By Bruce Jones
Sales numbers for November. November was a great month for book sales, coming in with 278 books sold. A nice jump from October and 201 books sold. Income also jumped from $644.00 to $921.00. I think everyone is getting ready for the holidays and they started shopping in November. I had some really nice sales before Thanksgiving. I thought I might get a bump for Black Friday and Cyber Monday but most of my book sales came before the holiday. Almost 100% of my sales came from my paperback books uploaded though CreateSpace, the print-on-demand service for Amazon.
One of my goals for this year was to move my books over the Kindle. This became quite a challenge and I had basically just given up on the effort until I learned about the Kindle Comic Creator. What a great application from Amazon. It took months of effort trying to figure out file sizes and types and how to get them all in Word and working on the Kindle platform. I just couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted it to. This application reduced this process to 15 minutes a book. I was able to convert all of my graphic books over to Kindle books and they are now up there and starting to sell. I will have the numbers in the December report. You can also read my extensive blog post on how I did it and how you can too.
Book Sales and Income Breakdown for the Month of November 2013
I sold 278 books for the month of November, a great month.
Total income comes in at of $921.00 with the break down across markets,
USA $705.00, UK $209.00, and Europe $6.00.
It is hard to figure out the number of books sold between the US and Great Britain as there are many different royalty rates going on, but this is a nice number for the UK. Europe itself typically is very small. I will be interested in how the Kindle works with my books as it sells worldwide.
My most popular title is my Blank Sheet Music Book for Guitar, selling 87 copies
the second title is World Regional Maps Coloring Book, selling 48 copies
Everything else winds down with 16 out of the 22 titles selling.
This was a nice jump from the month of October where I sold 201 books for a total of $644. I continue to see nice sales from my Geography books
Lessons
I am a firm believer that to be a successful author these days you need to also manage your web and social media presence. I use a series of websites and social media sites to drive traffic to Amazon. At the end of November and the beginning of this month I was finally able to do some fixes and additions to those websites and get them ready for the holidays.
On each site I have set up ads and sales pages for most of my books, especially the more popular ones and I feel that it helps a lot with their sales. My biggest traffic site is www.FreeUSandWorldMaps.com with over 50,000 views a month. This site focuses on my geography and coloring books. Here is a link to the site’s book store page. For my music books I set up www.AcousticMusicTV.com with about 5-8,000 views a month. On each of these sites I either have pages from the books or graphics that are described and alt tagged for search. Along the sides I drop in ads that link straight to their matching Amazon sales page. I also set up a book sales page that is modeled on how Amazon sets up their sales page. Each book I produce also gets a video on YouTube, a Pinterest board, Facebook posts, blog and Twitter posts. I think this is vital to promoting your book and for making sales.
Bruce Jones Publishing News
On the news side I have a new book coming out shortly, How to Publish Your Book, A Beginners Guide for Print, Digital and E-Books. This book is based on my publishing experiences and what I have learned and is designed to help people get started publishing their books. The book is being edited at the moment but you can pick up pre-release copy by signing up to this site and downloading the free pdf. Look up on the right. One of the very cool things I did with this book was to use the power of crowd sourcing to help with designing the cover. I will cover this in more detail in the December book sales report. I am also exploring using Gumroad.com to give me another channel for selling. I will also talk about this in a future post.
Affiliate Links and Resources from Companies or Services I Use to Build my Books
Disclosure: many of the links below are affiliate links that I will earn a commission if you purchase through them. If you do, I appreciate it and if you have any questions about any of the products or services please contact me!
HostGator.com, Web host for my book promotion sites
ShutterStock.com, Website I use for cover and inside stock images
CreateSpace.com, Amazon’s print-on-demand site for publishing physical books
Amazon/Kindle Direct Publishing, Access for publishing on Kindle
To see my books on Amazon please visit my author page https://www.amazon.com/author/jbrucejones
