How Is My Book Doing?

Before addressing the topic, let me say that I never wrote my book, Listen To My Heart – An Adult Fairy Tale, to make money. I would sell it for free but Amazon will not allow that. I worked 45 years as a computer engineer, directing all my imagination to that career. Now retired, I want to apply my active imagination to writing; telling stories that are entertaining, honest, and hopefully interesting to those with open minds.

As of February 15th, here are my sales results:

235  Ebooks

 35    Paperbacks

Now for a little honesty.

I purchased 31 paperbacks (5 Author’s proofs, 25 copies for friends and family, 1 copy to the Library of Congress Copyright Office). Four Amazon customers bought a paperback edition.

223 eBook copies were part of a Christmas Week promotion; they were free. The rest were Amazon customers who paid $2.99 each to download.

Did I make any money on this? Absolutely not. I spent money on Amazon Structured Product ads to trigger some sales; the cost of the ad campaign exceeded the income from sales by 250%. Amazon changed the rules for their advertising system in early January and the software tools that I purchased to help build the ad campaigns suddenly stopped working. For this reason, I have paused any ad campaigns until Amazon and the software tools people to get everything fixed. Hopefully, I can resume advertising on Amazon by the end of February.

Unfortunately, things are stacked against a first-time fiction author. A book like mine, with only four current reviews, ends up down at 1000th place for categories like adult fairy tales. People will have to click through 100 pages before encountering my book. The only way to change this is more positive reviews, more sales. If I have more than one novel in my Amazon bookshelf, they will let me offer one book for free to drive sales to the other books. That’s what I’m working on now. I will restart some Amazon ad campaigns soon to hopefully generate some sales.

I don’t write to make money. Maybe it’s to create another legacy, something on the cloud that my family and friends can remember me for.