Authors of Erotic Romance

That’s the question on everyones mind, regardless if you sell to NY or to an ePublisher.

For our own personal information a few of us at AOER have been running a spreadsheet of our sales. I thought an anon graph of our sales volumes might prove useful to aspiring and published authors alike.

We use units sold versus royalties earned for equality.

It’s no secret that the first week/month is where all the sales are, when it comes to eBooks. In fact, due to fortuitous timing, we were actually able to see that in fact the first day is where the bulk of that first months sales comes from — that was a bit of a shocker.

Whats not so well known is what the follow through is. Though I fitz’ed and futz’ed I wasn’t quite able to figure out how to get the genres to come up in an easily legible graph, but we’ve been running this spreadsheet for over a year for some titles, and we can say without a doubt that it depends.

Genre plays a huge role in your sell through. There will be other factors of course — new releases pumping up sales of your other titles, how much promotion you do, whether you cause a stink in Internet land and are getting roasted by the blogs … — but, all that aside a few genres stood out at this point in time.

Menage and M/M sell big. All those high points, yup you guessed it, either a menage or m/m title in the majority. Sell through on those titles continues to be relatively steady, and at fairly decent volumes each month. M/F still sold well, but in comparison … well, you can see on the chart.

One other thing that was visible – Dec/Jan are not good months to have a release.

For a while there has been the figure of 100books in a year being a good sales figure for an eBook floating around the internet. I think we can safely say that this chart shows you how ridiculous that statement can be when you are with a long standing reputable publisher (these figures come from our LI titles).

In fact, 1000 copies sold in the first year is entirely feasible, depending on the genre. Most of us in AOER are only in, or just over our first year as published authors, you can appreciate that with time and reputation these sales figures could only increase as readers seek out your next work or follow through on a series of books.

So the outcome of all that? If you’re willing to keep up with the trends, and can write good content reasonably quickly, it is possible to make a fair amount – but don’t give up your day job.

** please bear in mind that data is taken from a small pool, though it is varied in content. Other authors may sell through considerably more or much less than our data indicates.