I don't know why, but I really like talking about sales numbers and money made.
The irony is that, if I were actually doing well (as in, enough to actually live off of), I would probably never talk about this stuff. Nobody wants to read about me bragging about how awesome I'm doing as a writer living the dream.
However, as you can see from the chart above, I've made less than $150 in five months. Actually, I think that's pretty brag-worthy, because it's $150 more than I expected to make.
[Also, for the record, it's 17 days into June, and I've sold nothing this month.]
Why are some months better than others? With January, at least, you have the fact that many people had just received Kindles, AND KDP Select was pretty awesome, since not everybody had yet jumped on the bandwagon. I actually did quite well with free promotions (the best being my very first, a one day promotion with The Dowry getting over 800 downloads).
March, on the other hand, was due to a fluke in the system - shortly after a botched free promotion (where it ended up lasting about half a day longer than it should have), I received about 14 total purchases of both Family History: Part 1 and Part 2.
Here's another interesting tidbit: I gave up seriously advertising my books sometime in March. I assumed that this was why I got so few purchases in April; however, I actually did fairly well in May without any advertising or free promotion days. I'm still not sure what happened in May, though if I remember right, every purchase occurred in the first half of the month.
On the other hand, I've had literally no sales thus far for June. Again, I've done very little advertising. Perhaps people are spending less time browsing Amazon in the summertime? I would be interested to hear what experiences other people have with this (if any).
Your books look really interesting and unique. :) Don't expect too much out of June,July, and August, as I've heard they are traditionally very slow months for most of us.
ReplyDeleteI've heard that things pick up in the fall when people aren't out in the summer fun and are back to reading again.
Your figures are really respectable. I think most of us starting out, have similar. It is a slow build. But you are off to a great start.
I wish you much success!
Thank you! And thanks for the input on the summer months - I really hadn't thought about it until I was writing this blog post, actually. I just started thinking, "Hmmmmm, maybe nobody's online in the summer." It certainly makes sense. :)
DeleteWhen selling at such a low volume, it is impossible to eliminate a sufficient number of outlying factors to satisfactorily determine the cause of sales. I recommend taking another look at your tags and learning a bit about what makes for a good tag to better position future titles.
ReplyDeleteCongrats.