It’s been a busy week.  First, on Saturday I actually went past the 100,000 sales mark, mostly ebooks, but also some paperbacks and audiobooks.  That afternoon I signed a contract for my Exodus: Empires at War short story Goliath to appear in Volume Three of Kevin J Anderson’s Five By Five Military Anthology.  Did a blog post on Sunday about reaching that 100,000 book milestone, then a character interview with Cornelius Walborski on Monday as part of a blog tour.  Then finished this book yesterday and posted in on Amazon.  Add to that the blog post I will be sending to David Farland for his Kick In The Pants blog, and trying to close on a house (which is causing all kinds of problems) this had been a hectic week, made even more so by one of my cats getting an infection from an injury.  He’s a little jerk, but guess who gets to pay for his behavior?

So, about this book.  People ask me all the time about how I sell so many books.  This is at the same time when I am complaining to myself that I’m not selling enough.  I guess part of that drive to do more, get more, has led to my success.  When I started self-publishing, after over a decade of sending in manuscripts to garner rejection letters, I was really hoping to make enough money and sell enough books to get out of the financial hole I was in (over time) and gain the attention of some editors and publishers.  While that second part has worked out as I had wanted, the first part, getting out of the financial hole, has worked so well that I quit my day job in March of 2013.  And have never looked back.  But it did not start out so well.  I sold about sixty books in the first eight months I was self-published, making at most twenty or thirty dollars in a month.  I read every book I could about how to sell books on Amazon.  Most had a couple of techniques, some that seemed kind of flighty, like getting on the good side of readers with one blog post to gain their attention.  Some were pretty good.  I also read blogs.  I took all of the techniques and strategies and found the ones that worked for me.  Some didn’t, but I learned which they were and stopped putting effort there.  And here, in this book, is just about everything I have done to gain a positive net presence and sell lots of books.  I say just about, because there may be some things I did early on that I can no longer remember.  But everything of importance is in here, including hints on what not to do.  If you want to know what I did, get this book.

Now it’s on to completing the fourth book of the Refuge series (Doppleganger, though set in that world, does not count as a series book for most purposes).  After that will be a book title Exodus: Tales of the Empire: Supernova, which has nothing to do with the stellar explosion in Book 7, but which will introduce an alien race that will be very important to the war effort.   And asks the question, ‘while in the middle of a war of extinction, how many resources can you spare to save an alien species that is not even part of your society?’

So How I Sold 100,000 Books On Amazon is available.  If you want to know what I did, get the book.