Beginning this past September, something cool happened: Arcane Solutions, the first in my Discord Jones urban fantasy series, began selling.
Now, this particular title was released Jan. 25, 2012, so had been out for 1 year and 8 months before a noticeable uptick in sales began.
Prior to September 2013, it had sold 96 e-copies, and 4 paperback copies. It had 4 reviews on Amazon.com, 2 on Amazon.co.uk, and 2 reviews on Goodreads (plus a handful or so of ratings only).
Arcane had recovered $198.16 of its $1,157.11 in expenses, so was still quite deeply in the hole.
I’ve had a few people wanting to know what I did that resulted in Arcane finally beginning to sell.
I wrote the best book I could at that point in time, went through my steps (sending it to beta readers and having it professionally edited), uploaded it to Amazon and Smashwords (and through there, to other distribution sites), listed it on my sites, and linked to it a few times via my social media accounts. I did put up a series site for it, DiscordJones.com.
Then I basically did NOTHING. Sure, I tweeted the link a few times here and there, but I’d pretty much given up on promotion in favor of writing/releasing more titles. I started writing the second book, Something to Curse About, but ended up setting it aside. If the first one wasn’t selling much, it didn’t seem wise to go more into the hole getting the second one out.
After a truly disheartening spring/summer slump (May-12 sales, June-9, July-7, and August-5), I thought September was going to be more of the same. Instead, around the 15th, Arcane started selling a few copies.
February 2012 had been its best sales month to that point, with 11 copies sold. September 2013 ended with 16 sales for it, mostly through Amazon.co.uk.
In October 2013, Arcane sold 27 copies—again, mostly through Amazon.co.uk. And then November rolled around: 131 copies, plus Arcane appeared on Amazon.co.uk’s Top 100 lists for Paranormal and Urban Fantasy.
For December, Arcane sold 249 copies, and by then, my team and I had been busting our hind ends to finish Book 2 and release it. Arcane stayed steadily on the Paranormal Top 100 list throughout December.
Something to Curse About was released on Dec. 23rd. It sold a total of 83 copies that month (in 9 days!), which pretty much blew my socks off since my best prior new release had only sold 21 copies its first 30 days out, and that was with a blog tour and 99c intro price.
Not only that, but Something made an appearance on Amazon.co.uk’s Paranormal Top 100 on Christmas Day, as well as the 26th, 27th, and 28th, and has stayed on it daily since. Plus, it made an appearance on the Urban Fantasy Top 100 there on Dec. 30th and 31st, and has stayed on that list since Jan. 5th (as has Arcane Solutions!).
As of this writing, Arcane Solutions has sold 678 ebooks and 5 paperbacks. Something to Curse About has sold 252 ebooks (I’m working on formatting the paperback version).
Their sales have boosted the sales of my other titles to a degree. My best month of sales prior to November 2013 was April 2011 with 77 copies sold.
My new best month is December 2013, with 373 total copies sold, but January is catching up quickly, with 340 sales already reported just 12.5 days in.
Arcane Solutions has earned $231.39 over its expense so far. Something to Curse About has already recovered 65.22% of its expenses with only 22 days availability.
Note: For those who check/use it, Novelrank loses a LOT of accuracy once a title begins selling 3 or more copies per day in close conjunction. If the sales are spread out over the day, it stays pretty accurate. Once a title’s selling more than 7-10 copies per day, it only “captures” a relatively small portion of daily sales.
Example: Arcane sold 249 copies in December. Novelrank recorded 92 sales for it. It has sold 158 copies so far for January, and Novelrank has recorded 42 of those sales.
Something sold 83 copies in December, and Novelrank recorded 28 sales. It has sold 169 copies so far for January, and Novelrank’s recorded 44 of those sales.
Again, I did NOTHING to personally cause the sudden flow of sales. No blog tours, no other promotional tactics. I’d moved on to working on other stories, following Dean Wesley Smith’s advice to write more, release more in order to build sales. Which, I’ll note, is something I figured out myself back in 2010, since new releases were the only “sure fire” sales booster out of all the things I tried.
It was all a matter of pure, right place/right time, dumb luck…and Amazon’s mighty algorithm and onsite cross-promotion. Pure luck that a few people tripped over Arcane Solutions back in September and thought it looked interesting enough to buy, thus improving its ranking, which set the cross-promotion into gear with the alsobots.
And it simply began to snowball from there.
It’s still going. My average copies sold per day in December was 12. For January, it’s currently 27.8 per day, as of the end of yesterday. I’ve had two complete strangers contact me via email or Facebook to tell me how much they’ve loved the Discord books (SQUEEEEEE!) and asking when the next one will be out (I’m working on it!).
Arcane’s received a few new reviews on the Amazon sites, and on Goodreads, plus some ratings and has been added to more people’s To-Read lists there. But it DOES NOT have loads of reviews anywhere.
And, for the first time since I started down the indie path in late 2007, I ended a year in the black, instead of the red.
While I completely realize my numbers are still small potatoes to many, this has been a blinding stroke of luck that simply amazes me.
You hope, when you set out to become a writer and start putting your work out for public consumption, that people will want to read it, and will like it when they do.
You hope, since it costs money to produce each book, that each will sell…at least enough to earn back expenses so that you can keep writing and put more books out.
You hope, if you’re devoting a lot of time to writing and viewing it as a business, that you’ll see some return on that investment of your time and effort.
I don’t know about other writers that this has happened to, but it’s exciting and rather scary to me, even though I feel extremely fortunate that people have decided to buy my books and let me know they like them and want more.
It’s exciting for obvious reasons: My books are selling! People are saying they like them! Woohoo! 
It’s scary because I know it was all a matter of luck it’s happened (okay, aside from my continuing efforts to write well and make each book better than the one before it), and it could all come to a crashing halt at any second. It’s scary because right now, I’m actually on track to be earning a living writing by the end of 2014, and if it does stop as suddenly as it began, I’m thinking I’ll probably crash into a wall of depression that will keep me from writing for a while.
Which is dumb, but hey, I’m human. I can be pretty damn dumb sometimes.
It’s also scary because I know it’s all down to me, aside from luck, in whether it continues or not. If I can keep writing stories that people who’ve decided to stick with me as readers like, there’s a good chance this awesome thing will keep going. But if I flub it, I have no one to blame but myself. I’m the writer and the publisher, so have the final say on what I produce for public consumption. My beta readers and editors can only do so much with what I write.
I worry that my excitement and eagerness to respond to demands for “More Discord!” will lead to my sending the series flying over the proverbial shark, or to burning out on writing about the characters. Or trap me into writing ONLY about them and all my other projects never seeing the light of day.
Of course, none of that may happen. Spring and summer may roll around, and I’ll be back to being lucky to sell 5-12 copies per month.
Which is the point I’ve been trying to stress here:
It’s been a matter of luck.
Yes, I did and do try to write a good story every time. I do improve with each new, finished story. I do have other eyeballs on my work and pay to have it professionally edited. I love to write, but I do treat it as a business, with certain steps that must occur in order to produce the best quality book each time.
But whether or not a finished title catches any readers’ eyes comes down to luck. Even readers who have put me on their list of “Authors to read” aren’t going to want to read everything I write, or if they do, they’re not going to like everything. It’s not all going to be to their particular tastes.
But it all comes down to luck when you don’t have a big traditional publisher doing a promotional blitz for you with each new release.
Well, luck and through it, earning faithful readers.
And to those readers, old and new, I say “Thank you!”
