New author epublishing results after 8 months

Thank you a million times over for sharing your data. I was particularly interested by your pricing experiment. Is it correct to say that your unit sales were going up steadily at a lower price (99 cents?), then dropped precipitously when you raised the price to $2.99 (although your profits increased nonetheless), but that the unit sales didn't pick up again when you lowered the price back down?

It seems you did well initially at both prices (rapidly growing sales volume at 99 cents; high profits at $2.99), but that the second price change threw people off. Maybe too much price changing is a bad thing -- it confuses people.

Your experience is a little different from other stories I've read. Two self-pubbers I read about said when they cut the price from $2.99 to 99 cents their unit sales increased twenty fold, so their profitability skyrocketed just due to selliing more books. But not everyone has that experience.

Hmm... what to do?

To the OP: If you want people to read your posts, you might want to use a font size that people can actually read. Like, yanno, the default one.

Terie said:

To the OP: If you want people to read your posts, you might want to use a font size that people can actually read. Like, yanno, the default one.

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When you cut and paste it doesnt default to the same font.

Derek,

Congratulations. Looks impressive. I'm curious. Why did you lower your price when you were making more profit at the higher price?

AP7 said:

When you cut and paste it doesnt default to the same font.

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So what? It's still the poster's responsibility to ensure readability if they want the widest possible pool of respondents. ESPECIALLY if someone is self-publishing, knowing how to present information in a readable form is a key skill.

DerekJCanyon said:

For those of you who are interested in what a newbie self-publishing authors sales might look like, here are my up to date sales numbers for my self-publishing efforts over the last 11 months. In this time Ive sold 11,023 copies of 4 e-titles, earning about $9,700 in gross royalties and about $4,500 in profit.

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Hmmn. So most of the time you sold at $0.99, yes? I've been hearing that it's best to start at $2.99 and then drop in stages. You started at 0.99 and raised it briefly then dropped it again. Interesting.

Audience saturation. Having sold about 6,800 copies of Dead Dwarves Dont Dance, have I reached the majority of my audience? How many fans of genetically engineered dwarf assassin stories of redemption are there? Surely with the millions of ereaders out there my potential audience is more than a few thousand.

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6,800 isn't bad, but it isn't stellar. The good news is that sales of your other books haven't hit that ceiling so they might still creep up there.

Tell me, what advertising did you do? Did you have any help in getting the word out about your novels?

So were most of the sales you received after you jumped into the bestseller list? I'm just trying to determine if that might have been the biggest factor in your huge sales for that month. It makes sense as it puts your book up front and center but is also a pretty good guarantee of "other people liked this book, you should check it out, too!"

Is your book linked to any others on Amazon? Also, do you sell on other sites and have those sales matched the trends at Amazon, or have they followed their own sets of highs and lows?

Thank you so much for sharing this data.

Terie said:

To the OP: If you want people to read your posts, you might want to use a font size that people can actually read. Like, yanno, the default one.

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I didn't have any trouble with it. Sure, a bit small, but not enough to make me stop reading.

TY, DJC, for posting this. Always great to see what other people are trying. Quick question, as I'm not self-pubbing (though keeping my eyes peeled and ears tuned to the trends): Are these analytics provided by Amazon? Just curious.

For anyone interested, my writing partner is starting a new self-pub experiment focusing on selling several short stories to garner interest in his upcoming novel. He'll be writing about it next week on our blog. I'll have him repost here and elewhere when it goes live.

Excellent data, Derek - I hate to ask for fear of being accused of being a downer again but what did you spend on covers, editing and publicity up to this point?

I'm sure you're well into a profit but I think it's important to point out your initial investment and how looking professional really makes a difference.

Thanks!

Great analysis, probably something that many people would like to really study and think about for their own self-pub efforts - thanks for taking the time to post it.

I echo the request that it be edited to a larger font size.

Thank you for sharing the data, and congratulations on the success.

Excellent data, cheers Derek.

I wish I could help you figure it out, but since my busy season is apparently the opposite of yours, the only constructive criticism I have is that your busy season is probably right around the corner (holiday shoppers).

I publish non-fiction educational stuff, so for me the summer has been beyond fantastic in sales - about $12,000 in the last three months. But my sales take a series dump from February-April, right before it gets busy again. The other months are all pretty average.

I have three years of data now and this is my pattern - it is very consistent even though my sales have increased every month of every year. The ratio of high, low, and average sales months has remained the same with very little deviation. It is nice to know what to expect from month to month as far as income goes.

Your second year will tell you exactly what's going on, so if next summer you have the same pattern, you'll know this is normal. If not, you should begin to figure out where you went wrong. Maybe the pricing test was a mistake, but it will be hard to know until next year.


Also, your data presentation is fantastic!

ColoradoMom said:

I publish non-fiction educational stuff, so for me the summer has been beyond fantastic in sales - about $12,000 in the last three months.

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That's great, ColoradoMom--well done. Even though you know this is your high season you've still sold a shedload.

Old Hack said:

That's great, ColoradoMom--well done. Even though you know this is your high season you've still sold a shedload.

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Yeah, it is easy to get used to it, unfortunately! Too bad everything is cyclic!

Thanks for sharing this, and I love your graphs--how did you do them?

I have heard on the Kindleboards that summer doldrums had hit quite a few people, so I don't think it can be author saturation. I think Sage mentioned Borders as a possible reason. I would think it would have to be something broad sweeping like that to affect so many people at once.

Anyway, thanks again. And I bet things will look up for you soon, especially once the Christmas season rolls around.

Jodi

kaitie said:

So were most of the sales you received after you jumped into the bestseller list? I'm just trying to determine if that might have been the biggest factor in your huge sales for that month. It makes sense as it puts your book up front and center but is also a pretty good guarantee of "other people liked this book, you should check it out, too!"

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I took a survey of my readers on my website, which is hardly conclusive of anything, but 15% of my readers found me through an Amazon recommendation and 10% through an Amazon also-bought list. None found me through a Top 100 Category list.

While my data means very little due to the way I collected it (hardly scientific), I think it may be applicable to others' situations only because those Category lists are pretty difficult to find. You only see a book is on one when you navigate to the page. They aren't listed much of anywhere else (or if they are, I can't find them easily and I doubt most readers browsing look for them.) Now, if you manage to get into the Top 100 of the entire Kindle Store, then yes, you'll gets some eyes, because Amazon puts those lists on its front page. I'd wager the top ten of Romance or the top ten of Mysteries might have some visibility as well. But when I made the top 20 of Occult and Supernatural Horror, I wager that list was too specific to have been seen by much of anyone. (But it sure was fun to be ranked higher than Stephen King for a few weeks.)

From what I understand, Amazon figures your visibility by something they call a conversion rate, which means how many people who look at your book cover click on it and ultimately buy it. If your conversion rate is high, they show your book to more people (recommendations, also-boughts, etc.), meaning you have more likelihood of selling more books. If your conversion rate is low, then they show your book to less people, meaning you have less likelihood of making sales. That's why you see meteoric rises like Derek's or mine (which admittedly was way less, um, meteoric. I capped out at a ranking of about 2,000 before my sales declined) and also why the book suddenly takes a nose dive.

I kind of expect that as Amazon gets bigger and ebook buying becomes more commonplace, they'll change these algorithms again to encourage more niche-buying. I'm pretty sure that Amazon will get very good at providing readers with a tailor-made experience for them, which will probably make Amazon ebook sales change yet again. I think they'll stop pushing a few books at everyone and start pushing a wider variety of books at smaller targeted audiences. But that's just a hunch.

I find the "top categories" hard to navigate and not very reliable. Also, most of the time I've already read the ones that would appeal to me and many (just my personal opinion) are not as good as their position indicates. Or maybe, more accurately, they are not typically what I am looking for.

Since I buy a lot of niche Kindle books I typically find new authors in the "People who bought this also bought" section. So one suggestion is to get yourself on a better and more diverse recommended list in order to find more people in your target audience.

One way to get this ball rolling is to purchase your book then purchase books that are like yours - so that your book will have chance to get in on those sales. Of course, you can't do it with one purchase, but every little bit helps.

Another thing that I would do (if I had my fiction book on sale already), is find another author who is publishing books like mine and see if they wanted to do a joint venture where two (or more) authors team up to promote their books as a package. Of course, you'd have to be very choosy so you're not mixed up with crap, but I see local networking as a pretty good answer to author centered promotion and marketing - even if you have no intention of self publishing.


I could think of at least a dozen ways to manipulate Amazon for better positioning and you can bet when I put out some fiction, that's what I will be doing.

Good suggestions ColoradoMom. Thanks.

ColoradoMom said:

Another thing that I would do (if I had my fiction book on sale already), is find another author who is publishing books like mine and see if they wanted to do a joint venture where two (or more) authors team up to promote their books as a package. Of course, you'd have to be very choosy so you're not mixed up with crap, but I see local networking as a pretty good answer to author centered promotion and marketing - even if you have no intention of self publishing.

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One of the big problems with selling self-published print books is getting them into bookshops: without distribution (and I mean what trade publishing calls distribution, not what a lot of self publishers mean by that) it's impossible to get a decent bookshop presence.

I suggested to several self publishers and self-publishing groups that they band together and work as distributors, each holding stock of each others' books and making sales calls and so on: but they were all reluctant to do so. I always thought that was a shame and that they might well make a good number of sales if they did so. It would be worth trying, at least, I'd have thought.

Old Hack said:

One of the big problems with selling self-published print books is getting them into bookshops: without distribution (and I mean what trade publishing calls distribution, not what a lot of self publishers mean by that) it's impossible to get a decent bookshop presence.

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What about independent bookstores? Is there any hope there?