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The first thing you\u2019ll notice is that I\u2019m not making a princely amount of money. That shouldn\u2019t come as much of a surprise. The next thing you\u2019ll notice is that my books do way better on Barnes and Noble than anywhere else. This is<\/em> a surprise to me, and while I don\u2019t know exactly what\u2019s going on, I have a few ideas.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll walk you through some of the features of the figures. First of all, what happened in September of 2010? Well, I published my second novel, The Confederacy of Heaven<\/em>. At the time, both The Confederacy of Heaven<\/em> and Grizelda<\/em> were free. (Grizelda<\/em> was briefly $2.99 and I managed to sell one, which is why there\u2019s a blip in the sales figure.) Why did I suddenly get a bunch of free downloads of both books once The Confederacy <\/em>of Heaven<\/em> went up? One idea I\u2019ve got is that The Confederacy of Heaven<\/em> was a hit in B&N\u2019s free book category and pulled\u00a0Grizelda<\/em> up with it, all while I suspected nothing. Or maybe I signed up for Barnes and Noble distribution that month, or Smashwords added more distribution channels that month.<\/p>\n

What happened in September of 2013? The free downloads drop off there and the sales spike up. For this one, I know what\u2019s going on. In September 2013 I signed up with the Amazon Kindle program and switched my books from free to $3.99. It seems to be working well, but my B&N sales might be declining, just like the free downloads generally have declined since June 2011.<\/p>\n

A couple other notes on the figure: Apple\u2019s download data look pretty spiky because for a couple of years they would report all their downloads to Smashwords once a year in December. They started reporting once a month in 2013. My free downloads figures for Smashwords itself are underestimated because Smashwords only tells me when somebody redeems a 100% off coupon for one of my books. They don\u2019t store data on other kinds of downloads for more than 90 days. I generally get 2 or 3 downloads of my free short stories per day.<\/p>\n

You can see that little orange bump there when people redeemed coupons from my Kickstarter campaign<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So why do my books sell so much better on Barnes and Noble than anywhere else? I think there\u2019s a couple of reasons. Barnes and Noble is bigger than any other channel except Amazon. And I had two novels distributed through Barnes and Noble free for a few years. This gave the books a chance to build up a stock of book reviews that convinced people to buy later on. I don\u2019t have any free download data for Amazon because Amazon will only let you give away your book for two weeks per year, only<\/em> if you agree to publish exclusively with them. But that\u2019s a gripe for another day.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t tell from these figures, but why does The Confederacy of Heaven<\/em> consistently sell better than anything else, on every channel? I think it\u2019s better than Grizelda<\/em> but worse than Cannon Fodder<\/em>, and it definitely has the worst cover art. But I sure appreciate the attention.<\/p>\n

What do you guys think? Would you like to see another Confederacy of Heaven<\/em> giveaway? Better cover art? Have you got any sales stats on your blog?<\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"