Amber keeps on biting a chunk out of the market.
In my ongoing self-publishing experiment, I've always wanted a Bookbub. What's a Bookbub you ask? It's a "featured deal" that appears in the Bookbub newsletter (which is sent out to millions of subscribers). And it's a brilliant way to sell a great number of books in a short period of time (at a reduced price, I should add). There are authors who have hit the USA Today Bestselling list with the help of Bookbub. A huge volume of authors apply for a featured deal and a much smaller volume are accepted. If you want to read more about that process then read How the Bookbub Selection Process works.
I applied for Amber Fang, my vampire/librarian/assassin novel and was accepted for Bookbub's International featured deal (which basically means the ad would run everywhere but the US. That's not as big as having both US and International...but it's still a great thing to happen). I quickly paid my $112.00 US before they changed their minds. The book was featured in the Sept. 29th, 2017 newsletter (alas, I wasn't subscribed so don't have a screenshot of the ad itself). I had lowered the price to 99 cents (instead of $2.99) because I wanted to get as many readers as possible. Here are the results (prepare your eyes for a graph! A graph!):
So that gives you an idea of the sales in the first five days. And a general breakdown per platform. What you want another graph? Okay, you asked for it.
So, as you can see the number of sales for the first five days was 546 copies and the income was $213 US. Which means I made my money back (my first goal) and that the book also found 546 more readers (perfect timing since I'm preparing book 2 for release). I'm really pleased with that number of sales. Bookbub's own chart suggested the average for "supernatural suspense" is 390 copies. So Amber Fang is above average! Amazon, of course, was where the majority of sales were for the book, but Kobo also scored high. The sales on all markets were mostly to Canada, UK and Australia (as shown by the handy Kobo graphic):
And finally in terms of bestseller lists the book hit #27 on Kindle in Canada and #319 overall on Amazon.UK. The book burned bright, then fell back to its more regular 1 or 2 sales a day (at $2.99). But my hope is with the next book these readers will return (especially if Amazon is kind enough to nudge them with an email) and purchase book two at full price.
There. That's it!
P.S. Oh, wait, it's not complete without a screen capture of me and Stephen King:
Hanging out on the UK charts...