This amused me. Pleased me, too, of course, because #1 New Release is a lovely thing to have on a book page. I must admit, however, that those are obviously really easy categories in which to get a #1 New Release. Total sales are currently 54 on Amazon, 3 on other sites, with a grand total of 5 sales in the past week.
So what did I do to get those 54 sales? Posted on Facebook, even though I’m trying to get Facebook out of my life. Can’t say how many sales come from that, but at least 10-12, I would expect. Probably the first 10 sales.
I also emailed my mailing list, which currently has 904 members. (This was after some ruthless culling: anyone who hadn’t opened four or more emails in a row got booted, even if I recognized the email address as being someone I’d communicated with in the past or knew from real life.) I got a fantastic 49.66% open rate, (industry average is about 22%, according to mailchimp) and a more typical 5.03% click rate, but with high bounce rates (1.11%) and unsubscribe (1%) rates.
I’m not concerned about either of those things — I don’t use my mailing list often enough to keep everyone active and I’m sure there were people on it who didn’t even recognize my name. That’s what happens to me with mailing lists, anyway. Also, the world has too much email and we should all unsubscribe from lists that don’t interest us. Anyway, if all of those clicks were sales, which I am sure they were not, it would have been about 45 copies. I’d guess, though, that maybe 15 – 20 sales came from the mailing list, based on the dates of sales.
On March 2, BookBub sent an email to my US followers on that platform: currently somewhere around 7,200 people. If 1% of those people were purchasers, I’d have a lot more sales than I currently do, so I’m guessing I didn’t get much in the way of sales from that. That’s not surprising, though, since BookBub buyers are price-sensitive buyers and PH is currently priced at $7.99.
(Why so high? Because of the images: Amazon is charging me a lot more for the download of the book, but with very vague approximations of how much exactly that is. It could be anywhere from $0.75 to $3, so until I know for sure, I wanted to price the book so that I’d be earning at least a couple dollars per sale. The market for camping books is substantially smaller than the market for romances. Although possibly not smaller than the market for SF-fantasy, tough to say for sure. And the memoir market is great, but inundated, tough to break through the noise there, so not something I can count on.)
To the best of my knowledge, Amazon has not emailed my followers on their platform. I’m basing this on the fact that I follow myself and I haven’t seen an email. It’s possible that they will do so in a few weeks, also possible that they never will. In the black box that is Amazon, one never knows what will happen.
I haven’t done any other advertising or marketing. I don’t know whether I will or not: at the moment there’s not much social proof that the book is worth buying (aka actual reviews), so maybe if and when there is, I’ll consider looking for promotional opportunities. Meanwhile, though, I’m just going to move on to the next book. Right now, that seems to be a Cici sequel, but I have a couple covers that I made that I love so much that I really want to write the book/story that go with them. Talk about backwards writing! And there’s a funny Tassamara story that keeps creeping into my writing time.
Meanwhile, today is a sunny day — although brisk! — and I’m going to take advantage by borrowing Suzanne’s dog and going for a walk.
