I think 2023 can be best summed up as the year I decided to quit. Back in 2021, I read Becca Syme’s “Dear Writer, You Need to Quit” and I didn’t put much weight into her book when I first read it, but that all changed in 2023.
After more than twelve years of trying to earn a living as a self-published author, I knew that I needed to change. I had lost more money than I had earned and felt burned out.
Something had to go.
In this year’s wrap up, I’ll share not only what I spent and earned, but the difficult choices I made along the way to quit some of the core tenets of my business.
But first, if you’re new to my year-end wrap up, be sure to go back and read through past entries. They’re full of graphs, data, and insights that will help you with your own author business. (And let’s make no mistake about it: as authors, we’re running businesses so it takes our learning not only how to write, but all the ins and outs of maintaining a successful business.)
Past Wrap Ups
2023 Goals
For 2023, I wanted to finish my the sixth and final book in my Cinderella’s Secret Witch Diaries series, continue recording and releasing my weekly Let Go and Be Free podcast, publish the 30 Days of Gratitude: A Daily Guide for Adult Children of Alcoholics guide, and experiment with launching my own Payhip store to offer direct sales on my website.
I also tried three smaller experiments: I sent print copies of my Let Go and Be Free book to an indie bookstore in St. Louis, ran some Facebook ads, and tried out ChatGPT for marketing copy (more on that in a bit).
I’ll break down whether I achieved my goals in a bit and how the experiments went, but first, let’s talk money.
Expenses
Here’s a breakdown of all the expenses I had for my author business:
Mailerlite for my email list: $137.80
Amazon Marketing Services ads (AMS): $522.94
Written Word Media ad: $35.00
Bargain Booksy (Written Word Media Newsletter Ad): $35.00
Fussy Librarian: $18.00
Facebook ads (Let Go and Be Free): $126.49
Scribe count: $120.00
30 Days of Gratitude copyright: $45.00
Revelation copyright: $45.00
Libysn (for the Let Go and Be Free Podcast): $240.00
Google workspace: $76.32
Squarespace web hosting fees: $228.00
Web domains: $27.16
Bookfunnel: $20.00
Total 2023 expenses: $1676.71
Last year I spent $1952.05, so the good news is that I was able to bring down my expenses yet again. The not so good news is that I wasted $350 on services that didn’t return much ROI for me:
Mailerlite
Bargain Booksy, Written Word Media and Fussy Librarian ads
Facebook ads
Why would I say that Mailerlite was a waste of money? Isn’t it the cardinal rule that all indie authors need to have a newsletter and build up their own email list?
Let me be frank: This is where Becca Syme’s “Dear Writer, You Need to Quit” comes in. This year I took a hard look at my business and admitted that after years of carrying over the cost of a newsletter service, I wasn’t earning back my investment in fiction sales.
Here are the cold facts:
In 2023, readers purchased $126.67 on my fiction. I spent more paying for the Mailerlite service than I earned back in fiction sales.
After many years of writing a bi-monthly newsletter and sending that out to my readers, I decided to scale back the newsletter to monthly, and then ended the newsletter entirely.
Why?
I needed to quit. I had tried since 2011 to earn a profit off of my Cinderella’s Secret Witch Diaries series, three prequel books in the Werewhale series, and the one tie-in Jovian Gates Chronicle book where Cinderella’s daughter, Phoebe, is expelled to the future, but none of those books took off.
I tried culling my newsletter list after carrying a massive monthly fee on Mailchimp and switched to Mailerlite last year, but the numbers don’t lie: I was still spending more on the newsletter service than I was bringing in.
So I quit.
I told my Cinderella readers that I was ending my newsletter and that if they wanted to keep up with me that they could follow me on Substack.
I made a big decision at the end of 2023: I had finished my Cinderella’s series and now want to put all of that to rest. I started writing the Cinderella’s Secret Witch Diaries series for my daughter when she was a toddler. I wanted to write a series about a self-rescuing princess who doesn’t need a man to save her. She figures out, along a messy journey, how to not only save herself, but become one of the most powerful witches of all time.
What I liked about my interpretation of Cinderella is that she falls into a gray area: she makes mistakes, is sometimes selfish, and even embraces addictive tendencies at times. I had such fun writing that series and am so happy where the series ended.
I accomplished what I had started out to do, and after more than a decade of hard work, I have decided to let her go.
I’ve told her story and now it’s time for me to write something new.
Here’s a few other thoughts about my expenses:
I found that newsletter promo ads for non-fiction really don’t work. Fussy Librarian, Bargain Booksy, etc.—they work okay for fiction, but flopped for non-fiction.
Facebook ads. I keep failing with these ads. I spend a lot of money and receive $0 sales. I even tried using the ads as a loss leader: drive traffic to a free book or my Let Go and Be Free podcast. In the end, I didn’t earn back my expenses. I’m not saying that Facebook ads don’t work. I think that I haven’t figured out how best to run the ads. (I plan on listening to Matthew J Holmes’ Facebook ad series to help me.)
I found Amazon ads to be the most effective for me. What was my secret to making a profit? I spent very little time on setting up the ads: I chose Sponsored Products with automatic targeting, and selected bids below what was suggested by Amazon (most of my ads were $.37 per click or lower).
Sales
Here’s a breakdown of my income for 2023:
Book sales: $1447.37
Amazon: $1279.72
Google Books: $57.23
Draft2Digital: $56.70
Apple Books: $41.15
Barnes & Noble: $12.57
Kobo: $0
Amazon Affiliate sales: $80.32
Substack subscriptions: $85.90
Spine Book Store Café in St. Louis (print copies of Let Go and Be Free): $9.40
Book formatting: $618.48
2023 Total Sales: $2241.47
When I compare my gross book sales with 2022 ($1,650.84), I may have sold less, but if you dig deeper, you’ll see that I spent a lot less on ads in 2023.
2022 ad spend: $1163.25
2023 ad spend: $737.43
That’s $425.82 less I spent on ads in 2023.
And the eagle-eyed among you might be looking at my numbers and say: “Hey, wait a minute, why are you including book formatting earnings in your year-end breakdown? That’s not writing!”
It’s simple: I embraced the old adage of not placing all my eggs in one basket.
To stay profitable, I embraced an opportunity to bring in income from an additional revenue source.
Diversification
With my fiction not selling, I decided to change course in 2023. I doubled down on my non-fiction and spent my energies on my weekly podcast. But I also decided to embrace any freelance work for book formatting. Not only was I able to help several first-time authors get their books to market, but the extra funds allowed me to earn more of a profit in 2023.
After more than 12 years of being an indie author, I’ve finally turned enough of a profit that I didn’t have to worry about going into debt and pulling funds from my full-time job.
Let me be clear: At this point in my twelve year plus indie author career, I’m still not able to support my family with the author business income coming in. I used to be embarrassed to share my sales with the indie author community, but I believe that full transparency through articles like this one allows me to not only be accountable to myself, but to show new authors how challenging this career can be.
In 2023, I continued to focus on what worked: Advertising and supporting my non-fiction Let Go and Be Free series. By doing that, I chose to write and publish the last remaining Cinderella book and then make some hard decisions about the future of my business.
Part of that path forward consists on book formatting. It may not be writing, but the work pays the bills!
Reflections
When I compare my 2022 numbers with those of 2023, I see an interesting trend:
2022:
Expenses: $1952.05
Gross sales: $1977.38
Net profit: $25.33
2023:
Expenses: $1676.21
Gross sales: $2241.47
Net profit: $565.26
By lowering my expenses, trimming my budget on advertising, and diversifying my income streams, I was able increase my profits this year.
2023 BREAKDOWN OF SALES BY BOOK TITLE
After years of dumping money into advertising my fiction books and not making back enough sales to pay off the advertising fees, I spent all my advertising budget on my Let Go and Be Free non-fiction series.
I was able to make a profit, but the added boost this year came from my book formatting services.
By keeping my investment in Amazon ads lower, I pulled in enough profit to make the ads worth running.
But that wasn’t the case for my Facebook ads. They didn’t convert for me. I think if I were to invest more time into learning how best to optimize Facebook ads that I could turn a profit. I plan to change that in 2024 and learn more about how best to run Facebook ads.
With working full time at my day job, volunteering work, helping my kids, and then writing books—I decided to cut myself a break this year. After more than a decade of trying to make money on selling books, I learned that pulling back, cutting my losses in my current fiction series, and investing in my non-fiction works made a difference.
However, I will need to either write more non-fiction or broaden my audience in advertising my Let Go and Be Free series. I had less sales in 2023 of volume 1 of the series, but more organic sales for the rest of my books than I did last year.
Even though I didn’t spend any advertising on some books, they did sell in small numbers because of my offering book one in the series as free.
And my How to Become a Successful Author While Working Full-time: The Secret to Work-Life Balance book, had a few sales. That’s nice to see, considering I also didn’t spend any time or effort advertising the book.
BOOK EXPENSES AND SALES: 2011-2023
In the chart above, it’s great to see that after more than a decade of losses that I made a slight profit in 2022 and 2023.
It’s been a lot of hard work and I’ll need to revisit my fiction goals for 2024 because the reality is that my current series aren’t selling much.
What did I learn in 2023?
I could make much more money in many different kinds of side gigs. Writing does not make me lots of money. Yes, I know there are many “overnight” success stories, but often they’re authors who are writing to market in specific genres (romance and thrillers). At the moment, I don’t want to write in those genres and I’m also not interested in pumping out a book a month.
And I’m not writing to just make money.
My day job is how I pay the bills. Writing books and creating podcasts are how I scratch my creative side.
Would I like to earn more profit from my writing? Of course I would.
I’m on the long-term path and I may not be making lots of money through my writing yet, but I’m learning a lot and I’m getting the experience I need to make my books even better.
So, what else did I learn this year?
ChatGPT (and other AI)
We truly are in the midst of tremendous change. With ChatGPT, I was able to write the descriptions for my books and marketing copy for my ads. Not only did I get great copy that sped up the process so that I wasn’t wasting time on writing all that marketing copy, but I got to be hands on with ChatGPT and learn how to use it.
Understanding how to write good prompts is a key skill that I see will serve me well not only in my author business but also with my full-time job.
Machine language AI is truly a game changer and I expect the tools to continue to evolve at an exponential rate.
Each author will need to decide for themselves on how they want to use ChatGPT (or not). For me, I’m using AI to write marketing copy and I’m not using it to brainstorm or write my books.
Why?
I really like to write.
Using AI to speed up my process and help me put more books out into the world doesn’t line up with my personal mission and goals.
Again, I’m not looking to pump out a book a month (or even faster with ChatGPT). That’s not why I write.
But with other aspects of AI, I’ve also seen some extremely impressive uses of Dall-E for book covers, character sketches, and all sorts of graphics that an author might need for marketing.
I’m keeping an eye on this closely because I do see the value of using these tools. For now, I’ve decided not to use them to help me write my books.
But I did use Google’s AI to create audiobook versions of my books. Are they perfect? No, but they were easy to create and they’ll help readers who are not able (for health reasons) to read.
Vellum
I’ve been using Vellum to format all my books for years now and I can’t speak enough about how the tool has not only allowed me to streamline my process, but allowed me to gain back hours of my time back.
I’ve used Vellum to create ebooks, paperbacks, and large print editions of my books.
The investment that I made in purchasing the software (even though I don’t have a Mac and needed to use MacinCloud) was well worth it.
If you’re new to the indie author community and plan on publishing more than one book, then do yourself a favor and purchase Vellum. I resisted for years because I didn’t want to spend the money, but the financial investment paid me back in spades. For all the books that I formatted using Vellum, I saved dozens of hours of my time.
Podcasting
I experimented with podcasting more than 16 years ago when I ran The Magic Sock podcast (where I talked about the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering). Over five years of doing the show, I grew my audience to a little more than a thousand listeners and had a great time putting out a show a week.
Because I was creating content for the game, Hasbro allowed me to work with a PR firm to receive some free product and I got to preview new Magic cards to my audience.
I stopped the show in 2011 because I wanted to spend my time writing and marketing my own books.
Little did I know that podcast would explode in recent years.
So now I’ve come full circle because I started podcasting again back in March 2022 with the Let Go and Be Free podcast. I aligned the podcast to be a companion piece to my Let Go and Be Free non-fiction books.
It’s a win-win.
I get to focus on my own self-care and mental health while sharing what I’ve learned over the years with listeners.
I have an extremely small audience, but my podcast has been listened to in more 35 countries around the world.
One of my goals for 2024 is to expand the reach of the podcast and welcome new listeners.
There’s something to be said to have listeners who will come back each week to hear the next episode.
Provide People What They Want
But having listeners doesn’t always translate into knowing what type of book they would purchase from you. I ran an experiment this year and published 30 Days of Gratitude: A Daily Guide for Adult Children of Alcoholics. I thought that readers would enjoy a journal that they could use over the course of a month. Each of the 30 days comes with a prompt to challenge a reader to write down 3 things they are grateful for. I chose all sorts of topics over the course of the thirty days, but listeners of the podcast didn’t buy the book.
Something that I thought would be helpful to my listeners just didn’t land with them.
Well, it did land, but with a big thud.
For any future books aligned to my Let Go and Be Free brand, I want to ensure that what I write and publish will be what listeners/readers want and be helpful to them.
The good news is that I could poll and ask for listener feedback.
Substack
How can I receive this feedback if I cancelled my Mailerlite service and no longer have a newsletter? Well, I’ve been using Substack for more than a year now. I’m able to send a newsletter out to all my subscribers free of charge and I also have the ability to collect paid memberships from them.
Each week I use substack to send out an email to my Let Go and Be Free subscribers. I write them a personal story aligned to the Let Go and Be Free brand and provide them links to the latest episode of the podcast.
Substack is another reason why I had to let the fiction newsletter go: I was writing a substack email each week to my podcast subscribers and also writing two fiction newsletter emails a month. I was spending way too much time creating emails, and that detracted from my writing. (Yes, I know that I could have used ChatGPT to write the emails, but using AI that way isn’t aligned to the personal stories that I wish to share with my readers/listeners.)
There are only so many hours in the day and I needed to let something go.
So I chose to stop sending the fiction newsletter because of the Mailerlite fees and also because I had decided to write in an entirely different genre that my fairy tale Cinderella subscribers probably wouldn’t like.
With Substack, I now have a weekly newsletter for my Let Go and Be Free series and I’m not spending money each month like I was with Mailerlite. And when I launch my next fiction book late in 2024, I already have a separate fiction Substack setup with a few readers from my Cinderella mailing list. I’ll be able to grow that new list organically over time—again, without needing to pay a monthly fee.
And if Substack goes away, I have exports of my subscribers so I could just import them into another system in the future.
ScribeCount
For many years, I manually tracked all my sales. I’d spend hours doing that, but with ScribeCount I receive reports from all the platforms where I am selling books.
With a few clicks of a button, I get the data I need and some charts that help me visually see where my business stands.
Take the chart below (it’s from a screenshot mid-December 2023, so it might be a bit out of date to my latest sales that I mention at the beginning of this article).
I’ve been selling wide now for a few years, but I can easily see that Amazon is the lion’s share of my business. The other platforms don’t even come close.
But that’s okay: I do not wish to be in KDP Select. I’ve been hearing other authors complain about their profits in KDP Select going down and I want to make certain that I’m as wide as I can go. If Amazon were to stop selling books, go out of business, etc., I’d feel better knowing that I don’t have all my books exclusive to them.
Another cool feature with ScribeCount is that I’m also able to see that I gave away more than 3,500 books on the various platforms and read through to the next book in a series was extremely low as my fiction sales prove.
I no longer see much value in giving away the first book in a series. With millions of books available to readers, they’re inundated with more than they can read.
And over the last few years, some of my readers would reply to my newsletter and thank me for a free book, but talk about how they had hundreds of free books on their Kindles and just didn’t have time to read them all.
People love free things, but that doesn’t mean that they place a high value on those books. Instead, free books are jumbled together with hundreds of other free ones and often never get read.
Having the data from ScribeCount helps me visualize how I’m doing in the various publishing platforms, what countries, and with what books. I can then make business decisions on how I wish to spend my time.
After writing six Cinderella’s Secret Witch Diaries books, I could see that interest in the series had waned. I started book one when TV series like Once Upon a Time was in its heyday, but that series ended in 2018 and now it’s time for me to try something new.
I’m able to take the data from ScribeCount and overlay that with how I want to move my business forward.
And with other tools like Publisher Rocket, I can perform research to see what genres are selling and then decide whether I want to write a new book in that same genre or not.
I have more control over what I want to write and publish, where that content will be available for sale, and how to best disseminate that to readers (listeners).
PayHip
In 2023, the indie author discourse centered on control of one’s intellectual property. Authors solely in KDP Select began to see the limitations of being exclusive to Amazon and a realization spread through the writing community: If Amazon changed their rates overnight, how would an author adapt to the evolving landscape?
With indie author champions such as Joanna Penn singing the praises of direct sales for more than a year now, I decided to experiment and give it a try.
I didn’t have much to lose.
With having only a small amount of sales, I decided to use Payhip because I wouldn’t have to pay out a monthly fee. I built Payhip direct book sale pages for all of my major novels and non-fiction books so that readers could buy ebooks directly from me.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to convince any of my readers to try the service.
Although my experiment failed in 2023, I still see it as a win. Not only did I learn how to set up my Payhip store, but I have all my books available for sale allowing me to have an even wider means of selling to customers.
I can see that I could run some experiments by driving more traffic to the Payhip pages so that my readers could try the service. One way I plan to do that in 2024 is to release a book first on my Payhip store and share it with my readers/listeners. After the book has been out for a bit, I’ll then publish the book on Amazon and the other online retailers.
I may not have succeeded in bringing customers into the Payhip pages in 2023, but I did do the majority of the work, so the store has already been built. Now I only need to begin some tests to drive more traffic to those pages.
A few years ago I had decided that it would be best for my author career to go wide. I didn’t like being exclusive to Amazon. Yes, being exclusive is easier in the short term, but I tried that route and found the freedom of being wide to be more aligned with my personal goals.
Sure, almost 90% of my sales are from Amazon, but I like having all my books on the various platforms so that I could easily pivot away from Amazon if I needed to do so. And I like giving readers a choice of where to buy my books.
Summing it all up
I started writing the first draft of my first Cinderella’s Secret Witch Diaries book back in 2009 and published it on Amazon in 2011, so I’ve been writing books and learning marketing for more than a decade. A cynic would say after looking at my numbers that I’ve failed because I spent more money than I earned.
I can understand that point-of-view, but creating a business takes time and financial investment.
Plus, I don’t write just for money.
Over the years, I’ve received hundreds of positive reviews and have had readers thank me for all the great stories I’ve written.
However, what I’ve always found limiting is that many authors are branded by writing in only one genre: fantasies, sci-fi, thrillers, etc.
I grew up reading Isaac Asimov and like how he wrote hundreds of books in different genres. He might have been known for sci-fi, but I found it freeing to see that he also wrote books about Shakespeare, science, and even the Bible.
And I always wanted to do the same thing, but without the hassle of having a different pen name for each genre I wrote in.
In the grand scheme of things, I want the freedom to write what I want and not what I should write.
I don’t get up 5 am and write because I want to make a few bucks. That’s not what drives me.
I write because I need to tell the story and share it with the world.
In 2024, I have planned out a new book that is entirely different from anything I’ve ever written before. I like that challenge and have decided that I’ll use a new Substack newsletter and build out a fiction mailing list for readers who enjoy the new book.
And I will also continue to support my Let Go and Be Free series.
I’ve walked a fine line in 2022 and 2023: After a decade of pumping out books and learning how to market products, I’ve felt burned out.
Taking Becca Syme’s advice to heart, I’ve decided to quit my bi-monthly newsletter and all social media promotions. With much of social turning into a dumpster fire in 2023 (hello X, formerly known as Twitter, I’m waving at you), I’ve reclaimed time back so that I could focus on what is working for me in my author career.
Claiming time back means that I can read, listen to music, and explore other aspects of my life.
I can’t just work 100% of the time.
Working all the time (between my full-time and author career jobs) will only lead me to burnout.
H. Claire Taylor, formerly of the Sell More Books Show podcast, used to talk on the podcast about taking breaks so that she could recharge.
I’ve always felt guilty for doing that. If I stopped writing or doing marketing, would I still be an author? Or worse: If I stopped doing the work, would I want to start up again?
In 2023, I decided to give myself more space and time. And the funny thing is that the more time that I gave myself, the more ideas came to me for books to write.
Earlier this year, I was driving to visit my mother while listening to some classical music when a scene for my new novel spontaneously popped into my head. With the help of Siri on my iPhone, I dictated the idea and sent it to myself via email so that I could add it to my research.
For the new indie authors who stumble upon this article, I hope that I have shown the wide breadth of experiences that one can have in selling books in 2023.
The gold rush of the early Amazon is long gone, and now that the industry has matured, we need to adapt as well.
There’s always a new “get rich quick” scheme out there, but I don’t chase them. It’s not why I want to write. Sure, I could join the crowd and pump out a new book every few days using ChatGPT, but would I be happy? And how long could I maintain that pace before I fully burned out?
These are the questions that are important to ask yourself as you look at the future.
I want to write for decades to come and not be a flash in the pan.
Having failed financially in the past with my author career doesn’t mean that I can’t do better. Last year, I made a tiny profit. In 2023, I added to that profit. Will 2024 be another year where I make a profit? We shall see. But I’ll tell you what: Being fiscally responsible and cutting back my expenditures was critical to going in the black this year.
If all I wanted to do was make money, I could get a part-time job and call it a day.
But I want to write and I have stories to tell.
Maybe you have the same itch. And if you do, my recommendation is to be as frugal as possible with getting your books out into the world. Over time, as your business grows, then you can expand more.
Most indie authors aren’t an overnight success. Earning a profit takes a lot of work—you not only do you need to know how to write well, but you need to learn how to run a business and market your work.
That’s the tricky part.
It’s not impossible, but it’s also a lot of work and takes time.
Well, earning a profit took time for the majority of successful authors I know. Many of them took years to be successful.
So, thank you for stopping by and I hope that you learned something useful to help you with your own career. If you have a tip or feedback, please be sure to leave a comment.
Thank you and good luck!
Please note that there are affiliate hyperlinks used on this page and that I receive a small percentage of sales if you choose to purchase. I only recommend items that I have found helpful and useful, and am passing them on to you to help. Thank you!
