RE: Storage Unit
Oh crap. My optimism, what little there was of it, just took a nosedive.
RE: Unaccompanied minor & flying
Pretty sure this is irrelevant, anyway, but with Tylee being over 15, she's old enough to supervise JJ during a flight, and when half-sibling relatives of mine that are 15 and 8 flew cross-country last summer, it was very simple and they did not need a bunch of paperwork. Not that I believe the kids flew anywhere.
RE: Info from Nate's interview with the radio station
He states that Tylee was VERY ACTIVE on social media. I think he's probably talked to enough people to get a good sense of that. Given her age, she's much more likely to be on Snapchat and other of the newer, more private services. (And to have multiple accounts that we haven't found.)
Also. The bit about JJ calling Kay multiple times a day, even if just for a few seconds, got to me.
RE: Chad & books & publishing
I'm sorry,
@BigAl16, but I believe you're seriously underestimating Chad's income - or at least what it was prior to these last few weeks/months. I haven't been watching the Amazon rankings perfectly, or completely, but the titles I have been watching have been consistently trending lower and lower in the rankings. And Amazon rankings can change quickly.
As of about a week ago, just on
his Kindle titles that are available for purchase, I believe he was making, as a very low end guess, around $1000 a month on purchased Kindle books. It's not even possible to really make a stab at how much he was making with page reads on the series he has in Kindle Unlimited (KU).
For some example numbers. When I checked about a week ago, the majority of his series fiction titles were hovering in the 100,000-150,000 rank, with the lowest running no worse than 250,000. At the time, I did some figuring with book sales calculator, and it appeared he was averaging somewhere between 15-20 sales per month per book. There were just 10 books I was keeping track of. The price range for all but one of those was either $7.99 or $9.99. Either of those prices qualify for the 70% royalty rate.
If you figure 10 titles x 15 books/month x $7.99 x 70% = $838.95
And that's just sales of ebooks. No KU. No print books. Nobody else's titles. No audiobooks. And nothing at all published wide (not on Amazon), if there is any.
Audiobooks, along with podcasts, have made a HUGE jump in sales/listens this last couple of years. One of Daybell's sons is listed as the narrator of his audiobooks, so it's likely that the audiobooks were created at very little or no cost. Could potentially be making a decent chunk on them - some authors were reporting that up to a third of their income was coming from Audible in by the end of 2019.
Given the style of the covers, I doubt they paid anyone to design them. Probably done in-house. There seems to be no current advertising campaigns, so no money outlay for that.
There's not really any way whatsoever for me to make a decent stab at income from print or KU or wide. (If there is any. I haven't checked, and that would be way more time-consuming that I have patience for, when it's about someone else's books.)
Ditto on tracking or guessing at potential income from the rest of the titles published. Despite Spring Creek Book Company's website being down, and Archive.org & Google not having decent caches, I did find partial title lists, on
OpenLibrary and
Book Depository.
In summary... even today, some of his titles are jumping back up into the 100k rank range when I look, even though others are crashing to say, 800-900k. It's entirely possible he and Spring Creek were making a pretty decent chunk of change up until recently. (I noticed that the author people have been calling his "most famous" has a statement on her website calling him a "former publisher", with the publishing relationship ending in early 2019.)
Was it 30k a month? No idea, but there *are* quite a few authors out there making six figures with just ebook sales. Granted, a great many of those are in the romance and fantasy genres, but it's entirely possible he was doing quite well, since the niches he write in are a lot less crowded.
As always, this is MOO, and you're all free to disagree, because of course, without income or tax statements, we're all just guessing anyway. I just happen to believe that Chad might well have had access to more money than assumed, especially if the Daybell family tended toward saving rather than spending.
