June Book Sales and Analysis

Once again, back to reporting on numbers! And June was an odd, odd month.

First, things that affected sales: last month I started experimenting with Goodreads ads. Unfortunately I also started experimenting with Amazon ads, so now I'm not sure which ones are doing me the most good. (Fortunately neither of them are super expensive right now, so I can leave them both running.) Amazon tells me my Earthrise ad got 52 clicks since I started it at the beginning of the month; Goodreads has gotten me 39. So I'm not perceiving a whole lot of difference there, and I'm not even sure if those clicks led to sales, so... who knows?

What did have a measurable impact this month was Even the Wingless got a great mention in Tor.com. If you look at the year-to-date sales trend for Wingless, the only time it got any significant bump was when I ran the Bookbub ad and got bleedover from people finishing the Her Instruments series. June's doubling of the typical sales is the sole province of that review; up until the day it ran, I'd sold maybe 7 copies? 10? So, wow, most excellent.

Earthrise also got a mention in the USA Today column, and even though that was only a few days ago, it resulted in about a 100 downloads over the weekend. I'm curious to see if that number increases or falls off.

June, therefore, was a good month--better than May, even though it was a day shorter.

As always, the Peltedverse is earning my bread and butter. My other series are gently languishing, to the point that the Jokka and Kherishdar didn't move any units at all of some of their books. The two romance novels continue to do somewhat well for such niche books. But for the most part, non-Peltedverse books continue to be "for fun" projects rather than "for money." (I also have fun with the Pelted, or I wouldn't write them. But I know where my paychecks are coming from, and when I'm not writing Peltedverse books I feel faintly irresponsible.)

I went ahead and put both audio and print edition sales in their own table (all the rest of it is e-book only, so yes, that's where ALL MY MONEY comes from, with rare exceptions). Audiobooks are coming off the high from the ad in February, and appear to be stabilizing at about 40-50 a month (which is similar to the pre-promotion number). Print, as you can see, rarely fluctuates and is almost never high. That's why I am not rushing to make print editions of anything: they're a vanity project, because I think having print copies of things is cool, and I lose money on them.

Last month I debuted the "books per day" table, and here it is, updated for June:

As you can see, we're up from May! While it's a very minor minor bump, I still think it's positive since we've been trending downward since the promotion in February. As I mentioned previously, my goal for 'support my family comfortably instead of just me' is 60 books a day. I am sturdily chugging toward that.

July is going to be interesting, data-wise, because with the launch of Dreamhearth I'll be able to compare its sales on release versus In Extremis's and see whether Dreamhealers really does have more fans waiting eagerly for the next book than Princes' Game. (My gut feeling is that it does, but I could be wrong.) Additionally, I have a fake Bookbub for Mindtouch on July 8th, which is what I call Bookbub ads that run everywhere but in the US. Occasionally, Bookbub will be able to sell you slots in every country but the US (presumably because someone booked that week, but only for the US territory). I've done this once before with Shell, and the results were super-lackluster. Like "complete dud" lackluster. I'm curious whether a completely different book will have the same result--that's when I'll know it's not worth it to run Bookbubs without the US territory.

So that's where we are for sales. As usual, I'm doing okay! I do eventually want to make it to that '60+ books a day' mark because, paranoid creature that I am, I want to be able to float my family in a crisis. But I'm grateful for where I am, and interested to see where I'll end up.

As always, thanks so much for your recs and reviews. Word of mouth sells books, and you all are awesome about it. ❤️