You'd think so, wouldn't you? Looking at it from the outside, it seems pretty incredible that I've come to this decision, but here are are some details that might shed light on it.
My mailing list has gotten smaller because I did some significant culling of non-responders/non-openers. About 6,000 people remain. According to MailCheat(Chimp):
6% engage "often."
24% engage "sometimes."
63% engage "rarely."
And the analysis by
@MTF is pretty much spot-on. My books are priced at $3.99. The 70% commission of 3.99 is about $2.79. Even if all 6,000 people on my mailing list opened the email and purchased my book, I'd make about 17K per book from my list alone. However, as MTF said, most of my income comes from Kindle Unlimited, which means I make less than $2.79 per "purchase", even if the person reads the whole book, which many probably don't. Plus, only about 30% of my list are reasonably active, which further reduces the income.
Mailing lists in general have gotten tougher. I've heard rumblings from other authors that they're seeing the same thing -- low opens, low response rates, etc. It started maybe a couple of years ago, where mailing list responses dropped way off. Part of this might've stemmed from the fact that when the Amazon store was overrun with scammers, these "authors" were majorly spamming their lists, which included tons of romance readers. Also, I believe spam filters and other mechanisms that classify an email as "from a mailing list" are reducing the odds of readers seeing/opening the email. Some of this might also stem from the fact that romance readers have so many other ways to hear about new books -- Facebook ads, BookBub ads, Amazon ads, etc. This made mailing lists less important to readers, if not authors.
About audiobooks, etc., MTF is right in that it's hard to justify the cost up-front when the book may not be a hit, and I have zero control on pricing. There was a period when Amazon was giving away my audiobooks for something ridiculous, like 1.99
cents with the Kindle Purchase. I begged them to stop. They refused even though I own the copyright and paid for all of the production costs. But I had zero control, and saw my audiobook income fall accordingly.
This aside, audiobook sales have gotten to be a tougher nut to crack. Amazon drastically changed the bounty
system and introduced some subscription plans which also cut author income. Back in the day, my first audiobook made back its production costs in one month. These days, the production costs might take years to recoup. I have at least two audiobooks that will probably never earn out.
When it comes to romance books (whether kindle or audiobook), the shelf life has gotten incredibly short. There's a constant firehose of new releases always pushing, pushing, pushing down the previous releases -- and advertising heavily. If an author releases six or eight books a year, this will probably pay off bigtime because Amazon gives more visibility to new releases and advertising multiple new releases at once is a great way to fuel sales. But if you're a single author putting out three novels a year, it's going to be a challenge, especially if you're not a fast writer. For me, writing three full-length novels a year is a full-time job by itself. When I added so much advertising into the mix, it felt like two full-time jobs -- not in the beginning, but more and more as time went on.
Plus, Amazon is almost all pay-to-play for visibility. In the beginning, I got a ton of sales through Amazon's recommendation systems (such as "also-boughts", not only on my own books, but on similar books.) Now, I have to pay 42-
cents (or more, sometimes as high as 75
cents) for every click, and free exposure is almost non-existent -- all for a product that costs $3.99 or zero dollars, if the reader is using Kindle Unlimited.
And then there's Facebook. I have a decent amount of fans, but if I want to announce a new release, very few of my fans will see the announcement unless I pay for it. All of this adds up.
With both Amazon and Facebook, advertising costs have skyrocketed, costing triple or quadruple what they cost even three or four years ago. Meanwhile, book prices have remained fairly constant, and the Kindle Unlimited pay structure has gotten lower, which means that authors are squeezed on both ends.
One thing that's pretty interesting in all of this is that my gross revenue is still decent, much more than I ever made at my day job. It's just that the advertising/promotion costs are taking too much from the bottom line. And I don't just mean in terms of money. I mean in terms of time. In the beginning, there were no ways to advertise, and perversely things were much better for authors back then. Not only did they keep more of their money, they also didn't have an extra time-sink on top of writing.
One thing I should clarify: I may return to this. I'd give it a 50/50 chance that I'll release a trilogy sometime in late 2022, partly because so much of it is already written. The books are shorter, which means I might even take a chance and do audiobooks up front (because they would be more affordable due to their shorter length.) But I think the current market is unfavorable for romance authors. I would rather save my work for a future use than send it out under the current conditions. Things may change, and if/when this happens, I'll still have the skills to pursue this. And I'll still have a decent backlist. But for now, I'm jumping off the hamster wheel to regroup and focus on other things.
What cinched my decision was a question my best friend asked when I was debating this. She said, "If you had 70K to spend for any business, is self-publishing what you'd spend it on?" It didn't take long for me to conclude that my time and money was better spent elsewhere, even if it was only to regain some sanity.
I'm still incredibly grateful for the opportunities self-publishing gave me. I quit my dreaded day job, gave my husband the chance to build his business while self-publishing paid the bulk of our bills, and made some amazing memories. But every year, the deal has gotten just a little bit worse for writers, and I think that unless we see some reversal, more authors will be stepping aside to pursue other things.