While I’ve been working hard on my two works-in-progress, my second novel In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People and my non-fiction political book The Candy Store Generation, I have neglected many things. Family finances are behind. Accounting for my writing business and Lynda’s stock trading business are behind. Clean-up of papers around the house is behind.

Part of this is I’m not doing any marketing for my published books. Save for the occasional blog post into which I insert a link to one of them, or for the similar post on Facebook, I’m not doing anything to sell books.

So naturally I anticipate my sales will languish. The chart I insert here shows how my sales have been so far, since I began e-self-publishing in January 2011.

The chart shows book sales continuing, but the average graph shows no increase in sales for a few months. In fact, my sales per month in 2012 are:

• January – 8
• February – 4
• March – 4
• April – 3
• May (through 22nd) – 5

That’s 24 sales for the year. Not terribly impressive, is it? Four titles available, three of them since January, and only 24 sales.

To put this in perspective, however, by this time last year I had 7 sales. That was for only four months of actually having books actively listed, and only one book (a short story) for the first three of those months. But still, 24 books vs. 7 books. While I’m not cracking the bestseller lists, clearly something is going right.

Put in this perspective, I have more hope for going on. By August I hope to have eight or nine titles for sale. That’s not really a stretch. I could do it by July if I put my mind to it, but August seems quite firm. If the new items sell at the same rate as the old items (1.2 sales per title per month), I would end up the year selling around 90 books. I’m still not writing home about that.

But everyone who has been in the e-self-publishing industry says that your sales per title per month goes up as you publish more. Sales of one book will help promote sales of another. This is assuming your book don’t absolutely stink. For whatever faults my books have I don’t think they absolutely stink.

Will the bump from having more titles available result in a bump in average sales per title per month? I’m hoping so. Meanwhile, with my third sale this month yesterday of “Mom’s Letter”, now making 11 of that title this year and 20 overall, I’m on a roll.