That breakeven point I was talking about…

Mike GristLife 2 Comments

The stats from Amazon are in and I can finally represent, in hard-data graph form, the beautiful surfacing of my books net earnings- up from the depths of debt and into the dizzying clear sky of profit.

It has been a long time coming (two years self-publishing now) and there was never any certainty I’d get even this far. It is a great positive milestone, of which I hope there will be many more.

graph

The green line is cumulative total revenue (not total profit as the key says), the orange line is cumulative total costs, and the blue bars are cumulative net profits (ie- what I keep).

As you can see, for all of existence they were negative. Deep down there in the belly of the beast. Cumulative revenue crept up agonizingly slowly. Then suddenly in April it started to climb, thanks to The Last, which was enough to dig me out of debt and by September put me in the black.

You may wonder what put me in the red in the first place. Primarily it was the editing cost for my fantasy novel Ignifer’s Rise, on which I spent $600 dollars. That got the hole started. But every book since was about $300-$400 of cost- for covers and sometimes editing or proof-reading, plus promotions. They all dug the hole down, and not one of my books ‘earned out’ on that investment until now.

The Last earned out, The Lost has as well, and I’m hopeful book 3 will bring it all home.

There are no numbers on the graph- but it’s not big money. Yet…

Comments 2

  1. Fantastic!!

    Wonderful to see you keeping track of the costs as well as revenue. Too few writers seem to do this (or perhaps even know how). Its a great metric to keep in mind, as a motivator or if needed, a reality check.

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