Number-crunching - sales figures

[julesjones]

Number-crunching updated to include 2011. The numbers here are the total sales from when the book first went on sale to the end of the calendar year cited. Which means you can also get the sales per year figures for 2009 onwards with a bit of subtracting, if you're so inclined.

This does not include sales over the Christmas period, as the publisher account period runs to the third week of the month. Next month is when I start to get an idea if the big push on selling ereaders this Christmas will show up in my sales figures.

from 1st day on sale until end of	2008	2009	2010	2011
Black Leather Rose	774	922	995	1024
Buildup 1: Mindscan	1304	1466	1554	1629
Buildup 2: Pulling Strings	711	857	918	967
Dolphin Dreams	1739	2151	2352	2725
Lord and Master	1510	1839	2057	2390
L&M 2: Taking Work Home	648	1020	1201	1408
Promises To Keep	1002	1119	1200	1242
Spindrift	659	801	858	924
Spindrift 2: Ship to Shore	419	480	510	516

The pattern I was seeing last year continues -- sales direct from the publisher's website are a trickle (which is not surprising as all of these books have been out for at least three years, with my last release in August 2008). The bulk of the sales are coming from third party resellers, and the bulk of those are coming from Amazon. Second place now seems to go to ARe overall, although there's also a showing from Fictionwise and Barnes & Noble. Not much from Sony, although even there there's a handful of sales.

I made just over $2k in royalties, which given that I have no exposure from new releases for over three years, and have been doing no promotion, isn't too bad. It's certainly an incentive to keep working on the new book. :-)

And this shows very clearly why there will be no third Spindrift book, even though I know what the plot would be. The first Spindrift book is available on third party sites but has still sold fewer copies than two titles which are only available direct from Loose Id. If I were still writing full time and able to put out 2 or 3 books a year without risking quality, I might gamble on it, but I'm writing around a day job as and when my health is up to it. Not happening. I have more books I want to write than time to write them in, and sales are something I take into account when picking which one of them to put at the head of the queue.

Comments

[green_knight]

What I like - and I wonder how much this is a feature of a) your particular niche (ebook original) or b) the new book economy in general - is that all of those sales figures are rising. They might not be phenomenally large, but they're steady.

Here's to plenty of ideas , health, and writing time next year!

[julesjones]

They're not rising -- those are not sales per year, but the *total* number of sales since the book went on sale.

I've been doing it that way for a couple of reasons. One is that I have the total since a book went on sale already there on the spreadsheet and don't have to separately calculate "this year's sales". The other is that the total ever sold is of interest to ebook authors - as noted in the post, it's of interest in making commercial decisions about continuing a series or focusing on a particular genre.

[green_knight]

Ok, I misunderstood - that's more in line with expectations, then. And commercial decisions... of course you need to make them. Partly because they're not just 'commercial' because they also reflect what readers enjoy - they vote with their dollars. While writers shouldn't _just_ give in to pressure and shouldn't _just_ 'write what is popular' I feel that the opposite stance - writing whatever you like whether your readers enjoy it or not - is *also* a problem - other than tortured artist points, there seems to be little to be gained from it.

(Ideally, one would be able to identify the successful elements and incorporate them, but that looks suspiciously like a sideline of rejectomancy...)

[julesjones]

Yup. If it were a case of choosing to write something I actively didn't enjoy writing but which was more commercial, it would be a different matter -- not least because if you hate writing it, that is likely to show and thus is not in your long-term commercial interests anyway. But here it's a matter of choosing which one of many I would like to write, and one of the things that comes into play is recognising when one series is played out from a commercial point of view.

I'd agree with you that by and large, that would be a variation on rejectomancy. Unusually, with Spindrift I do know one of the elements that made it commercially unsuccessful -- it's written in first person. Apparently a lot of romance readers hate first person and won't read it. I didn't know that at the time I wrote it, and it would never have occurred to me, because some of my favourite books are first person. Most of my output is third person, but only because that's what works for me as a *writer*. (Of course, some of the people who finished Spindrift loved it being first person, probably because it's so hard to find first person romances if you happen to be one of the minority who like them.)