‘Tis the season…for book sales. People buy them for other people, and they buy them for themselves. As a writer trying to earn a little money from his sales, I’d like to be able to tap into some of this.

Last year I didn’t really see a spike in sales in December. They were the same then as in November 2012, both below monthly sale average. I’d seen an increase in December 2011 over the rest of 2011, but not so in December.

But it’s now 2013. Book sales have been abysmal in general. I have more titles available but have sold fewer books than in 2012, many fewer. In fact, so far none of my titles has sold in double digits for 2013. Reality has set in; I’m not a best seller, not even on a trend to become one.

But today gave me a little good news. One of the first things I do when I get to work is check to see if I had any book sales overnight. Since I’m selling an average of less than 5 per month in 2013, obviously I almost never see such a sale. This morning, as always, there wasn’t any. Mid-day I snuck another look at sales—still none. When I check sales like this I generally look at sales in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia, these being the main English speaking countries that Amazon sells in. In the morning I also look for sales at Smashwords and paperback sales through Amazon, which is on a different reporting page.

Then I checked in mid-afternoon. Lo and behold I had a sale! In the USA, of Documenting America, the first one (not the homeschool edition). After a silent yahoo, I did what I always do after a sale at Kindle: I checked every country that Amazon sells in. This requires two clicks to get to each country, so I seldom do that more than once a day. And to my surprise I had a sale of “The Learning Curve” in Italy.

“The Learning Curve” has not been translated into Italian. It’s an English language book that sold in Italy. My first sale in Italy, and my first sale of “The Learning Curve”. That brings me up to three sales in December. That’s already one more than November, though only half of October and and well below my long-term average of 7.5 per month.

I realize these aren’t good sales numbers. I could say “Sales have increased 50 percent month over month, and it’s only the 11th.” That would be true, but misleading. Having 13 books for sale and selling less than eight per month is, as I said before, abysmal. But as a self-published writer, I have to take hold of any good news and ride it for as long as I can. That’s where I’m at right now.

At work today I did some file maintenance on A Harmony of the Gospels, typed some manuscript in The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 2, and advertised The Gutter Chronicles to a new employee. At home tonight I mainly worked on typing edits in the Carlyle encyclopedia articles book. I think I did about 19 pages of edits. This is tedious business. A few edits on each page resulting from optical scanning errors, about half of which must be checked against the original book that was scanned. I should do it on the computer in The Dungeon, with the dual monitors, rather than the laptop. But this gives me a chance to be next to Lynda as I’m working, so for now I’m doing it here.

The struggle continues, and the end is not yet.