Honest Data: 28 January 2025

To be honest, the momentum has slowed. Much as I’d like to be able to report yet another doubling of income, the numbers aren’t that good.

Steady progress, so that’s a positive. I’ve got another story almost ready to go. Another thousand words of solid sex to finish up, come up with a blurb, cover image, package it up in Vellum and upload via KDP.

One thing I’ve learnt is that Kindle Unlimited pages aren’t a huge earner compared to actual sales of paperback or ebooks and that I only earned income from Kindle Unlimited this week.

$3.27, going by the Book Report numbers, a little less according to Amazon. The happy news here is that this weekly amount has gone up each week:

• 1-7 January: $0.51

• 8-14 January: $0.96

• 15-21 January: $1.73

• 22-28 January: $2.82

I asked Gemini to crunch these numbers:

Gemini has made a mistake by simply multiplying the weekly income at the end of the year by 48 and adding in what has been earnt already.

ChatGPT gives a more reasonable number:

So, about a thousand dollars from Kindle Unlimited reads total for the year. That works out to a really crappy weekly rate of pay.

There’s not yet enough data on sales (as opposed to page reads) to make any reasonable projections but I would expect those numbers to be around four times as large. Still a very modest income but I’m only working on this a couple of hours a day, on average.

Deepseek reports a high rate of server use, so I wasn’t able to test that model.

I’ll return to these numbers as more data comes in. It may be that I’m just not much good at this, it may be that the numbers will accelerate. I expect the latter as I gain a following of regular readers. This happened on Medium and is happening here on Substack.

We’ll see.

Here are my top earners for the year. Both of my second pen-name books are on the list now but as I only have six books published in total, that’s no surprise. Next week I’ll have another title on the list, maybe two.

More detailed reports behind the paywall. Um, they won’t be terribly exciting this week, so free subscribers aren’t missing out on much!

Britni