2025 Writing Roundup

[renegadefolkhero]

It's that time again. This year put almost everyone through the wringer, I think. I was a whiny wah-wah for a while but I got my shit together and changed my goals for this publishing thing.

What kinda year was it? Welllllllllllllll

The Great Itch.io Adult Content Massacre of 2025

I lost my itch.io stores. This wasn't a significant source of sales for me, but I spent a lot of time setting up my pages and I had plans for it. Itch.io said they were going to try to work out a payment processor agreement regarding erotic content but trust me. They won't.

Eden Asks, What Are Royalties?

Eden Books is notorious for delayed royalty payments, but they're my second best storefront and it's a small operation so I've always rolled with it. First, they denied us access to the order control panel that made it easier to track missed royalty payments (which is significant since they often, you know, don't pay us). In late October they sent out an email to some authors (but not all, I have multiple accounts and I didn't get one!) advising they would cease automatic payments effective November 1st and switch to a delayed payout system in 2026 with the first payment in late January.

It's honestly crazy they did that. They should have said, hey, we're switching to a delayed payout system in 2026, it starts January 1st and we'll obviously continue paying you what we owe through 2025 so we don't leave you high and dry. Instead they stopped paying everyone with like 1 week's notice. They also added a donate button to their site (rut roh). Based on this, there is speculation Eden Books is or will soon be insolvent. Some authors stopped have publishing books there until they are paid what's already due. We'll see what happens.

Draft2Digital Gets Real, then Gets Greedy

Good news/bad news for D2D authors this year.

Good news, D2D finally decided to crack down on AI slop and over-saturated niches that are dominated by content farms, like hypnosis, manosphere stuff, and public domain books. How much they'll actually crack down on AI is debatable, I think they will only lean on this when an author is abusing their system. Slop is still a big problem on Smashwords. But to my knowledge they are the first distributor to prohibit AI-written books that do not have substantial human editing.

Bad news, D2D looked at how much money is generated during Smashwords sitewide sales and decided they wanted a larger cut. They recently "simplified" Smashwords royalty structure by making it less competitive and more complicated, so thanks for that. The biggest issue is the royalty rate for books under $2.99 will drop to 40% (from 80%) AND this rate is based on the cart price, not the list price, so if you discount a $2.99 book you'll take a 40% royalty hit. NO OTHER RETAILER DOES THIS. EVERYONE ELSE BASES ROYALTY PERCENTAGE ON LIST PRICE. This change targets the many, many erotica authors who put their books on discount during the sitewide sales. There was some speculation D2D is intentionally forcing writers to increase the baseline price for short erotica from $2.99 (which originally started due to Amazon's royalty structure years ago) to $3.99. Blah blah, whatever. Frankly I just think they're assholes.

This past year, sitewide sales have become far less lucrative for me. Maybe it's slop, maybe it's some secret third thing. In the past, I always made 3x my average royalties during the Winter sale. This year, my December monthly royalties will be average, but units sold is higher because everything is discounted. I think it's safe to say the Smashword Sale Golden Age is over. RIP.

Me me me me

I saw the writing on the wall mid-year and recalibrated my estimated yearly earnings from $10k to $7k. Assuming something completely crazy doesn't happen the last day of the year (One year I sold around 200 books on 12/31 for reasons still unknown to me and THAT WAS AWESOME), I made about $7,500 this year before taxes and expenses. My royalties increased by $500 this year, which was less than I expected for my backlist and amount published (2 novels, 2 novellas, 5 shorts, and a bundle).

My bestselling book is my newest novel, which made $440 over the last 6 months. I pulled $1,000 on my best erotica bundle, and I had 3 books cross the $1,000 lifetime threshold which for me is a nice milestone. A while back I set extremely modest "earn out" thresholds of $2k for novels, $1k for novellas and $200 for shorts. I've had some bombs (one book only made $53 even though my superfans lost their minds over it) but generally speaking, the novellas and shorts usually hit those targets in about 2 years if they sell at all.

After really struggling with my SFF projects, and beating myself up about not fully crawling out of the romance/erotica pit, I've decided to embrace the creative wisdom I am where I need to be.

I am where I need to be. I will get there. In the meantime, I've drastically overhauled my short/mid term goals.

• Writing is officially a hobby now. It is not a business, it is a thing that accidentally makes money sometimes, and I will make it as stress-free as possible.
• Consequently, I am scaling back admin to basically zilch.
• My genre is now AO1 (audience of one, aka books for myself). I write what my heart desires and accept it's what I need to be working on at the moment no matter how weird or gooey or difficult to cat it might be
• My goal is to finish up the ghosts hanging around (languishing WIPs) and build up a backlog of unpublished books to trickle out once or twice a year.

This is very different from goal list I set last year or even six months ago, but right now the focus is writing consistently and enjoying myself. I adopted this mindset in mid-November. So far so good.

Comments

[samuraiter]

May you continue to be a Renegade in 2026.

[renegadefolkhero]

Thank you! I'm committed!