Apple

This morning, I broke 100 sales on my new book Knifepoint (don’t go hitting me up for riches yet, they’re all at $0.99). Since it’s in several stores, including a bevy of international ones, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at where those sales came from and see what if anything pops up.

Here’s how those first 100 sales break down:

83 – Amazon
4 – Amazon UK
1 – Amazon DE
10 – B&N
2 – Kobo (1 Canada, 1 Portugal)
0 – iBookstore

That’s 0 at the iBookstore because it was under review until just a few minutes ago, which is kind of a funny commentary on Apple in general–high standards that sometimes get in the way of their ability to sell shit. (But I’ll give them this, they have incredible customer support. After 36 hours of my book being under review, I inquired about its status. They got it live less than an hour later.) The rest of it follows common perceptions about the various storefronts: Amazon is the biggest by far; B&N is several times smaller than Amazon, but a few times larger than Kobo or the iBookstore; Kobo cleans up in Canada but also has a smattering of sales across the rest of the entire world.

100 sales is a pretty small sample size, but oddly enough, this lines up very closely with my sales for the last four months, which break down about like this:

85% – Amazon (all domains)
9% – B&N
4.5% – Kobo
1% – iBookstore, Smashwords, print

Those are just my numbers, of course. In reality, I think the iBookstore’s share of the ebook market is pretty similar in size to Kobo’s–I just haven’t been able to get anything going there. Meanwhile, Amazon’s market share these days is supposed to be 60% or less, but 85% of my sales come from it. While I’m no longer interested in being exclusive to Amazon through their Select program, without Amazon, I wouldn’t be making a living at this. That right there is why so many of us indies are Amazon-boosters.

Here’s the big question I’d ask myself, if I were a crazy person who talks to himself: Could I make up for the 15% of my non-Amazon sales by returning to the exclusivity of Select? I suspect I could right now, but I couldn’t begin to project how things would look a year from now. There’s an advantage to being in a store early on. For instance, I think the iBookstore’s ranks are getting harder and harder to crack, whereas 12-18 months ago, it wasn’t too tough to get a foothold. The same thing could wind up true for Kobo, which doesn’t have awesome discoverability, yet is growing by the day. Sneak up their ranks early, and it could give you a lasting advantage.

That said, if my non-Amazon sales were 10% of my total, I might be reconsidering Select. And if they were 5%, I would almost certainly hop back into the program. It’s hard to get going in the other stores, but Select is the easy-button. That’s why so many indies come off like they’re pro-Select. Well, few of them are fans of Select qua Select. They’re fans of things that let them sell books.

7% of those first 100 sales are non-US, by the way. I’ve been doing pretty well in in non-US markets lately, with nearly a quarter of my Amazon sales for February coming from the UK. It’s tough to get going there, too, but if you can, it’s like having access to a whole new market on par with one of the major non-Amazon stores.

…and I guess that’s it. Was it actually interesting to look at those first 100 sales? I don’t know, but it was certainly easier than writing that damned “how to interpret Select giveaway numbers” post I’ve been putting off.

It is an amazing time to be an author. No joke. It has probably never been easier or more realistic to make a living writing books. Self-publishing platforms offered by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and elsewhere have made it incredibly easy for authors to reach readers directly. Maybe too easy! Well, you don’t have to buy it, chums.

But I am deeply in love with all these companies. After spending most of a year gazing creepily into their Nooks and crannies, I have determined they are very much like people. Some take more time to understand than others. Some are easygoing. Others are grumpy. Whatever their faults, however, I love them all, because they have given me the job I have always wanted to had: writing books.

And just like friends and relatives, none of them is perfect. Since they’ve all come to me begging for advice, I’ve assembled a list of ways they can improve (from the perspective of indie authors) over the next year. It should be stated and restated that none of these suggestions means I think any of these places is useless or bad. I genuinely love all of them.

But some could be better to me. If I were these places, and I cared what indie authors thought, here’s what I would do to improve the experience in 2013.


Amazon needs to improve the Select program.

In 2012, Select changed everything. It released in early December of 2011 and allowed unknown authors to give their books away to thousands of readers. With a decent free run to vault them up Amazon’s popularity lists, an author could go on to sell a lot of their books over the next 7+ days, too. Over the period of just a few months, uncounted indie authors built real careers on the back of Select.

In March, Amazon tested ways to alter the program, because (presumably) it resulted in a lot of questionable books at the top of the popularity lists, which is one of their major drivers of sales. In May, they decided they had a better system, and watered down the effectiveness of freebies significantly. Within six months of Select going live and changing everything, Amazon neutered it.

The outcome looks great for Amazon. Only the books that gave away the greatest number of copies saw a significant boost in sales afterwards (and instead of lasting for 1-2 weeks, that boost could last for a full month!). That meant only the books that had been most vetted by free downloaders wound up in front of paying customers.

Which meant it became more of a winner-takes-all program. Great for indie books with strong packaging in popular genres. Not so great for niche subgenres, or for anyone who doesn’t fall into, say, the top 2-5% of the Select program.

I don’t know, maybe it’s best for readers to only be served up with the best of the best indie books. But it is not the best for authors. Especially those with quality books but whose genre/luck/ability to massage the big book blogs isn’t the strongest. Offering Select authors a 70% royalty in certain non-English-speaking territories isn’t enough. The KOLL doesn’t provide them enough alternative visibility, either (and anyway, it still disproportionately rewards those at the top). Exclusivity should be worth something. There’s got to be another way to get started as a new author besides trashing other books on Goodreads, building a following, and then releasing a New Adult book. Please add a new incentive to Select in 2013.

Barnes & Noble needs an affiliate program.

As far as I know, there is no B&N equivalent to free and bargain Kindle book blogs like Pixel of Ink, Ereader News Today, and Free Kindle Books and Tips, to name just the largest. Blogs like these are instrumental for helping indie authors run promotions and get in touch with eager readers, yet there’s not a single blog remotely like this for B&N.

Why are there a jillion Kindle blogs and zero for Nook? Because Kindle blogs make lots of money off Amazon’s affiliate program. When they direct a shopper to Amazon, they receive a cut of anything that shopper goes on to buy during that trip. This incentivizes entrepreneurs to set up sites meant to alert readers to free, bargain, and noteworthy books available on Amazon. If these blogs do a good job at that, they make lots and lots AND LOTS of money.

B&N has an affiliate program, but they don’t extend it to ebooks. Thus nobody cares enough to get one going for ebooks. Thus indie authors and small publishers have far fewer methods to promote ebooks on B&N. I don’t know why they don’t extend this program to ebooks. It seems like free money for everyone–B&N gets advertising at a small cost of the sales generated by that advertising; bloggers get affiliate money; authors get royalties–yet B&N discontinued the program earlier this year. Maybe the numbers just didn’t add up.

But this is one of the chief reasons Amazon has a robust indie market and B&N is a very distant second. If they want a share of that market, they’ve got to open up ways for people to participate in it. I think that starts with affiliate percentages on ebooks.

This goes for all the ebookstores, really. If I were a smaller outlet like Sony, I would be murdering myself–or better yet, everyone else!–to set up an effective affiliate program and get other people selling my products for me.

Kobo needs an automated new releases list.

Kobo’s got a bunch of lists on their site, but most appear to be hand-operated. As in, books are selected to appear on them by hand. That’s cool, but it rewards established authors who already have the name recognition to be selected for these lists.

This extends to new releases. Yet the new release lists are one of the few areas where new authors who have either a) great books or b) savvy can push their books up the list, drawing new eyeballs.

I love Kobo. They’ve made great strides in 2012, they’re super personable, they’re indie-friendly, and I think they will soon be/already are a vital part of the ebook and indie marketplace. Now they just need to make it a little easier for new authors to get a toehold in their store. A big step in that direction includes a new release list that’s ordered by bestsellers and sortable by genre.

An automated list of bestselling freebies would be nice, too, but one step at a time.

The iBookstore needs more avenues to visibility.

Apple’s iBookstore is deeply intriguing. When you’re not used to it, it looks awful. Browsing is weird. It’s a miracle anyone can find anything. But once you’re used to it, it’s not bad at all. In fact, it’s got a bunch of different categories to find books in, a few lists of bestsellers, bargain-priced books, and staff picks, and as an author, you can set prices in 50 different countries and counting, allowing you to target prices and promotions to markets as they emerge.

But the iBookstore is not all that deep. It’s easy to find the bestselling books, as well as the ones the iBookstore team hand-selects to appear on the couple lists they’ve got, but that’s about it. Its searchability is less than great. Like Kobo, it’s very winner-takes-all. The tail isn’t very long with Apple (or, to be more accurate, very fat). They’re well-curated, but maybe a little too well-curated. Let’s add a few more ways for books to be discovered. Let indies work to prove their worthy rather than relying on you to be placed in front of shoppers.


Amazon needs to quit obsessing about new releases.

You thought I was done with Amazon? Ha ha! In the words of Kramer, not bloody likely!

In the last 1-2 years, Amazon has geared their site more and more toward new releases. Hot New Releases lists now last 30 days instead of 90. The popularity lists measure the last 30 days of sales rather than the last ~7. It has resulted in a system where new releases are king, and if you don’t sell well right off the bat, you may never have the chance to. For new writers, there’s really no such thing as “organic” growth on Amazon. You either bring a fanbase to the table to buy your new book the instant it goes live, or you struggle in total obscurity until you give away enough books to have a fanbase for your next release.

This is a catastrophic system. On the one hand, by measuring the last full 30 days of sales, it makes it very difficult for a short-term boost to be big enough to get a book selling in any real numbers. On the other hand, by only measuring the last 30 days, you ensure that books that did gain from short-term boosts and are now finding their audience will die a noisy death as soon as that 30-day cliff rolls around.

Please vary it up a little. I know, you’ve got 1,800,000 ebooks and counting. Who cares about all that old crap when you’re adding 100,000 titles per month. But right now, too many elements of the system run along similar lines. Book sales crash too hard and rockets launch too fast. Vary it up so that authors can actually claw their ways up the ranks. And when it comes time to fade, let them parachute gradually rather than smashing into a big red writer-shaped puddle.

You’re too volatile, is what I’m saying. Having multiple systems working on 30-day scales isn’t helping anyone except people who understand how to game new releases.


Smashwords needs to quit sucking.

I feel bad for saying this, because Smashwords founder Mark Coker is pretty cool, and a definite friend of indies. But at this point, his ebook distribution service doesn’t offer a whole lot of value. It’s good to use if you don’t have a Mac and want to be on iTunes. It’s nice if you don’t live in the US but want to distribute to B&N. And it’s useful to get out to all those other tiny stores where nobody sells anything but you may as well be there because hey why not. Oh, and it lets you put free books on B&N, which is awesome for you but seems kind of useless for Smashwords.

Otherwise, there is no benefit to uploading through Smashwords instead of going direct to all the places that let you go direct (as of this writing, that includes [with some caveats] Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and the iBookstore).

On the contrary, Smashwords distribution can actually hurt you in a lot of ways. The Meatgrinder forces you to use .docs rather than the epubs that are industry-standard elsewhere. That means an additional round of formatting for many authors. Even .doc-users have to meet Smashwords’ rather rigid style guide. Smashwords doesn’t categorize books all that accurately, either, leaving your books in a wasteland of discoverability when they are pushed to other markets. And changes made to your books on Smashwords can take weeks or even months to filter through to the other stores.

I mean, Smashwords could be a pretty good service for a lot of authors, specifically the subset that wants to just buckle down and write rather than micromanaging their books on all the various vendors. Upload to Smashwords, distribute widely, collect checks, party party. I am far too data/control-neurotic to do that, but that is a valuable service. No joke.

But not accepting epubs and having very specific formatting requirements for .docs makes it less convenient to go through them, and their general sluggishness makes it excessively difficult to run effective sales or promotions. In fact, given pricematching between stores, having delayed price changes can result in authors losing hundreds or thousands of dollars when Amazon slashes their book prices down to match prices on Sony that should have been changed a month ago.

So there you go, SW. Get faster, get more precise in areas like category mapping, and accept epubs. I’m sure that’s just as easy as I’ve made it sound.

Everyone except Kobo and the iBookstore needs to improve their customer service.

Kobo and iBookstore: awesome. Knowledgable, prompt, helpful, eager. Everyone else: terrible. Take a lap.

B&N’s customer service department has apparently all been zapped to Lost, because they don’t respond at all anymore. Amazon has no phone number for emergencies and their representatives are inconsistent at best. Smashwords is small and can take a long time to reply. Sony says, “Sorry, take it up with Smashwords.”

I know this stuff costs a lot of money. But two stores are doing it right. If you can afford to step up your CS game, look to Kobo and Apple.

Sony needs to exist.

That place is just a myth, right? A land of makebelieve sales? As far as ebookstores, the more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. Out of roughly 14,000 books sold this year, I think about a dozen of those were on Sony. That is probably being generous. Sony: please prove you exist.

In my last post in this series, I looked at whether Select is as useful in the long term of an indie author’s career as it is in the short term, concluding that Select carries several costs and risks. My skepticism may be weird, coming after two posts that were nothing but rah-rah Select cheerleading, but Select isn’t a life-philosophy. There’s no Tao Te KDP Select. As I’ve said before, Select is a tool. And I think it is, in general, most effective as a tool for those who are just starting out.

Which isn’t to say it becomes useless once an author’s established. But things are a little different.

Before we get started, two things. What do I mean that an author is “established,” or has reached a “medium-term” portion of their career? Hell, I don’t know. Somewhere between fresh out of the gates and automatic bestseller? To put it in more concrete terms, I’m thinking about authors whose careers, at present, roughly match up to these guidelines:

  • Have published 3-6 or more full-length books (or some equivalent in serializations, novellas, and the like)
  • Capable of selling at least a few dozen copies of their new release right off the bat

  • Are writing and publishing 2+ novels a year

This is just ballpark thinking. To abstract these points a bit, the idea is that you’ve got a backlist of sorts, you’ve got the infrastructure in place to generate some sales with new releases (be this a mailing list, canny advertising, or whatever), and that you’re continuing to put out new books on at least a fairly regular schedule. To get even more abstract: you don’t just have a book or two out there floating in the ooze. Instead, you’ve got resources at your disposal to take advantage of when sales slow down and it’s time to give yourself a boost.

Onto the second qualification: take all this advice with a grain of salt. In fact, take it with two grains, because salt is delicious. But also take two grains because I’m not coming at this from the perspective of somebody with lengthy, firsthand expertise. I don’t sell 50,000 copies a month. My garage doesn’t contain a Ferrari and an elephant. Some twenty months into my indie career, I’m just breaking into this phase myself. I’m coming at it from the perspective of someone whose own floor is barely in place, who’s able to make a living, but not one most people would consider respectable. I’m observing and experimenting with all this stuff right now. That means what I’m seeing is present-day info, which is nice in a business changing this fast, but it could also mean I’m heading down the path to disaster. Just want to toss that out there!

Anyway, on to the thinkin’.

If the early stage of an indie career is about building your floor, I think the middle stage is about building.. the stuff that goes on top of the floor. Maybe this metaphor should be about a castle? In which case, the middle phase of your career is about raising new turrets, bastions, ramparts, moats, curtain walls lined with merlons, murder holes…you get the picture. All the infrastructure that will defend your career against the threats of the outside world and a rapidly changing industry. Logically, the best way to build a stable, steady career is to establish multiple revenue streams for yourself. To cast aside the shackles of Select and spread your arms to the healing rays of iTunes, Kobo, B&N, etc.

…or maybe the best way to build a stable career is to continue to reach as many readers as possible. And maybe that involves staying in Select.

I think both are valid points of view, so I’m going to explore both strategies, as well as some that fall in between. First off, though, is a bit of a cheat. You can be in Select and other stores. How? With paperbacks and other non-ebook formats, of course.

   On the Virtues of Non-eBook Formats

If you haven’t already, expanding to these other formats–the most obvious ones are paperbacks and audiobooks–is worth exploring. I know, not everyone is as lazy as me. They were downloading CreateSpace templates with one hand while uploading their ebooks to KDP with the other. Well you know what, pal, if you’re that ambidextrous, there are probably easier ways to make money than writing books.

And I think that, in the early phases of indiedom, it’s okay to focus exclusively on ebook formats. Ebooks are the easiest format for indies to break into, and proper formatting doesn’t require much specialized talent. Certainly not like producing quality cover art. Meanwhile, formatting a paperback or getting an audiobook produced requires an author to learn an entirely new set of skills. Considering how little money you’re likely to make off these formats in the early going, I think it’s perfectly valid to ignore them in favor of working on new books.

At first. Somewhere in this middle phase, however, I think it’s worth your while to take a break from your daily schedule to learn how to get these other formats available for people to buy. Hell, you don’t even have to learn paperback formatting for yourself. There are a lot of people out there who’ll do it for you for $30-100 a pop. That may not have been feasible for your to pay in the early going, when every cent mattered, but if you’re bringing in monthly sales, it’s time to invest some of that revenue into new ways to sell your books. With audiobooks, it can be expensive to hire a narrator outright, but if you agree on a royalty split, your total costs should be minimal.

If you choose to learn to format paperbacks for yourself, chances are you’ll find the next one takes far less time to produce. My first paperback took me several days to format. I’m finishing the second one right now. It took me maybe three hours in total to produce, including emails to my cover artist and such, and cost $50: $25 for CreateSpace’s expanded distribution, and $25 for the paperback cover. (Technically, an additional $25 on top of the ebook cover I’d commissioned earlier.) It is very difficult to predict the future, but assuming CreateSpace doesn’t go out of business in the next two months, I believe this minor investment of time and money will pay for itself many times over.

I think that’s all I’ll say about that. Other people have covered the importance of other revenue streams in much more detail, and with far greater experience, than I’m capable of doing. Paperbacks and audiobooks may never be a major component of your income, but they can be a small tower of your empire, a place to take refuge in even when other towers are collapsing. And if these formats are an area you enjoy exploring, you may be able to use these bastions as strongholds from which to expand your reach. Man, I write too much epic fantasy. I’m talking about getting paperbacks into local bookstores. Serializing audiobooks on your website. That sort of thing.

Back to ebooks. Specifically, to stay in Select, or to start heading sail for distant stores?

  What to Pull Out of Select

Again, I have a handy dodge. Unless all your titles are in successful series, you may have noticed that one of your books just doesn’t seem to get any juice from Select. Maybe the big freebie blogs rarely mention it when it’s free. Maybe you’ve never wound up with enough reviews, or a high enough review rating, to meet those blogs’ standards. Maybe everything about selling this book feels like pushing a boulder uphill.

Well, I say stop pushing that boulder. Nobody likes pushing boulders. Some books are just tough sells. It’s hard to know which ones are boulders before they’re up for sale–few people intend to write dud books–but given enough time, and several other books for comparison, it’s pretty easy to tell which of your books are tough sells, and may never see any significant benefit from Select. These are the books whose monthly sales columns make you want to shake your head and send them to the corner with a pointy cap on.

These boulders are perfect candidates to roll out of Select and into the other stores. The truth is they probably won’t sell like gangbusters elsewhere, either–if they lack that certain appeal in one store, they probably won’t have it anywhere–but they’ll more than likely sell a few copies here and there. They may gradually pick up a few reviews, not that those appear to be nearly as important beyond Amazon. And once you’re ready to transition your better-selling books to other stores, new readers who snap up your bestsellers will have other titles of yours to buy, too.

Additionally, novellas, short stories, and story collections all tend to have a hard time in Select, but may do better on platforms like iTunes. If you’re not getting any Select traction with them, don’t be afraid to let them expire from the program and distribute them to other stores.

   Should I Upload Directly? Or Use a Third-Party Distributor?

When it comes to the other stores, I recommend uploading directly whenever possible. Smashwords is a useful company and service, particularly if you’re trying to get into stores you can’t partner with directly (such as B&N, if you’re outside the US, or Apple, if you’re a human). But they’re very clumsy. They don’t always catalogue books correctly, and any changes you make to pricing, content, etc. may take days, weeks, even months to filter out to all the other stores. Use Smashwords where it makes sense–when you can’t get into a store, when you’ve got a book you’re all but certain you’ll rarely if ever change (an unpopular short story collection, say), when you’re making a book permanently free, and to be present on Smashwords itself.

But if you can, go direct through Kobo. Go direct through Barnes & Noble. If you’ve got a Mac, apply to sell direct through iTunes. Much like learning to format paperbacks, once you’ve learned to format an epub for the other stores, doing it with your next book will take no time at all. You may be able to upload the same Word document, or just have Calibre export an epub instead of a mobi. In exchange for this small expenditure of your time, you’ll have direct control over your books. You’ll be able to change prices, blurbs, categories, etc. in a matter of hours rather than days and weeks. And if you have to suddenly change your whole strategy–because, for instance, OMG selling books outside Amazon is impossible–you can unpublish tonight rather than waiting months to abandon the other stores and scurry back to Select like the scurvy rat ye be.

Okay, dunno where that came from. I don’t write any pirate fiction. Point is, you want to remain nimble at all times. Nimbleness (nimbility?) is one of your chief weapons as an indie. You want to be able to react to changes the moment after they happen. If you publish through a third-party distributor, you lose that flexibility. Don’t use Smashwords (or anywhere else) just because it’s easy. Use it smartly. Use it when it’s to your advantage. Otherwise, preserve control of your work wherever possible. You’ll thank yourself later.

Hey, I gave you that advice. You should be thanking me.

   Yeah, But You Said There Would Be Strategies Here

I know. But this is getting loooooong, and I have a new novel to flog. Anyway, all these things are strategies, kind of. And they’re applicable to all authors, whether or not Select is a major plank of your platform.

A lot of opinion-having writers feel like Select is an either/or proposition. It isn’t. Once you’ve reached this middle phase of your indie career, you should be in position to decide for yourself whether you want to stay in Select or branch out to other stores–but whatever you decide, you’ve still got options.

Even if you think you’ll stick with Select, you can kick your non-performing titles out of the nest and see if they have better luck elsewhere. Start building new floors at Kobo and B&N and iTunes, however tiny, in case you change your mind down the road. Your boulders aren’t doing you any good in Select anyway. Just fire ’em off and forget ’em.

If you plan to get all your books out of Select and into the other stores.. well, follow that exact same process, but more aggressively. Be faster to pull the trigger on suspected boulders. Use these advance scouts to get a feel for how the other stores work so you’ll be in best position to sell your popular titles. This metaphor is terribly mixed. But don’t fire and forget. Fool around with your scouts, then fool around some more.

Whatever your top-level strategy, bear in mind that the ebook is not the only property you have to work with. Your story is what’s of value. People will buy that story in whatever format it comes in–ebook, paperback, audiobook, holocube, neuronasal spraypaper. But you have to give them the option first. Once you’ve got a few books out there, try to find the chance to take a few weeks off your writing to devote to other formats.

This is 2300 words. That’s a lot of words. I will endeavor to produce another batch by tomorrow.

Yesterday, I noticed my novella The Zombies of Hobbiton was #34 on iTunes in Science Fiction & Literature. #34! That sounded like big news. Especially considering my Amazon sales are way, way down after the most recent algorithm changes that are strangling Select in its crib. That prompted me to take a real look at the iTunes store for the first time. I love Amazon and all, but I don’t like the idea of having all my eggs in one basket.

Here’s the problem. iTunes is a lot harder to read than Amazon.

There are a whole lot of different factors for this. Some of them are personal. I just haven’t ever really spent any time browsing the store. I’ve looked at my own books a couple times, but I found the store clumsy and confusing, especially when it came to navigation. Guess who just discovered iTunes has a back button!

The second factor is a cultural one. Among indie authors, Amazon is king. It currently owns something like 60% of the ebook market, yet it probably commands closer to 90% of the discussion. People just don’t talk about B&N or iTunes or Kobo or Sony, except perhaps to point and laugh. Maybe I need to expand my horizons, but in the circles I run in, very little analysis is focused on the workings of the other stores. And this makes sense. Who cares about how Kobo works if it’s only pulling 3% of all book sales? (Note: I made that number up.) Just distribute there through Smashwords and forget about it. Now let’s talk about Amazon some more.

In that environment, you don’t get communities of authors coming together to swap information and compare notes. Like, I am aware some indie authors do really well on iTunes or B&N, but I have no clue what’s driving that success.

The third and possibly biggest factor in the unknowns of iTunes is the real killer: I don’t have access to real-time sales figures.

I distribute to iTunes through Smashwords. Smashwords is a great program, but it places a filter between me and what’s happening with my books. For instance, right now, May 13, SW only has updated figures for Apple through March 31. Sales are all tallied on a lump sum, too–like, if SW updates their iTunes on May 15, and I sold 10 books during that period (I didn’t), it will list all those sales as occurring on May 15. Oh, and if you’re giving away a book for free, iTunes doesn’t give out numbers for how many copies you’ve had downloaded.

To summarize: so I’m stumbling around the store, with no real awareness of what I’m looking at, and with sales figures that lag 6-10 weeks behind whatever I might be doing with my books today.

To summarize another way: damn it.

But we can watch the storefront itself. And here’s what I’ve seen so far. iTunes updates constantly–like, possibly more than once an hour. Yesterday, after I spotted my book at #34 on Science Fiction & Literature, it quickly dropped to #35, then #36. A few hours later, it was at #58; a half hour later, it rose to #56, before falling back to #58, #63, and #64 when I stopped paying attention.

This morning, I first saw it back up at #34 (and sandwiched between Iain M. Banks and Neal Stephenson, my two favorite SF authors!). That was about an hour ago. Checking again, it’s currently at #36. I also saw Hugh Howey’s Wool take a big leap yesterday–it vaulted from somewhere in the 60s to #5, propelled, no doubt, by news of Howey’s movie deal. The Wool Omnibus was already at #1. Right now, Wool has slipped to #18, with the Omnibus at #4.

So we’re seeing a lot of volatility. At least within this category. What this suggests to me is that the sample size of sales is pretty low. It may only take a handful to vault you to the top, and if you don’t continue to sell regularly, you’ll quickly be knocked off the list by those who are. Possibly, it took me just one sale to get The Zombies of Hobbiton to #34. After that, it slid throughout the day into the #60s until this morning, when it sold another copy, kicking it back up to that same #34 placement. That small rise yesterday afternoon from #58 to #56 suggests the possibility sales figures are higher, but I don’t know iTunes’ algorithms well enough to put any major faith in that. Possibly, books ahead of me were just falling faster than I was.

Sales on any given store are driven by two things: external visibility–you driving traffic to your books via word of mouth, ads, etc.–and internal visibility, where the store’s own lists, recommendations, emails, etc. put your book in front of new customers. What this tells me is that if you want to stay on iTunes’ volatile bestseller lists, and you don’t have the fanbase to keep that up on their own, you’re going to have to find a way to get yourself on some of iTunes’ other lists and other sources of internal visibility. And I know far too little about the store just yet to know how to do that.

For fun, I’m going to guess my book is currently selling 1 copy/day. This doesn’t contradict the data and it will keep my expectations nice and low. I sell through Smashwords at $1.99. I get 60% of each sale made on iTunes through SW. So my cut for each copy sold will be about $1.19. If I can keep this up for a month, I expect to see around $36 from this title over that period.

And you know what? I would take that. In a heartbeat. Soon, I’ll have a novel and another novella up at iTunes as well. If I can figure out how to produce similar sales for them, my income through Apple would be a nice supplement to what I’m doing on Amazon–and would go a long ways towards convincing me to take my other titles out of Select, too. We’ll see if that’s possible. iTunes remains much more difficult to examine than Amazon. It may be weeks or months before I’ve got any solid conclusions. Expect more posts in this series as I continue to gather new information.

I spend a lot of time talking about Amazon here. That’s natural. Not only are they the biggest gorilla in the ebook business, but they’re the one I understand best. I can barely find my way around the iTunes store. To cap it off, after I started getting excited about Select back in February, I pulled all my novels from the other stores to meet Amazon’s exclusivity requirements. My total presence in the other stores consisted of one novella, which I made free, two short story collections priced at $0.99, and a longer collection at $2.99.

So it should be no surprise that according to Smashwords’ most recent updates, my total sales among all non-Amazon stores in 2012 have added up to about $30.

Well, last week I changed my novella The Zombies of Hobbiton from free to $1.99. Today, I was poking around iTunes. Here’s what I saw in Top Science Fiction & Literature Paid Books:

#34! In the entire Sci-Fi category! WOOOOO! Time to throw a party! Time to throw five parties!

Actually, I have absolutely no idea what that means in terms of sales. For all I know it only takes 1 sale/day to reach #34 in Sci-Fi. (And from what I hear from other authors, that’s probably a lot more realistic than thinking #34 means 10 or 100/day.) But you know what? Considering how crummy my sales of Amazon have been since the most recent algorithm change, I’m pretty damn happy to maybe be selling 1/day of something over on Apple. Time to get a couple more things out of Select and see what happens.

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I am a Science Fiction and Fantasy author, based in LA. Read More.

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