grayworld's self-publishing journey, in black and white

Wow. Take a month off from boring the Absolute Write community with your monthly updates and they go and change the whole website on you .

I’m about as receptive to change as that kid in my elementary school who got cornered and pelted with bicentennial quarters that one day, but I’ll try to adapt and overcome. Here goes.


May was rough on several fronts, but I managed to convince five awesome readers to look at my stuff. Here are the straightforward totals:

A World Gone Gray: 5 (4 at AmazonUS, and 1 at AmazonUK, all via KOLL).

I continued to do the Twitter thing in May as well. I also stumbled upon (after a year and a half of tripping over my own feet, Twitter-wise) the brilliant concept of adding a cover image to my tweets, which seems to have had no effect on sales. Yes, users retweet and click on my cover art, but they rarely click on the link to my fiction of questionable merit. So including a photo with my tweets seems to be a wash, sales-wise.

In June, I (apprehensively) decided to play around with KDP’s promotional tools and did a Kindle Countdown thing to promote AWGG at the US site. The results were about what I expected; I enjoyed a temporary spike in sales and borrows which fell off right after the promotion ended. Very much expected. Here are the actual numbers:

A World Gone Gray: 7 (3 sales, 4 borrows, all at AmazonUS).

Signal Fire: 1 (borrowed via AmazonUS).

AWGG continues to be my flagship of sorts, but it was nice to see Signal Fire get a little love last month.

[FONT=&quot]Thanks to the relative success of June’s Kindle Countdown promotion, I’ve decided to try the same thing in the UK market in July. I’m sure the numbers will be a bit smaller, what with the smaller population and my limited writing skill and whatnot. But I’ll be sure to share the gory details in August. [/FONT]

Remember that UK Kindle Countdown promotion I unveiled early last month? Neither does anyone else. In a word, failure. In all fairness (to my fragile writerly psyche), I have to admit the pricing/timing thing doesn’t translate too well when taking the whole currency exchange thing into account. I ended up with a 24-hour sale divided into two pricey 12-hour bits. But enough whining.

On the bright side, I have some huge numbers to report. But only because KDP Select changed their approach to payment. Here are the middling details:

A World Gone Gray: 1765

Isn’t that an impressive number? Unfortunately, that only represents the total number of pages read by readers of AWGG via Kindle. Fortunately, however, readers read 1765 pages of my book last month. Which is awesome.

Here are the more traditional numbers:

A World Gone Gray: 2 sold, 4 (presumably)* borrowed via KOLL

The Transience of Youth: 74

That Transience number looks somewhat impressive too, doesn’t it? But keep in mind it was fueled by a three-day free-download event. If memory serves, I peaked (after checking my numbers after doing the work thing, anyway) at #44 in General Humor. I also had downloads in Italy and Germany for the first time in my writerly-ish career, so that was nice.

A similar three-day free-download event involving Like Life Itself is winding down as I type, and the preliminary numbers suggest a 4:1:2 ratio regarding day-to-day, three-day free downloads holds true. I have no idea why that is. Or isn’t. Keep in mind that’s a small sample size.

*—Amazon, kindly include a separate KOLL borrow column so writers don’t have to stalk themselves while trying to determine how many readers are chucking their Kindles into stagnant ponds in disgust halfway through. Thanks.

I’m about a month late on my update, so here’s a two-fer — August and September at the usual price...

I’m still not sure what to make of Amazon’s KENP thing. Sure, I’m making more revenue-wise (remember we’re talking peanuts here) than I have since I uploaded my first novel and got that 90-day bump nearly two years ago, but this past August and September were as different as night and nite in the way they went about doing business. Here are the discombobulating details:

August:

A World Gone Gray: 4 sold, 442 pages read via AmazonUS
Signal Fire: 1 sold via AmazonUS
Like Life Itself: 20 free downloads (15 US, 3 UK, 2 Canada). Also, 43 pages (via KOLL) choked down before (I can only imagine) being disgustedly tossed into the business end of the nearest operational wood-chipper (AmazonUK)

September:

AWGG: 1 sold, 4201 pages read (2903 US, 1298 Canada)
SF: 1 sold, 547 pages read (all AmazonUS) Also, a very-much appreciated and much-too-kind five-star review.

So for the most part, it seems readers who are borrowing my humble scribblin’s are sloughing through them (except for the disappointed [or, more likely, disgusted], borrower of LLI in the UK. Sorry...), which is a good thing, since actual sales have fallen off the table recently. If memory serves (I have no desire to check the archives), I had a grand total of zero sales in October of last year, so I can’t in good conscience say I’m looking forward to the month that shall not speak its name.