It’s a good thing Amazon had a bunch of good albums on the $5 rack this month, or I’d be downright homicidal by now. Work sucks right now, but it’s just standard beginning of year evaluation/budget crap that everybody goes through. And I’m down a person because he and the company parted ways last week, so now I begin the hiring process all over again. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been interviewing people constantly for the past two years. But these are the perils of middle management, and since I take the check, I have to take the crap.
On the “take the check” front, January will wrap up as the best sales month to date for my books. As of this morning, I’ve sold the following –
Amazon –
Hard Day’s Knight – 27
Red Dirt Boy – 1
The Chosen – 17
Barnes & Noble (I don’t really believe these figures since they show zero sales since the 15th, but I suppose it’s possible. There have been issues with the BN reporting software).
Hard Day’s Knight – 6
The Chosen – 3
Smashwords- (a couple of these are freebies that I gave to reviewers)
Hard Day’s Knight – 3
The Chosen – 2
I’m not going to get rich on those kind of sales by any stretch, but this shows a 50% increase in sales on Amazon, my primary sales channel, since last month. So let’s extrapolate that a few months and see what it looks like.
January – 45 books – $90
February – 65 books – $130
March – 95 books – $190
April – 190 books – $380
So if I continue on this growth pattern, I might actually be making some significant money by late spring/early summer. Add to that the release of my next book in March, and I’m pretty optimistic about being able to pay for a couple of Vegas trips this year off of selling books, and that would be nice.
A lot of successful indie authors are reporting a point where the switch just flipped and they went from selling a couple dozen books a month to hundreds of books a month seemingly overnight. I’d love to see that happen, but if it doesn’t, it’s no big deal. I’ve written the books, and I’ll keep writing the books. I have faith that if I write to the best of my ability, that the market will find me eventually and my books will sell.
It’s kinda like when I started blogging – create good content and people will eventually find you. So I’m going to write good books, and trust in the marketplace to find me. Of course I’ll still do whatever promotion I can afford, but most of what I’m going to do is write.
Which reminds me, I have to crank out a short story tonight to replace the one I tore into electrons in a fit of frustration last night. I knew where it was going, it was clever, witty and going in exactly the direction I had planned for it. And it was boring as hell. I couldn’t come up with a way to show more than I was telling, so I trashed it. I might go back to it later, but now that I’m on deadline I need to shift gears and knock this bad boy out tonight or tomorrow. I came up with a new plan while I was driving to Atlanta yesterday, so I should be able to jam out 5K words in a night or two.
Alright, enough ramble – go buy a book, my cat needs fed!
Self-satisfaction is more important about the cheddar, but you already know about that already. The biggest pay day is when you finish the manuscript. Alas, any money helps.
Fingers crossed for a breakout year for ya!