KDP Select Free Promotion — Discoverability Experiment: One Month Later and Feeling Fine!
As stated in Part One, my goal in joining the KDP Select program had been simple, to get my two Victorian San Francisco historical mysteries, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits back up to the top of the Kindle historical mystery bestseller category. And, as I wrote in Part Two, not only did I achieve this goal, but I also had fantastic success in selling my books immediately after the free promotion was over. In addition, I was now selling a significant number of books in Kindle, UK, and I had started to have a large number of borrows of Maids of Misfortune, all unexpected but delightful consequences of enrolling a book in the KDP Select program. While not everyone has had the same kind of success using KDP Select, a number of authors have reported large numbers of downloads, Read more…
My Second Year as an Indie Author: Even Sweeter Success
In December 2010, a year after I had self-published my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I wrote a piece evaluating my experience in my first year as an indie author. This December it seemed fitting to see how my second year as an indie author compared to the first. First the Numbers: Last December, I wrote that “…there is every reason for me to think that I will do even better next year than I did this year with Maids of Misfortune…” and I was entirely right. In my first year as a self-published author (December 2009-November 2010), I sold 2693 books, most of them $2.99 ebooks, and I made slightly more than $5000. In my second year (December 2010-November 2011) I sold an additional 12,245 copies of Maids of Misfortune and 943 copies of my second book, Uneasy Read more…
Managing Expectations: Patience and Perspective in Indie Publishing
The last few weeks, because I have not been able to maintain the terrific sales numbers I achieved over the Christmas holidays for my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I have noticed a growing sense of disappointment. In addition, two of my friends who have recently self-published books, encouraged to do so by my solid sales, have sold very few of their books. Naturally I feel partly responsible for their frustration. Finally, the author facebook site I started last month only has 74 “likes,” most of them other authors who “liked” my site in exchange for me “liking” their sites, instead of the fans of the book I hoped to attract. I confess these three things were beginning to undermine my generally enthusiastic state of mind towards self-publishing. A few days ago, however, I experienced an interesting “attitude adjustment.”
Numbers, Numbers, Numbers: To an Indie Author, what do they mean?
9,093; 2.99; 2,049; 99; 15,570; 440; 7135; 4,882, 10,281; 1517; 94; 54; 18; 89; 229; 28; 18; 5; 10.264; 539; 20,505; 1577 For a writer, supposedly dominated by my right-brain, I seem to have become obsessed with a left-brained fixation on numbers. On reflection, I think this obsession with numbers may be related to the important role marketing (or selling-depending on how you define it) plays for me as an indie author. L. J. Sellers had an interesting blog post on Publetariat the other day, where she argued that one of the reasons that self-published authors seemed more motivated to get out there and sell their books than traditionally published authors is because the “…steady income and the sales data provide a great incentive to spend time everyday blogging, tweeting, posting comments, and writing press releases.” I tend to agree. Read more…
Thanks for all the nice support
Hi, I wanted to thank everyone who has commented on my blog in response to the last few posts I have made. I felt sort of odd about mentioning my sales so frequently, but everyone has taken this information in the spirit in which it was offered, as information for and encouragement to those authors who are taking the indie route to publish. I love to think of all of you as a growing and supportive community, and I have enjoyed checking out your websites and blogs in return. I would answer you all separately, but I am really trying to be good about carving out more time to write (something you all are familiar with), so I thought I would just try to give a general shout out. However, if you ever have a specific question, do feel free Read more…
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