Bestselling books of 2020

I thought it would be interesting to go through and look at my bestselling books of 2020. I’ll have to split this post into two categories – first my bestselling individual titles, and then my bestselling Kindle Unlimited books, since they’re essentially exclusive of one another. It will also be interesting to see what percentage of the total the titles reached.

First, my overall bestselling title of 2020 was MALISON: THE COMPLETE SERIES, which came in at 5.67% percentage of the total unit sales.

But that was a box set, so let’s look at individual titles:

1.) DRAGONTIARNA: WRAITHS, 3.3%

2.) DRAGONTIARNA: LEGIONS, 2.87%

3.) DRAGONTIARNA: DEFENDERS, 2.51%

4.) DRAGONTIARNA: GATES, 2.25%

5.) DRAGONTIARNA: CROWNS, 2.18%

6.) DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS, 2.08%

7.) DRAGONTIARNA: THIEVES, 1.83%

8.) GHOST IN THE COUNCIL, 1.58%

9.) SEVENFOLD SWORD: SOVEREIGN, 1.33%

10.) CLOAK OF ASHES, 1.28%

Other high performers were THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE at 2.33%, SEVENFOLD SWORD OMNIBUS ONE at 2.74%, FROSTBORN OMNIBUS ONE at 2.87%, and THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE at 1.44%.

So in 2020, six of my ten bestselling titles were new books, for a total of 13.78% of my book sales coming from titles published in 2020. Clearly I will need to write more books in DRAGONTIARNA, GHOST NIGHT, and CLOAK MAGE in 2021, so it’s just as well that was my plan. 🙂 It’s also good to have a big backlist, and regular sales on various box sets.

Next up, let’s look at my best-read Kindle Unlimited titles in 2020. KU, as you may know, works on “pages read” rather than units sold. 2020 was my best year ever for KU, and here are my most-read KU titles and their percentages of the KU total:

1.) THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE, 10.2%

2.) DEMONSOULED OMNIBUS ONE, 8%

3.) WRAITHSHARD: SWORD & FLAME, 6.25%

4.) WRAITHSHARD: SIEGE & STORM, 5.1%

5.) WRAITHSHARD: MAGE & KNIGHT, 4.13%

6.) MASK OF THE DEMONSOULED: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY, 3.62%

7.) WRAITHSHARD: PYRE & FORGE, 3.42%

8.) SOUL OF SORCERY, 2.96%

9.) THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS TWO, 2.87%

10.) GHOST EXILE OMNIBUS ONE, 2.71%

Four of the five WRAITHSHARD books, which were released into KU, made the list. WRAITHSHARD: WRATH & BATTLE only came out in the last three weeks of December 2020, so it didn’t really have a lot of time to rack of page reads.

From this, we can learn that 1.) KU really likes new books, since all the WRAITHSHARD books were new in 2020, and 2.) KU really, really likes big box sets like GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE. It helps that GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE has a massive 39 hour long audiobook linked to it, which helped drive page reads and borrows.

I don’t think I will release anything new into KU in 2021, and I’ve started the process of phasing out of it. The biggest problem with KU is that it’s really expensive to advertise in it, whether on Facebook or Amazon ads. It is much more cost effective to advertise permafree first-in-series books and gradually pull people into the series that way. So by the midpoint of 2021, I hope to be entirely out of KU (with WRAITHSHARD available on all ebook platforms) and have more permafree first-in-series books than I previously did.

That said, there might be two exceptions to this plan. First, WRAITHSHARD: SWORD & FLAME is currently in Prime Reading, and the series is firing along nicely. If that doesn’t drop off by the end of its KU term, I might keep it there for longer. The second exception could be something I learn from my bonus 11th writing goal in 2021, PROJECT UPDATE. That will be ready to go in the first week of February, so by the end of February I will know whether or not that would work better in KU or not.

Once again, thanks for reading!

-JM