2 million ebooks and 12 years of self-publishing

This month, April 2023, marks the twelfth anniversary since I started self-publishing. If my math is right, at the end of March I had also reached 2 million ebooks sold.

Twelve years! That’s a long time. That’s honestly the longest consecutive time I’ve ever done anything. The longest traditional job I’ve ever held was for ten and a half years. Like, in the US, you can only be president for a maximum of eight years (barring a technicality with a vice president who becomes president and then is reelected twice), and I think only six(?) UK Prime Ministers have held the office for longer than twelve years.

Two million ebooks is also a staggering figure. Thanks for reading, everyone!

I’m grateful to still be on the road, so to speak, after 12 years.

Since I’m a writer, I will mark this milestone in the most writerly fashion possible – a rambling, freeform essay! Let’s look back at some things I’ve learned over the last twelve years.

-Learning to finish books is the most important skill a new writer should learn. Occasionally I get asked whether a new writer should be working on their social media presence or website or mail list or whatever, and inevitably they haven’t finished a book yet. Writers have a bad habit of lapsing into endless rewrites or activities that are technically writing-related (like working on the website) but don’t help finish the book. So if you are a new writer, learning to finish things is the first skill you should learn. And since you do have to regularly finish things to be a writer, this will help you learn if you really want to be a writer or not.

-The second most important skill is learning to finish a series. This is harder, though.

-Nothing beats plodding persistence over the long run. A little bit every day adds up over the long term. It’s something I’ve learned quite forcefully since I’ve bought a house – no matter how well-constructed a house, if water damage is not addressed immediately, it will destroy the end. So to stretch this metaphor a bit, let’s say the “house” is artistic resistance, and “water damage” is your effort. Even if you do just a little bit every day, it will add up considerably if you keep at it.

-You should do the best job you can with your book, but perfection is only attainable by God, so you shouldn’t beat yourself up trying to reach it.

-Comparing yourself to other writers is a waste of time. No matter how well your books sell, there will always be another writer’s books who sell even better, even if you find the reasons incomprehensible. Likewise, if your books sell, there will be people who find that baffling and even enraging.

-Story ideas matter much less than their execution. Like, I’ve published 139 books, and I still have a million story ideas. It’s just finding the time to write them. If you have a hard time thinking of story ideas, just think of a conflict and expand it from there. Alternatively, if you’re the kind of writer who thinks up interesting characters and settings and doesn’t know what to do with them, just apply a potential conflict to them.

-The easiest way to sell books is to write in series and discount the first few books in the series. Acquiring the patience to write in a series is a different challenge entirely, as we mentioned above.

-It’s easiest to stick to a single genre if you want to make money. I started in epic fantasy with Mazael and Caina (and later Ridmark), and since then I’ve tried to expand to four other genres – urban fantasy (Nadia), science fiction (Silent Order), LitRPG, and mystery. Urban fantasy was really the only one that worked out of the gate, and it took a while for SILENT ORDER to get traction. Mystery and LitRPG kind of flopped for me. So if you write long enough, you’ll inevitably want to try a different genre, but be aware that it probably won’t sell as well as your main one.

-The longest book I wrote was 146,000 words, and the shortest about 40,000 words. How long does a book need to be? As long as necessary to adequately tell and resolve the story. Anything longer is useless padding, and anything shorter will leave your readers feeling cheated.

-Change just keeps on happening. When I started out, I uploaded DEMONSOULED to Amazon KDP, Barnes & Noble PubIt, and Smashwords, because that’s all there was at the time. Now there’s Kobo Writing Life, Google Play Books, ACX, Findaway Voices, Payhip, Bookfunnel, Bookbub, and a ton of other new services and platforms.  There are also a lot of software tools that didn’t exist back then – Vellum, Atticus, Bookbrush, and others. My process for turning a finished manuscript into a properly formatted book is completely different than what it was 12 year ago.

There’s also all the generative AI crap, which will either turn out to be a Big Deal or a scam for people easily parted from their money, like all those people who bought Bored Ape NFTs. Though to be fair, I was very hostile to Amazon Ads and Facebook Ads when they first came along, and I use them all the time now.

-Speaking of Amazon Ads, I wonder how long Amazon will remain the dominant force in self-publishing. Without Amazon pushing ahead with the Kindle, self-publishing as it is now probably wouldn’t exist, and I wouldn’t be writing this. That said, the wheel of fate never stops spinning, does it? Amazon right now kind of reminds me of Internet Explorer in the summer of 2004 – absolutely dominant in its market. Yet summer 2004 was the first time ever that Internet Explorer usage dropped as Mozilla Firefox started to emerge on the scene. It didn’t seem significant at the time – it was like a drop of about a tenth of a percent from 95.2% to 95.12%, something like that.  Yet it never went back up, and twenty years later, Microsoft has abandoned Internet Explorer. Microsoft is also no longer the hegemon of the technology space as it was in the 90s.

You can kind of see the same little cracks starting to form in the Amazon empire – how Amazon Ads has made the shopping experience on the site much worse, all the problems with Audible, labor relations trouble, first-ever layoffs, increasing antitrust scrutiny, the increasing ease of individualized ecommerce platforms like Shopify & WooCommerce, and so forth. (In fact, when I typed this sentence on April 17th, 2023, Amazon Ads hasn’t really been working properly for the last several days.) Of course, Microsoft isn’t the hegemon of technology any more, but it is still a powerful cloud computing company that happens to make client software for its products, and Amazon is likely on a similar trajectory. Eventually no longer dominant, but still powerful. (Jeff Bezos himself said that Amazon will one day be disrupted, which might be why he went off to build rocketships.)

-I think CLOAK MAGE will be the last really long series that I write. The trouble with double-digit (or more) series length is that the readthrough drops a little with every book, and it gets harder to draw new people in. I think in the future I’ll stick to series that run about 5 to 6 books long, with 7 as the absolute maximum if the story merits it. Though I might write multiple 5-7 book series with the same character if the character is compelling enough.

-Audiobooks are harder to sell than ebooks. To use a video game metaphor, audiobooks are self-publishing on Hard Mode. If you do a royalty-share contract on ACX (where you split royalties with your narrator), the contract lasts for seven years, which is a not unreasonable amount of time for a self-published audiobook to earn back its costs. To put it in context, since 2018 I did FROSTBORN #6 through #15 (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) in audiobook, and of those ten books, #6 through #10 have paid back their production costs and are now turning a profit. (Off the top of my head I think five or six of THE GHOSTS audiobooks, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, have reached the profitability stage.) I’m confident that all ten FROSTBORN audiobooks will earn back their production costs and turn a profit, but it will take a few years to get there.

I freely admit that the biggest business reason I do audiobooks is so I can take the production cost as a tax deduction. Given how expensive audiobook production is, if you don’t have a solid business plan for selling them or a good business reason for producing them, it’s probably best to avoid audiobook production until you have either a good business plan or a good reason.

-Not everyone will like your stuff. I had an amusing reminder of that recently. A reader mentioned that he liked the new covers for one of my series so much better than the old ones and wondered when Amazon would update the new ones. I was curious because I had updated those covers some time ago. Then I realized that I had forgotten to update my website with the new covers, and the reader thought the old covers were actually the new ones that he liked much better than the “old” ones. Oops! But there’s no denying that the new covers sell better than the old ones.

The fact is not everyone will like your writing, and sometimes will be eager to tell you about it. That’s fine. (Always bear in mind you’re not obliged to respond to anyone who’s annoying. I try to respond to most emails, but if one gets annoying I’ll let it pass.) There are something like 1.5 billion English speakers in the world, and if one of them doesn’t like your book, well, there are a few more to go through yet.

-Always be grateful for your readers. Remember, the economy sucks, money is tight, and yet people will still spend money on your books. Be respectful of that.

So, in that vein, thank you all for reading the last 139 novels I wrote, and I hope you stick around for however many more I end up writing!

-JM