Now that my travel/sailing/adventure memoir Plunge – One Woman’s Pursuit of a Life Less Ordinary has been launched more than 1.5 years ago, these book updates, or better, promo updates, will become less frequent. I’m thinking of sharing book news here a few times a year for the following reasons: to update people interested in the journey of an indie author, to inspire/inform fellow authors about my process, successes, and failures, and to – hopefully – entice new blog readers to check out Plunge. This page here provides the blurb, reviews, free chapters, and more. You can find my previous update here.
My book news
Let’s start with the biggest accomplishment… After I published Plunge in November 2020 (on my 45th birthday), I had three quantifiable goals for the first year after publication:
- Make back my investment in the book, which was $2,700. This chunk of money was spent on an editor (two rounds), cover artist, a packet of ten ISBN numbers, and miscellaneous costs related to the publication process.
- Gather 100 ratings/reviews for my book on Amazon.
- Sell 1,000 copies of Plunge.
I only managed to reach the first two goals by November 2021, one year in.
Eighteen months after publication, I’m happy to report that I achieved my third goal (in May 2022): 1,000 copies sold on Amazon; this is a combination of eBooks and paperbacks. If you add other markets and personal sales to this, the number is slightly higher. While this might not seem like much (it isn’t), all these books have been sold via word of mouth, personal efforts, and free “promo posts” on Facebook. I have yet to pay money for advertising, which I probably have to do soon if I want to keep selling books.
Crossing the 1,000 mark
If you are curious about my actual earnings for these sales (and who isn’t?), here is my royalty statement for those 1,020 books sold above. Don’t forget that $2,700 of this number went to creating Plunge. So far, I’ve made about $1,400 on a book that took five years to write. 🙂
Continue reading
