When I
published my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, four months ago, I had only two commercial hopes for it.
One was that it would sell better than my first mystery, The McHenry Inheritance. The other was that the second book would
attract new readers, who would then go back and buy the first book in the
series.
So far, so
good. In a short time, I’ve discovered that there are considerable benefits to
an author who has multiple books in a series on the market. Not the least of
these is that when I do a free promotion on Amazon for one of my books, there’s
another book that people can come back and pay for later, if they liked the one
they got free.
What has
really surprised me, though, has been how much that first book has benefited
from having its successor on the market and being part of a series. I expected
it to get a sales bump, but nothing as good as it has so far.
A New Wave of Interest
In the six
months before Wash Her Guilt Away
went up on Amazon, I was devoting nearly all my literary energy into getting it
done, and almost nothing to promoting The
McHenry Inheritance. As a result, McHenry sales had plateaued at a fairly
low level.
When the
second book came out, the sales impact on the first was immediate. Wash Her Guilt Away appeared on Amazon
April 30, and in May, with no particular promotional effort on my part, paid
e-book sales for The McHenry Inheritance
were ten times what they’d been in April. It was the book’s fifth best month
for sales since it had come out in July of 2012. Publishing another book in the
series made that much difference.
For both
May and June, sales of Wash Her Guilt
Away were more than double those of The
McHenry Inheritance, which was what I would have expected. But in July and
August something else has been happening. The first book has been accounting
for a bigger share of total sales.
One Good Thing Leads to Another
Wash Her Guilt Away sold 30 percent more
books on Amazon in July than The McHenry
Inheritance did. And as of midnight last night, August is the best month so
far for Quill Gordon mystery sales on Amazon. Best of all, the good month has
been fueled by both books. As I write, the second book is leading the first in
paid e-book sales by only one copy, and with five days remaining in the month,
their respective sales positions could conceivably flip.
What’s
more, The McHenry Inheritance has a
reasonable chance of beating its previous best month for sales this August.
Even if it doesn’t, it’s having its second best month, which is quite the sales
renaissance for a book published more than two years ago.
All this
has been very encouraging. From the sales and reviews so far, it’s beginning to
look as if some people are enjoying my mysteries and that I’m beginning to
build a small nucleus of readers that could conceivably grow with the
publication of more Quill Gordon mysteries. I don’t know if that will happen,
but there’s one thing I can say for sure. After seeing what publication of the
second book did for sales of the first, I really want to get the third one out
there (next year some time) and see what it does for the first two.
