I’m trying to figure out what’s going on at Smashwords. This is the site where I publish my books to for distribution on to Barne & Noble, Kobo, Apple, etc. I have 15 of my 16 books there. Smashwords doesn’t allow publishing of public domain books, so I can’t put my Thomas Carlyle book there. If I want it for Nook, etc. I’ll have to go to the individual site.
One of the things Smashwords does that Amazon doesn’t do is track the number of times your book is sampled at the Smashwords sale site. Samples aren’t sales, of course, but samples are evidence of interest. I would hope that more sample downloads would eventually result in more sales.
I began tracking my sample downloads in April. Monday morning, around 7:30 a.m. my time, I record, in a spreadsheet, how many times each book has been sampled. I have the spreadsheet calculate the change from the week before, and track this change as well as the total downloads. On April 2 (a Wednesday; then I standardized on Mondays), my books had been sampled 722 times. Since then, here are the samples week by week.
- April 2 – 722
- April 7 – 726, so 4 downloads
- April 14 – 738, so 12 downloads
- April 21 – 741, so 3 downloads
- April 28 – 745, so 4 downloads
- May 5 – 761, so 16 downloads
- May 12 – 783, so 22 downloads
- May 19 – 786, so 3 downloads
- May 26 – 787, so 1 download
- June 2 – 792, so 5 downloads
- June 9 – 804, so 12 downloads (new short story added)
- June 16 – 819, so 15 downloads
- June 23 – 842, so 23 downloads
- June 30 – 878, so 36 downloads (new short story added)
- July 6 – 896, so 18 downloads
- July 13 – 906, so 10 downloads
- July 20 – 927, so 21 downloads
As you can see, the trend is generally upwards, helped out quite a lot when I published those two new short stories in June. Now, if I add this week, as of today, which is almost three days short of a full week, I have:
- July 25 – 977, so 50 downloads
Wow! That’s a big increase from my previous high week, long before the week is over, and with no new book to stimulate downloads. If downloads continue proportionately for the rest of the seven days, I should have 60 or more by Monday morning.
What can I attribute this increase to? Could it possibly be a summer thing? People are looking for a summer read, and so are downloading more samples, trying to figure out what to buy? Is it a volume thing? I’m up to 15 items available on Smashwords. People who see my page think “Oh, this is a serious author; let me sample some of his stuff.” Is it just the law of averages? Some weeks you’re over average, some below, some right on average, and occasionally way over average?
Obviously I don’t know. I may never know. So far this hasn’t translated to higher sales on Smashwords or any of the places it distributes to. I think, however, that more downloads has to be good news. That means more interest, more exposure. Someday the sales will come.