My first novel, Vacancy has been on Amazon for a month now. It has been a month of trial and error mixed with some disappointment. We all hear stories about how Amazon sells a bazillion books, and how ebooks are all the rage and selling in the bazillions too. So, a newbie author I thought that putting your book on Amazon would reap instant sales with their worldwide reach, and I would soon be using my royalties to go on vacation in some sunny south destination. Not so much.
Vacancy is available for $8.99 for paperback and $2.99 for kindle ebook version - reasonable prices I think. In the last month, according to Amazon sales reports, I have sold 1 paperback (to family/friend), and 6 kindle versions. The interesting thing is that the first couple days as a tester, I had the kindle version at .99. I sold 5 copies in 5 days, then upped the price to $2.99. Since changing the price to $2.99 I have sold only 1 kindle copy in May. All of the kindle purchases are from "strangers" aka people around the world I don't know - which is good.
It's not like I haven't done anything to promote Vacancy. I have promoted many times on my own facebook page which has only family and friends (but I don't want to bombard them with pleas to buy my book), I posted on my highschool alumni facebook page. I started a facebook page just for Vacancy that only has readers and writers, and I have a twitter account just for my book with followers who are mostly readers and writers. And of course I created this website/blog. I have tried various strategies to entice people to at least go to the Vacancy Amazon page - not just hitting them on the head saying "buy my book". I have sent out a few hundred tweets and had many retweets from other authors.
Once you are in the game, you realize that there are hundreds, thousands of books on Amazon for kindle and many of them are .99 and even free!!! This is a learning process, and I will keep on trucking, learning new things everyday.
Someone said book profits "are a marathon not sprint" - this helps to keep things in perspective.
Thanks for reading my first blog. In the next one I will go over some of the "marketing" techniques I have used on Twitter and facebook and their results -what worked (not much) and what did not work (which is also useful to know)
Vacancy is available for $8.99 for paperback and $2.99 for kindle ebook version - reasonable prices I think. In the last month, according to Amazon sales reports, I have sold 1 paperback (to family/friend), and 6 kindle versions. The interesting thing is that the first couple days as a tester, I had the kindle version at .99. I sold 5 copies in 5 days, then upped the price to $2.99. Since changing the price to $2.99 I have sold only 1 kindle copy in May. All of the kindle purchases are from "strangers" aka people around the world I don't know - which is good.
It's not like I haven't done anything to promote Vacancy. I have promoted many times on my own facebook page which has only family and friends (but I don't want to bombard them with pleas to buy my book), I posted on my highschool alumni facebook page. I started a facebook page just for Vacancy that only has readers and writers, and I have a twitter account just for my book with followers who are mostly readers and writers. And of course I created this website/blog. I have tried various strategies to entice people to at least go to the Vacancy Amazon page - not just hitting them on the head saying "buy my book". I have sent out a few hundred tweets and had many retweets from other authors.
Once you are in the game, you realize that there are hundreds, thousands of books on Amazon for kindle and many of them are .99 and even free!!! This is a learning process, and I will keep on trucking, learning new things everyday.
Someone said book profits "are a marathon not sprint" - this helps to keep things in perspective.
Thanks for reading my first blog. In the next one I will go over some of the "marketing" techniques I have used on Twitter and facebook and their results -what worked (not much) and what did not work (which is also useful to know)