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I confess I am becoming addicted to the NovelRank website. This is a site that provides ‘guesstimates’ of sales, based on Amazon rankings, and over the last couple of years, I’ve checked it more and more frequently.
You can ‘track’ your books on the site, and find out how many have been sold over the last week, month or year, and initially I found the results fairly depressing – maybe half a dozen (or less) books per month.
It was when Irish Inheritance ‘took off’ two years ago that I started to keep a record of monthly sales, which were higher than any previous sales, so it was quite exciting watching the monthly totals gradually increase.
It became even more interesting when I received my royalty statements and realised that, while the estimated sales on the UK, Canadian, Australian, and various European sites were fairly accurate, the sales on the American site were massively underestimated, often by about one-fifth so, for example, 50 estimated sales in a month can translate to 250 actual sales.
The site also tells you the length of time since the last sale. Last night, I saw that at least one of each of my novels had been downloaded in the past 6 hours from one of the Amazon sites,
However, as all my novels are currently priced at 99cents/99 pence, I’m not planning any luxury world cruise on the proceeds! Rebecca, my publisher, is keeping them at this price, as she knows I’d far rather have more people buying my novels at a lower price, than fewer people buying them at a higher price. I write, not for the money, but for the satisfaction that people are reading my novels – and enjoying them! That’s the reason I’ve written stories since my teens when I was writing them for my friends to read.
Must just go check NovelRank again now…
Interesting that there is such a discrepancy, but what a lovely surprise.
ReplyDeleteEvidently (according to Becca) the discrepancy is something to do with the fact that credit card sales aren't counted on Amazon until after the end of the month.
DeleteIt must give you a good feeling that your books are so well read. Encouragement to write more.
ReplyDeleteIt's certainly satisfying to be able to keep track of downloads!
DeleteA sweet addiction!
ReplyDeleteSweet when sales are steadily increasing but it used to be rather depressing before my Irish books started to sell well!
DeleteI'm going to have to check this out. Thanks, Paula.
ReplyDeleteAnd I love your philosophy about the pricing of your books. Getting them into the hands of readers really is the most important thing. Kudos to you and your publisher.
Keeping them at a low price has certainly 'paid' off - not financially (because you don't get a lot of royalties from a 99 cent sale!), but definitely in number of downloads. When people get around to reading them on their Kindles is another matter though!
DeleteSo nice to hear, Paula.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteI'm glad you like the service... the big problem on Amazon.com is that there are a LOT of books, so it's nearly impossible to check every hour reliably since there is a sheer limit to requests/hour to Amazon. The exception is PRO subscribers, who get it FORCED every hour and more accuracy (and a ton of features).
ReplyDeleteNone-the-less, glad you like it.
Cheers,
Mario Lurig
Creator, Novelrank
Thanks for visiting, Mario. Looks like I may have to subscribe to PRO! :-)
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