Growth isn't linear
Indie author transparency: I'm in my bad sales era
(I will be talking numbers here, so if you don’t like money talk for whatever reason, please skip!)
Indie author transparency: I am not doing as well as I thought.
In 2023, with two books under my belt, I could expect to see $800-$1000 every month in my KDP dashboard. Now, in 2026, with 5 books under my belt, I’m seeing $400-$800…$800 being an unusually good month!
I released my fourth book, To Sway A Soul (NA romantic fantasy), in May 2025 with high hopes that it would outperform my previous three (YA fantasy). Up until then, I’d only ever seen growing returns, especially in the KDP dashboard, at a linear rate.
Once you see a pattern, you expect it to repeat. I expected my fourth book to follow the same path as my others and double my royalties after release. Delulu is the solulu, as they say.
I decided to do physical preorders and sell direct for the release of To Sway A Soul. I learned from my Kickstarter in 2024 (which made me a net profit of about $6k) that selling direct makes a huge difference in profit vs print-on-demand sales.
However, I didn’t make as much net profit selling To Sway A Soul direct as I thought. I ordered a print run from a third-party printer instead of print-on-demand (POD) self-publishing platforms like KDP or IngramSpark. This should’ve lowered my per-book print cost, but the printer ended up disappointing me and getting my order wrong, so I had to purchase over half of the preorders from IngramSpark, which was very pricey. I also had to account for swag, packing material, and Etsy fees (since I sold through Etsy). After doing the math post-preorder, I made about $1.9k net profit for 213 books, which comes to about $8.90 per book. Still better than POD sales, which is usually $4-5 per book for me. (I got a partial refund from the printer that messed up my order, but it probably wasn’t enough to offset the extra money I had to spend on IngramSpark copies lol).
Math-wise, I technically did make more upon release month than I did with my other book launches (not counting my Kickstarter book, since that was not a “regular” release). Usually, my new release spike is $1k, so $1.9k is an improvement...though considering the labor and stress and the back-and-forth with the disappointing printer, I’m not sure if the extra $900 was worth it.
To Sway A Soul did not carry its momentum after release. The audiobook has sold fewer than 20 copies in its lifetime. A year later, this novella is currently fighting for Least Sold Book Per Month with my spin-off novellette, which was actually my high-grossing Kickstarter book. (I have a theory that this is because both of these are novellas instead of full-length novels...but I don’t have data to support that.)
In November 2025, I released The Charmwitch Seamstress, book 3 of my Witches of Olderea series. It was a very low-key release because I was properly burnt out. I’ve done very little marketing for it since it’s a book 3 in a series; I figured it would sell itself. I haven’t done the math for net profit (I think I ended up selling about 150-ish copies direct). I’d put release month numbers at $1.5k, give or take a few hundred. So, very much in the ballpark of my previous books.
All that to say, in 2025 I was looking for a large cumulative income jump that took me above and beyond my past numbers, seeing as it was a double release year, but that ultimately did not happen. Royalties have actually plummeted for me. I was pretty disappointed in myself despite the enthusiasm of my readers for both these books, which is all that should matter, but as we know, capitalism ruins everything.
Strategy & Optimization: What I Probably Should’ve Done
The formula of indie author success, from what I’ve observed, is as follows: write and release the “same type of story” (preferably in a hot genre/trend) again and again, at a consistent rate. It builds a brand so readers know what they’re getting into when they pick up your book. If they like it, they’ll stick around for all subsequent releases. (Another option is to have a viral TikTok and blow up overnight, but you can’t really control that, unfortunately.)
A huge factor in growth is series sell-through, which means folks who read book 1 in a series are likely to read book 2 and 3, etc. With every subsequent book, you have the opportunity to find new readers and get them to buy the whole series.
My favorite example of this is romance authors who write sequels for all the side characters from book 1. The most famous example at this point is Bridgerton (my personal favorite Regency romance series that follows this formula is the Wishing Well series by Sofie Laporte). Mystery writers also do this, following one detective as they investigate one mystery in book 1, another in book 2, etc. These episodic collections of standalones are called an open series. If you read YA or fantasy, you might be more familiar with closed series, which follow the same characters over a long span of time with cliff hangers and escalating stakes.
Ideally, books in a series would be released consecutively with relatively short breaks in between (1 month to 1 year) to keep their readership engaged and build momentum. This is why lots of authors do the rapid release strategy, which is when you release the entire series in a very short span of time.
If I wanted to optimize, I would have released book 3 of my series the year after book 2 for ideal growth and done Kickstarter campaigns for all of them. But I didn’t know any better then, and creative whims got in the way. I ended up with this sequence of releases: Book 1 (2021), Book 2 (2023), Spin-off novellette (2024), Unrelated standalone novella (2025), Book 3 (2025).
After sitting with this for a bit and wondering about my messy, messed-up indie author strategy (or lack thereof), I’ve come to the conclusion that I will never follow the perfectly optimized book release schedule, even if I do know these strategies in theory.
I fear I’m not an “optimization” person, and it is very difficult to scale to the heights I dream of considering the way I currently operate: refusing to run ads, not being on social media consistently, not having multiple releases a year, not writing in a hot genre, taking a very long time to produce my books, etc, etc. Unfortunately, my creative whims will always take precedence over business strategy. That is why I’ve been looking at traditional publishing lately, wondering if the grass will be greener over there.
Luck and chance play a very big role in both paths of publishing, though. You’ll never know when a book is gonna take off, and you’ll never know when world events are gonna strike and mess things up (aka tariffs, war, economic recession/depression). Sometimes, even if you do everything right—market and release consistently and put out the best work you can—linear growth is not guaranteed, nor do I think it’s possible. The nature of creative entrepreneurship is a rollercoaster, and boy, am I strapped in.
However, I will try the rapid-release method with my next indie series, and we’ll see if it’s really all it’s cracked up to be. (With the rise of AI and some folks not understanding that authors can finish multiple books first and then release them all as quickly as they please, I’m hoping I don’t get AI allegations LMAO.)
Quiet Seasons & Lessons Learned
2026 is proving to be a very low-royalty year, even with five books under my belt. This is for multiple reasons.
1. I have not been posting or marketing much; I’ve been feeling extremely bleak considering current events, and I can’t muster the same amount of joy, optimism, and motivation that I had in the first two to three years of my career...and well, marketing only works if you’re excited.
2. I’m taking a step back from social media in general because I don’t have an upcoming indie release this year, as I’ve been quietly working on projects for trad pub.
After five years of being an independent artist/creator, I’ve noticed that there are quiet seasons: long stretches of time when not much is happening. I anticipate this year to be the longest of all.
That doesn’t mean nothing is being done, though. I just turned in another manuscript to my agent (a dark adult romantasy) after my cutesy YA romantasy is pretty much dead on sub (RIP, I was optimistic and delulu about it, but it’ll have its moment in the sun eventually). I’m also working on my new indie romantic mystery series as I wait. Seeds are being sown! They’re dormant now, but they’ll sprout in the next season.
So, even if To Sway A Soul didn’t catapult me to higher royalties in the short term, I see it as “planting a seed” for the future books I wanna release that are in the same vein (East Asian inspired fantasy). It’s a long-term investment, one that I hope will flourish in the seasons to come.
And finally, growth is not linear, a fact I knew in theory but never experienced until now. It’s not fun, TBH, but I thought I’d write about it anyway, considering all the instant-success publishing stories we’re shown daily. It’s not realistic for most of us.
Long success stories with lots of twists are kind of my favorite, anyway.
Im excited to see where your work goes in the future 💕 Ive loved everything Ive seen from you, and I love East Asian inspired fantasy, so I’m looking forward to the things you’ll write in the future. 😊
I know it's a disappointing and frustrating process despite how individual readers feel, but I did just want to share:
I loved TSAS so so much!! I bought the illustrated book (loved the illustrations) but then got so frustrated when I'd have to stop reading to drive somewhere, so I bought the audiobook as well. I basically switched back and forth (reading the book for the pictures, listening to the audiobook in the car and while doing brain-off tasks at work, eventually also buying the ebook to be able to read it in bed) until I finished it, which was the first time I'd really finished a book in a long long time after a really bad anxiety-induced reading slump. I loved that it was a standalone novella (and thus more acheivable after not having finished a book in so long), and I really did enjoy the audiobook a lot (although I know it didn't end up being super profitable). This book really meant so much to me and I'm really excited to see more like it. I did also tell all of my friends (and my therapist--the whole thing about shame/guilt really resonated) about it. I know it doesn't change everything else (*gestures at the state of publishing/finances/the general world rn*), but I want you to know that this book was so loved and appreciated. Reading THP now, and excited to read that series, but also very excited to see future NA/East Asian fantasy books as well.