TL;DR version: May was a damn good month.
First, the Spreadsheet of Doom for the last 3 months, in illegible mode. Click to make this into something you can read:
Now, even in its current unreadable state, you should be able to perceive some good news. Red days are days where I had no sales– and remember, a “sale” is a download regardless of whether I got paid for it. The last day I had zero downloads of one of my books was April 19th. I had zero no-sale days in May, which is fantastic. And unprecedented. That’s never happened before. Hell, I only had four days in May that didn’t feature multiple sales.
I had a total of 175 sales in the month of May. The majority of those were for Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1, which is free everywhere but Amazon– a total of 105. 73 of those were through OpenBooks.com, which I’ll need to devote a longer post to later, and which is currently my most active vendor. The amazing thing is that even if you cut the OpenBooks sales entirely out of the total I still tied my best month of 2015. The Sanctum of the Sphere had 39 sales, and Skylights had 31. My best day was, unsurprisingly, May 9th, which was the day of the signing. I had 52 sales across all of my vendors. Again, though, a testament to the strength of the month: you can delete all 52 of those and I’m still way over where I was in April.
I do not expect to hit 175 in June, although I’m probably going to do an end-of-the-school-year sale of some sort, so who knows. July will be interesting as I’ve got a three-day con in Indianapolis that I’ll be attending. We’ll see how well it goes.
But yeah. I’m ecstatic at how the month went.
I spent the last couple of weeks trying to push my Twitter following again. I think I’ve decided to get up to 10K and then spend at least a month or two sitting back and monitoring activity levels before trying to fiddle with it again. I discovered that Twitter’s mucking about with their Analytics page again, and not in an entirely positive way, although some of the stuff is okay. But check this nonsense out:
Um.
Where the hell’s the X-axis, Twitter? Is that daily? Monthly? Hourly? What the shit? This is no way to do a bar graph. And while we’re at it, what in the blazing hell does “Ethnic Explorers” mean?
Problematic, right? No math teacher would allow that graph to see the light of day. It gets worse. I use Crowdfire to control my various additions and deletions, and it recently prompted me to download a companion app called Stats. Which I did. And which gave me this:
That’s no axis at all. Those are literally just weird little lines that don’t mean anything. Now, if I click on any of those icons, I can drill down and get slightly more specific data, but there are still weird, contextless line graphs that provide absolutely no useful information of any kind. Okay, my follows are up 268%. From what?
Dreece’s line, by the way, has got to be wrong– he’s also showing no unfollowers for the last seven days and I don’t believe for a second that anyone’s account has that little churn. Dude’s got nearly 3000 followers. Something changed last week.
So, yeah. A step in the right direction, sorta, maybe, but Jesus, people, take some stats classes.
;dr version: That didn’t go poorly at all.
