A Year in the Life of Book Sales

Want to know what a year in the sales life of a very small-time author looks like? Let me nerd out about numbers for you.

Due to several factors,  mostly relating to my retirement last year, 2026 has been the first year I've made a serious push to participate in in-person book sales at events, mostly local Pride events and book fairs. Since the in-person season has come to a close, I thought I'd share what that looks like for a small author who doesn't do nearly enough book promotion. (I plan to work on that, but it's the hardest part for me.)

Currently, I have 7 books out: 5 from small presses and 2 self-published (one of which is very niche non-fiction).

Currently I get income from those books via 3 methods: royalties from my publishers, income from online books sales for the self-published titles (currently all through third parties, though I'm working on setting up to sell direct from my website), and in-person sales (all titles). As my first self-published title came out about a year ago, this is also the first year where that category shows up.

Just as background, up through around 2020, royalties were averaging just over $1000/year. Since 2020 they've averaged about half of that. Covid or coincidence? Or simply the fact that these titles have been out for a while? (Although sales had remained rather steady since the year my first book came out.) Since the 2026 royalty data won't be complete for another half year, I'm taking the most recent one-year period as a baseline comparison, which is $320, below the recent average.

Online sales are trivial. Maybe $20. My titles aren't best-seller material in any case and I've done very little so far to promote that angle, mostly because I find the task emotionally daunting.

On the other hand, direct, in-person sales for the year have netted me $234 across 10 events. Now I need to clarify what "net" means in this case. It's gross sales less sales tax collected, card processing fees, and my share of the table fee for selling at the event. It doesn't include convention costs (membershp, travel, hotel) becuase I would have attended those events anyway. And it doesn't include mileage to go to day events (because I"m not tracking and itemizing that currently)

So overall, book income for 2026 is looking like 320 + 20 + 234 = $574**

When I try to give people a sense of what my writing income looks like, I tend to describe it as "Starbucks money." Is that the case? Let's take a look, courtesy of my financial tracking database. Expenses for Starbucks & Peet's Coffee for the first 3/4 of the year come to $680. So, no, I'm not even making "Starbucks money." (No snarky comments about how I should stop going to coffee shops to save money. That isn't the point of this analysis.)

But let's back up and look at those in-person events. The biggest factor in whether an event made me money was the table fee. For the two events where I lost money (a couple bucks in both cases) my share of the table fee was $60-69. The two events where I netted the most ($67-70) didn't involve a table fee. Overall, table fees for all events for the year were $160, so about 2/3 of what my overall net income was. (The other major expense, of course, is cost-of-goods.) But notice that the pre-fee income was quite similar. At most events, I sold somewhere in the range of 6-11 books, which is quite respectable for a small local Pride festival, like the ones I attended in Concord and Fremont. On the other hand the local Pride festivals in Martinez and Emeryville (2 and 1 respectively) were scarcely worth the trouble. The thing is, you can't predict just from the nature of the event. All four of those events were quite similar in size and attendence. The two with higher income also had higher table fees, but I don't think there's any cause and effect there. It's a crap shoot, and as long as the small book events continue to pay off in the aggregate, I don't know that it's worth trying to pick and choose.

(Note that I've been doing the local events as part of the Bay Area Queer Writers Association, where 3-5 authors will share a table or two and split costs. Having a co-op table with a larger number and variety of titles makes the thing worthwhile, whereas I wouldn't be making any profit if I were getting solo tables, given the volume of sales I have.)

**Anything I receive from the Anthropic settlement will blow this out of the water in terms of income for the year.