So, I’m listening to David Gaughran on the Rocking Self Publishing Podcast, and I’m feeling moved to do a little update dance here on the site for my self-pub brethren. I’m gonna do a list, cause that’s how I find this info most frequently. Also, for the sake of simplicity, I’m calling The Scientific Method one book, even though it began life as six episodes and a box set.

2014:

February
Books out: 1
Vendors: 2 (Amazon and Smashwords)
Sales: 21

March
Books out: 2
Vendors: 3 (Amazon, Smashwords, ARE)
Sales: 101

April
Books out: 3
Vendors: 3 (Amazon, Smashwords, ARE)
Sales: 98

May
Books out: 4
Vendors: 4 (Amazon, Smashwords, ARE, Barnes and Noble)
Sales: 65

June
Books out: 5
Vendors: 5 (Amazon, Smashwords, ARE, Barnes and Noble, Google Play)
Sales: 124

July
Books out: 6
Vendors: 5 (Amazon, Smashwords, ARE, Barnes and Noble, Google Play)
Sales: 84

August
Books out: 7
Vendors: 5 (Amazon, Smashwords, ARE, Barnes and Noble, Google Play)
Sales: 118

Sooooo, as you can see, I am not making the big money yet. Ha ha ha. (I’ve done the math. I’d need to sell about eighty books a day at $2.99 to make a comfortable living allowing for taxes. Read: that’d be a chunk more than the not-enough-to-cover-expenses that I make now at the day job, but wouldn’t be the lap of luxury. I did allow for an increase in the grocery budget with that number, though.)

My production schedule is holding pretty strong at a release a month, which I think is helpful. Different vendors have different readers, and the pressure is on a lot of folks to enroll in KDP Select (for non-indies, that makes you exclusive to Amazon for ninety days, and comes along with some advantageous marketing opportunities), but I couldn’t do it. I’m way too OCD. And customers aren’t the same everywhere. It might take an Amazon reader three or four days to work through the series of The Scientific Method. If someone likes TSM on AllRomanceEbooks, they’re highly likely to buy the entire series at once and power through it. I don’t sell enough at other vendors yet to be able to identify customs, but it’s definitely fascinating.

I’m also looking forward to seeing if behavior is different with the Home Series, which is a different kind of series. TSM is all very inter-dependent. You will definitely enjoy the last books of that more if you’ve read the books that lead up to them. The Home books are far more independent. You’ll still enjoy the inside jokes more if you’ve read them all, but I suspect if you like the series, you’ll have a strong favorite among the books. They have slightly different flavors.

So. There we are, an update. I’ll shoot for another one in January, after the holidays, and after the print books get going. (Also, Kobo and iBooks. Kobo and iBooks. Going direct, people.)