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Over-Thinking Things As Usual
Dec. 6th, 2014 12:39 pmFor nearly a year now, when people have asked, "So how's the book doing?" (meaning the one that's published, not the ones I'm working on), my answer has been, "How the heck should I know? I haven't gotten my first royalty statement yet so all I have are Amazon sales numbers."
Well, so I've gotten my first royalty statement (covering Jan-Jun 2014) and you know what? I still have no idea how well my book is doing. I know how many copies have sold. I now have a rough translation of how Amazon numbers may correlate to overall sales numbers. (Amazon -- or rather, Bookscan -- hardcopy sales appear to account for about a third of total hardcopy sales. My rough estimation of Amazon Kindle sales appears to account for about a sixth of total e-book sales, although the intentional delay in making e-books available through Amazon means that at-release e-book sales may skew more strongly toward the publisher than in later terms.) I know roughly how my e-book sales correlate with hard copy sales (pretty close to equal).
But what I still don't know is whether Daughter of Mystery is selling as well as it ought to: as well as other similar books from similar publishers are, as well as it could if I were just doing all the right things for publicity (except that nobody knows what they are). I don't know whether it's selling well enough to make my publisher happy -- happy enough to keep going with the series. I know my numbers are laughable compared to books from a major publisher. I know my numbers look sad compared to someone selling $0.99 e-book erotica on Kindle Direct. On the other hand, you look at analyses like this one at Yahoo Answers and -- making a rough extrapolation for the rest of the first year based on Amazon numbers -- and maybe I'm not doing too badly after all. And the more you poke around online to find people talking about "typical book sales" the more you realize nobody except those at the very top of the bestseller lists has a real clue "how the book is doing".
So when people ask me "How's the book doing?" maybe I should stick to talking about the ones I'm in the process of writing. At this point, you readers have far more input into how my published work is doing than I do.
Well, so I've gotten my first royalty statement (covering Jan-Jun 2014) and you know what? I still have no idea how well my book is doing. I know how many copies have sold. I now have a rough translation of how Amazon numbers may correlate to overall sales numbers. (Amazon -- or rather, Bookscan -- hardcopy sales appear to account for about a third of total hardcopy sales. My rough estimation of Amazon Kindle sales appears to account for about a sixth of total e-book sales, although the intentional delay in making e-books available through Amazon means that at-release e-book sales may skew more strongly toward the publisher than in later terms.) I know roughly how my e-book sales correlate with hard copy sales (pretty close to equal).
But what I still don't know is whether Daughter of Mystery is selling as well as it ought to: as well as other similar books from similar publishers are, as well as it could if I were just doing all the right things for publicity (except that nobody knows what they are). I don't know whether it's selling well enough to make my publisher happy -- happy enough to keep going with the series. I know my numbers are laughable compared to books from a major publisher. I know my numbers look sad compared to someone selling $0.99 e-book erotica on Kindle Direct. On the other hand, you look at analyses like this one at Yahoo Answers and -- making a rough extrapolation for the rest of the first year based on Amazon numbers -- and maybe I'm not doing too badly after all. And the more you poke around online to find people talking about "typical book sales" the more you realize nobody except those at the very top of the bestseller lists has a real clue "how the book is doing".
So when people ask me "How's the book doing?" maybe I should stick to talking about the ones I'm in the process of writing. At this point, you readers have far more input into how my published work is doing than I do.
