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).
