Oh, I can't help but pull my own leg.
So, I have three titles up right now that have sat untouched for the two weeks they've been on sale. Well, untouched isn't quite right. One of the 99-centers sold once. Of course I'm not doing anything to promote them (this is a qualification I've read many times by many others when writing of their work, as if promotion alone will solve the matter), but I'm not presently convinced that my promotional efforts could do much. Let's take that one sale, for example, to see what I mean.
I originally sold that story to a semi-pro magazine that paid something like 38 bucks for it. I then later resold it to a podcasting outfit that paid something like 40 bucks for it. So from two sales the 5,467-word story made 78 bucks, or about 1.43-cents a word. The initial print sale to Talebones (now sadly defunct) met with a circulation of aroundish (near as I could find) “1,000,” that category of circulation that likely means “much less than that number.” Meanwhile, the podcasting outfit indicated that the story had been downloaded 22,000 times.
So why am I mentioning these things?
Well, in order for this one short story to make off of Kindle sales what it made from its earlier sales, it would have to sell 223 copies. The 99-cent price means I keep 35 cents (and at that number of copies, I'd come out a nickel ahead). In order to reach the same size of audience as it did before, say, collectively, 23,000, well … ah, there's the part I don't get. Reaching audience.
This one story is a very tiny needle in an ever-growing haystack. Selling to Talebones put it in the hands of “1,000” people who wanted that kind of fiction and who knew where to get it. Selling again to the podcasting outfit put it in front of an unknown number of people (recent figures show 775 unique visitors per month) who wanted that kind of fiction and who knew where to get it.
Now it sits on Amazon's Kindle Book shelf with, as far as I can tell, no real way for readers to find it.
Naturally, I'd much rather it find an audience who will be amused by it (or repelled, as the case may be), but I have a hard time imagining that it'll find new readers in the same numbers as before.
So, mine is not a Kindle success. At least not with that story. And not with others that collectively earned (pre Kindle) much more than that one.
Does this mean you shouldn't put your book in the Kindle store? Heck no. But it likely means that that will be the easy part.
Oh, here's the subject of my experiment.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SVD8OW/?tag=absowrit-20