sunday

#50: We’re Having a Fire ... Sale

Sunny silhouettes of couple and trees against a rocky creekbed.
Catskills, NY

Starting 10am EST Tuesday morning and lasting one week: These Days will be on sale for 99 cents in the Kindle store.

I’m enrolled in Amazon’s KDP Select program, which allows independent authors to run occasional book promotions in a way more integrated and less tedious to do than merely changing the price. The downside is you have to make your book exclusive to Amazon for three months. The upside is the promotions can help increase a book’s visibility in Amazon’s form of window shopping – their sales ranking and People Who Bought Also Bought lists. Having to make the book exclusive is a bummer in principle, but here is the reality:

These Days ebooks sold (first 6 Months)

  • Kindle: 132
  • Direct (using Gumroad): 92
  • iTunes: 21
  • Nook: 3
  • Kobo: 5

Next 6 months

  • Kindle: 54
  • Direct: 10
  • iTunes: 7
  • Nook: 0
  • Kobo: 1

Related note: if you include the original Kickstarter campaign, paperback orders, bulk sales to startups, and other promotions and giveaways, close to 2000 copies of the book are out there, maybe in the same city or neighborhood as you – maybe in the same room! Not enough to live off of, but good enough to fund a few months of uninterrupted writing.

If you’ve been enjoying these emails and would like to help, you can tell your friends when the time comes, or buy the book if you haven’t already. I’ll send a reminder Tuesday morning.

p.s. It’s spring in New York!