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.
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Last week I was still flying high on the reviews I had received for The Deep Dark Well (8 Five Star and 2 Four Star). Also received three five star reviews for The Shadows of the Multiverse. Most of the reviews were detailed, and some let me know what fault the reader found with my work, despite the praise. That seems to be the thing about good reviews. They point to particulars in the story that they liked, as well as what didn’t work for them. Some things are easily correctable, typos, formatting, misspelling a character’s name half the time (which can happen with made up names). Some are not so easy, like changing a book from a multicharacter, multiviewpoint work to one with a single strong focus. I got one of those the other day, a three star which complimented me on my science and the descriptions of hyperspatial dimensions, but came down hard on the use of so many different characters in different scenes stretched across an Interstellar Empire. I knew that was a risk with that kind of story, but I have always loved Harry Turtledove, who makes a living with such works. Another review loved that approach, so it seemed to work for some people, which is all I can ask. The guy who left the three star later wrote a glowing, detailed five star for The Deep Dark Well, and also communicated with me on Amazon to let me know that he was reading The Shadows of the Multiverse and loving it.
Then I received a pair of two star reviews back to back on The Deep Dark Well, which was really ego deflating. The first review stated that the novel was not polished, and made a crack about self publishing, stating that the best reason to be published by traditional firms was that the writer received constructive criticism. And of course none of this constructive criticism was offered. I am still not sure what the reviewer meant by polished. Did he get an earlier version of the work before I learned how to format, and started more rigorous quality control procedures? Or did he mean the writing style itself was not “polished’. The second one was just as enlightening. The reviewing mentioned a few books by masters scifi writers and said that I was not there yet. Remarks were also made about poor writing, but nothing that gave me any useful information. The most painful remark was how the book might be a good story for young readers (children?) Then I received the five star review which talked about how intelligent and thought provoking The Deep Dark Well was, and how I treated the reader like he had some intelligence of his own. I guess what I came away with from this is most negative reviews, even though they hurt, are pretty much useless, except to tell you that they thought you sucked as a writer. While many good reviews actually tell the writer something about perceived strengths and weaknesses. I corresponded with a friend who is a best selling scifi author on Amazon, and he pretty much had the same assessment. And I guess that I have arrived as a writer when I am getting attacked in the minority of reviews.
Today is the last day of my free KDP Select Promotion of The Shadows of the Multiverse. It was not doing well through Sunday, and I had only given away a little less than five hundred books. Yesterday it picked up, and by this morning I had given away 2,500 of them, and this evening is sitting at 2,828, and was ranked #84 on Kindle Free Books for some of the afternoon. Just hope I will get some reviews out of them, and the book will pick up in sales in the coming month. I haven’t tracked the other books like this, but since I learned how to use Amazon Reports I will do so in the future. Are Mondays and Tuesdays really the best days for giveaways, and the weekends not worth anything? Or was it just a statistical blip. I was trained in graduate level statistics, and know better than to put much emphasis on a One N study, unlike the people I work for. I will track again on my next promotion in three weeks and see if there is a trend there, then report it to all of you out there.
