This morning, after rolling out of bed on this 4th of July, I saw that my first novel had gotten its 100th review on Goodreads and its 66th review on Amazon. From the same person, and only 4 stars, nonetheless it was exciting to hit 100 on Goodreads. That is just one of many metrics that can describe my book’s success in the market.
So I thought I’d put together a quick summary of the various metrics my novel has hit. For those that have been following along for a while, it is taking what seems like forever to get my second novel out. It is an exciting time in our lives with kids going off to college, two kids starting high school, a new house, and a cool job. So my time to write in the last two years has been very limited.
In any event, here is a quick tally, which I found interesting…
| Notes | ||
| Book price on Amazon | $1.49 | I have kept the book at $1.49 for over 95% of the time it has been in market. |
| Books Sales (Ebooks, Borrows, Paperback, Audio) | 3,645 | |
| Average number of books sold per day | 3.1 | Though steadily declining and only 1.3 in the latest month. |
| Book sales attributable to AMS | 314 | A lot of people are very unhappy with AMS, but after a few tries I’ve figured it out and it is absolutely driving an increasing percentage of my declining sales, and doing so profitably. |
| Approximate Revenue (US$s) | $2,100 | |
| Donations from Revenue + Employer Match | $2,000 | I’ve been able to secure a match from my employer (which is very generous and considerate of them). Most of the money has gone to the VFW National Home for Children |
| Amazon Top 10 Lists* | 10 | |
| Number of #1 appearances in its Category* | Twice (UK and France) | |
| GoodReads Ratings/Reviews | 100/4.13 | |
| Total unique Amazon Reviews | 86 | |
| Amazon Reviews/Stars (US) | 66/4.3 | I’ve sold books in many other countries WW, but have only gotten unique reviews in these countries. |
| Amazon Reviews/Stars (UK) | 16/4.3 | |
| Amazon Reviews/Stars (Canada) | 3/5.0 | |
| Amazon Reviews/Stars (Australia) | 1/5.0 | |
| Libray Thing Reviews | 4/4.5 | |
| BetterWorldBooks Reviews | 1/5.0 | |
| Audio Book Reviews | 4/4.0 | |
| Email Subscribers | 779 | I use MailChimp. I rarely send out emails…about 2 per year to date, so I’ve not done a great job of building my list. It is time-consuming and I’m not as adept at it as I need to be. |
| Facebook Followers (of my Author page) | 184 | |
| Google+ Followers | 37 | |
| Twitter Followers | 2,799 | It may look like a reasonably big number, but honestly, I don’t tweet much about writing or anything else consistently. |
| WordPress Blog Followers | 11 | |
| Push Notification Followers | 18 | |
| Quora Followers | 23 |
*The #1 in the UK was exciting because that was a competitive market. The #1 in France not so much. That was more of a one-hit wonder because there are so few sales in that market.
More exciting to me was how long my novel stayed on the first page of Amazon’s Kindle page in response to searches for “Vietnam War”. It hung in there for almost a year. That is not a small market, and a year is a hell of a run. Though it rarely was #1 during that time, that it lasted so long on that page was very exciting. Screenshot below of one such instance…
That’s it… Now time to get to work on the family favorite: Chicken Nerds — cream cheese and peppercorni wrapped in marinated chicken tenderloins and then wrapped in bacon all held together with a few toothpicks and then thrown on the grill. Makes for an inferno, but damn good…
Enjoy your 4th!
