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Analysis of Sales of The Great Scottish Land Grab Part Two

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Yesterday I started an analyis of what worked and what failed as I attempted to market my first fiction ebook: The Great Scottish Land Grab.

Today I want to look in more detail at what I was doing to market the book and what results it had.

The chart below shows the lifetime sales of Land Grab book one since June 2014:

First thing to point out is that Orange/yellow shows sales where I got paid, blue is sales of the book after I set the price to free.

One of my biggest mistakes was not making book one free right away. Instead I priced it at 99p.

I was marketing Land Grab every single day during the summer of 2014. I printed up business cards, approached random strangers at village fairs and at train stations. I posted on Facebook and Twitter and while I sold over a hundred copies, look at the difference in numbers from October 2016… I did almost no marketing at all for the three months from October 2016 and people still found and downloaded the book!

I wonder how many more downloads I might have had in 2014 if I had enticed people in with a free offer.

The next two charts show life-time sales for books two and three respectively:

The numbers are not huge so I can’t make any hard and fast statements about what worked and what didn’t work, but it does seem to me that releasing Land Grab as a series did allow people to try at a low price and then free, and then go on to buy the other books in the series.

Both in 2014 and since October 2016, I’ve seen people go on to buy book two and three after downloading book one.

The chart for the full trilogy looks very different:

The fact is that I still carry business cards with me and still give them out or leave them in cafe’s and other venues for people to find. The business cards only advertise the full novel and I think that people who are intrigued by the cover image on the cards or maybe by something I’ve said will go on to buy the full novel.

Contrast the final chart with the first three and you see that huge dead area from November 2015 till August 2016. Without advertising I don’t see sales.

That’s a really important statement. Early this year I had an offer from Facebook. A £30 credit towards Facebook advertising. I used £12 of that voucher to advertise The Great Scottish Land Grab and later worked out that I made a slight profit off the back of it. (In reality a full profit as Facebook gave me a free voucher, but looking to see whether I would make a profit in future, it was small, but there.)

Tomorrow I’m going to try and round all this up into some sage advice to anyone thinking about how they can sell their book.

Analysis of Sales of The Great Scottish Land Grab Part One

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On 13th June 2014 I published my first fiction book: part one of a planned four book series titled The Great Scottish Land Grab. Published solely as an ebook through Amazon KDP, I fully intended to cash in on the hype surrounding the rapidly approaching referendum on Scottish independence.

This post is intended as an analysis of what worked and what failed as I attempted to market my first ebook.

Here’s the high level sales figures:

Total downloads:

The Great Scottish Land Grab Book One …. 227
The Great Scottish Land Grab Book Two …. 58
The Great Scottish Land Grab Book Three .. 56

Total sales receipts:

The Great Scottish Land Grab Book One …. £33.66
The Great Scottish Land Grab Book Two …. £74.75
The Great Scottish Land Grab Book Three .. £73.29

All these numbers are up to the end of May 2017, effectively three years worth of sales.

Somewhere during editing book two I realised that I would only manage to write three books before the referendum and so books three and four became one book.

On 24th September 2014, I released the full trilogy as a complete novel.

Total downloads:

The Great Scottish Land Grab …. 43

Total sales receipts:

The Great Scottish Land Grab …. £87.93

So, in total, in three years I’ve sold 384 books and made £269.63 from these ebooks.

I confess that at times it has been extremely depressing to know how few copies I’ve sold in a three year period. However, I’ve had a large number of readers contact me to tell me how much they enjoyed the story. I enjoyed writing the book and even enjoyed the rush of trying to market it at the time. It has been a worthwhile learning experience and I was able to go on to write a much better second novel in Fallen Warriors.

And I’ve gained knowledge about how not to market a book which does seem to be helping as I concentrate on Fallen Warriors. Tomorrow I’m going to look at some of the lessons I’m still trying to learn and apply.

Neglecting to Advertise

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When I set out to publish Fallen Warriors, I told myself that I would learn from previous mistakes. My first novel – The Great Scottish Land Grab – did sell and continues to be sold today, but I failed to keep advertising it and so for long months, no books were sold.

It is a fact of modern life that we are bombarded with advertising all day, every day. I have no desire to contribute to that tsunami we all face, yet I know that if I don’t advertise my novels, few people will hear of them.

Last month I launched my first Amazon Marketing Services campaign for Fallen Warriors in America. This ad resulted in 66,862 impressions over five days (impressions being where your ad is shown on screen.) 43 actual clicks from those ads and 2 sales actually putting me in profit for my $5.55 total spend!

The system is quite neat. Amazon only charge you when your ad is clicked by a customer. If that customer then goes on to buy your book, it is recorded as a sale.

You can enter as many keywords as you want which can be book titles or author names and if someone searches for that keyword (or phrase) then you then compete with other advertisers for your book to be shown. Whether you win or not is down to your CPC Bid which is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for your ad to be shown. And this can be set against each keyword…

For my first campaign I entered 38 keywords each with a $0.25 CPC bid.

For some reason it’s a whole lot harder (more expensive) to advertise on Amazon in the UK. They seem to be wanting a Vendor Code before you can set up an account to advertise which costs £25 a month. I’m looking into whether it is possible to avoid that monthly payment. More on that later…

I’ve been thinking that I need to take advantage of the ability to write posts in series. This week I’m going to carry out some analysis of sales data for my novels and other books. Tomorrow I’ll look at sales of The Great Scottish Land Grab and see if I can learn some lessons.