A Bee's-Eye View from the Clouds

July’s Over. Thank You, Everyone: 7,174 Books Sold, 64 Titles Published, and One Heart About to Burst

My writing is a house my life built.

Genre by genre, room by room—I laid the foundation with everything I’ve survived and everything I still believe in. Horror lives in the basement, where the worst parts of me are still whispering. Romance waits in the kitchen, warm and sharp. Satire peers through the bathroom mirror. Memoir coats the bedroom walls like fingerprints I couldn’t scrub out if I tried. It’s not a neat house. It creaks. It aches. It breathes. But it’s mine. And I live here.

The walls are painted with my queerness—not like some splashy accent color, but as structure. As history. As refusal. Every line I write is another brushstroke that says I was here—even when the world tried to whitewash me. The windows? They’re the hope I’ve always had. Not the glittery, empty kind—but the kind you earn. The kind that survives. The kind that lets in just enough light to keep going, even when you forget why.

The bones of this house—my house—are my found family. Shelby, Melissa, Tasi. People who didn’t just show up, but stayed. People who knew what was cracked and helped me build anyway. People who carried the frame when I couldn’t lift it. They are in every beam. Every corner. Every goddamn sentence.

And then there’s Matthew. He’s not the roof, or the fireplace, or the porch light. He’s the room I didn’t think I’d get to build. The one with soft light and safe silence. The one I don’t have to decorate for anyone but us. He doesn’t fix the foundation—I wouldn’t want him to. He just lives here with me. Fully. Quietly. Every day, choosing this house, cracks and all.

I write in every genre because my story doesn’t fit in one room. But the voice is always mine. The structure’s always the same: something raw, something real, something that refuses to disappear. Every book I write is a room in this house. Some of them are haunted. Some of them are loud. Some are locked and some are wide open. But every single one is built with care.

So when people say my books made them feel seen, I want to tell them this: you’re not just reading a story.

You’ve been in my house.

I still remember the first manuscript I ever finished. It was 2014, and I was writing in stolen hours—between shifts, heartbreaks, and long stretches of self-doubt. Over the years, I stacked up draft after draft, submitted to agents, celebrated near-misses, watched deals fall through, and kept waiting for the mythical “right time.” It never came.

So I stopped waiting.

Thanks to a push from my sister—the one who always believed—I finally hit publish. Not once. Not twice. But sixty-four times. Every story I’d been sitting on, every half-shelved novel, every memoir draft too raw to finish—I released them all. And in July, my first full month as a self-published author, something unbelievable happened.

You showed up.

7,174 books found their way into readers’ hands.
7,156 ebooks. 18 paperbacks. Sixty-four stories that finally got to breathe.

I could cry, but I’ll try to type instead.

The Stats: July by the Numbers

Number of Books Published: 64

Total Units Sold: 7,174

Ebooks: 7,156

Print: 18

Let me say this with my whole heart: Thank you. From the bottom of it. Whether you bought a book, borrowed through Kindle Unlimited, shared a link, or left a review—I see you. You are the reason indie art survives.

Here’s a look at which books resonated the most this month—and where readers showed up:

🌎 Global Sales Breakdown (Top 5)

  • United States: 4,672 sales
  • Germany: 963 sales
  • United Kingdom: 849 sales
  • Canada: 205 sales
  • Netherlands: 139 sales
    (Followed closely by Australia, Brazil, and even France, Mexico, and Japan—thank you all.)

🔥 Top-Performing Titles:

  • Daddy Issues Anonymous – 348 units
    • A slow-burn, emotionally rich romance about healing through sarcasm, unexpected intimacy, and the one man who won’t let you hide anymore.
  • Oil and Glitter – 298 units
    • Champagne, sabotage, and sequins collide when a chaotic event planner falls for a buttoned-up oil heir. A rom-com with heart, heels, and heat.
  • The Soft Launch – 275 units
    • A food critic with secrets. A CEO with a brand to protect. And a fake relationship that gets dangerously real. Viral, vulnerable, and viciously sexy.
  • To Be Continued… – 266 units
    • A reality TV producer and his high school nemesis collide in this sharp, messy second-chance romance. Old wounds. New scripts. No easy edits.
  • Fake It Till You Mean It – 260 units
    • A Hawaiian wedding, a fake boyfriend, and one very real heartbreak. A slow-burn stunner that builds to a devastating emotional punch.

And right behind them:

More than 40 other titles had 100+ downloads. These books span memoirs about conversion therapy and cancer survival, post-apocalyptic horror, sapphic baking rivals, grieving ER nurses, queer vampires, cult survivors, legal thrillers, romcoms with bite, and everything in between.

They aren’t just stories. They’re proof that queer voices can’t be erased. They’re love letters to anyone who’s ever felt too weird, too much, too broken. They’re mine. And now, they’re yours too.

Why Self-Publishing Matters

Self-publishing is more than an act of rebellion—it’s an act of ownership. It’s reclaiming your voice from an industry built to gatekeep. It’s betting on yourself even when no one else will. And it’s an open door for writers who are queer, neurodivergent, disabled, chronically ill, or otherwise told no in a hundred ways before anyone says yes.

When you support indie authors, you’re not padding a corporation—you’re fueling someone’s rent, therapy, dog food budget, and courage to write the next one.

A Note About Kindle Unlimited

Every book I release is free to read on Kindle Unlimited—and yes, I still get paid per page read. If you don’t want to commit to buying a book (or sixty-four), you don’t have to. Amazon even offers three free months of Kindle Unlimited, and I always make my new releases free for the first five days. No strings. Just stories.

What’s Next?

I’m not slowing down. More books are coming. More trauma-informed stories, more broken characters finding slivers of light, more dark comedy, more queer survival with sharp edges and soft landings.

When I publish something new, it’s always free for the first five days—so follow my Amazon author page to stay in the loop.

And if you’ve read any of my work: please leave a review. One sentence can change everything for an indie author.

How You Can Keep Supporting

  • Leave a review. Seriously. Just one line makes a difference. It tells the algorithm that this book matters.
  • Tell a friend. Or a group chat. Or your mom.
  • Use your KU subscription. Every page read helps me keep writing.

I’m building something here—something honest, messy, queer, and resilient. And I’m doing it with your help.

Final Thought:
This month was more than numbers. It was a second chance. A full-circle moment. A quiet, sacred thank you to every version of me who thought it would never happen.

To everyone who picked up a book, shared a post, told a friend: you made July unforgettable.

With gratitude and grit,
Brandon Cloud
Amazon Author Page