2020 Year-end Wrap-up: Full Sales and Expenses as an Indie Author

I had visions of 2020 being an amazing year, but it turned out to be the most complex and challenging year of my life so far. The pandemic hit, protests broke out throughout America, and we chose a new President. On a personal level, I lost my full-time day job in July and started a new position in September. But even with the year so difficult, I wrote 7 books, published 4 of them, and will be publishing 2 others in January (another is on hold for now).

If you’re new to my yearly wrap-up posts, be sure to go back and read through my past ones. There’s a lot of great data and analysis for new authors. Hopefully, you can learn from my mistakes and avoid them:

And for new readers, let me set some expectations: My full-time day job is my main source of income. Publishing fantasy/sci-fi and self-help non-fiction books as an indie author is my secondary career that I started in 2011. As such, I have a small budget and the numbers you’ll find in my reports reflect that being an indie author is my side hustle. I share my reports because I want to help new indie authors to see behind the curtain and read through some real-life numbers.

2020 Goals

I started 2020 out with a straightforward goal: Treat my writing as a business, publish more books, and learn as much as I could about Amazon Advertising. So on January 2nd, I kicked off a new year and focused on setting my budget ($1000 for the year) and getting to work.

Since I had a good amount of data from 2011 to 2019, I knew that my previous way of publishing wasn’t working for me. And I wanted to listen to the trend that other authors had mentioned: Without marketing, books were no longer being organically found on Amazon.

Strategy

For 2020, I decided to take a new approach to my writing: I’d focus on a year-long experiment. I wanted to write the Let Go and Be Free series. Every day I would write a blog post, which would be a daily reflection on growing up in an alcoholic and dysfunctional family. And then every 100 days, I’d publish a book with the posts. To date, I’ve written 400 posts and plan on publishing the fourth and final book in the series in January 2021.

I started the experiment in late November 2019, published the first volume in mid-March during the beginning of the pandemic, the second volume in July, and the third one in October.

Yet I didn’t give up on my fiction. I started a new series, the Red Door Diaries, and published book 1 in the series (Permissions) in September.

My plan was simple: Write fiction, publish the first book in my Red Door Diaries series, do no marketing, and immediately begin the second book. Once I’m finished the series, I’ll make book 1 permafree, and then run ads.

I also finished up book 1 in another series that I had started, but I decided to put that series on ice so that I could have some time to focus on my other two projects.

For the rest of you out there who have a full-time job like me, my writing schedule is set in stone:

  • Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday: Get up at 5 a.m. and write. My writing goal is 1,000 words each of those days, as well as a blog post for the non-fiction series.

  • Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday: I go running to get in my weekly exercise. I still had to do a blog post each day (though some days I cheated and wrote a few posts in advance and used Squarespace’s scheduling feature).

Tactics

I kept my plan simple as could be: Write, publish, and start the process over again. I wanted to get as many books out as I could while working full time, raising a family, volunteering to save democracy, and staying sane during the pandemic (thank you, Deep Chopra). After having spent a lot of money on marketing in the past and not seeing results, I decided to pull back, regroup, and try dedicated experiments:

  • Run Amazon Advertising ads.

  • Participate in Bookfunnel newsletter swaps.

  • Pay for promotions to places like Bargain booksy, Free Booksy, and the Fussy Librarian.

  • Go wide in all the major publishing platforms.

So how did I do? First, let’s look at what I spent to run my business.

Expenses

The good news is that I pulled way back from expenses from previous years.

  • Google Apps for business ($76.32/year)

  • Web domain and proxy registration fees ($23/year)

  • Squarespace website/hosting ($203.52/year)

  • Prowriting Aid ($75)

  • Copyright registration fees for 4 books ($260)

  • Mailchimp ($488.32)

  • Bookfunnel ($20) [I downgraded to the lowest pricing tier]

  • Facebook Ads ($7.95) [I had a moment of weakness and tried an experiment in August, but wised up when I realized I was throwing money away.]

  • Book promotions via paid newsletters ($216)

  • Amazon advertising ($469.64)

  • Amazon Ad School training with Bryan Cohen ($299)

  • K-lytics report ($37)

  • Trello ($0)

Total expenses: $2,173.75

Some takeaways about my expenses: Yeah, I know that I don’t have to file the copyright for my books with the U.S. government, but I like having the book on file and on receiving the certificate in case there’s any doubt over my being the copyright owner for my books. I like having peace of mind.

I’ve been with Mailchimp now for the last few years and I’m really happy with their service. The only problem is that it’s expensive. I have 3,300+ subscribers on my lists and I’ve looked into switching to another service, but I’m not seeing another one that’s less expensive with the same functionality.

For my yearly website fees, I’ve been with Squarespace since 2013. I love it. It’s easy to use, allows me to integrate with Mailchimp for sign-up forms, and is a solid platform.

This past year I took my day job experience and brought it into my indie author career by using Trello to organize all my work. With Trello, I can create digital “to-do” cards, add checklists on each card, attach images or Google doc links, and keep track of all my projects. And the best thing: Trello is free and, if I wanted to, I could collaborate with other authors on the board. I cannot stress how easy Trello is to use, and the mobile app has all the functionality of the desktop version. Here’s a sample Trello board that I built to give you an idea of the type of set up that you can create to keep track of all the work you need to do for your projects.

And finally: Training. Why did I drop $297 on Bryan Cohen’s Amazon Ad School? I believe in investing in myself when it comes to new skills. I’ve taken Bryan’s free Amazon Ad School challenge in the past and decided to pay for the training because not only did I learn a lot, but I believe good content is worth paying for. Bryan’s courses are extensive, helpful, and his team’s customer service is exemplary. If I want to become a better marketer, then I need to learn new skills. It’s that simple.

Sales

  • Amazon: $995.83

  • ACX audiobooks: $417.23

  • Amazon affiliate payment: $90.06

  • Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc.: $93.20

Total sales: $1,596.32

Some Thoughts

I went wide earlier this year, but I’ve not had the time to roll out a robust marketing plan. I focused on Amazon for 2020, and that’s where my books sold.

To date, I have 17 books available wide (Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, B&N, Google Play, and a bunch of places in Europe via D2D):

Fiction:

Non-fiction:

I focused on getting all my books wide this year and spent some of the time over the summer while looking for a full-time job to reformat all my fiction books (updating back matter, validating the ePubs to clean any issues up, etc.).

In 2020, I published volumes 1-3 of my new Let Go and Be Free non-fiction series and Permission (book 1 in the new The Red Door Diaries series). When I did run some advertising, I pushed 90% of the Amazon Advertising ads to volume 1 in the Let Go and Be Free series because in early experiments that book sold easily and made a profit. Early in December, I ran a Fussy Librarian and Freebooksy ads for Ahab’s Daughter (book 1 of The Werewhale Series that I recently set to permafree on all major publishing platforms).

I tried other tests with Amazon ads for Lost and to Ahab’s Daughter before I made them to permafree earlier in the year, but I did not have many sales and turned those ads off. For 2021, I intend to run more ads to my permafree books to help drive traffic for sales in those series.

What would I like to change? I’ll be honest: I wish I had more funds to get better covers for some of them. I think they would do better with readers, but I’ve paid a lot of money in the past for not-so-great covers (I am especially not fond of my Cinderella book covers). With limited funds and time, I made a big decision for 2020: My wife created all my new book covers for me (Let Go and Be Free series and Permission). After years of spending a lot of money on my covers ($150-$450 per cover), I pulled back and am thankful that my wife could help me. I needed to cut expenses somewhere and I feel the new covers that my wife has designed are much more professional. I’m hoping to work with her on having her create new covers for my Cinderella’s series, but that’s going to take time since it’s four books.

One of the covers my gracious wife created for me.

One of the covers my gracious wife created for me.

Fiction cover that my wife designed for me in 2020.

Fiction cover that my wife designed for me in 2020.

When I look at the breakdown of my sales, I know that most came from Amazon because I advertised there. (Though to be fair, historically, my sales mostly come from Amazon.) During the months that I didn’t advertise on Amazon, my sales went down considerably.

As for ACX, why such high numbers? I had a bunch of legacy coupons to give out before they changed their reimbursement policy, so I gave away all my codes to my newsletter subscribers.

So what sold and what didn’t?

Here’s a graph I put together of my top 5 books on Amazon. Yes, my sales are low, but I put these reports together to show new indie authors the challenges of making a profit. It’s not easy. Long gone are the early days of putting an eBook up for sale without any advertising and making a solid profit.

2020 Breakdown of Amazon Sales by Book Title

(I listed only my Amazon sales because my sales on other platforms is neglibile.)

What I found in my experiments with Amazon Advertising is that I could quickly and easily run an ad for my Let Go and Be Free Vol. 1 book and make a profit. I experimented with bids and found that a bid between $.30-$.35 resulted in sales of my book. Every few days I would start up a new ad, run it for two weeks, sit back, and get back to work on writing.

My ad settings were straightforward: Sponsored products, 2-week duration, automatic targeting, a daily budget of $10,000 (I’d barely hit a few dollars each day), dynamic bids down only, and I chose a standard ad. I would have liked to have run a custom ad, but I couldn’t find the right text that would pass Amazon’s filters (any claims of targeting a class of people using a term such as “alcoholic” appear to get your ad declined).

With all the other work I had on my plate this year, I found that running and experimenting with Amazon ads to be just the right amount of time that I had available.

I published three Let Go and Be Free books in 2020 and sold $564 worth of books with little marketing effort. However, what I found most interesting is that I noticed that readers purchased the print version of the book most of the time. In an era of digital products, I have to admit that I hadn’t expected this to happen.

Without hard data to back up my hypothesis, I think that readers wanted a physical copy of the book because of its content (a daily reflection) and that the age range skewed older. When I look at my Google analytics for my website, I can see that visitors to my Let Go and Be Free Vol. 1 webpage averaged over the 55+ age demographic. Granted, I can’t correlate Amazon sales to visitors on my website, but it’s worth pointing out.

My takeaway from 2020: My experiment with non-fiction worked. I could write my non-fiction self-help books much faster, and I made more money, all while writing about a topic I’m passionate about.

When I write my fiction books, I need more time to plot; the books are longer, and the covers take more work as well. And in my experience, readers tend to like reading a series. With my Let Go and Be Free Vol. 1 book, readers started buying that right away.

What I Learned

Kindle Unlimited

I started with having Let Go and Be Free Vol. 1 in Kindle Unlimited for 90 days as well as my gaslamp fantasy book, Permission, and neither made any dent in sales. I had thought that my Let Go and Be Free Vol. 1 would do well in Kindle Unlimited once I had books 2 & 3 in the series out and started running ads but that wasn’t the case. So instead of keeping the book in KU, I decided to go wide.

And I did the same with Permission: the long-term plan is to finish the series, don’t spend a dime on marketing in the meantime, and then make book 1 permafree and drive traffic to the other books in the series.

Instead of being tied to Amazon, I found it more beneficial to be wide with the hope of expanding the advertising of my books on other platforms in 2021 and beyond.

Newsletter swaps

Years ago, I had much more success with newsletter swaps than I did this year. And with Bookfunnel, swapping with other authors became even easier. But at the end of 2019, I spent $150 on Bookfunnel so that I could integrate with Mailchimp. What did I find? Readers would sign up to get my free book, get my automated emails over the course of 6 weeks, and then every two weeks I’d follow up with a new newsletter. But did I sell more books? No.

I have seen this behavior in the past as there are many people out there who like receiving free things. They grab a free book but have no intention of ever reading it. A few years back a reader wrote to me and thanked me for the free book but fessed up and told me that she had thousands of free books. She would “try” to bring my book to the top of the digital pile.

And I think that’s the challenge authors are having these days: There’s a glut of free books out there, and it’s a fast race to the bottom. You can’t compete with zero. With wanting to keep my 2021 publishing costs low, I opted to downgrade my Bookfunnel account to the $20 yearly fee.

My plan is to use web forms on my website that are connected to Mailchimp on the back-end to add organic subscribers to my mailing list.

Staying wide (and going wider)

I’ve spent a lot of time and energy in going wide in 2020 and I’m going to continue to publish my future books wide at the start. Yes, it’s more work, but I’ve created a process to format my own eBooks. Do I wish I had a Mac and Vellum? Yep. I’m tempted to follow Paul Teague’s advice and rent space in the cloud to run a virtual Mac and install Vellum and format my books that way. What’s stopping me? Money and time. I love learning, but 2020 hit me hard. With writing all the books I did, experimenting with Amazon Advertising along with everything else we all dealt with in this hard year, I just couldn’t stretch myself even more. I think learning how to rent space to run a virtual Mac and try out Vellum is going to be an experiment for 2021.

The Big Picture

So where am I with my author career when I look back over the lifetime of expenses and sales? The graphic below tells the tale. I have chosen to raise a family and work full time. They are my top two priorities that take up most of my time. I’m not rationalizing my lack of sales or making any sort of statement about my abilities. I’m being honest.

I love writing. I still remember the first story I wrote as a kid. Over the years, I’ve used my imagination to share stories about people who overcome their past trauma to grow and heal. Writing is therapeutic for me. I have a lot to learn as an author and a marketer, but when I look back to 2010, here’s the truth: I had one novel that I had tried to get published for years and another on a hard drive. I couldn’t get into traditional publishing, no matter how hard I tried.

With indie publishing, I had an opportunity to publish the books on my own or to give up my dream of writing. I don’t often read through the reviews on my books, but I’m happy to see that readers are enjoying them. Sure, some dislike my books, but I’m learning how to refine my writing to zero in on my niche. Reading the 4 and 5-star reviews helps me better understand what I’m doing right, and the 1 and 2-star reviews have been useful to me as well.

But when I tally up all the numbers over the last nine years of sales, I’ve still failed as a business. When you look at the graph below, you’ll see how much money I’ve earned and spent. I’ve lost money. I’ve made mistakes (one of my earliest mistakes was spending money on advertising when I didn’t have a series finished yet), but keep moving forward. Since I started publishing books back in 2011, I’ve built up a nice base for my intellectual property. Each book is a unique product that I can morph into other properties: audiobooks, eBooks (single or box sets), print, licensing deals, etc. I may not have made a profit yet, but I’m in this for the long haul. (Let’s just say that I know what I plan on doing once I retire from my day job.)

Book Expenses and Sales: 2011-2020

What matters to me is that I’m writing, learning, and I’m having a hell of a lot of fun. There’s nothing better than sitting down at 5:30 a.m., writing a really exciting scene, and feeling like I did as a kid when I first started reading books. Am I making a lot of money today with my writing? No, I’m not. Does my writing suck and am I a bad marketer? I don’t think so. But I know my limitations, and I do have a lot to learn. The good news is that I can learn and there are people to help me.

I maybe not have a lot in sales now, but I’m enjoying what I’m learning, creating new intellectual property, and I’m building up a backlist for the future. Again, I’m planning for the long haul with my author career.

Networking Is Key

Before I finish, I want to mention the importance of networking and to call out a few people who I look to as mentors. If you’re not reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Business Musings weekly blog, sign up and read it religiously. I’ve learned a lot over the years from her blog and have taken some of her husband’s (Dean Wesley Smith) online courses.

And I can’t remember when I first started listening to Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn podcast, but it’s been years. I look forward to Monday mornings so that I can listen to the latest episode.

On a personal note, both Kris and Joanna have been so patient and kind in answering my emails, being supportive, and sharing their knowledge with me. I am so thankful to both of them.

In 2020, I also learned a lot from the Wide for the Win Facebook group. If you’re an indie author and are looking to put your books wide, participating in the group is a great way to network with fellow authors.

I also want to thank Lisa Lilly for her friendship. I first heard Lisa on The Creative Penn podcast and decided to reach out and network. I’m so glad I did! Throughout the year we had some great conversations where we shared what we’d learned about indie publishing, but also had some great talks about how we were doing during various stages of the pandemic.

If I never wrote books, I wouldn’t have connected with so many great people. My world has become larger because of my writing. I’ve sold books as far away as Japan and have come to realize that I can take an idea, make a book, and then offer it to the world. As a kid, I never thought anything like that would ever be possible.

But now, I’m listening to great podcasts like the Sell More Books Show and I’m learning skills that no professor ever taught in college or even in my graduate school courses. Anyone with a desire to write, the internet, a laptop, and the willingness to learn new skills can start a business from their home. The possibilities truly are endless, but my time isn’t.

I found 2020 personally challenging, but I did grow and learn a lot. I don’t know what 2021 will bring, but I do know this: I need to be willing to be flexible not only in my day job but also in my second career as an author. The world has changed and we will continue to do so on a daily basis. Entire industries have been gutted due to the pandemic, and there’s more need now than ever for workers with digital skills.

Although I might not have made a profit this year through my books, I did use the skills I’ve learned as an indie author to land me my most recent job. Doors opened to me because of what I’ve learned in the last 9 years.

I appreciate you taking the time to read my post. I invite you to share what I’ve learned with other authors you know and for to you pay it forward. That’s how we move forward—by helping others. Thank you.

Ron Vitale is a fantasy, science fiction and non-fiction author. To date, he’s published 13 fiction books. His first nonfiction book, How to Be a Successful Author While Working Full-Time: The Secret to Work/Life Balance is also now available. When not writing, Ron loves spending time with his kids even when they beat him in the fun card game Kittens in a Blender.