 155,000 words that I’m somewhat intimidated by it. I think it will be such an expensive book that it won’t sell at POD prices, so I don’t mind putting off the formatting. Plus, I’ve had plenty of other things to do on my writing and publishing to-do lists.

I’ll work through it all. I feel good about my progress. Someday I might even get to the point where I don’t fear clicking the “submit” button. It might take three or four more e-book items, and at least that many print, but I’ll get there.

I interrupt this series on the genesis, goals, research, writing, and publishing of Doctor Luke’s Assistant to present my book sales graph. This is from the beginning of my self-publishing in Februrary 2011 through the end of June 2012. Big jump, big encouragement. Lots of work ahead.

It’s June 1st, which means it’s time for me to report my book sales in May.

I’m happy to report my book sales doubled in May compared to April, and were 50 percent higher than sales in each of February and March.

Of course, we’re talking about 6 sales in May, 3 in April, 4 in March, and 4 in February. No, I didn’t drop any zeroes. Here’s what I sold:

Documenting America: 1 e-book

“Mom’s Letter”: 5 e-books

Doctor Luke’s Assistant: 0

“Too Old To Play”: 0

My total sales for 2012 are 25. That doesn’t sound too good until you compare it with sales in 2011, which at the end of May were 7. Four of those came in May, so year over year May sales increased 50 percent, and total 2012 sales increased 257 percent. Business is booming. I should add that the copy of Documenting America I sold to a fellow writer at the OWFI conference in early May. The sales of “Mom’s Letter” were no doubt helped out by Susan Barrett Braun’s mentioning it twice on her blog, Girls In White Dresses, and giving it a good review on Amazon.

This would all be exciting if the numbers involved weren’t so small. Still, I can be exited that sales have increased. That’s in part because I have four titles for sale compared to two at that point in 2011, and had nothing in that year until mid-February.

By this time in 2013 I hope to have 10 to 13 titles available. Will I see 257 percent growth from 2012 to 2013? That would be a whopping 65 sales. I hope to do much, much better than that. And I think that, with the royalties earned at Amazon in May, I actually passed the payout threshold (thought I did before, but no payment has showed up yet), and I should get a payment in July.

While I’ve been working hard on my two works-in-progress, my second novel In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People and my non-fiction political book The Candy Store Generation, I have neglected many things. Family finances are behind. Accounting for my writing business and Lynda’s stock trading business are behind. Clean-up of papers around the house is behind.

Part of this is I’m not doing any marketing for my published books. Save for the occasional blog post into which I insert a link to one of them, or for the similar post on Facebook, I’m not doing anything to sell books.

So naturally I anticipate my sales will languish. The chart I insert here shows how my sales have been so far, since I began e-self-publishing in January 2011.

The chart shows book sales continuing, but the average graph shows no increase in sales for a few months. In fact, my sales per month in 2012 are:

• January – 8
• February – 4
• March – 4
• April – 3
• May (through 22nd) – 5

That’s 24 sales for the year. Not terribly impressive, is it? Four titles available, three of them since January, and only 24 sales.

To put this in perspective, however, by this time last year I had 7 sales. That was for only four months of actually having books actively listed, and only one book (a short story) for the first three of those months. But still, 24 books vs. 7 books. While I’m not cracking the bestseller lists, clearly something is going right.

Put in this perspective, I have more hope for going on. By August I hope to have eight or nine titles for sale. That’s not really a stretch. I could do it by July if I put my mind to it, but August seems quite firm. If the new items sell at the same rate as the old items (1.2 sales per title per month), I would end up the year selling around 90 books. I’m still not writing home about that.

But everyone who has been in the e-self-publishing industry says that your sales per title per month goes up as you publish more. Sales of one book will help promote sales of another. This is assuming your book don’t absolutely stink. For whatever faults my books have I don’t think they absolutely stink.

Will the bump from having more titles available result in a bump in average sales per title per month? I’m hoping so. Meanwhile, with my third sale this month yesterday of “Mom’s Letter”, now making 11 of that title this year and 20 overall, I’m on a roll.

The wife is gone to Oklahoma City, helping our daughter and son-in-law out with those two precious grandsons of ours.

The taxes are filed. I completed my income taxes a couple of weeks ago. I also do my mother-in-law’s taxes, and completed those last night and today made the copies, had her sign them, and put them in the mail. My stuff is filed, and her’s is organized for filing. My tax spreadsheets are in better shape than they ever have been, and a few clicks will put them in the 2012 taxes folder, ready for next year.

So, with the quiet at home, and with my major non-writing projects out of the way, I should be kicking butt on word count. Yet, I find myself unable to write tonight. Don’t even feel like writing this post. I feel kind of deflated over the whole publishing thing. Writing is still a joy, but not having a single sale for about six weeks is the pits. Having blog page views tank is the pits.

Obviously I’m doing something wrong, but I don’t know what. Over at the indie writers Facebook page they are advising me to do “tag swaps”, that is asking people to tag my books with certain keywords and with me reciprocating.  None of these people have read each other’s book, mind you. One writer says, “Please tag my book with the tag “teenage grief”, and the other writer believes that’s what the book is about, and makes the tag. These tags are used in search engines, I guess. If 50 people tagged your book with “teenage grief” and someone searchers for that, your book will pop up as number one.

To me that seems like gaming the system. Yet, that’s what you’re supposed to do, they say, to get noticed by Amazon’s search engines. I have to decide if it’s unethical, regardless of being allowed by Amazon’s Terms of Service. My gut is telling me not to do it.

Today I was served with a subpoena to give a deposition in a lawsuit related to the time I was city engineer (by contract) for Centerton. The deposition is next Wednesday, which isn’t a lot of time to prepare, given the reams of documents and drawings to review for this troubled project. I spent a lot of the day reading old correspondence (2004-2007) on the project, and the problems associated with the project made me sad.

So writing is making me sad today, and engineering is making me sad today. I’d drive down to Wal-Mart and pick up a half-gallon of ice cream and eat the whole thing as comfort food, but that would spike my blood sugar, which would just make me sad.

Oh, and it didn’t help that I was the only one who showed up for writers group last night.

Literary agent Rachelle Gardner made two excellent posts recently about traditional publishing vs. self-publishing; or, as I sometimes call them, publisher-financed publishing vs. author-financed publishing.

6 Reasons Authors Still Want Publishers

6 Reasons Authors Self-Publish

The two posts have generated close to 300 comments. Most of them have been civil. It is a good conversation on the subject.

Lately, on the writing blogs I read, a number of posts have dealt with the business side of writing. Literary agent Chip MacGregor has had several posts lately about treating writing as a business, and how to generate income streams. His focus so far (I don’t think he’s finished with the topic) has been on things other than books. He’s talked about how a writer can be proactive with seeking and even creating writing gigs that generate income with writing that is shorter than book length. He gives hints of how to beat the bushes and make a living off writing. In other words, he’s talking to someone who isn’t tied to a day job while chasing the writing dream.

Rachelle Gardner, also a literary agent, has addressed business issues of late. Both she and MacGregor are thinking of the author published with a “traditional publisher”, not self-publishing.

The Passive Guy, at his Passive Voice blog, frequently deals with writing business issues, especially from the legal sense. He’s normally more focused on independent authors, although yesterday he had a summary of a post on “The Daily Beast” blog post where author Jodi Picoult gave this advice to new authors: “Do not self-publish.”

Yesterday Dean Wesley Smith published a post on streams of writing income, but focused more . He divided the author’s outlook into short-term and long-term. In the latter he put many, many streams of income, thinking mostly of books. On the short-term chart he showed only three revenue streams, all related to e-book self-publishing.

So what’s writer to do? Those who are most invested in the traditional publishing industry say don’t self-publish. The long-term approach demands that you submit, submit, submit to traditional publishers, and gather a basketful of rejections. Picoult says she had over 100 on her first novel. Those who have turned away from traditional publishing say the long-term approach is to write, write, write. Forget about submitting (which takes a lot of time to research and do). Write as many works as you can as quickly as you can. Polish them to some minimum level of quality that a reader demands, and get them out there for purchase. Over the long-term these will generate income.

It seems that both of these camps are talking from a basis of success. Picoult has been on the bestseller lists for a long time, even hitting number 1. She graduated college in 1987, and her debut novel was published in 1992. That’s a relatively short time to accumulate over a hundred rejections, finally have an acceptance, and go through the year-long (or longer) process of manuscript submission, editing, line editing, typesetting, printing, warehousing, distributing, and the beginning of actual sales.

While I don’t fully discount Picoult’s advice, I take note that she broke into traditional publishing over 20 years ago (her acceptance must have been in 1990 or 1991). The industry has changes since then. Drastically changed. The barriers to entry are so much higher than when Picoult broke through. The gate keepers have increased in number, and the gates are smaller. The literary agents are mainly invested in the traditional publishing industry, which is where they make their money.

Smith and Joe Konrath push the long view of e-self-publishing. They are invested in that. They are also concerned with a writer making a decent wage from their words. They aren’t looking to coach a writer into producing the next bestseller. And they realize a significant amount of luck enters in, whether you self-publish or are traditionally published.

I’m comfortable in my decision to e-self-publish, and have book-length works also available in paper. Would I still consider a deal with a traditional publisher if one fell in my lap? Probably, but I’m not taking time away from writing to seek one.