In last
week’s post I developed the theme that publishing (and trying to sell) your own
book is kind of like fishing. If you don’t want to scroll down and read the
whole thing, the gist of it was as follows:
Amazon, the
big player in self-publishing, can roughly be compared to a large lake teeming
with fish, i.e., the customers for your book. Selling your book is kind of like
taking a boat out into some point in the lake and casting out your line. If
your bait (that is to say, your book) is any good, you’ll probably catch a few
fish (make a few sales), but most of the fish in the lake will never know
you’re there.
Publishing
a second book, I reasoned, should significantly improve your chances. It’s like
having two lines and two rods working, plus with two books, you have two
different pieces of bait to dangle from each line. All other things being
equal, you should do better with two books out than with one.
An Experiment in Real Time
On April
30, I published my second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, as an e-book on Amazon. A month has now
elapsed, and the early returns seem to be vindicating the theory.
My hope was
that the second book would do better at the start than the first one, and that
turned out to be the case. Wash Her Guilt
Away recorded paid sales in May that were 20 percent higher than the best
month the first book, The McHenry Inheritance, has yet had. It also did well on two free-promotion days,
cracking Amazon’s top 40 free books in crime fiction on both occasions. I don’t
make any money from the books given away, but it’s a great way to get people
who never heard of me (which would be 99.99999 percent of Amazon customers) to
give me a try. If they like the book they got free, the theory goes, they’ll
pay for the next one and the one after that.
So far, so
good. But probably the biggest surprise from that first month was the positive
impact the release of the second book had on the sales of the first. I figured
there would be a little bump, but it was much more than I expected.
Like a Candidate With Coattails
Amazon
doesn’t tell me who buys my books and why, so I have to make deductions. The
first free promotion for Wash Her Guilt
Away was on Saturday May 3, and several days later, I started seeing a
distinct uptick in sales of The McHenry
Inheritance. By the end of May, the first mystery had registered its fifth
best month (out of 23) in paid sales and was selling almost even with the new
one in the second half of the month. It sold ten times more copies in May than
it did in April.
Maybe I’m
being a crazy optimist here, but the only explanation I can come up with is
that some of the people who got the second book free read it, liked it, and
came back to buy the first one. Or at least were intrigued enough to order it
anyway.
If true,
that’s good news, and it certainly provides a powerful motivation for writing
and publishing the third novel in the Quill Gordon mystery series, given that
for sales, the more the merrier seems to be the rule. So here I go. I have the
story and characters in place; all I need is a title and a year of work.
