Cadence & Slang’s sales, for the curious.
Cadence & Slang broke even with its Kickstarter funding, but while 1,062 copies were printed, only 320 copies went to those who helped get it printed. I’m keeping eleven copies for myself (one of which is beaten to hell with corrections), two were damaged out of the box, and as of this writing, 98 remain for sale. So that leaves 631 that I’ve sold for 100% profit, minus Google Checkout’s fees. For a $43 book after shipping, I earn $41.45 after those fees. Minus $2.72 in media mail postage, that’s $38.73. There are a couple of other overhead costs - my postage provider charges me $17 a month for their services, for instance - but they’re roundoff errors in the grand scheme.
I think many people are squeamish about making precisely enough of their work for backers, but I was clear with my readers that this was going to fund a full offset run, and I put all of their money back to supporting them with bonus notebooks, stickers, etc. Yesterday, I gave them free PDFs of the book, because I don’t think it’s right to charge people (and especially backers) twice for the same content.
While the whole process has not gone perfectly smoothly, nothing on this scale does, and I have no regret about how I’ve conducted my business with my backers and customers. I would do it all again in a heartbeat. So in light of Amy Hoy’s lack of squeamishness about sales figures, I’m going to follow suit and share my sales figures, too.
As of this writing, I have earned $22,898 from people buying through the site, $741 from multiple copy orders, $1,240 from in-person sales through Square, and $160 in cash. Since launching the PDF yesterday, I’ve earned $238 in sales from that, too.
My sales have dropped off considerably since the holidays; around $18,000 of that was before December 24. Part of this was because I had unusually strong sales from being listed on Ars Technica’s holiday gift guide; part of this is probably a post-holiday slump. My launching of the PDF was not in response to this, and it was not a cash grab; in fact, I’ve already given away 1,712 downloads of the PDF in the past day, mostly to my Kickstarter backers, which was about double the number of book owners. I care more about spreading my book’s message than making money, and many people simply wouldn’t be reached if Cadence & Slang remained a physical artifact.
I have very little idea what sales are like for other independent authors, and I have no idea if these numbers are even good (or if it constitutes success by any sort of arbitrary metric - hell, I barely even know if folks like it), but I believe that these are the most favorable terms for me, and I’m pretty certain that they would be far worse if I had gone through a traditional publisher. Lest you think I’m smugly rolling in money like the Scrooge McDuck in my Kickstarter video, that could not be farther from the truth; with Cadence & Slang’s profits I’ve bought a pair of nice boots, I took my infinitely patient girlfriend out to a nice dinner, and then I put the entire rest of it into my student loans.
If you have any more questions about Cadence & Slang’s finances, I’d be happy to share anything with you. I’ve probably omitted something, which I assure you is more forgetfulness than hesitance.
