Re: Formats

Thu 25 Jan 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

I’ve updated my chart of the ratio of formats Small Beer titles (including chapbooks and LCRW) sell in.

Print books (in red on the chart) were 90% of sales in 2010 — we started selling ebooks in 2005 — and dropped to a low of 49% in 2014 (or: we sold a lot of ebooks that year).

The 2023 breakdown was 65.36% print and 34.64% ebooks. I’ve never tracked audio books, mostly because the half dozen audio book publishers all send statements at different times and they are somewhat hard to extract numbers from. I think audio sales would be about 2-3% of the total. Although I prefer print or audio, I’m format agnostic as a publisher, especially knowing how useful ebooks are for books such as ours where there are no large type editions. I’d like people to read Small Beer books and I know that people enjoy different types of books in different formats: for some fiction only works on audio or short stories only work in print, etc. Anyway, every year when I get to this point in Jul.-Dec. royalty calculations I like to stop and look at the format percentages, see if there’s anything I’m missing, any books I should be reminding people exist. Oh wait, all of them!


Caught up on shipping

Thu 18 Dec 2014 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Friday morning update: Caught up again! usps.com says books shipped yesterday are scheduled to arrive Monday so you can still order today and fingers crossed they will arrive Tuesday!

Hey, we still have a couple of days — today and tomorrow — where the post office says that if you order from our site, since we’re upgrading all US book orders to Priority Mail, the books should arrive by December 24th. It’s been pretty great fun in the last week piling up the books and shipping them all out. The post office has been really busy!

Also: don’t miss these signed books:

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar paperback:

Questionable Practices by Eileen Gunn

(We also did quite a few ebooks!)

Exit, Pursued by a Bear by Greer Gilman

Stranger Things Happen (and other books) by Kelly Link

Stranger Things Happen cover - click to view full size

& even some random older books (After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh, Howard Who? by Howard Waldrop, oh I don’t know!) all shipping free Priority (if only I could spell that) free until December 20th