in this video i'm going to tell you exactly how much money that i have made from my books since i began publishing as an indie author and that's about four years worth of data so we're gonna find out and then i'm going to tell you exactly how many books i have sold since i began publishing as an indie author as well and last but not least i think we'll have some fun we'll do the math and see how much money do i make on average per book so let's start with the total income from my books and i mean specifically only for my books because not every author has my other income streams like patreon and youtube but in theory every author should have income from books i'm going to show you one year at a time because i think it'll be really fascinating for you to see the big differences and i'll tell you which books were published each year as well so let's take a look as always i've got it blacked out so that i can show you one year at a time because i think it'll be fun for you to see the difference so let's start with 2017. this year i published only one book at the very end of the year in december evelyn's number as you can see i put in parentheses that this was a kickstarter and i made from that kickstarter 1 694 that's a whole other video but that's how i was originally doing pre-orders because i didn't know how to do pre-orders for real and then once the book was published i had the month of december to make money on amazon which was the only place where i was selling the book which was 61. 6 cents for a total of 1755 and six cents obviously that income right there is very very modest it's definitely not enough to live on and i really wanted to point that out because a lot of us in the authors including myself really would love to start out of the gate as a seller and make tons of money right but the truth is that it's usually a lot harder to get the ball rolling and it takes a while and supposedly the average business takes about two years to get off the ground so i think you're gonna see that in the next year as well so let's look at 2018.
we have more income streams added so i added ingramspark for 250. amazon was 804 that year i had not yet gotten drafted digital but i did start doing website sales and i sold it looks like 873 dollars and 56 cents there in books and i had not yet started uh publishing my audiobooks yet either at this point and i didn't have any like other categories so the total of my second year in publishing i made one 1928. 77 just a side note i did expand my business into other things outside of books that year so i was making money from other things but this is only only my income from books i should be showing you these books hold up so here's evelyn's number and then in 2018 i published pearl's number which is the sequel so this is a duology but before i published that guy i also did a fun kind of side project just for kicks and giggles which was a children's book with my dog penny the confident corgi this was literally just for fun but i did a bunch of youtube videos on it that for whatever reason are like my top performing videos on this channel if you're curious you can check them out so now in 2018 i'm making money from these three books but let's move on to 2019 are you ready in 2019 i published my first non-fiction book the first book in the marketing for author series that i co-wrote with my co-author mandy lynn so i make money off of this book since i wrote it and she makes money off of these two books and she wrote these guys so i don't get royalties from those two i only get royalties from the first book so that's what we're gonna count after that i published the first book in my why a fantasy series the stolen kingdom which is an aladdin retelling that was in august and then shortly after that in december i published the sequel book two the jenny key let's take these two out so i don't get confused because i don't make profit from those so at the end of 2019 i was making income from six books those six books made me on amazon 2661 on ingramspark 866 still not on draft to digital and no audio books yet but on my website i had 5 320 from books also in the other category this was the year i went to bookcon and i made 659 at bookcon so that was a grand total of 9 thousand five hundred and six dollars in 2019 that pace was pretty unsustainable let's be real so in 2020 i actually only published one book that is the third book in my series the cursed hunter i was working on other books as well but this is the only one that came out so that's a total now of seven books let's see how much money i made in 2020 on amazon 4263 on ingramspark 3102 and on draft digital here i am i finally got on this platform 429 and audible i also began publishing my audiobook that year so that should say acx i keep saying audible let's change it now so sorry acx i made 176 dollars so not that much and then over on my website i made 2077 for a grand total of eleven thousand and fifty dollars from my books in 2020.
i forgot to mention my writing award that i got here which is really hard to read hold on i have to put like a book behind it there you go so this was in 2020 i forgot to mention that but it's pretty exciting so gotta throw it in there then i managed to pick up my pace again because i did write some books in 2020 that just didn't get published till 2021 so that was first of all the enchanted crown the fourth and final book in the stolen kingdom series and this was published in march followed by later on that year in september i published the spin-off in a new series hopefully the secret gift which is jezebel's origin story and i have more coming in that but this is like in the stolen kingdom world but separate from this series so that's another one and then my co-author mandy lynn and i finished the marketing for author series right here this was her book so i don't make any royalties from that but this is the one that i wrote secrets to selling books on social media and so i make royalties from this guy as well three new books added to my income stream for a total of 10 books that make me money but i do have one important note that i should say before we do 2021 which is that i actually have gotta find it hold on shoot it's out in the living room because i've been using it to write my book but i have this novel planner notebook and it actually comes in two different cover styles that i made gosh when did i make that 2019 or 2020 i can't remember but that eventually started to become part of my income stream is just very minimal and then hold up you also would have seen this if you've been around for a while i put all four books together in a collector's edition here which is really fun and then of course i made an e-book version online which is just like your typical box set so we got to add this guy those could both technically be considered their own product as well so that's two notebooks plus the two different versions of the stolen kingdom series combined for a total of about 14 books at this point in 2021 that made me income all right let's look at 2021 boom if you watch this video then you know some fun behind the scene details about 2021 but i made 6338 from amazon 2230 from ingramspark 889 from draft to digital 2356 on my website 487 from my audiobook and last but not least 58. 91 from the library grand total in 2021 of 12 369 from books and now drum roll yes i did hide the total total because i want to show you each month at a time and then i promise i'll show you a little over 14 thousand on amazon it's officially over fifteen thousand now which is really fun and then ingramspark is six thousand four hundred fifty nine dollars from them draft digital had one thousand three hundred and nineteen dollars total so far my website i've actually sold 12 wait hold on is that real wow i need to do more website sales twelve thousand three hundred and twenty one dollars from books there i didn't say this in my last video and i should have which is you have to keep in mind that's just my profit before i put in the expenses i did have to order all those books ship them to myself and ship them out to everyone who ordered a copy so that's i didn't keep all of that money that's just something to consider when you look at the website sales versus this amazon column and all the other columns are pure profit like i don't have to spend anything that's what i make after amazon already took their cut i hope that makes sense that number is really exciting but then you have to just keep in mind that i also had to spend a lot to make that acx is under 700 and then over on the total for like the other column here is 1 717 for a grand total of 36 610. 40 from my books since i began as an indie author four years ago i'll link this video below if you want to know more about why the different income streams are so different because i talked a lot more about that when i shared my specific book income from 2021 but in this video we're talking about totals so let's talk next about the total number of books that i've sold since i began publishing in 2017.
guys let me just say that just the same way that there are unicorn authors in traditional publishing there are also unicorn authors in self-publishing there are some authors that make like millions of dollars but there's also the other end the authors who make like no money from self-publishing and same with traditional publishing so i honestly think i'm somewhere just like right in the middle so i hope that helps give you a really good picture of like the average in the author okay now let's talk number of books sold and i do have a spreadsheet for this as well this is my all-time sales tracking and i do have like month by month ones as well and i have to give shout out to sarah cannon give her credit for giving me these different trackers and even telling me that i should do that i got these trackers from her back in 2019 when i took her course publish and thrive which is just an amazing course i'm an affiliate for it still it's linked below all of my videos if you're ever interested but she is an amazing person i did not even know about tracking my books before this so what i did is i actually had to go back and try to like find all the data from my first two years of publishing because i hadn't been tracking anything on the left side here you can see the date so this column is just you know the month december 2017 through december 2021 i haven't started tracking for 2022 yet and then i did kind of finagle the categories because i wanted to put in my own stuff so obviously amazon's usually there for most authors and then i have ingram spark draft to digital this category i have the book box slash my audio books and then this category is kind of all combined in person stuff events that i've done and my website sales and then you'll notice there's a free column here because there are two different times where i did a freebie for my books and then the final column is actually going to calculate everything from those previous columns so if i click on it you can see it's the sum of all the columns there so it does the math for me which you've gotta love and again i think this is a really good visual of what it looks like when you start out publishing because yes i had a great you know beginning 129 books but then it was like a trickle six books 11 books sold 45 books sold and the first time i got over 100 in a month was during a freebie right here but if you don't count that freebie sale you can see that it took all the way until august of 2019 before i sold over a thousand books in a month and this is exciting because this is the month that the stolen kingdom came out and after that you can see that it started to increase and there's my other freebie sale right here it began at the very tail end of february and went into the first week of march so those were some really really exciting months and then here we are in december 2021 and i'm going to reveal this column to you as well but there are a lot of free books in here and i don't think those count as sold books right so i thought it was important to first show you my total number of books sold minus the free books and to do that i'm going to use that sum feature i'm going to take this little box that you can't see but it's going to calculate it for us anyway of the total sold ever and then i'm going to subtract the free books in this column right here you ready for this okay i'm going to click enter 10 031 books over 10 000 books sold like i have actually sold this many books that's wild to me that's mind-blowing amazon that was over 5 000 almost 6 000 books sold there on ingramspark almost 2 000 sold on draft2digital almost a thousand there the book box was 700 books and then as you can see i kind of calculated the audiobook under here i've got a sum going on for that 206 books and then the in-person slash event slash website sales were 554 books and the free books column i unveiled that all on its own here because that was over 20 000 people have gotten a free book from me some of them were evelyn's number but the majority were the stolen kingdom all right and then we're going to get to our total of books that i have like either sold or given to readers which is 30 306 books that means that over 30 000 of my books have either been sold or given away and over 10 000 were sold which is crazy that's so cool so let's get to the math i want to find out how much on average that i made per book my guess is 2.
