I did a post a few months ago about my 2025 sales. And I had plans to do a mid-year sales post but life got in the way – June and July were super busy months – and even worse, I’ve moved a fraction of the books that I did last year. But there’s reasons for that! And I’ll talk to them here.
2023-2024 are really bad years for comparison – I released The Martian Incident in December 2023, right before I left the military, and Lag Delay just a few months later in March 2024. Those books were written in 2015-2018 and 2020-2022 respectively and had to wait for Pentagon clearance to get published, so I had two books ready to go back-to-back but I also was an unknown author with 100 Twitter followers and no backlist or past performance to go on.
2025, where I released The Europan Deception in May, is a much better measuring stick. I didn’t do a mid-year check-in (just a end-of-year sales post) but I’ll pull the info here.
First 6 Months of 2025
From Book Report (which I love). I had an awful January, but then I put my two books in the Based Book Sale in February and killed it. Then, I had The Europan Deception release in May and that helped just my numbers as well. And if you’ve read my aforementioned 2025 sales post you know that the rest of the year was pretty good too – I made almost $1500 total across my three books. Not bad. I also spent maybe $100 in advertising over this.
That being said…
First 6 Months of 2026
Not great!
The February Based Book Sale helped, but I didn’t move many books in the May one (which I didn’t participate in last year).
Also, no ads – I’ve spent a big old $0 in AMS ads this year. I’ll do an ad post at some point but the moral of the story is that the numbers don’t make sense for me without 3 books in a series. I have the money to spend, but it’s not worth it – I can get a small amount of organic sales just fine (which may make me a unique outlier?).
I also pulled my stuff from Draft2Digital after they changed their policy. I was making enough to avoid the new fees, but I had no guarantee that was going to be the case this year, and that’s such a tiny market anyway. So that’s another revenue avenue for my paperbacks that’s gone.
But the biggest issue is a lack of a release. If you have read my end of month posts, I have had two complete, edited books at the Pentagon since February, and now as of July have three. This is just murdering any kind of forward momentum that I have, especially since I have The Saturn Anomaly and The Kuiper Dominion finishing a series that started with The Martian Incident that’s sold just under a thousand copies. Sales trail off after 60-90 days on Amazon and having over a year since my last release is killing me.
How am I trying to resolve this?
I’m working on Memento Vivere (just finished Chapter Forty-Two!) which does not require a Pentagon security review. When I’m done with it and it’s edited, I can just publish it whenever. And I’m adding a “non-review” novel in between the “review required” novels so that I don’t have a 15+ month gap again. This is a huge change, and it took about a month to get through, but I have a bunch of either primary-world fantasy novels outlined/brainstormed or some far-future sci-fi (“Duology,” “Alien Noir,” “Roman Time Travel,” “Alien Airframe”) that won’t need any prepublication clearance. I’ll do The Apophis Contingency (the The Europan Deception sequel) next, which will need a review, and then Black Sails & Sorcery – a pirate fantasy novel that will not need a review at all.
I never expected writing to replace my day job, but I did expect to keep the momentum going, and the Pentagon is just killing me. I’ll do a post next month about writing in a series and why that’s so important (and not doing three first-in-series books!) and where I messed up early in my career by doing that. But it is a bit disappointing, not going to lie.
However, like I put in my 2025 sales post and my post on reviews, I’m open and transparent not to brag (obviously not here!!!!) but in case some of this information helps out other authors and lets them avoid some of the mistake I’ve made. More than happy to answer questions on this either via email or on Twitter.
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