Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeB1972
I get you, the quoted figure of 640 followers just seemed a bit exact.
Either way the actual sales should be at least 1 order of magnitude higher than this right?
1 in 10 people who read your book care enough to spread the word (Unintentional pun, but what the heck, I'll keep it in)
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It's more like 1 in 100 who leave a review and/or spread the word, but it varies by genre. Romance readers, for example, tend to converse more about characters/books online than some other genres.
Reviews also vary by whether the book is paid for or given away (probably because most books given away for free are not read. Kobo did a study and based on what they could see of "progress" from e-reader data, it was less than one percent read for freebie downloads). So, for example, I recently gave away 1000 copies of Executive Lunch (approx) and 1000 copies of Under Witch Moon in a free run of each. So far I've gotten 1 review on GR and two ratings for Lunch (it's a mystery btw). No new reviews on Amazon. Moon ran two weeks after Lunch and I've gotten one GR rating so far, and no reviews.
This 1 review per 1000 given away matches other authors I checked with before I did the run so that I knew what to expect. For 1000 books sold the number of reviews was about double, but I'm not sure if that holds true over the last year. The GR ratings for books sold is about 5 to 10 per 1000 sold, but the reviews...that is closer to the 1 per 1000 for me.
Keep in mind that GR has only been popular the last 4-5 years or so, which means books released before that will have different data. Some authors I know report almost no activity on GR, but they have very good sales and lots of Amazon reviews. Some of that is genre and some of it is just a complete mystery!
I agree with MikeB and the facebook followers info--we authors do giveaways on FB and we get likes that have nothing to do with followers/buyers. When Amazon used to show the number of followers via the author profile, it was probably a more accurate count of "core" followers. Mailing lists or subscriptions to blogs are probably better at identifying core followers, but those can be skewed by giveaways as well.