I realized I hadn’t done a sales/progress update in six months, so I figured I’d wrap the first half of 2017 into a single post. Kindle Direct Publishing recently overhauled their author dashboard and made a lot of improvements to the way data is handled and displayed. As a result I’ve all but abandoned the[…]
Best. Month. Ever. Literally. After selling fewer than a hundred books per month for the first year and a half of my self-publishing career, my latest series has taken off. Lessons learned: it’s important to write well, but it’s just as important to write stuff people want to read. For the fourth month in a[…]
Thank you. Just… thank you. To the thousands (yes, that’s thousands, plural, and I’m still in disbelief) of readers who have picked up one or more of my books. This month, for the first time ever, it has become unwieldy to count my exact unit sales. Suffice it to say my writing income has tripled[…]
I continue to be amazed, astonished, floored, and [insert myriad other adjectival synonyms] about the direction in which things are moving. Amazon-only sales further increased from 344 units in July to 464 in August across all my titles, and now nearly halfway through September it seems sales will surpass that record yet again. In doing[…]
I could not be more pleased with the way things are going. As I mentioned in my last update, Amazon-only unit sales doubled in June from my previous monthly average (143 books in June, compared with 50-80 books per month over the previous several months). Well, in July, sales doubled again. On Amazon alone, people[…]
I have been editing for close to three weeks now, and not a day passes where I can’t wait to get back to writing. I’m outlining a new Urban Fantasy series as I edit, and as a result I’ll have the most detailed scaffolding I’ve ever created for the first three books in the series[…]
The holidays hit hard and didn’t stop this year, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here. I spent almost all of my “author time” these last few months writing, and virtually none of it on editing or marketing. As a result, I now have three complete novels in three different series[…]
Things slowed down in September, sales-wise. Although my perma-free book, Driftmetal, hung out in the Top 20 of the Steampunk and Cyberpunk categories on Amazon almost all month, sales settled into a trough. On the positive side, Driftmetal IV comes out tomorrow, and the book’s pre-order sales alone will be enough to eclipse all of September’s[…]
This is a general monthly update alongside an advertising update. I know it’s not the end of the month yet, but I’ve got enough data to do a quick post and give you a general idea of where I’m headed. I used two ad services this month to coincide with the release of the third[…]
It’s been a while since I’ve posted my sales numbers, so I thought I’d provide an update. It’s been just shy of seven months since I published my first novella on Amazon. I now have four books out, with a fifth on pre-order to be released a month from now. I enrolled my first two[…]
Not much new to report, except that Driftmetal has been bouncing around in the Top 10 of both the Steampunk and Cyberpunk categories ever since it reached the #1 spot in Steampunk a couple of weeks ago. It’s been seeing steady download numbers since the post-promotion plummet, with a higher average than before as positive[…]
As of this morning, Driftmetal is sitting at #1 in Steampunk. Thanks to at least two well-timed promotions, neither of which I had anything to do with, the first book in the series cracked the Top 500 overall in the Kindle Free Store and finally snagged the top spot in its category. It’s also on[…]
Two weeks ago, I wrote about how difficult it has been as a new author to get reviews of my work. A few days after that, the first book in each of my series went perma-free on Amazon. In the afterword of each book, I ask readers to leave their honest reviews. I’m excited to[…]
To date, I’ve designed the covers for all of my books. Being a graphic designer by trade has been a helpful perk, and it’s saved me a lot of time and money in getting started. So I venture into the realm of cover design not because I think my covers look bad, but because I’m[…]
As soon as the 90-day KDP Select period ended for The Shepherd, I threw it on Smashwords for free and sent Amazon a couple of notifications using the “tell us about a lower price” link on the book’s product page. I had heard that price-matching is often more effective when you contact Amazon directly through[…]
I ran my first-ever Kindle Countdown Deal last week for The Infernal Lands. The promotion ran for seven days, with a price that incremented from 0.99¢ up to the book’s regular price of $4.99. In hindsight, I should’ve left the price at 0.99¢ for the duration of the promo. Thanks in large part to a helpful[…]