People always seem to only sporadically talk about the numbers to this stuff, so I figured I’d demystify it a little.
Basically, I put up FROZEN DREAMS a month ago (June 14th): as of last night (July 13th) it had moved 114 units. The vast majority (104) were Kindle books; obviously, 10 were paperbacks. Working out how many books were sold during the Kickstarter is complicated, because of multiple formats and people getting extra copies, so I’m going to use 150 as a low-ball estimate. So, we’ll call it 260 in total, and 114 for the month.
All of that means… well, a lot of people seem to have different opinions about what it means, and the implications are likewise not uniform*. I think that it’s doing fine. I think that it’s also fair to say that arguably the book’s doing better than average.
But, my droogies: ‘average’ in this business is a chill place of loneliness and despair**. If you have an author that you’re fond of (this is not a passive-aggressive technique for looking for more reviews***), and you’re not in the habit of reviewing books you read: you well and truly will be doing them a favor by reviewing that book they wrote and you liked. And yeah, I think I’ve mentioned all of this before, but it bears repeating. The metrics for success here are convoluted, and not always obvious from the outside.
Anyway, if you have any questions about any of this, ask ’em and I’ll try to answer. But you knew that already.
Moe Lane
*Unless the person in question works for a book promotion/distribution service. For those the meta-response is uniform: “Let me rewrite your question into one where the answer is ‘Use our services!'” Seriously, I’m waiting to see somebody respond to that when the question is “Should I let my cat watch me as I write?”
**And I thought political writing didn’t pay much!
***I’ll come right out and, err, write it: if you liked FROZEN DREAMS, here’s the Amazon site and here’s the Goodreads site. But not everybody has my nigh-invulnerable self-esteem bordering on insufferable arrogance, and those other people could use the boost that comes from a good review.
I remember reading an author (Larry Niven, maybe?) talking about the writing profession. He said, anybody that can be discouraged from writing as a career should be discouraged.
I can kind of see his point.