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- Jun 8, 2013
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In another progress thread, @Cannonball was remarking about feeling discouraged from publishing his first book and not seeing many/any initial sales. This brought up a question that I've been wondering about since first getting into publishing on Amazon, and now that we have a stable of writers with experience publishing there, I was hoping to revisit this question and see if we can get any meaningful data from it.
The question is this:
As a new author or new pen name, if you publish your first book (or any book) and do not see sales on the first day of publishing, do you assume you missed the mark for your genre? I.E. do you assume that simply making a title live on Amazon garners enough initial visibility to produce sales and soft launch a book?
I guess this would be assuming that the visibility from the 'Published in last 30 days list' are popular enough to launch a book since this is the only way I can see for customers to find newly released titles from unknowns--but is it? I mean, looking at Romance right now, for example, it had 6,455 titles released in the last 30 days, or 215 books per day, or 9 books hour! With that kind of volume, I can't imagine you're visible on the first couple pages of those lists for long at all without sales/reviews to get you on 'New and Popular' or 'Avg Customer Review.'
So what do you fiction writing Fastlaners think? What's been your experiences with newly published books and what are your expectations based on sales from Amazon without any outside promotion?
I'll go ahead and add my limited experience...
I published my first story in a poorly targeted genre, but to me, it felt as if publishing the book alone didn't provide enough visibility to really do anything. Now that may have been from poor genre selection, a bad cover, blurb, sample, whatever, but who knows. In total though, publishing by itself felt like putting up a web page that nobody knew existed. This, of course, all changed once I managed to get the first title permafree and there was measurable visibility through free downloads.
Looking forward to hearing others' experience and expectations.
The question is this:
As a new author or new pen name, if you publish your first book (or any book) and do not see sales on the first day of publishing, do you assume you missed the mark for your genre? I.E. do you assume that simply making a title live on Amazon garners enough initial visibility to produce sales and soft launch a book?
I guess this would be assuming that the visibility from the 'Published in last 30 days list' are popular enough to launch a book since this is the only way I can see for customers to find newly released titles from unknowns--but is it? I mean, looking at Romance right now, for example, it had 6,455 titles released in the last 30 days, or 215 books per day, or 9 books hour! With that kind of volume, I can't imagine you're visible on the first couple pages of those lists for long at all without sales/reviews to get you on 'New and Popular' or 'Avg Customer Review.'
So what do you fiction writing Fastlaners think? What's been your experiences with newly published books and what are your expectations based on sales from Amazon without any outside promotion?
I'll go ahead and add my limited experience...
I published my first story in a poorly targeted genre, but to me, it felt as if publishing the book alone didn't provide enough visibility to really do anything. Now that may have been from poor genre selection, a bad cover, blurb, sample, whatever, but who knows. In total though, publishing by itself felt like putting up a web page that nobody knew existed. This, of course, all changed once I managed to get the first title permafree and there was measurable visibility through free downloads.
Looking forward to hearing others' experience and expectations.
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