In this third year of writing, I find at year end that I've managed to earn a little less than in the year before, but not due to lack of trying.
This year, I made about $150 less on my writing than last year, which I attribute in large part to the total number of releases I had during the year. Given the lack of releases, this seems to me to be a fairly strong result.
I appear to be doing quite well for an indie author, so I don't want to complain too much, but the heart always wishes for more, alas!
2023
- 2 shorts (The Gift That Keeps on Giving, Bugged Out)
- 5 novellas (The Rubber Order: Sanctification, Over Easy, Droneship, Bull Moon, Training Betsy)
- 1 novel (Target of Corruption)
2024
- 1 short (Pod Problems)
- 2 novels (Dirty Hearts, Tick Tock)
Additionally, I wrote a 21K short, 'Soldiers of Darkness,' to support the release of 'Dirty Hearts,' and three new endings to 'Nine to Hive' (26K). I don't think the extra time I spent to enhance these stories was worth it in the end, and I don't think I would take on a similar project in the future. I may write a short here or there as an advertisement, but anything longer really needs to be prepped for a separate release.
The last four months, I have been occupied writing two new novels and an anthology, all of which will be released next year. Since the 'Enthralled' duology is technically done and just needs editing, I'm going to count them in the analysis I do below.
By The Numbers
As in last year's analysis, these releases are in revenue order.
Dirty Hearts
KENP: 14,617
Word Count: 108,615
Word Count: 25,366
Word Count: 175,725
This work earned more than Tick Tock last year, purely by virtue of being the first release in the year. It didn't do as well as I had hoped, to be honest - I consider this one to be rather a bust. It was an unusual story, really, with characters being named after colors, and the primary form of transformation being costume changes, with perhaps not as long of a corruption arc as some would have liked.
I think that this was pretty hot, but it didn't seem to be a large hit with the readers. Additionally, the add-on story I wrote didn't appear to drive sales all that much.
Tick Tock
KENP: 13,945
This has been out for a shorter length of time than Dirty Hearts, and seems to be following a similar revenue curve. I've had several people tell me that they consider 'Nine to Hive' to be one of my best works, yet writing a novel in that universe didn't appear to translate into sales here, nor did adding more endings to 'Nine to Hive.' I was somewhat disappointed with the performance of this one as well.
Pod Problems
KENP: 5,513
This did the worst of the bunch, but it was a one off short. If I released a lot of these during the year, having a less than stellar performance wouldn't really matter all that much. As it is, I need to work on getting more covers created and more releases done next year to see if that will help at all.
Enthralled (The Divine/The Awakened) - Not Yet Released
I think these two novels do a much better job of showing the overall corruption of the main character than I was able to manage in Target of Corruption. We'll have to see if the readers agree once I can get it edited and released starting next month!
Soldiers Of Darkness - Free
Word Count: 21,756
I did receive a compliment about this story, but also a complaint that the corruption happened too fast. Since I was more or less following the plotline of the original doujinshi, that didn't give me as much room for creativity, so I apologize for some of the abruptness.
Nine To Hive Endings - Free
Word Count: 26,693
I liked the new endings I came up with for this story, but I didn't receive any comments on them, so I have no idea how they were received!
Choose Your Own Submission Anthology - Not Yet Released
Word Count: 35,182
I think this one is going to be super hot, but it might be a tough sell as not all the stories in it are going to hit all the preferred kinks of the readers. I'm curious to see how this one will do, though it's more likely that I'll split up future shorts into individual releases instead of putting them together into one monolithic book.
The reason for doing an anthology in the first place is selfish in nature - the fewer covers I have to make, the better, as I only have so many sexy stock photos and backgrounds to work with. Does anybody know of a fetish stock photo site?
Totals
Word Count 2023 - 522,032
Word Count 2024 - 498,139
I didn't quite manage to do the same amount of writing as last year, but I wasn't too far off! Overall, I think it's the lack of year end releases that hit me the hardest.
KENP Page Reads 2023 - 187,964
KENP Page Reads 2024 - 200,310
This is definitely a good sign, in my opinion, almost better than the overall revenue in terms of readers, since it indicates that people are actively enjoying my work! A lot of this has been driven by older works, of course, and I hope to do even better with this metric next year!
Top Ten KENP
- Doll Factory (2022) - 89,081
- Sky Trained (2022) - 83,219
- Target of Corruption (2023) - 58,267
- Droneship (2023) - 41,158
- Training Betsy (2023) - 29,694
- The Rubber Order (2021) - 28,970
- Containment (2022) - 23,174
- Over Easy (2023) - 17,297
- Dirty Hearts (2024) - 14,617
- Tick Tock (2024) - 13,945
In general, the oldest works do best here, and the novels get a leg up simply because they're long and have more pages. So far, it seems like rubber dolls and pet play have been most popular, though I don't want to read too much into that.
It's certainly something to think about going forward. I'm rather interested in seeing how my next works measure up, but I won't really know until the end of next year!
The Future
Next year should start out really strong, as I have three releases in the pipe. After those are complete, I am planning on picking up the 'Training Betsy' universe again. While this story didn't perform well initially, it was a pretty strong read via KENP throughout the year (it's in 5th place of all the works I've released!), so I think it deserves some kind of sequel since I left a lot of ideas on the cutting room floor.
This will require that I read through the original novella before I can start work on it again, which will slow down preproduction. Hopefully, I can come up with some suitable ideas that work well with my old ideas to create something tantalizing and fun!
Additionally, I have a lot of short story ideas that didn't make the first anthology. I would like to either release these as shorts, or create a second anthology.
Abandoned Plans
Someone suggested from last year's retrospective that I should consider starting a tip jar. I looked all over the place in an attempt to figure out how to do this, but it became very clear that the adult material I create is frowned upon tremendously by pretty much every payment processor.
I finally settled on Gumroad, but shortly after this decision, they banned all NSFW material from the site.
If I wanted to set up something, I'd have to put together a SubscribeStar page, but that doesn't seem to fit my model very well. The only reward I could give is early access to some of my material, but that then raises the risk that my writing will be posted elsewhere online for free. This would make it much more difficult to get my stories approved on Amazon.
As a result, I still have no idea how I would implement this, so I've abandoned the idea for now.
Final Thoughts
This year was simply hamstrung by writing too many large novels in the final months. Someone suggested on this blog that I should be releasing shorter stories, and I totally agree with them.
Once I finish editing my current works and get them released, I'm going to really try to write fewer novels and more shorts, and see how that goes!
I am fairly proud of the novels I've produced, but they're really an oddity in this space. It would make more sense to write non-smut novels and keep the smut in shorter works so that there isn't such huge gaps between releases!
Finally, I don't think writing tie-in stories make any sense unless they're shorts, so going forward, I'm going to do much less of that. Fortunately, I don't have any other old stories that it would make sense to do this with anyway.
With the dearth of feedback I get from my free material, it just makes more sense to release most of my stuff on Amazon, where I can at least let the market decide via KENP page reads to get a sense of the direction I should be heading in!
Thanks to everyone for supporting me this year, and a special thanks to draphy, who has helped me a lot with pre-reading my latest novels!
Over and Out for 2024,
Half Shim/Caroline Waters
After last year’s, I was looking forward to reading this year’s update. It’s nice to see that things are going well – more or less. I had hoped that adding books to your catalog would increase income, but it seems Amazon is a bit less straightforward in that regard. Take the Kindle search, for instance – I still have no idea how to find your works through it. Target of Corruption and Droneship are the easiest to find using tags like corruption, drones, or latex. Maybe that’s how Kindle search works, or maybe the books are set up that way...
ReplyDeleteAt first, I thought perhaps Kindle’s idea is that there are so many works, it shows an author’s single most relevant title, and then readers are expected to check the author’s page for more. But then, some searches bring up multiple works by the same author – even a whole series.
All this makes you think that the key might be promoting through other mediums...
Looking forward to next year! And I’ll definitely finish the work you helped me edit – it’s such a drag for a novice writer like me to finish a piece. But it helps knowing I can’t let the time you spent go to waste :)
The so-called long 'tail' of publishing appears to be there, but only really in terms of KENP reads. I can't complain about that, because I love to see that people are enjoying my work. New sales seem to be a function of new releases, for the most part.
ReplyDeleteI don't have any idea how Amazon works with discoverability, and to be honest, I try not to waste time thinking about it. There's little I can do either way, except to do my best to avoid being banned (I try to make things as consensual between sex partners as possible, since that appears to be the biggest taboo in publishing). Anything I write that I don't think follows the guidelines close enough gets published online, which is why 'Repopulated' turned into such a huge debacle in 2023.
I do post an advertisement in all the places that I'm aware of that would enjoy my work: The 'Mind Control Literature' Discord, DeviantArt, Hentai Foundry, the old MCStories forum, and Fetlife, as well as here on my blog (which doesn't exactly have high readership, but that's how it is!)
There are a few other places it might make sense to post, but there's a surprising amount of locales that don't allow or like self promotion, which is kind of a bummer.
Sometimes, I try to write short stories to point to/advertise my novels, but I don't have any idea how effective that is for discoverability. It's probably doing something, but is it a good use of my writing time? Should I be writing and releasing those shorts on Amazon instead? I really have no idea.
Those kinds of shorts do allow me to explore topics I wouldn't otherwise be able to publish, but I've discovered during writing over the last couple of years that I'm not really into hardcore nonconsensual stuff anyway.
Good luck with your work! There are several more releases from me currently in editing... stay tuned later this month!