Dangerous Data

 Back to random business stuff. HERE IS A PIE.

(nom)

This is 2017's book revenue (so far) broken out by edition, wherein you may conclude that if people stop reading on their phones I will starve to death!

No, really. More serious now. >.>

Every year I do this chart, and every year it's about the same. E-books are always the bulk of my sales. Audio, every year, creeps up a little more. Print never grows. I call this data dangerous, though, because it's easy to look at it and assume things, like, say 'you should totes do more audio editions!' But there's some needful information left out of this chart:

• Not all my books have a print or audio edition, so direct comparison is imperfect.
• (More of my books have print editions than audio editions, however, so I'd expect it to skew in the direction opposite of where it's going).
• The average e-book edition, for a novel-length work, costs my time. Nothing else. (If I do the book cover. But the book covers are part of the cost of all three editions, so that zeros out when making the comparisons.)
• The average print edition, for a novel-length work, costs $300-500 to produce (designer, proof copies, etc), and my time managing the project.
• The average audiobook edition, for a novel-length work, costs between $1500 and $3000 to produce, and again, my time managing the project.

So, even if the audiobooks do better, do they do enough better than print to justify produce them instead? Especially if I can afford several print editions for every audiobook edition's price tag?

Fun choices! Don't they sound like fun to you? :D

Seriously, sometimes combing through the numbers creates more uncertainty than you hoped for. I do extrapolate based on this data, though, because most of my e-book sales (as those of you who've examined my previous spreadsheet posts) are of the same books that I also have audio and print editions, so I feel like gambling on the assumptions is reasonable. But it doesn't rule out questions like 'do those books do well because they have all three editions?' Or 'do audio and e-book do equally well because they don't require shipping?' Or even 'would print do better if it was face-out in bookstores?'

Okay, admittedly I don't worry about the latter much, given how fast books get churned at bookstores.

*stares at chart*

So, yeah. This is the kind of stuff I work with when making decisions. Maybe it's weird that I enjoy it, but, you know. Artists are supposed to be a little crazy. :)