friendos ♥

mooney

• I made $450 this month (I think... probably more than that, who cares)
• Eden paid me. I honestly wasn't sure if that would happen or not.
• Last year I made $34 in ebook sales on Kobo. This month, I made $27! Not sure what happened but awright.
• I've said before shorter works will like never pay out on Kobo+, but I just figured out one of my short novellas paid out twice last year so booyah.

boook

• I finished a 60k romance draft this month. I started this book back in 2024 and watching it finally come to life has been very rewarding. It's still missing Something so I'm gonna marinate it a while. For some reason, 60k ish is a common stopping point for me on a middle draft, and I usually come back and add 10 to 20k. I expect this one to be about 70k finalized.
• I decided to post a recent finished story on my Patreon. Some people post weekly chapters on subscription platforms as a way to motivate themselves. Personally, I can't do that. It stresses me out, and my back and forth discovery/writing style is not conducive to serial publishing. That being said, publishing there scratched an itch for me and I made uhhhh I think $70 in subscriptions?
• The urge to publish is rapidly fading now that I'm getting used to not doing that, and realizing how nice it feels to just write and not deal with hoohah. I set a tentative goal to push out two book babies sometime this year but who knows

Next book? I don't know! When I'm between drafts I tend to flit around here and there, feeling things out and seeing what I vibe with. I have 3 ghost WIPs I'd love to finish. There's one novella in particular I have returned to about four times. I really want to finish that book, but I also don't want to touch it more than five times, so I'll probably prance around it a bit longer.

ALLi 2025 Indie Author Data Drop

Interesting data in this one, including some things I'd noticed from the trenches (like the uptick in authors selling books direct, e.g. from their own stores). Direct sales and subscription sales are rising (I also use a subscription platform, I'll discuss it at the end of the month).

One part that was really interesting was the section on AI authors (page 20)

242 books in 120 days

That’s the kind of volume some AI "authors" are now churning out. Whatever the quality, the sheer quantity of new titles made a killing on Amazon’s old algorithm (which favoured new releases) and led to a drop in visibility for everyone else, even authors who use a "rapid release" model. Here's one AI author, as profiled by the K-lytics market intelligence service.

You can see from the cover collage the author they spotlight published in a number of different niches in erotica and romance, including some fairly fringe stuff like lactation kink (see June column, the AI covers with giant milkers are the giveaway)*. This catalog was pulled from Zon for whatever reason but the books are still floating around on B&N and GPB with some mashups I'm... really not sure about in terms of marketing (hucow + dark reverse harem?) but make no mistake I glanced over the sample and I'm here for it. Favorite quote: "You already live in hell," he said. "We just decorate it."

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

ANyway, moving on

There's been a massive uptick (x25!!) in self-help books (and we've seen D2D's pushback against this) across the board. Contemp, SF, and thriller titles per month have increased 2, 3, and 5 times respectively, but what's interesting to me is they all end up hovering in the 4-6k range. MEANING it probably doesn't matter what you write, all categories are affected. If you look at the 5-year spread, # of Kindle titles per month holds fairly consistent from 2020 to 2022, and then we see the frankly insane jump around June 2023.

* This made me laugh because I when I was suffering really bad burnout last year I jokingly suggested to my partner I'd start writing milky books and we had a lot of fun spitballing ideas. I'd attempted to do a market survey and it seemed there was a healthy market (?) somehow(??), and I read a few and was just floored by the general insanity. ANYWAY, apparently Ms. AI up there came to the same conclusion.