Sales History

First book in a three-book series for the Kindle Worlds Foreworld Saga came out in late March 2015. The graph below shows relative sales volume over time. In the first three months after release, the owning authors of the Foreworld Saga had releases of their own that I think tent-poled my own launch (thank you Neal Stephenson). A later release by Mark Teppo gave me a bump as well.

In January, Amazon marked my book down to half the normal price and I saw another nice little bump. Same in July. However, from the graph, you can see that the half-price month essentially cannibalized sales from the following months. The second in my series came out at the end of August and I am seeing a noticeable uptick in sales of book one. I don’t have numbers for October yet, but the pattern should follow.




 A few other items of note:

1. Actual royalties amount to about two nice cases of California reserve, old-vine Zin. So the hope that springs eternal can be washed down with something more substantial. 
2. KW is all e-books, Amazon only. Print and other sales channels may react differently.
3. Amazon does not announce a half-price sale in advance (even to the authors) so there’s no way to promote it until it happens.
4. Second in series did not enjoy the popularity spike of the first book. I think that’s because the underlying Foreworld series itself is getting a little old. 

 Don’t know if this is of much help to anyone, but I do think it is indicative of sales patterns that most new authors can expect. And yes, there will be a third and final volume in the series. I’m really, really gonna need another case of Zin pretty soon.