Digit Envy

Hot off the press from Amazon comes a late Christmas gift to indie authors everywhere. The company has announced that during the last 3 months of 2010 ebooks outsold paperbacks.

The trend continued this month, with 115 ebooks sold for every 100 paperbacks. It encompassed all of last year with Amazon selling 15% more e-books than paperbacks.  In July of 2010 Amazon reported that it had sold more ebooks than hardcovers. By year's end the etailer had sold 3 times as many ebooks as hardbacks. And yes, Virginia, that figure excludes free ebooks.

And you know what? Amazon sells lots of stuff. All kinds of stuff. If it's legal to buy and sell, it's probably sold somewhere on Amazon. Despite all of that, despite all of the gazillions and God-help-me trillions of items that Amazon sells now and has ever sold - you know what? The Kindle is Amazon's best selling item in its 16 year history.

What does it all mean to authors? It means that new indie writers will start getting directions that sound something like this - Yes. You know where those Castle walls used to be? Well, you go that way, and ...

It means that times aren't just "a-changing." It means that they've changed.
There are indie authors everywhere selling enough books to quit their day jobs. Guest blogging over at Joe Konrath's place, Robin Sullivan posted a list of VERY successful indie writers that she and Derek J. Canyon compiled of indie authors December, 2010 sales numbers.  There's more detailed info over at Derek's blog.

Okay. That was transference. It doesn't say that all the writers on the list have quit their day jobs. I believe that Konrath has (hero-worship much?) and he's mentioned that before on his blog. Yeah, it's the kind of fact that sticks with me. The list is of December sales numbers of some very successful indie authors. It may be just the ebooks on Kindle (I was a little unclear about that). Most of them never had a previous print deal with a major publisher. These are folks selling in the thousands every month. And yeah, if I were selling Joe's numbers, Stephen Leather's numbers (over 40,000 in December) or - Lord Love A Duck - Amanda Hocking's numbers (over 100,000 in December), then I'd surely quit my day job.

So, like I said, transference. Well, transference combined with a big ole' case of Digit Envy. See, I keep reading all these numbers from all these folks who are doing so well. Robin's guest post at Konrath's place made me drool.

And I read over at the DTP forums (Are they KDP now that Amazon has changed the name?) posts by authors who talk about selling in the multiple hundreds a month. Over on Smashwords, at the end of each quarter SW founder Mark Coker will blog about the authors who've really knocked it over the fence that period.

I want to sell in the multiple hundreds every month for a bit. Then I want the multiple hundreds to climb and climb until they're in the multiple thousands. Yeah, I want to be one of those home-run-hitting SW authors that Mark blogs about. But so far, it hasn't happened.

Derek Canyon's blog - Adventures In ePublishing - ran the numbers. He's right that selling 1000+ books a month at .99 cents per book wouldn't be enough to live on, but it would be an extra $350.00 a month. At my house, that's the electric bill, the equity line payment and the water bill. Selling 1000+ books a month at $2.99, Derek says, would earn just over $2,000 per month. That would be huge. It wouldn't be quitting my day job huge, but combined with my salary and my hubby's, my family could do more than climb out of the hole. We could head towards prosperity. Heck, we might even be able to take a vacation that didn't involve going to Orlando to take or fetch the eldest.

I know that more books mean more sales. Right now I have 6 full-length romance novels (4 historical; 2 contemporary) available everywhere. Plus I have my WIP (work in progress), The Duke of Eden, serialized on Amazon, with 2 sections out and available for .99 cents each. In the next month to 6 weeks, the 3rd and final section should be out. Then the book will be available. Yeah, having 7 full novels available will sell more than 6.

But I have more work to do - we have more work to do. QA Romances is very much a team effort. I believe my hubby still finds it odd that he's part of a romance novel pairing. (They're not his cup of tea.) But he does the covers, the graphic design work on the blog, and ALL - did I say all - the computer wizardry behind the blog and the Facebook page. His part of our effort to gear up and reach out to increase our sales and our family's prospects is directed at the book covers. He's in the process of re-vamping all the covers to make them more sensual, more exotic, more appealing to women. Yeah, that'll include lots of heaving man-chest. (And no, that's not his cup of tea either.)

I'm writing the WIP, of course, and I'm also playing with the sales prices. I'm about to start re-vamping all the descriptions. SW now allows longer descriptions so I'm hoping to fine-tune some longer, more persuasive cover blurbs and product descriptions. I need to work harder to interest readers enough to pull down the book sample. And I need to use my blogging efforts to convince readers to give over-the-top romance a shot. (Come on folks, if you can believe in zombies with hard-ons and sensitive werewolves, then you can surely believe that a human man could fall so hard he'd leap tall buildings or rope a rampaging carriage or go a lot batty - can't you?)

Congratulations to Amazon for its amazing success with the Kindle and good going to the etailer for changing the publishing landscape almost singlehandedly. The success of the ebook at Amazon is good news, great news for indies everywhere. It means more people are buying ebooks than ever before. And the numbers are growing, which means the future's looking awfully bright.

But my future is not so bright (yet) that I have to wear shades. Team QA is working to improve sales, but we've not made the 1000+ club on Amazon. But we are working. The one thing hubby and I both know is that quitting and saying we can't will never get us there. We're just not there yet so for now, I have a mighty bad case of Digit Envy.

I'm surely looking forward to the day when QA Romances has enviable digits.