Ryan M. Patrick

As anyone who’s worked with me in a professional setting knows, I’m always open and honest, even to a fault. I’m going to be like that with my book sales too.

I’m planning to give an update every 6 months, with all of my successes or failures highlighted for the world to see. It might be helpful for others, it might not be, but it’ll definitely be helpful for me to collect all of the data and put it out there. I know that in different writing groups and forums I’m in sharing my outlines/query letters/etc has assisted others, so it might be the same here

I might change the format up later, but for now, I’m going to go book-by-book – including my free short story I released. I snapped the line on June 5 so it’s exactly six months of my publishing career.

The Martian Incident

I released The Martian Incident on December 5, 2023, a Tuesday. I opened the paperback up two weeks prior to that so that I could get reviews on release day, and one of my writing friends (won’t say who!) bought it in November, hence the lone sale that month. Here’s the graph of orders, with paperbacks in yellow and ebooks in blue. The spike in April 2024 is from the Naratess sale I was a part of where the ebook sold for $0.99/£0.99.

And here’s the KENP pages read (I am in KU). Book Report tells me this is 31 borrows.

For a total of 98 units. That’s…not bad, and a lot better than I had anticipated. Definitely seeing a decline after the first few months, but the sale helped make up for some of it. The reviews are pretty good too – I’m consistently at 3-5 stars on both Amazon and Goodreads, and even the 3 stars are positive ones. I hope that it’ll be a key part of my backlist for years to come. I ran some ads from January to March but honestly didn’t see that much of an increase in sales, maybe 5 of those 67 can be attributed to the AMS ads, so I turned them off. Advertising is a future-me problem.

However, there’s some negatives here as well. I did a really good job in December of promoting myself on social media – I was winding down my time at the Pentagon, working from home, and had the time to mess around on Twitter all day. That changed in January, and I can definitely see the drop in sales there.

I also really screwed up in that it’s a standalone, it’s not going to have a sequel. Originally, it was supposed to be the prequel to my The Dark Galaxy series, with the main plot point in The Martian Incident (no spoilers!) coming back at the start of the first book to kick off the plot. That’s no longer a thing in The Europan Deception, but maybe there’s a way to tie the two series together in the future? Or maybe branch it off to its own series? Regardless, from all of the advice I’ve heard from other, more established authors, I am shooting myself in the foot somewhat by not focusing on a series.

Still, I’m blessed to have the success that I’ve had, with it and look forward to having more sales trickle in!

Lag Delay

Lag Delay was my pandemic book. It was originally my take on Michael Crichton’s Airframe, but evolved over the course of drafting it into a very different book. The final manuscript is evocative of a Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child thriller, a fast-paced rush through the space industry with gunfights, car chases, and action after a slower start.

It’s the novel I’m the most proud of, it’s the one I cut my teeth editing, and when I released it on March 26, 2024, I had high hopes for it.

But, those haven’t materialized.

Here’s my orders – 10 paperbacks, 6 ebooks:

And my KENP read, which Book Report tells me is 2 borrows:

So 18 units sold.

Honestly, I know it’s only been a little over 2 months, but I’m a little disappointed. In my honest opinion, it’s a far superior book than The Martian Incident, but the sales and borrows haven’t materialized. However, I haven’t been advertising it – I can’t get the AMS ads to work, even with high bids – and I haven’t pushed it on social media like I was able to do The Martian Incident in December.

What really scares me is this is supposed to be the first book in a series – I want to write a bunch of standalones featuring the same main character, aerospace engineer Grace Parkowski, with different aerospace/conspiracy/technothriller elements in each one. If I can’t get the first one off of the ground, I may be doing something wrong.

And, after some research, I very well might be. My cover is very sci-fi-esque when the book itself is a modern-day technothriller, which tells me I might be targeting the wrong audience. I’m also fully willing to admit that I didn’t nail the first few chapters, so the “Look Inside” on Amazon might be scaring some people away.

However, the reviews are great. Every single person who’s read it has loved it, and I haven’t gotten anything less than 5 stars on Amazon or Goodreads. I think I just need to find the right audience, whether through ads or social media, and the sales/borrows will start coming.

Low Frequency

Low Frequency is a (longer) short story that I wrote many years ago and have been editing and submitting ever since. I ran out of markets to sub it to, I decided to teach myself Draft2Digital and release it as a free standalone, just to see what happens. It’s also the free story you get if you sign up for my newsletter!

In just over a month, I had well over a hundred downloads…but only a couple of reviews. 90 from Amazon:

And 35 from Draft2Digital storefronts:

Who knows if it’ll lead to any sales of my other books, but as I’ve said before, I’m not really in it for the money – I want people to read my stuff! Hopefully more than 2 people will leave me a rating or review :-).

Conclusion

Based on the limited information I have, here’s what I think I can gleam:

• It is much easier to sell indie sci-fi than indie technothriller. I believe the readers of the former genre mostly read traditionally published authors. I am a huge technothriller fan and outside of A.G. Riddle I cannot list a single indie technothriller author whose books I have particularly enjoyed.
• Ads aren’t particularly effective unless you have enough books out to justify the high bid rates. More on my limited advertising journey in a future post.
• My stuff isn’t terrible – nor is most indie authors’. If you spend the time to edit your books based on feedback, from beta readers or editors, people will enjoy it.
• Free books are great, they get lots of downloads, but not many reviews/ratings.
• And, in general, reviews are hard to come by! I’d at least like some more ratings ;-).
• Focus on one series! I’m probably never going to be able to do this, my creative flow jumps around too much, but if an early-career writer could pump out a trilogy and really focus on marketing it, I think it’d pay dividends.
• Finally, I don’t think Kindle Unlimited is a good place for my technothrillers. Not enough page reads to justify keeping it in there. I’ll hold Lag Delay in KDP Select until Crush Depth is ready, then I’ll release the two simultaneously to a wide audience.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll do another one of these in December. Hope it was helpful to someone!