The End Of All Worlds has now been published for almost seven months – time I think to say something about how well its been selling. I’m really not sure how many I expected to sell (and how quickly) when I started this project. If I’m honest, then of course I had that classic dream that it would go whoosh. As I was gearing up to publication day, and I was telling my friends and my family what was happening I couldn’t help but make little mental tallies of interest and equate that to sales. Sales have been nothing like that.
After a couple of week’s I tried a free promo day. It wasn’t the best planned of things, rushing it out with barely 24 hours notice but buoyed up sales and kept it ticking along. Generally speaking I’ve been having a monthly peak and a corresponding dip. During September and October they dipped a lot, flat-lining to virtually nothing. Again, possibly with not enough planning, I organised another free promo this time across Thursday and Friday to celebrate the first six months of publication. In just 24 hours the book was downloaded just short of 3,000 times and rocketed me into the number one spot (if of free books) in a couple of genres…
I did look at those 3,000 downloads and think ‘if only they were paid downloads I’d be looking at more money that I get paid doing the day job in three months’ – I couldn’t help myself – but in truth I shouldn’t feel like that because those people wouldn’t have known about the book had it not been on free promo. And it doesn’t matter anyway, the promo lifted me back up the rankings, increased my visibility, and kept me bobbing along (often in the Top 100 of the Fairytales/Myths and Fairytales genres) with on average one sale every day, ever since. I’m also pretty certain that the book has now gone beyond my own sphere of influence to be bought by persons completely unknown to me.
It’s both a scary and exciting thought that something that I created now has its own (if modest) momentum. Long may it continue!
