Charting Sales, Rankings, Marketing, etc.

This is going to be a boring post.  Unless you're a nerd like me. 

Okay, so I'm doing a sale this week for Accidental Death.  And I thought it would be a good time to try and track the advertising I'm doing along with sales and rankings. 

Yep, I built a spreadsheet.

On one tab, I'm noting when I did a markety thing - date and time, who it was with, and the results as I see them.  On another tab, I'm tracking rankings and how they fluctuate with time and sales.  On the third tab, I'm keeping track of the time of each sale.

This is not scientific.  There's no consistency with when I'm checking sales and rankings, so the times may be off depending on how busy I got doing something else. 

One thing I've learned so far is it takes about 8 hours from the time I get a sale until when it impacts my rankings in the US.  The UK rankings change after about 6-7 hours.  Not nearly quick enough to jump my ranking for boosting sales in the eight hour period, but further sales should help sustain it. 

And it doesn't take long for the rankings to start dropping again if there are no further sales. 

I had one sale Monday morning.  At the time, AD's ranking was around 943,000 in the US.  Eight hours later, the ranking rose to about 159,000.  It dropped throughout the day yesterday with no more sales in the US.  Yesterday, the ranking in the UK was around 920,000.  I got one sale early afternoon here (early evening there) that upped my ranking to 53K.

This morning, the rankings are at around 400K in the US and 81K in the UK. 

Now, I'm not sure how Kindle Unlimited downloads impact rankings and in what timeframe.  I read something the other day that made it seem like it would take 4 days to show up, but I think that might've been for some other bestselling list thing.  I'm unclear.  Fingers crossed I am getting some KU interest that will show up in later days.

Thus far, I have only been doing free advertising - blog, Facebook (groups and pages), and Twitter.  This blog netted me my first sale.  I have no way of knowing which post got me the UK sale, since I had completed three different types of advertising that day before the sale, and five different types the day before. 

Today, a paid ad goes out to the populace.  It's the only advertising I'm doing today, so I can chart it better.  Not sure if the Wednesday before TGD is the best time to put out an ad, but it was all they had open for this week, so I took a chance.  Might be a total waste of $55.  Might be awesome.  Who knows.  Thursday through Sunday I will continue with the free stuff and see what happens.

Poor planning on my part means the sale will end before Cyber Monday.  Derp.

I probably couldn't do this if Accidental Death was selling like hotcakes.  Not at this level anyway. 

Anyway, I hope I haven't bored the hell out of you with my nerdy numbers thing. 

Any questions?

Oh, and have a Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow.  (If you're here in the states.  If not, just have a happy day.)