Ryan M. Patrick

I’m very transparent about my writing, especially the business side of things. This is a very secondary source of income for me – I do this more to get people to read my books than to make any real money off of it. If you DM or email me, I’ll send you 1 or all of my epubs if you promise to leave me a review. That being said, the best way to get more people to read your stuff…is to sell more of it! So while it’s not my primary objective, it is an objective.

I do posts like this and my end-of-month transparency posts because it might help someone, not to brag (far from it!) or beg for more sales. It is what it is and I am by no means an expert on any of the writing or marketing process. I’ll do a little editorializing throughout but for the most part it’s raw, naked numbers presented without comment.

This post will break down my 2025 in terms of both sales and finances – I’ll let you go behind the hood on my Kindle Dashboard, Draft2Digital Dashboard, and Book Report. But first…

My Books

I currently have 3 books released, all first-in-series. Blog post on why this was a terrible idea later, but here they are!:

• The Martian Incident – near-future sci-fi thriller
• Lag Delay – technothriller
• The Europan Deception – future sci-fi espionage thriller

I also have a short story “Low Frequency” that I used as a test for D2D and permafree. It’s $0.99 on Amazon because they continually reset it to that price point no matter how many times I tell them to price match the wide stores (free!). I make minimal money off of it. You’ll see that in some of my data but for the most part I made less than $5 the entire year.

Books Sold

Let’s start with Amazon, my biggest royalty source by far. I sold 762 books last year through KDP. 76 of them were free copies of Lag Delay (not doing that again, got 1 review out of it), the rest were paid – either at the $0.99 price point during a Based Book Sale or full price ($3.99 for my first two books, $4.99 for The Europan Deception).

For KENP page reads as part of KU, I had 95,033 (would have been great to get to 100,000!). Lag Delay was removed from that program in October to go wide, but it’s not really successful there either. As you can see it does the worst of my 3 novels so I am going to make that entire series wide – Crush Depth will be released on Smashwords, B&N, Apple, and whatnot at the same time as Amazon.

For Draft2Digital, I made most of my sales through paperbacks. All 3 of my novels are available there and Lag Delay is on Smashwords and the other wide stores. The D2D Print, Overdrive, and Smashwords orders are paid sales, the others are free downloads of “Low Frequency.”

I also sold 10 paperback books – 5 each of The Martian Incident and Lag Delay – through my writing friend Mike Mollman who travels around to cons selling both his books and those of other indie authors.

What does that work out to from a revenue standpoint?

Honestly…not terrible. January sucked, the rest of the year was really, really good – 3x my last year. The February and September bumps are from the Based Book Sale. I was in the November/December Black Friday one but didn’t sell that money books through it (I may be saturating that audience with my current inventory of stories). That’s not accounting for all of my D2D sales – the dashboard is wonky right now, and I had a lot in December so it’s closer to $1500, but not quite (mental math puts me at $1490). I’ll know exactly how much at tax time!

Short Stories

I sold one short story and made $10 off of it – well below pro rate, but it’s my first sale! So I was over $1500 for the year. Again, I’ll have an exact number at tax time, but I’m using $1500 for this calculation.

Advertising

I spent $253.34 on Amazon sales January through April, where I turned all of them off. My ads dashboard is being wonky – you’re going to have to take me at my word, no screenshots!! What I’ve found is that Amazon ads aren’t cost effective for single books – you need the readthrough. Once I get a series complete, hopefully the NASA Engineer one first, then I’ll get seriously into ads. I have found that indie author sales and releasing new books are most bang for your buck until you get a series together. I’ll do an AMS ads post at some point.

Other Expenses

I pay $8 a month for Twitter Premium, which is my go-to social network, coming out to $96 for the year. Grok is my go-to AI for a lot of things and the blue check is nice to have as well. I also bought a cover for The Europan Deception for $89 and got a proof for the paperback for $11.04, and also renewed my website domain for $13 in July. I also bought a stock photo for The Saturn Anomaly (my next release) for $12. I am a cheap author if you couldn’t tell!

Total

I made $1,036.66 for the year after expenses. Obviously with KDP and D2D royalties this isn’t what I will pay taxes on, there’s a 2 month delay, but this was my total revenue minus expenses. I’m not quitting my day job anytime soon!

What I learned in 2025

• Ads aren’t effective for a single book.
• Social media is mostly a waste of time, but when you hit with someone, they usually buy a book (or two!) from you. I had a couple of Twitter posts go viral and had increased sales for a week after both of them.
• Write in a series.
• Be involved in the indie author community and promote both your books and the ones you read that you enjoyed, as well as participate in other author’s sales.
• Get social media influencers/big posters to read & talk about your books.
• Write a good book. I am confident in my stuff and am more than happy to push it, both on social media or in person, but I’m not pushy. I know my novels appeal to a certain kind of reader (my dad and brother!) and not others (my wife!). I have 4+ stars on both Amazon and Goodreads and my later two novels have 4.5+. People generally like what I’m selling, and not to brag but I’ve done an OK job of finding my audience.

If you want to know more, or if there’s data that I have (outside of ads, that dashboard is a mess) that would help you, hit me up on email or Twitter/X. I hope that this is of use to someone!