It's Always Something, or the Difficulty of Making a Living in this Business

One of the problems with working in the Entertainment business, and trust me, writing is Entertainment. Is that it's always a moving target. People change, trends change, tastes change and what sells change. So dealing with that can be a headache at times, there's no doubt about that.

But when what you get paid for your work changes, well that ads a layer of complication that makes things even more frustrating at times.

You see, back when I started out I realized that in order to do 'okay' (and by 'okay' I mean make what I consider to be a decent living as a writer) I needed to sell an average of one hundred books a day. This was a daunting task for someone who felt lucky if they sold a hundred books in a month! But, I set out to achieve that goal, by trying to write stuff people would enjoy, and by increasing my 'catalog' of books, so I'd have a steady level of income off of that 'backlog'.

Which I do. With every new book I see a sales bump as I pick up a few new readers who work their way through my backlog, on top of the sales of the new book of course. And after several years of hard work I'm now to the spot where I actually do sell, on average, about one hundred books a day.

BUT

(and it's a big BUT, hence the size of it)

But Amazon came out with kindle unlimited and two thirds of my customers moved over to it. Add to that Amazon's dropping of the price per page that they pay, and I'm making a third of my normal sale price on those books (about a dollar). So, do the math: I'm making 1/3rd what I used to on 2/3rds of my sales. Which works about to about a fifty percent decrease in take home pay.

So now I need to aim for two hundred sales a day! If you think aiming for one hundred is a daunting task, aiming for twice that is even more so. Add in the fear that the rules of the game will change again if I get there (or should I say when I get there, always pays to think positive) and sometimes I wonder if I'm really in the right business. But this is why I've thought of ditching kindle unlimited, yes I get two-thirds of my sales through it, which is huge. But how many of those people would still buy my books if I wasn't in the program? Would it be enough that I'd make more money, or less? Also being in the KU program means my books climb up faster through the ranks because of all the borrows and page reads I get.

Yes, I've lost sleep over this, because making any changes that could lead to financial hardship are what you want to avoid as a writer. So honestly I think my only choice is to try and increase my sales. The only way to do that is to write more, and try new things (hence the new pen name and the new 'brand' - I can't afford to alienate any of my readers because I started writing stories with sex in them, which apparently is still a touchy subject for a lot of people, hell, a simple F-bomb in a book can lose you percentage points!)

And of course, as always, you'd think book companies would be interested in an author who sells over 30K books a year without an advertising budget. But you'd be wrong.