Quote:
Originally Posted by LeeGoldberg
This is shaping up to be my biggest Kindle month ever. As of 7 pm tonight, I have earned $810 in royalties this month. If sales continue at this rate, and that's a big if, I could reach about $1400 by the end of April. But I will certainly top the nearly $1000 I earned in March. And all of this on books that were out-of-print, gathering dust on a shelf.
|
I was right. I earned $1416 (you can see my complete royalty statement
here). April was, by far, my best Kindle month since I began this experiment eleven months ago. Last month, I sold 1360 books...this month I sold 1798, an increase of 438 books and $400 in royalties.
I credit the surge this month to three things:
1. My bet with Joe Konrath, which resulted in new covers and titles for my Vigilante novels. It was a bet I was thrilled to lose.
2. raising the price of THREE WAYS TO DIE from .99 cents to 1.99.
3. adding a Kindle edition of my out-0f-print book
THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE to my available titles.
Sales of the VIGILANTE books (now known, thanks to Joe, as The Jury Series) shot up enormously. For example, the previously titled .357 VIGILANTE #4: KILLSTORM sold 14 copies last month. This month, by rebranding the book
GUILTY, I sold 125 copies. I now have someone re-reading the manuscripts of all four books, correcting the conversion errors that have bedeviled me since I posted them a few months ago.
Last month, THREE WAYS TO DIE sold 201 priced at 99 cents and earned $70. This month, I sold 169 and earned $103. Fewer sales, but higher royalties. I can live with that. .
THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE, priced at $2.99, quickly became my second best-selling title, if not in volume (234 copies sold) certainly in profits ($245). Those sales reassure me that my bestselling title,
THE WALK, will do fine when, in late June, I raise the price from $1.99 to $2.99 to take advantage of Amazon's new royalty formula, which will give me a 70% royalty instead of the 35% I get now. By the way, this month
THE WALK sold 629 copies, earning me $440 (last month I sold 575 copies). A new high.
Changing the cover and title of BEYOND THE BEYOND boosted sales a bit. Last month, under the BEYOND title, I sold 73 copies. This month, rebranded as
DEAD SPACE, I sold 92.
I can't wait to see how things shake out in July once my royalty doubles. Will my earning, if not my volume of sales, go up? Or will it level off? Or will the bubble burst and sales slowly begin to deteriorate? I don't know, but no matter what happens, I am already a winner. As I keep saying, this is all found money on out-of-print books that were packed away in my garage or in a dark corner of my hard-drive.