My (final) G.R.I.P.E. (Great Indie Pub Experiment)

Last year, I announced that I was going to take the plunge and, along with my husband, try out the new trend toward independent publishing--and that I'd post our results here for all to see.

As a reminder, here were the goals I'd set in my last post:

PREVIOUS PROJECTED GOALS (for Sep/Oct/Nov 2011)
Total available titles: 12
Total hours spent per week (writing not included): 5
Total sales projected: 500

A bold, but not crazy step up from my first-quarter goal of 6 titles available and a mere 30 copies sold for 40 hours work per week. Since my actual numbers wound up being better than this, happily, I adjusted the above projection accordingly.

So what happened? Did I make the goal?

Here are the results from September through November:

ACTUAL TOTALS
Total available titles: 28
Total hours spent (per week) on promotion/learning curve/production: 20
Total sales: 3,770

Well! Quite a lot more available titles than we'd planned. My husband and I buckled down and did more writing than anticipated the first two months of the quarter (and then took a break in November). However, this also meant a greater time requirement for production--four times as much. However, the return was seven times greater than projected, so overall we were still ahead.

Not too shabby for our little experiment, I'd say. I will mention that December saw our sales drop(ironically when holiday shopping is at its annual high), which we highly suspect was due to our November hiatus (no new content for a month). Still, we were quite pleased with the numbers overall, which have tallied close to 6k since we began.

With 2011 behind us, the official "Experiment" is over, and we have declared it a success. My husband is doing indie work exclusively and has largely stopped other business ventures in order to focus on it. I will still be writing for my publishers, but will keep doing indie stories as well.

I wouldn't have guessed this when I first started our experiment, but with the way our coming year's schedule has evolved, I've conceded that this must be my last post here at Nocturnal Nights. Sadly, some shuffling of time commitments was in order to keep the train rolling. I've truly enjoyed my time here and hope you all found some helpful (or, at least, entertaining!) info within my posts.

Happy 2012, and Happy Writing to all of you!