Income Streams

November was an interesting month for me, at least from the perspective of watching my Kindle sales.

I published my  six month collection of my fictional blog right at the end of October, and on the first day it was up sold eleven copies, which was on Halloween. The first day of November kind of showed me the tail end of that first small burst of sales, with another four copies sold. Then, for three days, nothing.

I started to get sales again, averaging somewhere around one a day. Not much if I was trying to make a living on my Kindle sales, of course, but interesting and frankly encouraging from an independent writer with virtually no advertising. By the end of the month, I had sold thirty-three copies of my collection, and ten copies of my $.99 collection of the first month of the blog. All told I took in almost exactly what I predicted: $70.

That's several tanks of gas for my car. It's a month's worth of my favorite comics. More importantly, it's also extra money that I can use to pay off bills and keep the lights on here if I get to a point where money is that tight. To me, this is essentially money for nothing. I don't count the hours I spend writing the blog--for me that is fun all on its own for the most part, as much a hobby pursued for enjoyment as someone else would go to the park and play basketball with his friends. So you'll understand how psyched I am to get paid for something I enjoy doing, even if it's less than a hundred dollars.

Enough with me beating that particular dead horse, I know.

So, on to the month of December so far. The first few days were very slow on the Kindle, I sold not one copy anywhere (and still haven't on the UK Kindle store, not that I'm all that fussed about it). What was really strange was a very fast and strange uptick in sales starting on Dec 4th. In the last four days, I have sold twelve copies of my six month collection and four copies of the collection that just has the first month in it. The numbers keep trending up, though I'm not counting on this to continue. Not because I don't think they will, only due to a fairly deep streak of realism that doesn't let me hope for the best...

But the fun doesn't stop there.

I also put the six month collection, Living With the Dead: With Spring comes The Fall, on the Barnes and Noble eBook store for the Nook eReader. I've sold five copies there so far this month, and think that I'll maybe get another five to ten more by the end of the month. If I don't sell any more than I already have, I won't count them for my sales for this month, as I won't be able to get paid for them. The minimum threshold for getting funds sent is ten bucks.

Lastly, I am very excited about starting to also publish with Google Editions, the eBook publishing arm of Google Books. The partner program seems decent, and you essentially get a ton of advertising for free just by putting your books on there. That would make it worth it to me if I never sold one copy through the actual Google eBook store--because they sell to third party vendors, advertise your book wherever you may have it, all kinds of sweet fringe benefits. Sadly, despite the fact that this service launched Monday, It still isn't allowing new partners to upload anything. And the user interface is needlessly complicated, which is pretty jarring to someone who is used to the simplicity and ease of use of Amazon's system.

That's all I've got for today, but check back soon, because I have a few bits of news to share for fans of Living With the Dead that will make purchasing the next few big collections an easy decision to make.