I've never tried to hide that I want to build up my side business of translating old German folk tales into a significant side income. "Quit your day job" levels are unrealistic, since my day job pays decently and I quite like the benefits, but maybe it will be possible to work reduced hours one day.
Currently, I earn about €200 per months. I do have some expenses - commissing cover illustrations, hiring a copywriter, and pay for domain and website maintenance (which has gotten more expensive as of late - thanks,
#LLM scrapers!).
https://sunkencastles.com/the-books/
Right now, my books are primarily a marketing tool for my Patreon campaign, although I do get some money from them.
My sales per year are:
2020: 71 (Release of "Sunken Castles, Evil Poodles")
2021: 69
2022: 133 (Release of "Lurkers at the Threshold")
2023: 78
2024: 50
2025: 52
Even though I haven't released a new book since 2022, book sales haven't declined nearly as much as is usual for books. I assume that this means that knowledge of their existence is spread by word of mouth - thanks to everyone who has recommended them to others! Still, I really need to get "Old Goatfoot" out (the next book) - and I have enough material to start on the manuscripts for "Magic in Theory and Malpractice" and "Unnatural Taxonomies" as well (with "Spirits in Motion" not far behind). While publishing my weekly translations on Patreon remains the first priority, this is the second highest one.
https://graphtreon.com/creator/sunkencastles
Speaking of my Patreon campaign, it has generally plateaued since its high point in 2023. I suspect the reason for this, too, is the lack of new books, which are the visible representation of all the work I do. If my people see more of my books on the shelves, they will be more intrigued in the early release material I publish there.
And once my Patreon campaign grows big enough, I hope to use it to pay for custom illustrations for the tales - but alas, I am not there yet.
But of course, I do further marketing beyond selling books. After I abandoned/fled Twitter, I focused on
#Mastodon as my primary marketing tool. I tried a
#Facebook page for two years or so, but that was a waste of time - I never attracted even a hundred followers, and I refused to pay Meta for advertising. Better to stick to the
#Fediverse, where there is no algorithm that hates you.
Still, even my Mastodon-based approach has seen some refinement. I used to share my tales as screenshots, but that was not ideal from an accessibility point of view. Thus, I spent seven months on building up a wiki repository, and now share invididual tales as links:
https://wiki.sunkencastles.com/wiki/Main_Page
This required a lot of effort which distracted me from working on the book manuscripts. But now it is functionally complete, and I think the end result is worth it.
So here you have it: My focus for the rest of the year is to get my next book published, and hopefully this will bring me a further increase in revenue.
Does anyone have any further questions about my work as an independent author/translator, and my future goals?
#amwriting
