As the year progresses with no new books to show for it, the sales get weaker and weaker, so I probably shouldn't expect much. You need to be constantly putting forth new material.
Anyway, I said I'd share the results of the latest sale, so here we are.
First, an update on last month's OUAD sale. It finally made enough money to pay for the ad I placed. And with page reads still coming in, I'm ahead a little.
Now, the SCIU sale. It ran from the 10th through the night of the 16th. Dying Embers was 99c, Fertile Ground and Early Grave were $1.99. I placed an ad with Bargain Booksy that ran on the 12th for DE ($55).
As of this morning, I sold just under 36 copies of DE, 5 copies of FG and 5 copies of EG. I'm still seeing page reads, but the hope of actually paying off the ad is slim. Which kind of blows but like I said, not unexpected.
Overall, I'm still ahead on ad revenue, showing a 8.91% profit. $271 spent on ads. $297.50 earned off ads. That'll change a little as the month progresses and page reads continue to come in, but not in any major way.
I didn't keep track of rankings this time. At one point, DE made it into the 300s in its genre specification and into the teen-thousands in overall books. Not quite enough to effect sales greatly.
Prior to the ad, I had no sales this time around. I fell down on the job of pushing on FB. That may account for lower sales from the ad because the rankings of all three books were so poor when the ad came out. I made a pretty, new graphic that seemed to get a lot of Likes on FB, but didn't really equate to more sales.
Could be that because one of my pre-ad push days was Sept 11th the pre-sales fell apart. It wasn't really a great day for book buying or looking at ads. But when I set my sale dates, it wasn't even on my radar. My mistake.
Anyway, live and learn.
Not sure what lies ahead for marketing this year. I have sales penciled in for October, November, and December. Whether I'll be able to advertise remains to be seen. Gotta make money to spend money to make money... Ad infinitum.
As for overall sales for the year, I just passed the 400 books/$400 mark. Not sure if I'll pass last year at this rate, but I've already passed 2017, so this won't be my worst year ever. That's gotta count for something.
And that's it. Any questions?
My sales have picked up slightly since taking the Nightrider series off KU. While sales from other stores aren't huge, there have been some and I've sold enough on Amazon to cover the revenue loss in page reads.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah. All the stuff I picked up at RWA Nationals pointed to being prolific. I need to get on that. No excuses. I may never make a list but at least with new stuff hitting the "chart", there's a chance for new readers discovering my back list.
Glad you're making upward progress on sales!