When Is a Sale Not a Sale? · 7:13pm Sep 27th, 2018
When it doesn’t sell anything, clearly.
Okay, this needs a bit of explanation, but it’s an odd one. So things have been going pretty well sales-wise lately. Colony and Shadow of an Empire just keep ticking away copies, finally moving my book income from “Spare change” to “rent payment.” Or at least, they were, save for this last week.
What happened? Well, I went ahead and put Unusual Events: A “Short” Story Collectionon a random sale for the week. Starting a 99 cents. Colony and Shadow were both doing well, so I figured that a nice discount on Unusual Events (Still, to date, my only book to not generate a profit and my lowest selling of all time) would maybe allow it to move a few copies alongside its stronger siblings.
Let me tell you, did that backfire. Instead of Events selling a few copies … all other sales stopped dead.
Most likely that one, nowdays the discount for stuff tends to be on "all/most" of x (group, person, whatever) work so people probably though the others might become discounted over the next few days?
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Well, Colony, Shadow, and Dead Silver will all be going on a sale this weekend to give things a nudge toward getting back to their usual levels, so ... it worked?
Well, that's zarking weird.
What would happen if you raised the price of Unusual Events?
It's really a shame UE hasn't done better. I loved those stories...
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There will still be a second one. A Game of Stakes has to go somewhere, after all, other than the anthology it was written for ..
But I digress. Yeah, it's Weird with a capital W.
The opposite happened to me. I only have the one book out and I've never done any real marketing for it, don't run a blog, nothing, so as expected, it's getting basically no sales or page reads. (I intend to change this hopefully in the near future, set up a website, and so on, but for now, nothing.) I've recently been fiddling with Amazon ads, just to see how they work, but nothing serious, really.
About 3 days ago, page reads on the book skyrocketed. I mean going from getting maybe a couple hundred page reads in a month to thousands every day. I don't want to jinx it, but it's still going. I've absolutely no clue where the page reads are coming from. More puzzling, the book is also still getting no actual sales, no reviews, nothing. Just a bunch of people on KU/KOLL devouring this book in the span of a day, every day.
...could there be a connection? Seriously. Your book goes on sale, lots of people click it, see my book in the "people also bought..." list or something and think "hey this looks interesting"? I'm just spitballing because I've honestly no clue what's happening here.