Writing the book is the easy part. What comes after is much harder—at least for me. All of us authors are always fighting for attention in a saturated market. It’s one of the most difficult things about this journey. Thousands, millions of books are written and released per year. How the fuck do I get anyone to care about mine?
In the name of transparency, and to open an honest dialogue about real book sales, I thought it’d be fun to talk about my recent release with actual numbers and how they came to be.
The Corpse Priest has been out for about three months now and I’m ecstatic with how it’s going. For a small indie release, through a friend’s press, where I did everything (including cover, editing, formatting, and marketing), it’s been great. But sales are a never ending game for the author, and I wanted to talk a little about how a modest sword-and-sorcery-and-horror novella has managed to outsell some of my other books.
Before a layoff this spring, I was a full-time marketer. Now, you might think that makes me good at marketing, but really it just makes me fully understand all the ways I fail. My books have decidedly not gone viral. They have their audience of cool folks who like cool things, but ultimately, I write for a niche within a niche—and that’s okay.
But I’ve learned a lot over the years and it’s been cool to see this hard-fought knowledge applied during the release of The Corpse Priest and net some results.
First off though, let’s set some expectations.
- I am proud of how The Corpse Priest has sold, but let’s not pretend it’s a massive hit. The average indie book—according to oft-quoted, proverbial knowledge—averages less than 200 copies sold per year, and I’d be willing to bet that in horror, that number is much lower. Anecdotally, many authors struggle to sell even a 100 copies in their first year of release. I know this, because my first novella, Reunion Special, only sold 14 copies in 2020, and 84 copies in 2021. In its entire six year lifetime? A whopping 149 copies. So, 178 copies isn’t earth-shattering, but in three months, it has demolished what I’ve sold in six years. That’s pretty cool, right?
- The Corpse Priest is a cross-genre horror novella. An author in another genre will likely have a very different experience, and I’d suspect that a full-length novel would sell much more.
- Salt Heart Press is P.L. McMillan’s publishing house which she graciously lets me use from time to time to release books. It’s not a full service press with lots of marketing and brand recognition. A larger press (and more famous author!) would undoubtedly have a lot more reach.
Sales
The first thing to establish is where I’m selling these books. I published the paperback and ebook through Ingramspark, while also publishing the ebook on Amazon. In addition, I’m selling copies directly from my website (both formats) and occasionally sell books at events too.
| Ebook | Paperback | Total Copies | |
| Ingramspark | 14 | 71 | 85 |
| Amazon | 17 | 17 | |
| Author website | 29 | 43 | 72 |
| Self-sales | 4 | 4 | |
| Totals | 60 | 118 | 178 |
So, before I go into everything that I did to help get this book to sell, let’s see if we can draw some conclusions based on the numbers.
First, Ingramspark accounted for the most sales with 85 total. In second place is my website with 72 sales. Positioning-wise, there’s a very good reason for this. As a small-time author, I collect a larger percentage of profit by selling directly, so in my initial announcement and cover reveal, I did my best to direct people to my website to take advantage of that interest and retain the largest cut of sales. I also incentivized sales at my website by pricing my ebook lower on my website ($4.99 vs. $7.99) and signing paperbacks for the same price as a regular, unsigned paperback on other platforms.
This led folks to support me directly, not just because of the feel-goods, but because it was a better value offer.
When I ran out of books from my initial order, I shifted my sales strategy to asking people to purchase it wherever they liked to buy books (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, etc.), while referring ebook readers to my website where the download was still available at the lower price.
One surprise comes from the breakdown of ebook sales vs. paperback, but it makes sense in retrospect if we divine motivation through a little arm-chair psychography.
| Ebook | Paperback | |
| Percent of sales | 33% | 67% |
Part of my sales pitch for this book is that I painted the cover myself. I’m no artist, but I think lots of folks in the horror community are absolutely sick of how generative AI continues to pop up in the publishing landscape. I wanted to make something deliberately handmade to counter the idea that anyone should use AI to create a cover to “save money.”
Seeing the breakdown above, it seems a lot of people agreed with me and that the cover urged readers to spring for the tangible copy.
Of course, there’s a lot of guess work here. We can’t know for sure whether it was the cover, or the fact that a lot of people just prefer a real book. But if there’s one thing I know about the horror reading audience is that there’s significant overlap with the horror writing community—and it wouldn’t be out of line to attribute an affinity for something scrappy and DIY to the current zeitgeist.
Attribution
While I can’t see where everyone came from to buy my books, I can see my website sales’ attribution. This is just one small slice of sales, but it does have some interesting data to reflect on.
First off, let’s look at the two big elephants in the room: direct links and search engines. We can’t say with 100% accuracy what caused these two chunks to be what they are. But we can probably say that they’re an accumulation of marketing tactics. These are the people who had a link and followed it, or searched for my website and found it. They knew about the book and took action.
Who are these people?
A couple of guesses:
- People who saw the announcement and for one reason or another went directly to my website or searched for it later when they were ready to purchase.
- Fans! Readers who were already familiar with my work and needed little convincing.
- Word of mouth sales and link sharing in private messages; recommendations between readers.
Now, let’s get into the rest of it.
While Salt Heart Press is a small publisher, we can absolutely see that having a publisher made a difference. It encourages a certain amount of trust with the reader, and also allows the author to collect some goodwill based on association. If someone liked one of the other books published by Salt Heart Press, they might see the release notice for The Corpse Priest and think they might like it too.
Next, we have social media. I posted the initial announcement on four platforms: Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. To my surprise, relative upstart Bluesky (13.2%) gave me the greatest attributions for my website sales, with Facebook (3.8%) and Instagram (1.9%) following.
Finally, my newsletter announcement gave me 3.8% of attributed sales.
Marketing
So, how did these numbers happen in the first place?
Well, in a lot of ways. But it all really boils down to the initial pitch.
For The Corpse Priest, I wanted to try something different from prior releases. I noticed that there’s a lot of excitement when a book is announced initially, with a lot of fervor especially when the cover is revealed. But, when it came to the release day, the enthusiasm largely felt as if it died down. There’s just too many books. By the time your cover is revealed, another fifty have gone through the same cycle.
I wondered what would happen if I didn’t do any lead up. No blurbs, no cover, no big hints, and just laid it all out on release day. And that’s exactly what I did.
For past releases, I’d gotten really positive feedback from doing longform threads on Bluesky where I discussed what a book meant to me—the influences, why I was writing it, genre, plot, everything. A sort of mini director’s commentary to give you, the reader, a sense of why I’m so excited about this thing, and by extension, why you should be too.
Before the release, I typed out a big long sales pitch telling the story of the release, seeking to communicate everything I thought was cool about it. Touching upon:
- Its genre mashup of sword and sorcery and weird horror.
- A quick plot description.
- My history with fantasy fiction and how the initial idea came to be.
- Comparisons with other media, as well as my other releases.
- Why I did the cover art.
- Why I chose to do a surprise release.
With this information at hand, I think it made it very easy for people to decide if they were in for it or not. If the concept, the DIY behind the scenes hustle, or even the cover art alone grabbed you, I had links ready for the reader to convert that enthusiasm to a sale.
There’s two bits of advice I received along the way that also guided my approach to this book’s marketing.
- Alex Woodroe, from Tenebrous Press, has at least once reminded me that books are out for longer for their release date. We tend to get caught up in first day/year/month sales. But the truth is that books are available for a long time. They’re constantly discovered, read, loved, and shared.
- After detailing my anxiety about sales for a different release, Sam Richard (Weirdpunk) told me, “every book sells one copy at a time.” It’s obvious, but it’s the truth. Every book is a relationship, and it requires discovery and nurturing, but most of all effort.
As an indie author, I knew that I couldn’t afford to go big on my marketing budget, but I also knew there were lots of free or cheap ways to continue to beat the drum and put the pitch in front of people’s eyes.
- I continually posted on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads to share updates about the book, including positive reviews.
- I asked Matt Blairstone from Tenebrous if he’d include a short pitch for The Corpse Priest in Tenebrous’ newsletter.
- I ran a FB ad for $50.
- I booked an interview with Arwyn Sherman’s newsletter.
- I designed graphics featuring my book tropes, sales celebrations, and review quotes to offer something new when I posted about my book.
- On the Dead Languages Podcast, we did an episode where I talked about the creation of The Corpse Priest from ideation to release.
- I created a promotional video with me reading an excerpt using stock images.
- Salt Heart Press owner P.L. McMillan hosted a digital release party and interview where I chatted about the book and gave away free copies.
- RSL interviewed me on Fantasy-Hive.
And the battle is never truly over. There’ll be more opportunities, more graphics, more interviews, more of everything. But one thing I can say right now is this—every little thing helped.
In Marketing, there is a Rule of 7. It’s a pithy little reminder that repetition is part of the game. Apparently, it takes seven touchpoints before someone decides to pull the trigger on a purchase. This could very well be false—it might be anywhere between eight and a million. But the point stands, that when someone is ready for what you’re selling, they need to know about it before they can click Add to Cart.
And you never know when someone is ready for your book. Maybe a fantasy-horror about a man named Corpse wasn’t someone’s idea of a good time on release day, but maybe it will be in a year, or two, or thirty. The best you can do is give it every chance to stick as you can.
I hope this breakdown of The Corpse Priest’s first three months are illuminating and helpful. As an author, sales can be a scary subject. There’s little idea of what normal is or isn’t, but hopefully this will help you when it comes to the release of your own book.
In true marketing form, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share a link to where you can buy The Corpse Priest. Grab the ebook from my website, or traverse the wilds of the internet to buy it wherever you prefer to shop.