Saturday, October 31, 2009

Survey says: SEXtupled

Purple Prosaic
...with change (and a few hours remaining in the month). That's my revenue report for the first month of self-publishing via Purple Prosaic. That's right. In just one month, with just a fraction of my backlist, I earned more than SIX times my last author royalties check. I think that data more than supports a continuation of this little endeavor, don't you?

Here are a few more stats:

The entire revenue is from ebook sales (and most of it previously published material, at that). No print sales are included (although I did re-release fine flickering hungers in both paperback and commemorative hardcover).

The majority of sales (67%) came through All Romance eBooks *blows a kiss to Lori & Barb* with Amazon Kindle in a distant second (27%) and Smashwords finishing third (6%). (Of note, the Smashwords titles have not yet been distributed via Fictionwise, Barnes and Noble, and Sony. Thus, Smashwords figures will *crosses fingers* be growing.)

There is no revenue to report via direct sales or on the titles available on Lulu, Scribd, or 1 Romance Ebooks. I'll keep plugging away at Lulu because it feeds into the weRead app on Facebook and Scribd because I'm getting plenty of hits there that will hopefully someday translate into sales.  I'm not going to invest more time/effort into 1 Romance Ebooks until I see at least a sale or two of what's already available there.

Three titles (Boiling Point, Say It with a Strap-On, and Hallowing Eve) account for 48% of the titles sold.  THEY ARE ALL LESBIAN FICTION.  I find this very interesting given that I've heard two of my publishers (Phaze Books & Torquere Press) report that the lesbian fiction in their catalogs doesn't sell well. Now, my stats may be skewed by the fact that these were the first three titles I released -- and thus, they've had all month to accumulate sales -- but I don't think that explains it all.  I'm both puzzled and pleased by the success of these titles -- and I'll definitely be writing more in the genre.

Thanks to all the readers for their support!

Until next time...

peace and purple passion,

~ Alessia

Friday, October 16, 2009

Rainbow Awards: Sapphistocated


Sapphistocated is a finalist in the "Contemporary Fiction - Lesbian" category of Elisa Rolle's first Rainbow Awards, and I would much appreciate your votes.

There are a slew of other categories in which to vote, but I only care about *cough* mine.  Just kidding.  I think everyone who reads rainbow (GLBTQ) fiction should pop over to her LiveJournal and vote in all the polls, regardless of whether or not they vote for Sapphistocated (which, by all accounts, they should).

Thanks, y'all!

peace and rainbow passion,