A Queer Indie Author’s Experience of 2024
Looking back on my top stories, sales stats, and best experiences of the year past, and looking to the year ahead!
Hello hello!
I’ve just been in the process of attending to my yearly tradition, ordinarily attended to in the last days of December and the first of January — I sit down with my new year’s calendar, and I write down all the vital dates and pieces of information.
On the current calendar in front of me — a charming Peter Rabbit family planner with a little attached whiteboard, as I wasn’t able to get the Discworld calendar this year — I’ve transferred over the birthdays of all my friends and loved ones, written down some of the main conventions of 2025 I’m planning to attend like TeratoCon, and other already established professional and social plans, as well as deadlines for different submissions.
As I’m looking ahead, I thought it would be worth looking back a little bit as well, for a nice bit of contrast!
Statistics for 2024:
Total Books Sold Through KDP (Amazon) in 2024: 1,548
1,265 of those units were eBooks and 283 were print books — my top performer was my first novel, Heart of Stone, which sold 637 units (396 eBooks, 241 paperbacks), and after that was Touch-Starved, which sold 209 total units, then Powder and Feathers, at 82 total units.
Approximated royalties are at $2,288.42.
Total Books Sold Through Draft2Digital in 2024: 13,529
Draft2Digital is the company through which I publish to several platforms, particularly Kobo and Kobo+, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Everand, Smashwords, and then library programs like BorrowBox, Hoopla, CloudLibrary, etc.
The sales are so incredibly high because it was the Smashwords End of Year sale, and all of my 99c shorts were discounted to free for most of December, so 12,548 sales were in December, and I only had 981 sales for the rest of the year.
I unfortunately have absolutely no idea how to look at the breakdown between eBooks and paperbacks for D2D, but my top sellers were Touch-Starved, at 464 units sold, Sweet On, at 400 units sold, and Hitting the Books, at 369 units sold.
Approximated royalties are at $1,117.56, with $354.52 of those royalties being in the last month. While obviously ten thousand books were free books sold, my advertisements for the free books and the freebies themselves drove a lot of traffic to my other works like Heart of Stone or Strange Liberty, etc.
Total Royalties from Medium in 2024: $1073.92
Medium pays out royalties based on views of subscribers and how much time subscribers spend reading each work. I normally tock up my top story for each month on Medium, but Medium has helpfully taken away the option to do that for months January through July, thinking that only the last six months are useful in the stats block for the Partner Program rather than the last 12.
Nonetheless, for the months I can see:
August’s Total Earnings on Medium: $64.39
September’s Total Earnings on Medium: $47.33
October’s Total Earnings on Medium: $56.25
November’s Total Earnings on Medium: $57.27
December’s Total Earnings on Medium: $57.08
August 2024’s Top Performer was Yentl: A Trans Man Studying Talmud is Distracted by Gay Thoughts. It earned $3.80 that month, and its lifetime earnings, having been published in July 2023, stand at $163.36. It was also September 2024’s Top Performer, earning $3.79. It was also November 2024’s Top Performer, earning $3.71.
August 2024’s Top Fiction Performer was The Devil’s Mark, which earned $2.76, having been published that month, and has managed $3.12 lifetime earnings since publication.
September 2024’s Top Fiction Performer was Street Trade, which earned $1.15, and has managed $1.81 lifetime earnings since publication.
October 2024’s Top Performer was Passing Privilege: Through My Eyes, as a Trans Man Who Passes, earning $11.64 that month, and its lifetime earnings, having been published in June 2023, stand $138.04.
October 2024’s Top Fiction Performer was Bred & Betting, which earned $2.09 that month, and has managed $3.10 lifetime earnings since publication.
November 2024’s Top Fiction Performer was Divine Service, which earned $2.52 that month, and its lifetime earnings, having released on Medium in May 2024, stand at $32.99. It was also December 2024’s Top Fiction Performer, earning $2.21.
December 2024’s Top Performer was A Transphobe Ruined His Own Night Because I Was Existing Next to Him, which earned $13.42 and was actually a new piece, so that’s its lifetime earnings.
Total Income from Patreon in 2024: $16,502.38
Of course, Patreon is always the bulk of my income, and I’m very grateful for my Patreon subscribers!
On my Patreon, I publish all of my short stories and essays, barring a handful that due to Patreon’s guidelines can’t be cross-posted there, and the new benefit I’m going to be offering my patrons is going to be giving them voucher codes so they can always buy eBook versions of all my works on Smashwords as an additional benefit.
I try not to look at my general new subscriber and unsubscription rate on Patreon each month, but my Active Subscribers currently stand at 420 (noice), with 104 new subscribers and having had 102 cancelled subscribers in the past year.
People regularly unsubscribe on Patreon and come back later when they can afford it, or go between Medium and Patreon, depending on what works best for their income at the moment.
What I Did in 2024
This year has been really good for me, and I’ve been absolutely delighted with the results, but the past few months particularly have been especially good, and I’m really excited with some decisions I’ve made and what they’re gonna look like for me in 2025.
Firstly, in February I accompanied Dalton Harrison, author of The Boy Behind The Wall, and Kirsty from Bi+ Leeds to HMP Askham Grange to run a Q&A and read from some of our pieces in Transmuted to the prisoners there.
It was such a privilege to be able to talk to some of the prisoners incarcerated there, especially other queer and trans people, and to advocate for prisoners’ queer identities to guards and staff in a way that prisoners often don’t feel able to approach in the same way for themselves, but mostly just to spread a little joy and talk about creativity and art to the prisoners in place there.
In April, I delivered a talk with Romancing the Gothic about Crimson Peak as a modern Gothic Romance, and I of course ran my usual Monstrous May prompt event, although I don’t think I did enough promotion for it in 2024 and I don’t think my prompts were necessarily that enticing. I’m hoping to drum up more excitement and interest in 2025.
I went to WorldCon in August, and I had an excellent time, it felt really fulfilling as a creative professional, I loved being on several panels and also being able to moderate a panel, and I’m very excited to further cultivate my skills in the next year or two in interviewing and moderation for Q&As and panels alike!
I didn’t unfortunately get to any other conventions in 2024 because WorldCon was very expensive between con tickets, travel up to Glasgow, and the AirBnB, but more cons is absolutely the goal.
I also got involved in a few other projects that are going to be published in 2025 — I contributed a short story to Dudes Rock: A Celebration of Queer Masculinity in Speculative Fiction, edited by Jay Kang Romanus and published by The Circus Collective, and the anthology is currently open for preorder, due for release on January 10th!
I’ve also contributed to SLAKE HOUSE, an erotic horror Choose-Your-Own-Ending anthology presented by Noah’s Ark and Radha Kai Zan that’s due for release in the next few months, and I’m very excited for that as well, it was such a cool project to be a part of, and I was so delighted to work along so many splendid and deliciously fucked-up creators, both other authors and amazing visual artists!
I made some changes to my social media presence — most notably swapping the bulk of my activity from the dying-a-swift-death X, née Twitter, to BlueSky, which has now added threading — enabling me to write my first ThreadFic on the platform — and publishing more actively to Reddit, especially in the fantasy, romance, and queer subs, as well as making a Threads account.
And finally, the biggest change I’ve made in 2024, I went through my back catalogue of longer shorts, those that were in the 5k to 30k range, and made each of them available as 99c shorts, with new eBooks published in the 5–10k range to be published as 99c shorts, and ones closer to the 20k range or above to be priced at $2.99, apart from my serials that get re-edited and published as extended novels.
For a long time, I was quite reticent to publish shorts in this way, convincing myself that I absolutely had to publish shorts in big collections or otherwise I was somehow cheating the reader by giving them such a short piece, but I’m so glad I managed to shake off that anxiety.
The response to all these 99c shorts has been overwhelmingly and absurdly positive, and I’ve reached a huge swathe of new readers even before the Smashwords sale where I sold off 10k of these shorts for free. Quite a lot of readers have been really excited at the short story, novelette, and novella formats for a lot of these pieces, especially because they’re so varied in their subject matter, genre, and characters, and obviously like…
Each of these books individually can work up its own popularity and readers who have affection for it, each of them individually being recommended on their own strengths, but having so many shorts available, people often recommend a handful in the same breath, especially those that play with similar topics or themes.
Going from having a back catalogue of seven or so eBooks and paperbacks to 50 eBooks and 20 paperbacks makes a big difference, and it’s going to be great to be able to pick out paperbacks to bring along to sell at conventions and so on that exactly match the brief or the theme!
As each of these shorts and novelettes gain reviews, I’m excited for them to gain more of an audience over time as readers find them as their favourites, similar to the response Heart of Stone has received over time, and that I hope Powder and Feathers and other long novels in future to receive, such as the next expected release, An Uncommon Betrothal.
I’ve come on leaps and bounds with my own ability to design book covers, working with a pared back vintage style that incorporates a lot of public domain etchings, sketches, and block prints, the sort I grew up seeing in adventure novels and so on, and also in editing and formatting my books for paperback on KDP!
My Goals for 2025
Most of what I want to achieve in 2025 is more of the same.
I definitely feel that because I was working on a lot of longer pieces this year, and then because I was working on making eBooks and paperback versions of various pieces available, that I didn’t publish as many fiction pieces overall, but I’m very proud of what I have published!
I want to attend more conventions, as I’ve said, and involve myself in more literary and author-run events where I can, as well as maybe selling books and merch at pride events.
I haven’t focused that much on merchandise this year, but now that my printer is up and running, I’m excited to design new badges in a few months, as well as maybe make some bookmarks, postcards, stickers, and similar. Depending on how my income looks in the next few months and how significant a difference my back catalogue makes, I think I’d also like to have some business cards printed.
I’ve definitely made more money business-wise this last year than I ever have before, and I’m keen to keep those growths doing, but we’re hoping to get a cat this year as well as do some home repairs, so I want to be modest about how I’m reinvesting that new income as I keep it building up.
I want to be more creative about how I’m advertising to new readers and meeting new people — I actually put up some posters around Leeds last month to advertise the Smash sale, and I definitely think I want to get into the habit of regularly putting up posters advertising my work in queer spaces around Yorkshire, both around Bradford and Leeds, but also if I’m going out in York, or even if I’m going farther afield to Manchester or Bristol or London.
And my biggest goal I think is that when I finish An Uncommon Betrothal, I want to do an official in-person launch for the paperback and do an event where I’m reading from it, selling copies, and signing them as well!
That would most likely be in Leeds, and I just think it would be a really fun event if I can do it, and would drum up a lot of support and sales both online and in paperback.
Thank you so much for all your support, and wishing everyone a happy new year!