By my best
calculation, the last friend to buy my mystery novel did so on January 9 of
this year. That was when I gave a talk on self-publishing to my Rotary Club and
sold about a dozen copies after the meeting.
From that
point on, I figure every book that’s sold has been to a stranger, someone who
doesn’t know me at all. Well, maybe not every one. There are no doubt a couple
of stragglers out there who know me and have been meaning to buy the book but
haven’t. But the bottom line is that I’ve reached that tipping point that every
first-time author has to face. What happens when your friends stop buying the
book and your sales depend on people you don’t know?
This is not
an insignificant question. I read somewhere that the average self-published
book sells 150 copies, and the number is no coincidence. Sociologists say that’s
how many people the average person knows tolerably well, through family,
school, work, church, and other organizations. How the first-time author gets
past 150 sales is the sixty four thousand dollar question.
Numbers on a Computer Screen
Since the
beginning of the year, when I figure my friends stopped buying it, my book, The McHenry Inheritance, continues to
move on Amazon. Almost every other day one of those strangers I wonder about
shells out $2.99 to buy the e-book version. The print-on-demand version sells
less well, but still gets a couple of bites each month. And when I offer it
free as a one-day promotion, the numbers steadily improve. In January, I did
two promotional days and “sold” 154 books. For two days in March the number is
up to 378.
(A cynic
might argue that the volume of free books simply establishes what mine is
worth, and perhaps that’s so. But there seem to be fifteen to twenty thousand
free books available each day on Kindle, and a lot of them seem to be moving in
single digits, so something about my book must be ringing a bell.)
The sales
figures for my book are mere numbers on a computer screen, and I wish I had
some way of knowing more about who is buying the book and why. The people who
actually paid for the book (albeit less than they’d pay for a latte) clearly
had to make a decision, but what about the ones who take it when it’s free?
Literary Hoarders
I wonder
all sorts of things. How much time do they spend considering the book before
adding it to the cart? What’s the tipping point that makes them buy? How many
free books do they “buy” in one shopping spree? How many are seriously
interested, as opposed to simply locking it in for nothing, just in case they
feel like reading it later?
There’s no
way of knowing for sure, but I suspect that quite a few of the free sales are
to people I would characterize as literary hoarders, people who can’t stand to
pass up a free book because maybe some day they’ll want to read it. Many, if
not most, will never open it, or if they do, won’t read beyond the first few
pages.
What I have
to hope for is that a handful of those who impulsively snapped it up free will
eventually read it. That probably won’t be for a while, because they didn’t
really set out to buy it. But if they
like the book, and tell their friends about it, those friends might actually go
to Kindle and pay for it because they want it. I can only hope.
