The writing income and book sales post

Since all the cool kids are doing it (see Martha Wells' and Jim Hines' blogs for particularly honest examples), I thought it might be interesting to write about writing income and book sales from a small press perspective. Let me start out by saying that 2011 was my best writing income year ever. A huge thank you to my readers, booksellers, editors who bought my work and anyone who reviewed my work or interviewed me or in any way promoted my writing.

 

Some context for what “my best writing income year” means: I am primarily, though not solely, published through a small niche press, Lethe Press. I primarily write fiction with female, usually lesbian or queer protagonists, and for the last year have only published short stories (see below) singly, together or other people’s. I am primarily a writer of sf/f and erotica, more occasionally romance and sundry. All of these things define what my writing income is from one year to the next based on my target audiences.

 

So without further ado, my writing income from the sale of the five books that currently bear my name, plus one novelette and three short stories for 2011 was almost exactly $2000. Bear in mind that my writing income for 2010 was closer to $1200 and you can understand why I’m pretty pleased, all things considered.

 

The book sales broke down as follows:

Night’s Kiss (Lethe Press, 2009) – 363 copies in various formats

Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades (Lethe Press, 2008) – 117 copies in various formats

A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace and Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2011) – 86 copies, various formats

Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic (Lethe Press, 2011) – 78 copies, print only.

Crave: Tales of Lust, Love and Longing (Lethe Press, 2007) – 64 copies in various formats

 

The vast majority of my book sales were eBook format.

 

To promote my (or in the case of H&R, our) books, I was on panels at six science fiction conventions and one erotic author’s convention, did three bookstore readings, three podcasts, participated in two author book tables at two festivals and was interviewed on two blogs.

 

By way of external pieces of good luck that only involved Steve from Lethe or me nominating things, Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades was designated as a “Best Other Work” by the 2011 Gaylactic Spectrum Awards Committee, who also chose “One Horse Town” by Melissa Scott, “City of the Dead” by Kaite Welsh and “Waiting Tables and Time” by Lyn McConchie as short fiction finalists. Hellebore and Rue was selected as one of the three best lesbian speculative fiction books of 2011 by the Rainbow Book Awards (the ALA Over the Rainbow inclusion was a 2012 thing so I’ll include that in the 2012 post). And both Hellebore and Rue and A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace and Other Stories were nominated for the Lambda Awards, the Goldie Awards and the Spectrum Awards. A Day at the Inn is under consideration for the Tiptree Award and several stories from Hellebore and Rue are nominees for the WSJA Small Press Award, among other things.

 

Sales of Night’s Kiss are still driven by word of mouth from its 2010 Goldie Award win, as far as I can tell. It takes a year or more for any of my books to take off to whatever degree they are going to achieve. Crave, for example, won the same awards that Kiss did, but has never sold anywhere near as well.

 

Of the 2011 titles, Hellebore and Rue was reviewed positively in Lambda Literary, Black Gate Magazine, Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus, Kissed by Venus, The Lesbrary, Rainbow Reader, Planet Fury and Future Fire, along with multiple reader reviews. A Day at the Inn was reviewed at Kissed by Venus and received multiple reader reviews.

 

In short, it has been a lot of work to get this far, to begin to build a readership on a minimal budget and with low name recognition. This is what small press authors, particularly those writing for niche genres, deal with all the time: the ongoing struggle to convince people to try their books. Every time you read a small press or indie book, mine or someone else’s, and recommend it to somebody else, you make a huge difference. So thank you very much. And please don’t ask when I’m quitting my day job, at least not for another couple of years.