Saturday, April 9, 2011

Weekly eBook Sales Update.

Things are moving along!

The only fly in the ointment? Two readers have reported some formatting issues in two different Kindlebooks. I suspect it's the em-dashes, which some ereaders don't translate correctly. I am, at the moment, pretty stumped about how to fix this. The two readers both got their books from Smashwords (right Kathryn?) so I have no way of uploading the html version Guido Henkel teaches you how to make which is the only one that would address this, as far as I know. Smashwords only takes .doc files. So mostly at this point I'm crossing my fingers that the formatting won't be bad on most ereaders. On my laptop, using Amazon's Kindle for PC app, I am unable to reproduce the formatting bug. And I'm also unable to bring it up on my actual Kindle.

Another possibility would be to find/replace all my em-dashes and make them into "--" instead. I'm reluctant to do this without more of a sense of how pervasive the problem is, though. The "--" just doesn't look as professional to me. It's probably just me being anal. What do you all think?

Anyway, to the numbers!

Smashwords, total sales by title:
Broken Ones = 5
Veronica in Paris = 2
The River and the Roses = 4

Amazon, total sales by title:
Broken Ones = 4
Veronica in Paris = 4
The River and the Roses = 2

B&N, total sales by title:*
Broken Ones = 0
Veronica in Paris = 1
The River and the Roses = 0

*Keeping in mind that B&N has a reputation for being slow to report sales.

Total sales of all titles, just this last week: 14

Total sales since the beginning: 22

My sales have almost doubled since the first week. This is very encouraging! I've been submitting my books for bloggers to review. I'm hoping once the books get reviewed, they'll really start selling.

By the way, if you have a minute, something you can do for me is go to the sites of each book and select some of the tags associated with each. For instance, The River and the Roses has the tags: psychic, ghost, mystery, etc. The more times people click on these tags (signifying that they agree with them) the higher up in certain lists the books go.

For Amazon, US, go here. That should bring up my three ebooks. Select one and scroll down the page until you get to the tags. Click on a few of those. That simple!

For Amazon, UK, go here.

For B&N, go here. Edited to add: I can't seem to find tags on B&N--did you? I think maybe they don't do them. Please let me know--sometimes I don't see the same stuff because I published the book.

Smashwords doesn't do tags the same way.

Anyway, THANK YOU whether you have a chance to do that or not--just that fact that you are here, reading this blog, shows me that you are supporting me.

Please comment and let me know how your own pursuits are going!

7 comments:

  1. Awesome stats. Strange about the formatting, though. Seems that em-dashes should translate correctly. Oy.

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  2. Well done, I'll pop in and have a look.
    My stats were very similar but I have to wait for my publisher to send them to me. My shorts however are flying with more than 300 doenloaded (because they're free)in two months. It gets my name out there.
    Not sure about the formatting - can you have a look on friend's kindle?

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  3. Mary: Thanks. I know, weird, right? I'm going to try to fix everything today, but it's frustrating because I think it means I have to wait another 10 days or so to get relisted in the Smashwords catalogue. Oh well, better than having formatting glitches.

    Beaturvey: That's awesome about your shorts! Do you plan to put a price on them eventually? Have you found that people go on to buy your other works?

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  4. Might not matter any, but I bought it on Amazon, not Smashwords.

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  5. I was eventually able to find the glitches, and they existed on all formats. I spent some time today fixing everything. Should be all good as soon as all the sites post the updated versions. If you want, though, I'll send you a coupon for Smashwords so you can download a repaired copy for free. :)

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