Blogwanking and salewanking. Just a lot of wanking, basically.

The sale’s not quite over yet, but I like looking at numbers so let’s do that.  With a little bit of luck, I’ll get another sale or two today.  I figure I have enough indie authors reading this that somebody ought to find this interesting.  Forgive me if you’re not among that group.

Here are my Amazon sales since Skylights launched.  Note that this is for both of my books:

As you can see, since a day or two after the book launched, I’ve been good to get a sale in a day, and getting sales two days in a row is unusual.  Last week I had one little spike with two sales– someone bought both Benevolence Archives and Skylights within a couple of minutes of each other, if I remember right, but then nothing until this weekend.

So, in terms of absolute numbers, selling seven books?  Not great.  Selling seven books in a weekend compared to the month that it took to sell seven books before that?  I’ll take it.

Most of the sales at Amazon were of Skylights, by the way. I think one of them, maybe, is BA.

Here’s Smashwords, which won’t let me combine stats into one chart.  We’ll look at BA first:

Now, keep in mind that Benevolence Archives is free at Smashwords, so each download here represents a full download of the book.  By my standards, I feel like it’s done pretty well– days of multiple downloads have been reasonably common lately and I had that one nice spike where I got eleven downloads in a single day.  (I have no idea what triggered that, by the way, and I wish I did.)  There were a handful of downloads during the sale, but it doesn’t stand out compared to the pattern over the last month all that much.

Here’s Skylights at Smashwords:

(I should note here that you should be able to click on all of these to make ’em bigger.)

The little spike of four downloads in the middle there is the day where I handed out free codes to people who wanted them.  In general, Skylights hasn’t done very well at Smashwords, but I’ve been pretty gratified by the number of sample downloads, particularly the bump you see over the last four days during the sale, and the actual sales of the book have been nice, too.  I recognize that a lot of those sample downloads aren’t getting read– hell, I haven’t read a lot of the sample chapters I’ve downloaded– but I think Skylights starts off really strong, and I’m confident that if people actually read the first bit they’ll end up downloading the book.

As far as the set-your-own pricing?  No one paid the recommended price. We had a few who got it for free (which, again, is fine,) one person paid $2, and one paid $6.99, two dollars above the recommended price.  I have not yet nailed down which relative it was that did that.  🙂

I think that later tonight I’m probably going to return the Amazon prices to where they were– you could make the argument that the lower prices were what drove the sales, but when I reduced Benevolence Archives to $0.99 for a few weeks sales didn’t change at all, so I think it’s probably the increased noise I’ve been making over the last four days to get people to buy my books– which I’m not going to be able to keep up, because it’s exhausting.  I’m still toying with the idea of leaving Skylights at set-your-own pricing; BA will remain free at Smashwords.  We’ll see if I pick up any sales over the next couple of days once I stop shouting about it constantly.

And now, on another note:

This continues to entertain the hell out of me.  2572 views; my second most popular post of all time does not have 1000 yet.  Note that it’s not 5:00 yet and the post is already within a hit or two of its best day ever; hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if I reloaded after finishing this and found out it was at its best (Edit: yep.)  Mondays are huge for the Snowpiercer review because people see the movie over the weekend, hate it, and then go looking for bad reviews of it on Monday. Don’t believe me?  Here’s my search queries lately:

There are legions of people out there who hate this movie, and I am their king.