
Looking at that and tabulating the results, I can tell I had 1,897 book sales in 2015.
Since I started in 2013 I’ve sold 4,300 books.
In regard to retailers, 2016 breaks down like so:
- Amazon: 1,208 sales
- Createspace: 389 sales
- D2D: 260 sales
- Smashwords: 49 sales
That actually comes out to 1,906 sales, meaning I’m off by 9 sales for the year.
Oh well, that’s close enough, especially considering that no one really cares.
I care.
I’m quite happy with these sales. I average 158 book sales a month.
Not bad.
Could it be better?
You bet.
Could it be worse?
You bet.
That’s the problem – comparing yourself to others. I mean, I’m doing a helluva lot better than probably 75% of the writers/authors out there.
Still, I and many others like me look to the 25% that are ahead of us.
Those are the people we compare ourselves to, and it’s often not helpful or healthy.
So I’m satisfied with my sales, and thankful for them.
Besides that, I had an extra 78,054 pages read, which gave me about $400 or so in extra income throughout the year…depending on the KU 2.0 payout.
This is how my most popular KU 2.0 books broke down:
- Colter’s Winter: 34,577 pages read
- Colter’s Hell: 19,941 pages read
- The Warring States, Vol. 1-3: 4,453 pages read
- The Jongurian Resolution: 2,754 pages read
- Trouble in Jonguria: 2,239 pages read
- Dulce Base: 2,276 pages read
- The Warring States: 1,893 pages read
As you can see, the most popular books are my Montana westerns, which I’ve since taken out of the program.
Other than that, it’s not even really worth it to have my books in KU 2.0.
Sure, I get a few thousand pages read over a few months. That’s just not enough to boost me high on a Top 100, however.
Mainly, I think I’ll go wide again with a few of my novels.
Doing so has helped me with D2D, where I’ve picked up more than a dozen sales this month on those Colter books on that retailer.
For the books I released in 2015, sales broke down like so:
- Colter’s Winter: 276
- Dulce Base: 136
- Stand Out: 121
- Colter’s Hell: 53
- Social Media Politics: 41
- Colter’s Run: 40
- How to Write Fantasy: 20
- Colter’s Friend: 19
- Soul Catcher: 7
- Strategic Self-Publishing: 7
- Get Noticed: 6
- Feds and Farmers: 5
- Mountain Man Series 1-3: 4
- Flight 370: 3
Based on my total sales, these are my bestselling books:
You’re seeing the total sales for that book, then the percentage that book makes up for my total sales.
So for English Rocks, it makes up 12% of my total book sales since I started in 2013.
Colter’s Winter, released this past year, makes up nearly 7% of my total book sales to date.
So those are my book sales. Thanks for reading.