July Book Sales and Analysis

So July! Let's talk numbers.

In my June post, I mentioned that I was running a couple of experiments in July. First, a non-US territory Bookbub for Mindtouch (an ad only in the UK, Canada, Australia, and India), and the release of Dreamhearth, which I wanted to compare against the release of In Extremis to see if there really were more fans waiting for Dreamhealers books than for Princes' Game books.

You'll immediately see I messed up my experimental parameters there, because I ran a promotion for Dreamhealers 1 the month I released Dreamhealers 3, and didn't run any promotion for Princes' Game. So I can't tell if some of Dreamhearth's launch sales are from existing fans or new ones! But I didn't know if the Mindtouch ad would even work--if you'll recall, I mentioned buying a non-US Bookbub for Shell and having no sales bump at all.

The good news is that the non-US ad did work! Quite well, given that it wasn't in the biggest territory. As you can see I moved 1034 discounted copies (compared to June's 29!). No complaints there! Even if it does mean I no longer know whether non-US Bookbubs are worth the money. I now have two data points: "Yes" and "No." 😆

Well, no one said this business was easy. Or even made any sense, most days...!

So, that was very good. Also good: I discovered Amazon had munged up metadata for the Dreamhealers' series: "Family" wasn't showing up as part of the series at all. When I fixed that, I saw an immediate bump in sales (like, that day). That was instructional: always, always get your metadata right. Don't count on the retailer to recommend the next book in the series for you correctly.

Anyway, the answer to my "which series has more fans waiting" question is, I think, pretty obvious, with Dreamhearth at 516 in its launch month and In Extremis at 102. Even if half the Dreamhearth numbers are an artifact of the promotion (building on the assumption that most of the 264 sales of Book 2 are new folks), that's still double Extremis's launch. I am getting some reports that people are using the Princes' Game summaries to get into that series, though, which was completely unanticipated: I wrote the summaries for people who didn't want to read the series! But in retrospect, I should have known. I read spoilers myself if I think something's going to be rough. Heck, I read spoilers even if I don't think it's going to be rough, because I like knowing what's going to happen; it lets me pay attention to how it happens. This is one of those cases where I didn't think my habits would map to anyone else's (when I should know, from observation, that this is a dopey assumption. I am not a special snowflake.)

But anyway, back to analysis. Earthrise's giveaways stayed pretty strong, mostly due to a couple of promotions I ran for it: Just Kindle Books on the 1st (roughly 100 downloads) and OHFB on the 31st (about 230). I got some bleedover from the Mindtouch Bookbub as well... an extra 87 there as (presumably) people discovered me from checking my catalog. I still have my Goodreads and Amazon ads running, but I'm not sure how much good they're doing, to be honest. I'm waiting for them to hit their ad campaign end dates so I can run a month without them, see if they're keeping my numbers up.

Non-Peltedverse books continue to be uninspiring, sales-wise. I am trying to line up promotions for them but I keep running into issues, like the fact that there's no book category for me to slot my romances in. (There's no 'fantasy romance' category in Bookbub. You are either a paranormal, a historical, or a contemporary, and these are not my romances' audiences.) I'm still trying to figure out what to do with that there.

I've got my audio and print numbers up, as usual: big drop in audio, big jump in print (relatively speaking, for those categories). Still not making me most of my money. And my "books per day" total for July was heartening! Thanks to the Mindtouch promotion, I jumped up to 92 books a day... the highest I've been since... my other Bookbub month, in February.

You can see, a little, how promotion works. You can spend a lot of energy on stuff that has almost no return. :,

Anyway! That's July! I am expecting August to be abysmal. I have some small promotions lined up, but nothing major... I have no book releases... and it's back-to-school month, when most people are far too busy to read. We'll see how it goes. And as always, thank you so much for your reviews and your word-of-mouth. It helps. 💖