10,000 audiobooks!

I am pleased to report that as of this week, I have sold my 10,000th self-published audiobook! Thanks for listening, everyone!

To be fair, I don’t know exactly how many audiobooks I’ve sold, since there’s no good way to collate that data without taking a week or two off from writing to do it. For that matter, there are some definition questions – does a library checkout count as a sale? Or a Scribd listen? And I get 6x from a Chirp audiobook sale as I do from a Scribd listen, so does six Scribd listens equal one Chirp sale?

But I have officially sold 10,000 audiobooks through ACX, which is Audible, Apple, and Amazon. My bestselling individual audiobook is FROSTBORN: THE DARK WARDEN, and my bestselling collection edition is THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE.

I would like to thank the narrators I’ve worked with over the last four and a half years – Meghan Kelly, Hollis McCarthy, Madison Niederhauser, and Brad Wills – for all their excellent narration. Working with them to create great audiobooks has been an excellent experience.

That said, I should note that while creating the audiobooks is a great experience, selling them is an uphill slog. There’s no way around it – audiobooks are hard to sell! To put that into context, in the span of time it took me to get to 10,000 audiobook sales (starting in October 2018), I sold somewhere around 700,000 ebooks and had about 16.4 million Kindle Unlimited page reads from my various KU experiments.

But that’s okay. I’m good at uphill slogs. I’ve written 200,000 words so far this year. Last week I ran a total of 21 miles in hopes of losing weight. Uphill slog is my default mode of operation.

I should also note that across four and a half years, I’ve turned a very small profit on audiobooks – I haven’t lost money on them. That said, laying aside all artistic considerations and looking at it with cold-eyed business logic, the biggest advantage I get from audiobooks is that the production cost can be deducted as a business expense. Obviously I am not a CPA or a financial planner, and if you need financial advice, you should hire a qualified CPA or a financial planner versed in the laws of your nation, state/province, and municipality. For my situation, a legitimate business expense that also creates a revenue-producing asset is a great thing. I could spend more money on advertising or new covers for a deduction, but that’s less likely to generate revenue the way audiobooks do.

However, if you’re unprepared, it’s easy to lose a whole lot of money on audiobook production. I don’t want to puncture anyone’s artistic dreams, but it’s best to go into audiobook production with a clear-eyed grasp of the situation, or at the very least a solid business plan.

But I suppose if selling 10,000 audiobooks was easy, everyone would do it.

That is true of all endeavors. Selling 10,000 audiobooks sounds impressive, but there was a lot of time and effort behind it. Brandon Sanderson’s recent mega-Kickstarter ($17.3 million dollars as of when I’m writing this on March 2nd) is a much, much larger example of that phenomenon. On the surface, it sounds like “put up a Kickstarter link out of nowhere, get $17 million dollars!”, but there was a huge amount of effort behind it. From what I understand, Sanderson basically has a warehouse with a team of 30 people working on the Kickstarter, and they’ve spent years developing the infrastructure for this kind of thing. Granted, I don’t have a warehouse and a team of 30 people, and I really wouldn’t want them, either – thinking about the logistical and management challenges involved with fulfilling pledges for 68,000 backers makes my blood pressure spike. 🙂

Nevertheless, it was still a lot of work to reach the milestone of 10,000 audiobooks sold.

But it was enjoyable work! Thanks again for listening, everyone, and I’m excited that new audiobooks will be coming soon – FROSTBORN: THE DRAGON KNIGHT, CLOAK OF IRON, CLOAK MAGE OMNIBUS ONE, and GHOST EXILE OMNIBUS TWO.

-JM