March 17th: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Wish I had more “green” to celebrate today than this. Lulu transferred my current earnings to me today via Paypal. A whole $9.55! This is the first payment I’ve received from them since December. These earnings were for 1 copy downloaded through Lulu, 1 hard copy sold through Lulu, and 3 copies sold through other distribution channels such as Amazon. I basically earned 67 cents per copy through the outside distribution channels. That’s the price you “pay” for wanting to keep the price of your book low.
I invested $81.40 in 10 copies of the book last week to take advantage of Lulu’s bulk discount. I’m already shipping 6 of those copies back out to reviewers, in response to my Amazon Discussion which I mentioned in my previous entry. So, I’ll be adding that postage to the bill in my next post, but for now let’s add Lulu’s payment and my cost of the 10 copies to my running total…
Total money invested on this project to date (after book sales only): $218.27 (debt) I subtracted the $9.55, then added the $81.40.
Profit made to date on this project after all sales and services: $298.86 Here, I added my $9.55 to the profit, then subtracted the $81.40.
I also have some sad news today. My book did not make the finalists for Best Fiction in the 2009 Lambda Literary Awards.
That was kind of my next stepping stone I was pacing myself for this year on the path to promoting and marketing this book. Now that I’ve stepped over that stone in the road, it’s time to keep going. My Kindle sales continue to be strong and have far surpassed anything I’d ever dreamed of even selling in actual hard copies. My debt above will be wiped out with two more months of Kindle royalty payments if I don’t invest any more money in this project. And with that said, I probably won’t invest more money in it.
I’m not giving up, but the one year birth date of this book is fast approaching (June 9th, 2008 is the publication date shown on Amazon). I have decided to make my last entry in the POD Diary this year on that date. We’ve come full circle and there are other personal writing projects I need to pursue. Authors out there can relate…there are other characters playing around in my head and I need to see them born on paper. I’ve also managed to devote a ton of my extra time to this blog alone, outside of the POD Diary, and I want to continue to see that grow which requires me to give more of my attention to other self-published authors who are on this same journey. So, let my diary here be a written web record of it. Take from it what you can…my mistakes, my triumphs, my hair pulling…
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