Revenue Is Nice. Net Royalty Is the reality.

Sometimes I wonder if other authors check their statistics as obsessively as I do.

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Books sold. Pages read. Rankings. Royalties.

There is something deeply satisfying about watching the numbers move, especially when you’re an indie author, and so much of this work happens without anyone standing beside you saying, Yep, it’s working.

So I check...

Since I started using Publisher Champ, though, I’ve begun looking at those numbers differently.

For the first time, I could easily see not just how many books I was selling, but what those sales were actually returning to me. And when I looked at my author business from a net royalty perspective, the picture was sobering.

People are buying them. They’re reading them through Kindle Unlimited. Some have downloaded free books and gone on to discover other work. Readers have shown up at events, bought books from my table, recommended them, reviewed them, and sent me photographs of my books traveling to places I have never taken them myself.

I am enormously grateful for that.

But sales and profitability
are not the same thing.

When I looked at the lifetime of my author business, I had to acknowledge something I hadn’t fully appreciated while celebrating each sale: I had spent more building, promoting, and supporting my books than the books had returned to me in royalties. The price of the book does not equal the amount of money that comes back to me. Sometimes, it’s not even close.

Oof.

Not exactly the statistic you screenshot and post with a champagne emoji.

But it may be one of the most useful numbers I’ve seen. Because it made me look at the other side of every sale.

And there is another piece of the math that is easy to miss from the outside: the price of a book is not what comes back to the author.

A $16.99 paperback does not mean $16.99 lands in my account. The retailer takes its share. Printing costs come out. A distributor may take another share. What remains is the royalty, sometimes just a few dollars from the sale of a book.

And that is before the cost of running the author business.

Advertising. Event fees. Travel. Software subscriptions. Promotional materials. Shipping. Copies purchased for galleys, physical advanced reader copies, giveaways and other opportunities. Then there are the expenses required simply to create a professional book: editing, proofreading, cover design, formatting, and production.

I don’t regret those investments.

They helped me become an author.

They helped me put professionally produced books into the world. They helped readers find me. They put me in rooms with other writers and book lovers. They taught me what I enjoy about this business and, just as importantly, what I don’t.

Some of those investments may continue paying dividends years from now.

Still, gratitude doesn’t require me to ignore math that was not mathing.

My bottom line ↴

Once I saw that the numbers weren’t adding up, I made a decision. (1) In July, I stopped paying for Meta and Facebook advertising for my books. (2) And I no longer submit to book awards programs.

For now, I’m limiting my ongoing spending primarily to what is necessary to bring the books themselves into existence.

That decision has changed the questions I ask.

• Not simply, Did this sell books?

• But, What did it cost me to sell those books?

• When I was advertising, did the additional sales justify what I spent to generate them?

• When I pay to attend an event, am I expecting book sales to cover the cost, or am I consciously choosing to pay for community, visibility, relationships, and the experience?

• When I give away a book, what am I hoping that investment will return? A new fan, a review, a social media endorsement?

And perhaps the biggest question:

• Can I grow my readership without continually paying to make that growth happen?

That’s what I want to find out next.

I’m not retreating from my author business. Quite the opposite. I’m giving the books a chance to do more of the work. I want to see what happens through reader recommendations, reviews, direct relationships, author events, book fairs, podcasts and conversations about books, and a growing body of work that gives someone somewhere else to go after finishing one of my stories.

And yes, I still check the statistics.

I still get a little thrill when another book sells, or a new review comes in. I still love seeing pages read. I still celebrate when someone who has never met me chooses to spend money and time on something I wrote.

Maybe I appreciate those numbers even more now.

Because I’m beginning to understand the difference between selling books and building an author business that can sustain itself.

I’ve spent the past few years investing in becoming the author I wanted to be. I’m grateful I had the opportunity to do that. Now I want to see whether the business I built can start returning the favor.

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Àṣẹ, Scarlet!