Kindle-ing Interest in My Novel
Yes, this is a reprint of a column I published online in August 2009. And, yes, I can see the irony. I guess. At the time, this was how you got ebooks to readers. But things are changing, that’s for sure. Anyway, I’m republishing this because it establishes a record of my activities at the time. From a historical perspective, you’ll see what I did and ways I was mistaken, and why it seemed to make sense.
It all really started with Joe Konrath’s blog, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, [It has a new URL. Under his own domain, which is always for the best.] in which he discussed selling his backlisted and out-of-print books as e-books for Kindle. He even provided the link to click on to get started.
Well, I’m no Joe Konrath, but I knew one thing: my out-of-print novel, IDENTITY CRISIS, wasn’t going anywhere just sitting on my hard drive. So I decided to e-publish it.
I made the book available for download on Amazon’s Kindle. [Current affiliate link] Plus I also made it available through the Scribd Store [I had to search for that link] and Smashwords. [Still live and kicking ass!] I figured-what could it hurt? I’ll pick up a few bucks and a few more readers will get to know me. A win-win proposition for everyone all around.
IDENTITY CRISIS first became available as an e-book on June 2, [2009] by the way. I posted the news to all the lists I could think of, as well as Facebook, [That link surely is dead as a doornail], LinkedIn [I had to search for myself there] and Twitter. [Old reliable! 🙂 ] My first download was on June 8. (I was so thrilled!) And it picked up a few more sales over the course of a couple of weeks-maybe six or seven for Kindle alone.
Then, I saw from Lee Goldberg’s blog [Who was nice enough to leave a notice that his website/blog has moved since] that he was also publishing e-books and that he posted notices on various Kindle forums. Smart move, I thought. So I made an announcement on one Kindle form, and one mobile reader forum.
I expected to get a few more hits, but nothing like the response I got. Because when I checked my stats later that day, I’d accumulated 26 downloads. Many times more than I’d experienced in one day up until then.
I thought, “Oh my God.” So I kept track and the next day and my hit count continued to increase rather steadily. By June 21, I’d sold 59 e-books for Kindle alone. This is less than three weeks after I first put the book up for Kindle readers. And I am, after all, a complete unknown.
So, to say I was impressed with the results is putting it mildly. I continued to keep track (almost compulsively at that point) and watched my numbers grow, noting the number of sales per day now.
Between June 21 and the end of the month, I was selling anywhere from 1 to 6 downloads per day (or an average of 3.25 downloads per day). By July 1, I’d sold 85 e-books for Kindle.
Now, I know this isn’t exactly taking the publishing industry by storm. But for an unknown author, I thought I was doing pretty well. I continued to keep track of my numbers, noting that the daily download numbers slacked off a bit in July. It was inevitable, of course. The curve had to level off at some point. But I still got encouraging little spikes in sales, particularly on the weekend. (Saturday seems to be the day people buy e-books.)
Along with my Amazon sales, I’ve also made a few sales through Smashwords, as well as one through Scribd. As of July 10, the combined total of e-books sales on IDENTITY CRISIS reached 100. A little more than five weeks after it first appeared online.
Today is July 27 and as I send in this column, my total e-books sales have reached 170. Okay, still not earthshaking, however . . . all this has happened less than two months after I issued the book online. And when my book was in print, I made around 125 sales-many of which were the result of holding book signings and attending conferences over the course of about nine months. [This has to be a reference to the actual first edition of the book, which went out of print when that publisher went under.]
You don’t need a map to see where I’m going with this. If I, an unknown author, can sell 170 copies of my novel online in less than two months-as opposed to selling 125 in nine months, after investing time and expense into traveling to conferences and signings-what does this tell you about the power of e-publishing and online marketing? I’d say it works, wouldn’t you?
So if you’re a small business (and being a fiction author is running a small business, when you come down to it) and you’re not marketing online, I’d rethink my strategy if I were you.
And don’t forget-my sales numbers didn’t really start to rise until I’d posted notices about my book on various e-reader forums.
Can anyone say “targeted marketing”?
PS-I’d like to add for the benefit of all print book readers that IDENTITY CRISIS is back in print, [That links to my online bookstore, okay? I didn’t have that back then.] too. It’s gotten great reader reviews [Yep, still there!]-many of them 5-star raves-including several recent contributions from e-book readers. Right now, the print version is available only from the publisher, [I published through Lulu.com, at the time. That’s no longer true.] but it should be available through other retail outlets, such as Amazon, by early next month.
PPS: And little did I know what I’d gotten into! 🙂
Originally published at http://randomandsundrythings.wordpress.com on September 10, 2021.
