Category Archives: self-publishing
July 2013 Sales
Here’s the book sales story for July 2013. Eight sales total. Seven of those were e-books and one a print book. That’s of six different titles. So that’s down from my 20 sales in June, but otherwise is way ahead of what I sold in February through May, and just behind the nine in January. Still not even thinking about bestseller lists.
I added one book in July: “Charley Delta Delta”, a short story. I’ll past in two sizes of my sales table, one easy to read and a smaller one of the size I have to use at my self-publishing diary at Absolute Write.
June 2013 Sales
As slow as February through May were for sales, and with two new titles appearing in June, I was really hoping for sales to pick up. And they did. I sold a total of 20 books in June. While that’s not exactly bestseller status, it’s enough to give me an upbeat outlook. Here’s my sales table.
So that’s seven different titles selling. I was surprised when Barnes & Noble reported through June 27 to see three sales of Operation Lotus Sunday s0ld on June 25, which was the first day it appeared in their catalog. I was also surprise and please to see a few sales of The Gutter Chronicles, which has sat without sales for some time. Even had a review of it posted.
For linking at a writers’ site I’m on, I’m pasting in a smaller copy of the sales table.
The Amazon Love-Hate Affair
I’m wondering if my writing website has been hacked. I can’t login to the admin page. Lately I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments, somehow getting past the captcha code, and have been deleting them all. I’ll see when I get home tonight and try logging in with a different browser. For now I’ll type the post I was going to make in another medium and hope I can paste it in later.
The on-line writing community is having a huge debate right now about an op-ed piece in the NY Times by author Scott Turow. Scott is also president of the author’s guild. The gist of his piece, which is titled “The Slow Death of the American Author” is that the Internet and yahoo and pirates, all facilitated by technology is killing the American author, and the government better do something about it. It seems every author/publisher/agent/editor with a blog is writing about it (me included now). Here’s a link to Turow’s piece.
On the one end of the spectrum, Turow (whom I’ve never read) is being hailed as a hero. Yes, piracy will kill the American author. Amazon will kill Barnes & Noble and with it the big six (now five) American publishers, which will kill the American author. Technology enables Amazon, so technology will kill the American author. To these people, Amazon is the biggest evil to hit the world since the slave trade.
On the other end of the spectrum are the Amazon lovers. Amazon can do no wrong. They may be a monopoly, but that’s because they were the ones who saw the market need and created the business model to serve it. No one else is restricted from entering. Indeed, Amazon’s share of the e-book market has shrunk from 90 percent to something below 70 percent. They have empowered the self-published author and done much to attract and keep them. If they put Barnes and Noble or the big publishers out of business, so what? Let them go the way of the buggy whip manufacturers. Those companies had adequate time to develop business models that would have embraced technology and taken market share from Amazon.
So it really seems we have an Amazon divide in the country. Love it or hate it. This is just within the writing/publishing community, and maybe not even all of that. Maybe it’s just the blogging world I take part in that’s all up in arms over this. Perhaps the writing/publishing community at large doesn’t even know this is going on. Perhaps they are all blissfully about their writing and publishing tasks and not worrying whether they’ll be dead soon from a painful and slow death.
I haven’t seen many balanced approaches to this. Kristen Lamb did one, I think, here. The comments are quite interesting.
So long as readers seek material to read, publishers and writers will have work. I probably need to quit reading those blogs and just concentrate on writing, editing, and publishing. Off now to take my own advice.
March 2013 Sales
March was just as dismal as February in terms of sales. I don’t know that I officially posted February’s sales. I sold two whole books in February. In March I again sold two books. That actually made March more dismal than February, since it had three more days in it. That gives me 13 sales for the year, which is three less than I had at this time last year with only three publications out instead of nine.
Here’s my sales table. I’m not going to post a graph. Interestingly those two sales were of my first two self-published works.
So, I guess I need to re-think going with the Dean Wesley Smith strategy of ignoring promotion and putting all my effort into adding new titles. It seems I can’t get my new titles out fast enough to keep the interest of readers. That, plus my Genre Identity Disorder, seem to be working against sales.
But I don’t really like promotion, so for now I’ll keep writing and trying to bring new works to the market. China Tour is probably two months away at the rate I’m editing (which is very slow). I have nothing else in the works, though I’m thinking of taking some items I’ve written for work and turning them into generic professional engineering publications and putting them out there. It won’t help much with those who have bought my other works, but maybe it will bring in a few sales.
And, adding a smaller version of the table to upload to Absolute Write.
No Sale
It’s been a long dry spell without a sale. My last one was February 13. So right now it’s 41 days without a sale. This has been a difficult time. A large part of the prevailing wisdom about promoting your published works is to not promote them. Rather, write more things and get them up for sale.
That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing—not promoting, that is. About once a month, on the self-promotion days of a couple of Facebook writer groups I’m in, I promote something. On even rarer occasions I post a reminder on my Facebook that I have books for sale. I did that last night.
On of the things Amazon has, something that’s still in beta mode, is an author ranking. As of last night I was #343,269. That means 343,268 authors within the Amazon system are more popular than I am. Here’s a graph of my ranking.
Sobering, isn’t it? You can see from this graph how, at these lower levels, a single book sale can propel you upward by a couple of hundred thousand places. That tells me that somewhere between 100,000 to 150,000 authors will have a sale at Amazon on any given day. By the way, the big, one-day drop I circled on the chart was Thanksgiving Day. Amazon seemed to have a glitch in their system, and that does not look like a valid ranking. That one day excepted, I’m at my lowest ranking since Amazon instituted the system.
I suppose the sales will come. At other places at Amazon’s Author Central site they say they are having to reconstruct some things, and that sales haven’t posted since maybe February 1. However, my stats show at least two sales after that, so I don’t think I can hope that a bunch of sales are happening and they just aren’t posting.
We’ll see what happens. I’m at least a month away from publishing China Tour, with nothing in between them. I have a couple of professional essays I could put up fairly quickly, and they wouldn’t need fancy covers, so I could do them myself. But would even that small amount of work divert me from my creative writing and delay my overall progress? It’s a decision I need to make over the next few days.
Errors in Self-Published Books
This will be a short post. The universal complaint about self-published books is that they are poorly edited. They need a content editor, line editor, and proof-reader. In my book The Candy Store Generation a fried read it after publishing and found four or five errors (in 196 pages). At some point I’ll fix those and re-publish.
Today I was looking at Doctor Luke’s Assistant on Amazon, specifically at the “Customers who bought this book also bought…” section. I clicked on one of those. I won’t say what the book was. It has 13 reviews to my 12 for DLA, but a significantly lower rating mix. As I usually do I checked the lower ratings, and they contained the “lots of errors” complaint. Sine the book has a “Look Inside” feature, I went inside. The book opens like this:
On the 29th of Sivan, in the year 2449, between the Wilderness of Paran and the Wilderness of Tzin, west of Egypt and south of Canaan, in a remote desert location known as Kadesh-Barnea or Ein-Mishpat, there were fourteen hours, four minutes and forty seconds of light in a day.
I stopped there. Kadesh-Barnea is on the Sinai Peninsula, the first watering hole south of Israel/Canaan and EAST of Egypt, not WEST.
A minor detail, perhaps, but important enough that someone who knows a smidgen of geography will be turned off and not buy the book. I’d like to contact the author and advise him to fix it, but not sure that I should.
I hope I hope I hope that, in my books, I haven’t mixed up east and west anywhere.
2013 Publishing Goals
My time off from writing during Christmas and New Year’s travels was extended by the flu. Finally the last three days I’ve felt like doing something. I read about 50 pages in China Tour, doing light edits. I should finish it tonight and get the edits typed not later than Saturday morning.
Then it’s send it off to a beta reader and get back to writing. My goal for the weekend is to add 6,000 words. If I manage to do that, I’ll be at 44,000+ words, on the way to…? I’m still not sure how long the book is, but if I get the 6,000 words added I think I’ll be at a point where I’ll have a handle on the length.
One things I haven’t spent much time on is my goals for 2013. Last year I decided to establish a publishing schedule rather than writing goals. It seems more definite, more intentional. I wasn’t writing to write. I was writing to publish. I intend to do the same thing in 2013.
Except, I haven’t spent enough time so far considering what I can actually accomplish. So for right now it’s publishing goals. I hope, before January ends, to do the necessary work to establish a publishing schedule.
Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.
- Publish China Tour
- Publish one other novel, either Headshots or Preserve The Revelation
- Publish two short stories. One will be in my teen grief series, and probably be titled “Kicking Stones”. The other will likely be in the Sharon Williams CIA agent series (if the inspiration comes), currently untitled.
- Publish one non-fiction book, almost certainly Documenting America: Civil War Edition.
- Publish two professional essays in the engineering field. These are actually written. I would only need to tweak them for a somewhat broader audience and figure out how to do covers, or bite the bullet and pay for them.
So there it is. Stay tuned for further updates.
2012 Book Sales Table
December 2012 Book Sales
Forgive my absence, please. After trips to Chicago and Oklahoma City during Christmas and New Year’s, I came home sick, possibly picked up from sick grandchildren in OKC. After fighting it for several days at home, I went to the doc and learned it was flu. So I’m on antibiotics and strong cough medicine. Finally today I was well enough to go to work. The good news is I’ve lost 12 pounds through all of this. Now if I can just keep it off and lose 30 or 40 more in 2013.
I compiled my December book sales today, once I had access to the spreadsheet on my computer at work. Here’s the totals and the graph.
- “Mom’s Letter” – 1
- Documenting America – Homeschool Edition – 1
- In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People – 1
- “Whiskey, Zebra, Tango” – 3
In short, my sales have flatlined for the last five months (8, 12, 8, 7, 7) after the bump that Doctor Luke’s Assistant gave them in June and July.
I’m working on a table of book sales for the year, and will provide that in another post, either today or tomorrow.