If you know where to look, you can find ebook sales numbers for any number of indie ebook authors, and you’ll find they run the gamut from almost nothing to six figures a year. J.A. Konrath details his figures on his blog, others post them on KindleBoards.com. I’ve read samples of books from many of the authors, both large sellers and small, and I’ve come to some conclusions.

 

First, if your sample sucks, people won’t buy your book.

 

Eh? What? You mean I need to write well? Yes. Write a good book. Get all the errors out. Don’t screw up your POV. Start with something interesting to read. Readers read the samples before buying the book. You do, don’t you? I sure do. I may have some disposable income, but I’m not about to dispose of it on something I don’t want, and I certainly don’t want books where I can’t stand the writing.

 

Second, one book isn’t enough.

 

You may get lucky and that book you wrote may be the only book you ever need to write. You may also get lucky and have a thousand one carat diamonds just fall into your lap. Nearly every author selling large numbers of books (hundreds per month) has more than one book available. Each book sells itself, but they are advertisements for your other books, as well. Each new book is a new page on Amazon. Each page helps to sell all your books because of the link to your Author Name. They also help because of links to similar titles and people who bought this also bought this other thing.

 

Third, this is going to take forfuckingever.

 

I’ve seen that when you’re just starting out, one book a day is a pretty decent number for the first month. If you can get some additional books available, you can be selling a few hundred books a month after about six months. Even if I could write and release four books a year, and their average numbers are Konrath numbers, it will take several years to replace my current income with writing income. Big numbers come from multiple complementary books, and I haven’t even finished the first one yet.

 

I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m writing only for money. I’m not. I’m writing because I want to write. I’d like to be able to spend my entire day working on things I want to work on, be it my games, my music, or my writing. The only way I can do that is if one of those things, or a combination of them, generates enough money that I can jettison the day job.

 

If you really want to help me out, tell all your friends to buy multiple copies of StoryBox. I like working on that, too.

 

 

If you look at the “In Progress” bar to the right, you might see something interesting. That 100%? Yeah. I finished the initial draft of WiW last night. It didn’t quite make it to 100,000 words, but that doesn’t matter. I wasn’t trying to hit that number spot on. It was a number I didn’t want to exceed (but I would have if the story called for it). There’s probably a couple months of work left on it, between having some people close to me check it out and editing.

 

Finishing it was sort of anti-climactic. I always hear stories of how great authors feel after they’ve written that last word, but I just felt numb. I sat in front of my computer and stared at it for a couple minutes, dutifully copied out the word count into a spreadsheet I keep to track each day’s output (there’s a feature I need in StoryBox), updated the progress widget on the blog, and then stared some more.

 

Maybe it’s just that I know there’s still work ahead, with editing, querying, and publishing. Maybe I had just pushed so hard to get through the last chapter. I just don’t know.

 

But, this morning, I’m excited. It’s done. I think it might be pretty good. I won’t know until I’ve read it a couple weeks from now.

 

I’m going to give myself through the weekend to decide on the next project.

 

One of my concerns in making that choice is timing. In November, I’m going to David Farland’s Writers Death Camp, and he recommends being well into the project you’re going to be working on before getting there. But the timing is such, if I start a new project in three days and it follows the pattern of WiW (90k words), I could be done with it only days before going to the workshop. Or worse, I’ll finish it on Monday or Tuesday and have nothing to write for the rest of that week.