I believe most people think authors make a lot of money. Alas, it’s exactly the opposite. Conventional wisdom within the author community is a self-published writer is above average if they sell 50 copies of a book.
When you get to my position, with over 40 items for sale (novels, non-fiction, short stories, essays), you hope the sales start to add up. But again alas, that hasn’t happened so far.
Amazon is an enigma. Several times in my 13 years of bookselling on their platform, I’ve seen sales start to increase. I get to the point where I think I may see a breakthrough, only to see them plummet after a few months of increasing sales. That’s happened three of four times over the years.
Now, I don’t want you to think that the ramping up period meant huge sales for a few months. I might have had sales go from 5 to 10 or even 15 per month, but then suddenly it dropped back to under 5. It’s frustrating. Since I started running ads on Amazon I’ve seen some increase, but not great.
The pattern seemed to repeat in 2023. After some decent sales—well, decent for me—the bottom dropped out in September and stayed down the next few months. Last December saw a slight uptick and I was hopeful, while at the same time waiting for Amazon to change their algorithms again, Let me give you sales per month for the last year.
Or, to see it another way, here’s a graph of my lifetime book sales. The current month, May 2024, is obviously not complete yet, but is off to a good start.
So it’s not a lot of sales, but the number is growing. The recent trend upward is encouraging. And unexplained. Did Amazon change their algorithm in a way that’s favorable to me? Did they suddenly start showing my ads to people more likely to buy? Or have I reached some point of combination of past sales, ranking, and total items for sale that sales have become self-sustaining? I wish I knew.
My Documenting America series continues to sell best. It makes me anxious to get on to the next one. But I think I’ll stay with the schedule I’ve made: finish the Bible study series, write the next The Forest Throne book, then see what’s next.