This will be tiny and illegible, but those of you who care can click on it for a larger and actually readable edition. You still may have to scroll a bit, since I work with a 27″ monitor and this image is all sorts of horizontal:
Basically, a day of fiddling with Excel and every sales report I can get anyone to give me has convinced me that I need to start fresh and on my own with 2015, as not nearly enough of the data I have for 2014 can give me specific dates on which I made sales– or, at least, dates on which I made sales anywhere other than Amazon. Smashwords’ date data seems to fall into a black hole after 30 days, so I’ll have to keep track of that separately and on my own if I want to be able to see it. Thus, this Excel spreadsheet, which keeps track of each book and each venue the book is available at. I have to manually enter day-by-day sales and then it totals everything up for me; line graphs are on the next sheet.
Interesting fact: As of last night (I had six BA sales yesterday!) I’ve sold more books in January than there are days in January. That’s a first for me if you don’t count the couple of KDP Select free days that I gave Benevolence Archives 1 when it was on Select at Amazon; those garnered hundreds of downloads. If I was able to make BA free at Amazon I would get a lot more visibility for it. Select has been good for Skylights, hands down, no debate, and I suspect when BA 2 launches in April it will be on Select as well.
It remains to be seen if my nonsense is finally starting to catch on a bit, if Select is solely responsible for this, or if people just buy more books in January than they do in December. But it’s probably worth pointing out that my January check from Amazon will probably be at least a fourth of my income from writing in all of 2014. That’s gotta mean things are looking up, right?
And, just for the hell of it:
- SKYLIGHTS at Amazon ($4.95 ebook/$12.95 print)
- THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, VOL. 1 at Amazon ($1.99)
- THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, VOL. 1 at Smashwords (Free!)
They’re good. I promise!
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I have a spreadsheet too to chart sales. It isn’t daily, just monthly, but it works well for me. I have had a lot more interest in January than in December. I ran a 99 cent promotion and sold more books in January than I did from June-December last year (not including freebies). I think people are starting to use their giftcards now.
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I’m thinking about a sale in February sometime. The gift card thing is a good point; I was trying to think of a reason sales might be higher in January than the biggest gift-giving month of the year. That’s at least something.
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If you do a sale, make sure you advertise it in one of the discounted ebook venues. I used Ereader News Today. For a scifi book, it’s $15. I recouped that several times over.
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I have tried that, on a couple of occasions and with a fair amount of advanced warning, and never seen any evidence that it did any good. That said, I haven’t tried that particular service, so I’ll check into them.
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I have made nearly 100 sales between the 99c sale and the aftermath of it (including a handful of KU/KOLL sales), and I don’t think I could have done that without the ENT ad and other authors I know sharing my ad.
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(And, for the record, half the reason I do these posts is precisely for stuff like this– I won’t know if most writers see a bump in January unless I give them a reason to tell me, and advice about useful advertising sites is always great.)
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Select seems to do well for unestablished authors. It gives readers a chance to sample your work with out feeling they are risking anything. Or so goes the theory. Glad it’s working!
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Thank you
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Good luck
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