Looking Back at 2017: Lessons from Launching Novel #3

Thursday, January 4, 2018
I'm not much of a math person--as my students who are constantly correcting my math errors on their tests and quizzes will tell you--but being an indie author has turned me into a person who crunches numbers. Each month, I sit down and tally up my book sales on the various platforms I use for distribution and keep detailed spreadsheets. Even when the numbers are a little depressing, it feels productive to keep track, and over the months, those sad little figures start to add up to something.

In 2017, when I launched my third novel, What She Inherits, I set sales goals for the first time ever. For my previous books, I was happy with (or sad because of) whatever happened, but I supposed I didn't feel it made sense to have an expectations. I was sending my books into the world, and that was that. But for my new book, I got the idea into my head that concrete measurable goals mattered, and I decided that my goals needed to be doable but ambitious. If they were too easy, they wouldn't really be goals, would they?

To that end, I made I decided that I would try to sell 365 books in 2017, one for every day of the year. Ambitious? Hell yes. I published my second novel in 2013, and I still haven't sold 365 copies of it. Nonetheless, I thought my goal was still doable. In one year, I sold 296 copies of my first novel. My new novel was a better book, and I knew more about marketing.

For much of the year, I was actually ahead of my goal, which was pretty darn exciting, but as the year wore on, and my enthusiasm for marketing my book, which might be a new release but which felt old me after years of working on it, decreased, my numbers started to drop off.

Here's how the year turned out:

What She Inherits: 278 paid purchases/downloads; 8458 free downloads
The Latecomers Fan Club: 4 paid purchases/downloads; 174 free downloads
Watch Me Disappear: 32 paid purchases/downloads; 54 free downloads

So at the end of 2017, I had sold 319 books.

I fell short of my goal, but I still had my best year ever as a self-publishing author. Here are some interesting things I've learned along the way:

1. Having a lot of legit, positive reviews before doing a free giveaway makes a huge difference. When I did my first free giveaway, my book went straight to the top of the free charts, and, thanks to that, I got a ton of paid audiobook downloads by people who qualified for a discounted audiobook after downloading the free ebook. Those audiobook purchases make up 83 of the 278 paid sales.

2. Watch Me Disappear had more sales this than in the past two years, and the reason is truly hilarious. A big bestseller novel in the women's fiction genre was releases this summer with the same title by an author named Janelle Brown. The book got press like crazy, and, funnily enough, my sales noticeably increased. I didn't sell a single ebook of Watch Me Disappear in 2016. I sold a bunch this year. So I guess titles matter... I'm not saying you should mimic a bestseller's title (the opposite is what happened to me), but hey, whatever works.

3. Winning awards doesn't equal book sales. The Latecomers Fan Club won the Indie Reader Discovery Award for Chick Lit in 2014. It has the worst sales of my three novels and the worst reader reviews. My guess as to the reason: a. It's too dark to really be chick lit. It's more accurately women's fiction, but maybe not quite serious enough for that genre. b. The cover sucks. It's my worst cover. I just don't quite know what to do with the cover, so I haven't bothered trying to change it. Meanwhile, What She Inherits has my best cover. It also has the best ratings of all my books, so no surprise that it's selling well.

4. Despite my initial reservations about enrolling in Kindle Select, it has actually paid off for me with What She Inherits. I have had more income from that book this year than from my other books combined in their entire lifespans thanks to readers borrowing the book through Kindle Select. In a slow month, it brings me an extra $15, but in a good month, it can be as much as $100, which may not be much, but it's more than nothing. My other books get very little traction on Kindle Select, and I will likely unenroll them when their current term expires.

To other self-publishers out there, I hope this information is helpful. If you want to learn more about getting reviews, check out some of my other posts and let me know what you think!


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