Rosalie Lario

Hi everyone. The past couple of months have been so crazy-busy I could barely even breathe. I just realized it’s been 2 1/2 months since I released my first self-published novella, so I’d like to give an update on sales.

In my first month of sales (I’m counting mid-May to mid-June), I sold about 120 books. The next month I doubled that figure. And so far for this month? On track to double last month’s figure. Now, overall my sales are relatively modest, so I didn’t put the pattern together until I decided to do another update for you folks.

The result? I’m pretty freaking excited. If the sales numbers are doubling every month, within a few months I’ll have a pretty nice income for one little story that took me less than a month to write and publish. And what will happen when I put up a second book for sale? A third? I can see how sales figures will grow exponentially, and that makes me want to dance around the room.

In other industry thoughts, there are times when you make a decision and you are truly conflicted over whether you’ve made the right one. You could go one of two ways and you seriously don’t know which way would be better.

This is how I felt back in March when I received an offer of publication from Entangled Publishing. I was querying my manuscript and several agents had the full. My request rate for queries was pretty decent: about 1 out of 10. I finally decided to go with Entangled because I loved their vision and truly believed they understood where the industry was headed. Also, frankly, I’m very impatient. I didn’t want to wait to find an agent, wait to (hopefully) sell, then wait another 1-2 years to be published. The thought of that killed me.

Now, several months later, I’m so glad I made the choice I did. So much has changed in the industry even in just these four months. Ebooks are taking over far more rapidly than I think anyone could have expected. Part of that is the ease of these reading devices. Earlier this year I told anyone who’d listen that I would never switch over to an ereader. Now? I’m addicted. I still like my paper books, but for traveling nothing beats an ereader, and I can see how I will likely phase my paper books out as time goes by (especially now that my fave bookstore, Borders, is out of business). And the best thing about my new publisher is that, for those who refuse to make the leap to ebooks, they will also release in print (via POD and possibly through sales to retailers like Walmart and Target).

To sum up, there are a lot of great things happening in the publishing industry right now, and they’re happening on the ebook front. Can’t wait to see what comes next!