I’ve been chronicling my ebook sales since February of this year – in late January, I put up my entire Lawson backlist, have added some new Lawson adventures since then, and have been keeping track of sales – for other authors to have a glimpse at how I’m doing. I find great inspiration in reading about the success of folks like Joe Konrath and others, and while I’m nowhere near them in terms of sales numbers, I’m pretty damned happy with how things are going.
So, without further ado, here are the numbers for May as of 1PM EST on May 31st, 2011:
Total EBooks Sold for May: 3,068
This is down slightly from April sales, and I’ve made a few hundred dollars less than I made last month. But I’m still doing extremely well. And I’m thrilled with the sales.
As with the preceding months, the vast majority of my sales are coming from my Lawson Vampire series on Amazon. And while sales of THE FIXER (book 1 in the series) are down from last month, sales of the other installments in the series are actually up over last month. Looked at another way, last month I had four titles that sold triple digits. This month, I had seven titles that sold triple digits. And this bears out the thought that the more titles you have, the better it is. Why? With more titles, there’s less pressure on any one title to do the heavy lifting, so to speak. THE FIXER sold less, but other titles sold more, which makes up for the decrease in sales for book 1. In fact, once I reach a certain number of titles selling at the $2.99 price point, each title will have to sell very few copies (comparatively speaking) in order to maintain and even grow my monthly income.
That’s pretty cool.
On the Barnes & Noble front, sales stayed about even with last month. I know some folks who sell better on B&N than Amazon, but at least 90% of my sales come directly from Amazon US. I’d love to see my B&N Nook sales match my Amazon sales (wouldn’t that be nice!) so I’ll be devoting some time to trying to figure out how to do that.
Additionally, my sales on Amazon UK are frankly disappointing. And sales on Amazon Germany are nonexistent for the month. Not one ebook sold there, despite my attempts to market to German Kindle users. I have heard, however, that German publishers are pushing back hard against the “encroachment” of ebooks and that the European market (minus the UK) might be up to 2 years behind the US market in ebook consumption. No idea if this is fact, but it is being bandied about online.
For June, I’ll be launching two new Lawson adventures – one a novella, THE SHEPHERD, and one a short story, OATHBREAKER. I’ll also have PREY out before too lone, although that is a SF/horror title.
I continue to look for ways to maximize chances for finding new readers in this brave new world. And I’ll continue to update my experiences from those attempts. If you’ve got your own experiences you’d like to share, please leave a comment below or send me a message. A rising tide floats all boats, so if we, as authors, can help each other – all the better!
Thanks for reading! Feel free to share this around!