5 years of self-publishing
As of April, I’ve now been self-publishing for five years now.
First, thank you all for reading! I spent years writing without an audience, so it is very gratifying to get emails asking when the next book is coming. So thanks for coming along on the adventures of Mazael, Caina, Ridmark, Nadia, Rachaelis, and all the others – knowing that people await the next book is a good spur towards excellence!
Man. Five years. Tempus fugit! Considering my original plan was to self-publish DEMONSOULED and SOUL OF TYRANTS and then forget about them, self-publishing worked out really well. 🙂
In the last five years, I’ve written 7 DEMONSOULED novels, 14 GHOSTS novels, 11 FROSTBORN novels, 3 CLOAK GAMES novels, 9 nonfiction books, and dozens of short stories. I thought I was done with fiction in 2010, but clearly that was not to be.
Stay tuned – I have some sales scheduled to celebrate the 5 year mark, and I’ll give away some stories for free to my newsletter subscribers later this week. Of course, this would be an excellent time to subscribe to my new-release newsletter. 🙂
-JM
thanks for having me along! here’s to 5 more years!
Thank you! And thanks for coming along. 🙂
Congrats. A search of my Kobo for “Jonathan Moeller” shows me 79 results. I think I am missing one or two still.
Thanks! My Kobo Dashboard claims I presently have 80 books live via Kobo, so I don’t think you missed much. 🙂
What’s the total number of book sales you have had over that timeline. I bet that is a pretty significant amount and would make any “traditionally publish” sit up and take notice.
*”traditionally published” author
About 375,000 total over five years. None of the individual books have like big bestseller numbers, but they add up in aggregate, and most traditionally published novels never earn out their advance, so I prefer doing it this way. 🙂
That sir, is a respectable number. Hat’s off to you!
“… so it is very gratifying to get emails asking when the next book is coming … knowing that people await the next book is a good spur towards excellence!”
Oh. Huh. If I had known that emails (or comments here) would’ve helped spur you towards excellence, I definitely would’ve sent them. I didn’t want emails to distract you from writing and I think you’ve achieved excellence anyway. On the other hand, given that you can write thousands of words per day, I imagine you can probably handle reading a few hundred from fans without being too distracted.
I’m ALWAYS waiting for the next Ghosts and Cloak Games books (I usually finish them within a few hours of their release), so please feel spurred towards excellence! For some reason, stories that have a female lead written by a male author tend to be my favorites and that’s probably why those two series resonate more with me than your other currently “live” series (I liked your Third Soul series too, but that’s retired).
Thanks for sticking with it. Writing fiction (or maybe anything) looks like a brutal way to try to make a living. The author Annie Bellet wrote an article (http://anniebellet.com/musings-on-income/) about her income from writing and the graph at the bottom shows her pretty much making nothing for five years before she started doing pretty well. Yikes! That’s a tough road. I can see why many authors throw in the towel and I’m very glad you didn’t.
That was an interesting post. Thanks for sharing!
My situation was different. I started writing a really long time ago, and I finished a novel for the first time in 2000. I wrote DEMONSOULED in 2001, and I spent a big chunk of 2001 to 2011 trying to get traditionally published. I did get published a few times, but didn’t make much money, and by 2010 I was so disgusted with the traditional publishing ecosystem that I had decided to ditch it in favor for writing a website about Linux. So when I discovered the Kindle in 2011, I had something like 10 finished and unpublished novels, and my Linux website had given me a lot of experience in online marketing, so I was able to take to self-publishing really easily.
I think the best metaphor for writing I’ve ever seen in the season 9 episode of Doctor Who called “Heaven Sent”. That diamond wall… 🙂
Just some odd thoughts here. How much different do you think the e-book market is compared to when you first started? How has your approach towards self publishing changed? I know that you self edit most if not all your books, do you think that is a better route than having someone else edit it?
“How much different do you think the e-book market is compared to when you first started?”
Some things haven’t changed. Amazon is still dominant. Kobo, Google Play, and iTunes have really all upped their games, but Barnes & Noble is in decline. Draft2Digital is a pretty useful distributor, though I still use Smashwords. Kindle Unlimited had an impact on the market, but less of one than I would have thought, honestly.
“How has your approach towards self publishing changed?”
Write more books. 🙂 I do fewer novellas, since they don’t sell as much as regular novels, and I only do short stories for newsletter bonuses. That’s why I never got around to continuing THE THIRD SOUL – if I was going to do it, I would do it as a full-length novel.
“I know that you self edit most if not all your books, do you think that is a better route than having someone else edit it?”
I have actually had some books edited, and those books still get complaints about typos. What’s interesting is when I get emails from people pointing out grammar mistakes, and their understanding of grammar is actually wrong! Like, they’ll point out a sentence and say “fix this”, but there’s nothing wrong with the sentence and their fix is actually a mistake. I suspect they learned it incorrectly from a dogmatic writing teacher or a bad boss and have stuck to it ever since. So I just do the best I can to remove typos, and accept that even if I pay someone $1k to edit the book, there will still be typos.
In terms of structural editing (plot, characters, etc.) I’ve been doing this long enough that I trust my own judgment for the most part.
My wife bought me a Kobo in 2010 as a Father’s Day present while I was deployed. She knew that I always loved to read, but she wasn’t sure what I would think of it. Six years later, I am on my third one – wore one out and upgraded to a Kobo Aura H20 model….400+ books on my account (all bought and paid for). I am huge fan of e-books. Kobo has definitely improved, there are a few areas where it could be better. (Like stop recommending books to me if I already bought them)
Just have to say that Demonsouled, Third Soul and Frostborn are my favorite series.
Excellent! I am glad the Kobo readers have given you excellent service, and I’m glad you enjoyed the books.
I haven’t decided what I’ll write once FROSTBORN is done – right now I’m trying to decide between a new DEMONSOULED series, a new THIRD SOUL series, or something new entirely.
Whatever you’re doing for editing, keep doing it, because your books have few enough mistakes. Even Harry Potter books, even with vast hordes of editors have an occasional typo, so perfection is out of reach for everyone.
So I can’t tell from your comment. Would you prefer readers point of typos (even though they’ll be wrong some of the time) or would you prefer we don’t bother you?
Nah, send them in. It’s impossible to eliminate all the typos, but I’ll certainly try anyway! 🙂
if you’re taking votes, i’d like to see the world of third soul again; but more demonsouled wouldn’t be unwelcome. of course, i’m sure i’ll read whatever you end up writing 🙂
Thanks! I might actually write a DEMONSOULED novella, a THE THIRD SOUL novella, and a novella in a new world and release them all at once and see which one sells the best. Still, I don’t have to think about it until 2017.
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