Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge

I have been keeping track of my sales on Amazon through the month. You could almost say I was obsessive about it, clicking on that damned refresh button several times an hour every night. I even made a little spreadsheet to track domestic and overseas sales for each month, as well as how each individual book is doing and how many I have given away. The numbers are looking very good. Including giveaways, which account for over ten thousand ebooks, I have put over sixteen thousand copies into the hands of my readers. The Deep Dark Well leads the pack of the freebies, with over four thousand given away, and it has still sold over twelve hundred copies since the promotion. I am hoping that will pay big dividends when I release To Well and Back, the sequel, sometime in January. Some I gave a lot away, like over two thousand of The Hunger and almost as many of The Shadows of the Universe, for mediocre results. Shadows has at least sold a couple of hundred since its promotion, but The Hunger hasn’t even made it to the twenty book mark. The big surprise was Exodus: Empires at War: Book 1, which has sold over two thousand copies with no promotion, and the sequel is about to crack the one thousand mark any day now, after having been out less than two weeks. But I have a feeling that the promotions of the other scifi books really helped Exodus. For a while there I was wondering about Exodus, which was jumping off the digital shelves with very few reviews and only one like. And those reviews were one 5 star, one 3 star, and one 1 star, not exactly stellar. Now it is up to 15 reviews, but still only one like, and the reviews have all been 5 and 4 star. Still, that one like makes me wonder if that even has a bearing on how well a book is doing, since two thousand have sold and the sequel looks to do just as well. To date, across all my books, I have gotten 54 reviews, 32 5 star, 16 4 star, 2 3 star, 3 2 star and 1 1 star. That’s an average of 4.39, and no book falls below a 4.0 average. This lets me know that I am doing well, that not everyone likes my books, but probably the majority of the readers find them acceptable material for their enjoyment.
The great thing about the digital bookshelf is that the books can stay there forever, waiting for their chance to take off. Unlike the brick and mortar stores, where a book must do well right out of the gate or get pulled, they can sit and wait for discovery, and if enough people make that discovery, or just the right person, like a big time book blogger or a top reviewer, they can take off. The Deep Dark Well spent 8 months on the digital bookshelves of Amazon and Smashwords and sold about twenty copies. Then I switched it to KDP Select, ran a promotion, and it caught the attention of enough readers to make it and several other books popular. In a traditional bookstore it would have been sent back to the publisher, or at least the cover would have. I have other books that really aren’t doing much, despite large giveaways. Part of that is probably due to their not being many reviews returned. I think these books are just as good as the ones doing well. They might be different enough that the readers of the popular books wouldn’t like them, but I do believe they will someday find an audience. I have started to ask for reviews on the last page of all my ebooks. How has that gone? I really don’t know, but it can’t hurt. At least from the reviews I have been getting I can be fairly confident that I might just make it at this writing thing. Coming soon will be a Newsletter, then the thoughts of quitting the day job may become reality, and I can spend each work day doing what I really want to do.