Sales Stats And What They Can Tell Us - Lynne Garner

By Lynne Garner -
Anansi - by Lynne Garner
It's that time when I look at my previous years sales and try to discover any patterns in said sales. Now as it's also my turn to write a blog post I decided to share some of my 2014 results with you.

 For the purposes of this blog I've looked at sales from September to December 2014 of my ebooks Anansi the Trickster Spider volume one and volume two plus the physical book which contains both volumes. The reason it's not the entire year is I didn't upload these books onto Smashwords or create a physical version via CreateSpace until September.

 Firstly I looked at the sales of these titles as ebooks only. As you can see the Amazon sales dwarf sales from Smashwords. I also noted that on Smashwords my sales were 11%  of the total number of the free sample downloads (which is much higher than I anticipated).      


However results become a little more interesting when I add the sales of the physical book. As you can see physical book sales outstrip my ebook sales made via Smashwords and are approximately half of my ebooks sales made by Amazon.
  

I then decided to look at the Amazon regions I made sales in. As you can see America is my biggest market.  


I then looked at the sales made by Smashwords and I found my sales via Apple (iTunes) were slightly behind the sales made via Barnes and Noble.


Last but not least I looked at sales across those four months and found that my ebook sales via Amazon and Smashwords were at their lowest during December. However my sales for December via Createspace were 20% higher than previous months.  

So what do all these stats tell me?

  • Firstly I should have converted my ebooks to physical books much sooner. 
  • Although sales via Smashwords are low compared to Amazon I am still making sales.
  • When someone is looking for a gift a physical book is still in demand.       

Actions for 2015

  • Write more books - I have one fiction book underway and I am on the second draft for two non-fiction titles. 
  • When I upload a new ebook to Amazon I'll also add to Smashwords and will create a physical version (if appropriate) via Createspace. 
  • Although it goes against the grain I'll 'Americanise' all future books, as that's my biggest market.
  • Get into marketing mode in August and really plug any physical version of the books I have and try to improve on that 20% December increase.

 As a close to this post I was wondering if you've looked at your sales and found anything interesting you are willing to share.

Lynne

My writing ecourses starting soon via Women On Writing:

Comments

Mari Biella said…
Interesting, Lynne - my own experiences pretty much mirror yours. Amazon account for the bulk of my sales, followed by Barnes and Noble. I've always sold more books in America than in the UK too, though that's probably inevitable given the relative sizes of the markets.
8 January 2015 at 14:35
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