The next installment of the Spreadsheet of Doom! for April.  As always, click for something that’s remotely readable, and I hope you have a big monitor or good eyes:

April was a real real real good month, relatively speaking, and the amazing thing is it would have been a real good month even if I hadn’t launched a new book.  My previous best month was February, which got to 72 sales with the help of a Kindle countdown deal.  April had 102 sales without the Kindle countdown, which makes me super happy.  My best market continues to be OpenBooks.com, which brought me 46 downloads of Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1.  The book continues to be top-10 in its genre there, although it’s lost its #1 ranking, which makes me sad. It’s #15 in all fiction ebooks right now.  That’s awesome.

Interesting fact: Skylights sold more copies in print than in ebook form.  Then again, I hope May will see both of my print books doing that, since I have the signing.  Second interesting fact: only four days in all of April with no sales.  That’s fantastic.  

As far as presales: The Sanctum of the Sphere ended up doing about exactly as well as Skylights did on launch, but with one interesting caveat: I had eight presales for the book.  All but one of them actually downloaded on the 27th, and one of them downloaded on the 28th.  I didn’t sell a single digital copy on the 28th that hadn’t been presold.  That sounds like a complaint.  It’s not, although it was an enormous surprise.  What it means is that I basically convinced literally everybody who might have bought my book on launch day to preorder it– which says good things about my ability to push preorders and slightly less good things about my ability to drive sales in general.  Eight sales of anything in a day is a big deal for me, so I’m happy with it– as of right now, combining print and digital sales, Sanctum has moved 13 copies, which I’m fairly happy with for a book that’s only been out for five days.

I had initially thought that pre-sales didn’t affect day-of-release sales rank, but it turns out that that’s not the case, it’s just that Amazon takes its time to update it, since Sanctum abruptly jumped into the 50,000 range sometime on the 29th.  They claim to update sales data hourly; that may be true for high-selling books but definitely isn’t true for the long-tail items.

This will be a big week, as Tuesday is May the 4th, Star Wars Day, and the signing is a week from today.  I haven’t decided exactly what I’m doing for SWD but I’ll be doing something, and hopefully the signing is going to be hugely successful and not a giant waste of money.

We’ll see.  April was great, but hopefully May will be even better.