Saturday, October 1, 2011

September Sales for Cancelled

I am very proud of my release month! My original goal, way back when, was to sell 50 copies, releasing the beginning of the month. I didn't release CANCELLED until September 14, so I only had 16 days, not 30. I sold a total of 28 copies!!! Extrapolating that rate out, it was roughly 1.75 books on average per day, and if I had had 30 days, multiplied by 1.75, that would have been 52.5 books!

Here is what my sales looked like:



















By platform, I sold:
Amazon: 21
B&N: 3 (my Barnes & Noble listing was down for most than a week!)
Smashwords: 4














I don't know if Amazon will remain 80% of my sales or not. I did have two appearances on others' blogs: @J_A_Bennett on 9/22 and my first review, yesterday, 9/30 on @SusiBorath blog. I am learning that you can't really tell direct sales from a blog appearance because I know a few people saw the review on Susi's blog and just downloaded my sample. It will be days, possibly weeks, maybe months before they remember "Oh yeah, I liked that" and buy it, or "Ugh, this didn't grab me" and archive it.

On royalties. My book is priced at $2.99 for a few reasons. Financially, I need this book to produce income as quickly as possible so that I can pay for the production costs of Book 2. At 250 sales, this book "earns out." If I was at the $.99 price point, that would be 1500 sales. I also plan to run a few promotions where the price is lowered to $.99 for short periods of time. Finally, I don't have another book out. Once PAST DUE is out in February, I will re-evaluate the price point of CANCELLED depending on its total sales.

Between all three platforms, my royalties for the month of September will be somewhere around $55. I won't get this money until December/January. However, donating 10% to charity every month is very important to me. I already bought a $5 bag of food for my local food bank since Thanksgiving is right around the corner. I'm hoping in November to put together a promotion of ebook authors benefiting various charities, to help bring awareness to local charities and make November about giving back.

How did everyone else's September go?
A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby. CANCELLED is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords WIP: PAST DUE A nurse, crippled by debt, takes a part-time job in medical investigation only to find the man she's dating is a fraud!  (status: outlining)

7 comments:

  1. Congrats! Looks like you're off to a really fantastic start. :)

    Thanks for sharing the stats with us! I, for one, find it fascinating.

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  2. Congrats. We all want our sales charts to look like that. May they continue to climb...and climb!

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  3. Thanks Ava Jae! None of those sales would have been possible without me building a platform before I published. This blog helped keep people interested in me as I was writing, and I made friendships with other authors that helped me promote my launch. We cannot do this alone!

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  4. Thank you Anne! I am being a little sneaky. That chart isn't books sold per day, but total sales for the month, so it can't go down, just plateau. :) I did that on purpose to be an uplifting tool for me. I do have a graph that is books sold per day, but I don't think I will continue that. The 0 days are just too depressing.

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  5. Congratulations, and thank you very much for showing the rest of us how it's done! Your blog is fantastic, and your writing style is a BLAST!

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  6. Thanks Kate! Let me know if there's anything I can do to help you on your journey! And we're close by, I live over in CT! :) Finishing that manuscript is the first obstacle to overcome, and you just have to kick it's butt! You can do it!

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