Self-Publishing: On Sales (May 2012)

Are you proud? I'm getting this post up in the first week!

Here's the screenshot of my May 2012 sales totals. I went ahead and just hid all the outlets through which my books are available, but no sales were made.

Numbers are still falling, but they're not all that abysmal, I don't think.

Self-Publishing: On Sales (March and April 2012)

My last sales post showed sales for February 2012 (compared to January 2012 sales and including an overview of my figures from the first six months of self-published fiction sales). I intended to post March 2012 sales at the beginning of May, but time got away from me. Now here we are in the first week of June and I still owe you readers a look at my March sales plus a look at my April sales. Shall we?

Well, that's... depressing. Can I say depressing without looking like a jerk? Those sales are still more than I hoped for, but the trend is also going in the direction opposite of the one I hoped to see.

Self-Publishing: On Sales (January 2012)

I've posted on sales twice before, here and here, and figured I'd just keep going. These posts give me a good reason to reflect on my strategies and analyze the figures. Sales figures are final for January now, so let's look at them.

January's figures aren't as nice as December's, but I kind of expected that. I did see a spike in sales early in the month, something I attributed to people getting home from traveling and finally getting a chance to use their gift cards and really play with their new ereaders. I also didn't release anything new in January, like I hoped, so those sales are from the same four books and the same one book comprised the bulk of sales.

Those numbers aren't disappointing to me. Of course they aren't--any sale is exciting for me. I'm pretty proud of my numbers, all things considered.

Self-Publishing: On Sales (December 2011)

At the end of December, I posted about my sales data. I included data through November of 2011 since December's sales figures were not yet final. Now that January is over, December's sales figures are final and I thought, hey, why not share them again.

As before, I'm not sure this will be a regular thing, but for now, it seems useful to share my information with fellow self-published authors.

First, my last sales snapshot:

I put my first book out in August and my fourth in December. All four of my available titles are around 10,000 words, so I've priced them at $0.99. I've also run several free promotions at Smashwords.

Here are my numbers for November and December:

I would credit adding the fourth book for nearly doubling my sales, but the fact is that the bulk of all sales between November and December actually came from just one book. That one book definitely affected the rest of my book sales, but I suspect that even without the other three, that book would be selling.