Available HERE @ $2.99 and free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers
THE jury is still out on the success of my non-price based promotion of
Jane Sharp’s psychic mystery anthology, Vision: the Reluctant Psychic.
My publishing hut Bent Banana Books publishes Jane’s
book.
With the literary explosion propelling millions of eBooks
into cyberspace, literally hundreds of thousands of authors are filling Amazon
bookshelves.
Amazon has millions of eBooks for sale but only a few
hundred titles will rake in the big dough.
Maybe it is because writers are usually better at English
than maths. Whatever the reason, many wannabees do not seem to realize how astronomical
are the odds of having a best-seller to your name.
KDP is the arm of Amazon which facilitates self-publishing.
KDP provides a calculator which estimates sales based on Amazon ranking. You
would hope it is reasonably accurate.
So let’s look at an author whose book is ranked 1000, above millions of its competitors. Predicted sales are 100-300 copies a day. I would imagine the range of the predicted sales is so wide as books sell in different numbers during various months of the year.
Depending on the cover price, the 1000th top seller should be returning a reasonable income
to its author.
What of a book ranked 5000, still ranked above millions.
The calculator says 10-30 books a day. Even at the top
end, it is barely a decent wage by many western standards.
These figures debunk the myth that eBooks have
allowed a significant number of authors to give up their day jobs.
So how did Jane’s book go? Well it improved from
500,000 to 90,000. Sounds impressive. One or two sales can provoke such a movement so I am not
getting carried away.
But it did show you can market around things other
than price. That is worth crowing about. In this instance we pushed "free to Kindle Unlimited members" and Jane's birthday which by coincidence fell on the day of our promotion.
And now we press on towards #5000. Any suggestions for our future tactics?
