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)