Three years
ago, full of hope and inflated expectations, I put my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, up for sale on
Amazon. Good as it was, I thought it might sell 10,000 copies the first month.
It sold 11
copies, and I personally knew 9 of the people who bought it.
That was
hardly an auspicious beginning, but the more I learn about self-publishing, the
more I have come to realize it was par for the course. The old rule of thumb
used to be that the average self-published book sells 150 copies. There’s a
reason for that.
Sociologists
figure that between work, church, clubs, neighbors, and old friends, the
typical American knows about 150 people reasonably well. If you write a book
(and who doesn’t these days?) you can figure half your circle of people will
buy it, and a similar number of outliers will stumble across it somewhere as
well. And perhaps Amazon has pushed the number of outliers up a bit.
Reason to Keep Going
Despite the
slow start for my book, I started getting positive feedback from people who didn’t
have to say anything, and the book gradually began getting positive reviews
from strangers. Encouraged by the response, and experiencing a serious case of
Writer’s Ego, I decided to write a second mystery in the series.
Wash Her Guilt Away was published at the
end of April 2014. At the time of its release, I expected it would boost sales
of The McHenry Inheritance by a bit. After all, I reasoned, people who never
saw the first book might read and like the second, then go back to the first.
In a good month, I figured, The McHenry
Inheritance might sell half as many copies as Wash Her Guilt Away.
Wrong
again. In September, the fourth month the second book was out, The McHenry Inheritance outsold it. And
it continued to outsell Wash Her Guilt
Away over eight of the next nine months. Furthermore, from the scant
information Amazon provides its authors, it appeared that a fair number of
people were buying the two books together.
What’s Happening Here?
At the end
of May of this year, I published the third mystery novel in the series, Not Death, But Love. June was the first
full month it was available. And The
McHenry Inheritance had more paid downloads (e-book sales and borrows) that
month than the new book did.
I must
confess I’m at a loss to explain why the three-year old book is steadily
outselling the newer releases. Is it because the cover is more of an
attention-getter? Is it because it has more reviews on file than the other two
books, having been out longer? Is it because it’s the first book in the series
and people want to start at the beginning? Or is it some combination of those
factors plus something else I haven’t thought of?
Whatever it
is, the book is showing legs that I never imagined it would have, and the wise
author takes any sale he can get. Last week, on the third anniversary of its
publication, The McHenry Inheritance
got two new reviews from strangers (five and four stars) and sold its first
copy in Spain. Spain! If this be magic of some sort, I’m going to get out of
the way and let it happen. The wise author also has to suspect that the readers
might be right.
