Quarterly Author Update: April 2025

Book sales, draft progress, secret projects, and more!

If this is your first time reading one of these, this is my quarterly author business update where I share book progress, sales, and other things that are going on related to my book writing work. You can find the last two updates here and here.

2025 is off to a great start with writing. I finished up my sci-fi novel Husk which you can learn more about here and set that for final production to Scribe at the end of February. Everything should be on track for it to come out at the end of May.

I've also written the first draft of a novella set in the same universe as Husk, as well as started on the sequel to Husk. Blog posts are slowly becoming regular again, and Between Drafts episodes have been a ton of fun.

In this post, I'm going to share some updates on how everything is going both from a book progress and a business standpoint. Here’s the TOC:

1. Husk

2. Crypto Confidential

3. Husk Novella

4. Husk 2

5. Secret Project

6. Newsletters I’m enjoying

Husk Preorders & Sales

A few weeks ago I launched preorders for my sci-fi novel, Husk. Here’s the blurb in case you missed it:

Immortality awaits…but at what cost?

As a Tech, Isaac maintains the servers housing humanity’s collective consciousness. Tomorrow he turns twenty-five—old enough to transfer into the digital paradise of Meru. Virtual immortality will be his in a world free from the death and disease that plague what’s left of civilization.

But when tragedy strikes, Isaac discovers Meru may not be the paradise he thought. Powerful forces are conspiring to destroy it, and the ones he trusts most have turned against him.

Outcast. Abandoned. Exiled. Isaac must uncover the truth about Meru before it’s too late. And before he suffers a fate he thought was confined to the history books:

Death.

Husk: Book 1 of the Meru Initiative is Nathaniel Eliason’s post-apocalyptic, action-fueled sci-fi adventure: a gripping journey and vibrant world that forces you to question what makes you human.

And you can preorder it directly from me here, or the Kindle version on Amazon here.

This was a bit of an experiment with how to do preorders for a book. Normally, when somebody announces pre-orders for their book, that's entirely done through Amazon.

But because I'm self-publishing this, there is a bit of complicated challenge with putting a paperback or hardcover book up for pre-order on Amazon. They don't allow you to easily do it.

Because of that challenge, and because this sounded like a neat experiment to try, I decided to try selling preorders of the book through my own store instead and I've been extremely happy with how it has gone.

In the last three weeks since it launched, I’ve sold 204 copies directly through Shopify, and another 35 through Amazon, for a total of 239 preorders.

That’s $7,727 in total sales on Shopify, and another $122 or so on Amazon.

If this were a traditional pub book with a big advance, 239 pre-orders at this point would not be very good.

But for what I'm doing, I'm really happy with how this is going so far.

Pre-ordering a book on Shopify is not normal. There's a lot of extra complications that come with it that are going to make people less likely to convert and more likely to wait until the book is available on Amazon.

Further, people pre-order fiction books less in general, especially from an unknown author and especially a first book in a series from an unknown author. If you think about when you have pre-ordered fiction in the past, it was probably only for a subsequent book in a series or from a fiction author who you already really loved.

On top of that, no one except for a few people has ever read any fiction from me. So this isn't like selling a nonfiction book on topics that I've written about. This is something where people are mostly taking it on faith that I have figured out how to do this, Instead of waiting until they can hear from other people if this book is any good or not (by the way, it is, it’s very good).

All that to say, thank you so much to everybody who's pre-ordered - it means a ton, and I've been thrilled to see this response so far!

As a reminder, when you pre-order the book, you get:

1. A signed hardcover edition for the price of a normal hardcover

2. The Kindle or digital version and the audiobook thrown in for free.

This bundle won't be available once it actually publishes on May 27th, and I'll likely shut down pre-orders a week or two before that date to make sure I have time to fulfill them.

So if you want one of these first edition signed copies, you should pre-order it now so you don't forget before I turn it off.

You can also preorder just the Kindle version on Amazon here.

Crypto Confidential Sales

These are less great.

Since the last update in January, I’ve sold 453 copies, bringing the total to 3,700.

And per my predictions in the previous updates, the chart basically follows the crypto market. I think I’ve covered my theories on why enough in the previous posts so I won’t repeat them here.

Ultimately I’m very proud of the quality of Crypto Confidential but it hasn’t found a place in the market, or there never was a great place for it to begin with. I’m taking opportunities to promote it as they come up, but also not actively seeking them out as much because I feel at this point that time is better spent on making new books.

The kinda crazy thing is that in March, I only sold 66 copies. So I sold significantly more copies of Husk! Granted it’s an apples to oranges comparison but still, interesting to see.

Husk Novella Progress

My Between Drafts cohost and close friend Nathan Baugh turned me on to the idea of writing a novella.

Husk is the first book in what will likely be a trilogy, and while it’s not terribly long at 102,000 words that’s still almost 400 pages, which can be intimidating to take a gamble on, especially for someone who’s never read anything from me before.

So enter the novella. He learned this tip from Ryan Cahill, author of The Bound and the Broken series, who uses a 100 page novella as the “taste” of his world to get people interested since his first book is 500 pages and the subsequent ones are over 1,000.

Cahill also gives the novella away for free on his website for anyone who joins his email list, which is a great lead magnet and a worthwhile freebie since anyone who reads it might go buy the next four books.

Once Nathan explained the philosophy I fell in love with the idea, and instantly knew what storyline in Husk I wanted to do a novella on. It’s the story of the day transference first succeeds, when one of the main characters in Husk, Felix, finally leaves his body behind and enters the digital world of Meru.

It was extremely fun to write, and I managed to finish a full draft of it in March, clocking in at about 36,000 words, roughly 120 pages.

My plan is to let this sit for a few weeks, finish a second draft towards the end of April, do another draft in May, then send it off for publishing in June.

I was going to take four months on it instead of three, but honestly the first draft came out good. Better than I expected. So I don’t think editing is going to take as long as I anticipated, though I’ll let you know in a few months if I end up eating my words.

Husk 2 Progress

I finished the draft of the novella on March 27th, so on March 28th I started on Husk 2.

I have a very strong idea of how the first two-thirds of the book are going to go, and a foggy idea of how it ends, but I rather like it that way.

The ending of Husk surprised me, I hadn’t planned it when I started writing it, but I absolutely love it. Basically everyone who reads it says the last act is their favorite part. So I’m leaving room to be surprised by where the story takes me again.

My goal is to turn in the final version to Scribe at the end of November. I assume I’ll need four drafts to get it where I want it, and I think four to six weeks is a good amount of time for drafts after the first, so I should aim to finish drafts in around October 16th, September 4th, and July 24th.

Those are only rough dates of course, but using that timeline as a guide, that gives me three and a half months to write the first draft of Husk 2, minus some weeks off to edit the novella. Call it 12 weeks of writing time.

I estimate it will come in closer to 150,000 words, so I need to average 12,500 words per week while working on it. I’ve set my goal at 3,000 words per day (15,000 per week) to be safe, which sounds like a lot, but it’s much lighter than when I wrote 5,000 words per day for the first draft of Husk.

I’m almost 25,000 words in, and I have to say, it is so fun working on a sequel. Having the characters and world already established and getting to dive back in and build them up further, escalate their conflicts, raise the stakes, it’s very different from starting from scratch.

And in a way I’ve grown to really like all these characters, so I’m excited to see what they do next, and whether that’s what I planned for them or they go off in some other direction.

Secret Project

I’m mostly mentioning this here to see if I follow up on it in three to six to twelve months.

While on a ski trip a few weeks ago, I had an idea for another book, possibly a series, that I’m absolutely in love with. I ended up writing about 10,000 words of backstory and did a high level outline for the plot of the book in the evenings.

The problem is I’m not sure how to prioritize it. The smart thing to do is to focus on the Husk books until the trilogy is completed, but I also want to work on this one.

And, well, books take up such a massive amount of time that you have to be quite deliberate in which one you pick. Husk was easy to choose because I didn’t have as many story ideas when I started, and it was such a strong winner that I knew I wanted to do it.

But now the story ideas are starting to multiply and I’ll need to figure out a better system for what to focus on.

Anyway, more on this later. Maybe. We’ll see.

Newsletters I’m Loving

Finally, a few shoutouts for newsletters I've really been enjoying in the book world:

Nathan Baugh’s World Builders. If you’re interested in fiction writing, or telling better stores in your nonfiction, Nathan’s newsletter is a must read. He’s gone deep on the science of storytelling and has used it for everything from writing his fantasy novel (publishing this year) to building a massive LinkedIn audience.

Alex & Books Summaries and Recommendations. For the nonfiction lovers, Alex has a wonderful weekly newsletter where he shares new books he’s enjoying as well as the best takeaways from books he’s read. If you want a guide to picking the best nonfiction books to read, his newsletter is a great place to start.

Paul Millerd’s Pathless Path. Paul has been a trove of information, guidance, and support as I figure out the world of self-publishing, and his posts on how his books are doing were the inspiration for me starting this series. If you’re interested in becoming an author in the strange new publishing environment, definitely check his newsletter out.

See you in the next update, and don’t forget to preorder Husk if you haven’t already.