Book Sales Thus Far

Thought I would post some of the results The Wandering King has been getting now that’s on Amazon.

During the 5-day period that I gave the book away for free, approximately 700 people downloaded it in the U.S. and 100 people downloaded it overseas.  Over the approximately 10 days that it’s been up for sale, it has sold 54 copies, and 13 people have borrowed it from Amazon’s library.

When you sign up for Kindle Select, they automatically offer your book to Amazon Prime members to borrow it for free.   Surprisingly, the author actually gets paid when people borrow your book.  Amazon takes some of the money they make from Amazon Prime memberships and distributes a percentage of that back to authors who sign up for Kindle Select.

The downside to signing up for Kindle Select is that Amazon has exclusive rights to your book for 90 days.  Which means I can’t sell it to Barnes & Noble for the Nook.  Which is fine for now.  In 90 days I’ll re-evaluate and either stick with Select or make it available to Nook owners through SmashWords.

One of the things I’ve been watching is where the book falls in Amazon ranking system, which determines how visible your book is on their site.  Initially the book was ranked approximately #95,000 out of probably hundreds of thousands of books.  When I gave it away for free for 5 days, it rose up in the rankings to #1,200 under their ‘free book’ listings.  It was ranked #1 under Ancient/Greece, #5 under History/Ancient and #10 on their Historical Fiction pages.

Once the book goes up for sale, it switches over to the ‘paid book’ listings, putting you in competiton with the Ken Follett’s, Bernard Cornwell’s and Cormac McCarthy’s of the world.  Immediately the book dropped in the rankings to about #20,000.  It stayed in the top 5 under the category for Ancient/Greece and History/Ancient, but disappeared entirely from the Historical Fiction page.  Over the past week the book has bounced around in the rankings from #16,000 to #80,000 and on the Ancient/Greece page from 1 to 20 on their ‘top 100’ list.

The things that seems to affect your ranking are reviews and sales.  Each time someone has posted a review of the book it has inspired additional sales, which has boosted the book’s place in the rankings.  Thus far the book has received 6 reviews, 5 of whom gave it 5-stars and one of whom gave it 4-stars.

Can only hope that some of the 800 people that downloaded it for free post reviews.  At least that was the plan.  Let’s see if the plan works.

Next step is to get the book on Amazon as a paperback.  Am hoping that happens in the next few days.  When it does I’ll blog about the process and how prospective authors can make it happen.
Kindle-Book-Sales

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