Self-Publishing: On Sales

There are places to check out sales data from traditionally-published and self-published authors. I've read many times that romance and erotica are regularly bestselling genres. You can see what that means, numbers-wise, at websites like Erotic Romance: Sales Data. The RWA has a page featuring romantic literature statistics. Erotic Romance reports traditionally-published sales information and while the RWA numbers may include self-published numbers, from what I can gather, that's mostly traditionally-published information, too.

J. A. Konrath dedicated an entire post to discussing his sales figures. The post is a couple of years old, but it's not a bad place to start. Norah Wilson even has a special tag for sharing her sales data. That information is more recent.

Here's my data.

I started in August with one erotic short story collection priced at $0.99. I added romance novelettes in September and November, both priced at $0.99, bringing my total number of books available at the end of November to three. For roughly a week after the release of each book, I offered coupon codes for Smashwords to Twitter followers, blog readers, and my friends and family on Facebook and through email. (Most Smashwords "sales" in August, September, and November were free downloads.) All of my books were approved for premium distribution through Smashwords, but as you can see, the vast majority of my sales came from Amazon.com and the vast majority of those sales are of a single book. (The Cowboy Next Door specifically. I don't have any explanation for it, either.) I don't do too much in the way of promotion: occasionally I tweet about my books and every time someone visits my blog they see the book covers on the right of the page. Mostly I chalk up those numbers to luck and to decent enough writing to grab a reader's attention.

With all of that said, I find those numbers more than satisfying. Okay, frankly, I find them downright exciting. They're encouraging. They give me hope that this self-publishing thing is going to work out. I honestly hoped for slower, steadier growth over a much longer period of time to start seeing numbers like the ones I saw in November.