Friday, July 27, 2012

Tracking the Oiled Ferret (Sales)

With all this discussion about pricing and effects on sales, a sobering thought entered my befuddled brain. These are barely real-time statistics I am referencing for my conclusions.

Amazon and Smashwords are relatively on-time with their notifications of sales and how much that will put in my account. I recently received a nice little sum of money from both of them for sales in May and June. That was the end of the second quarter.

The next payments, no matter how many I sell, won't com until the end of October. I can still track sales for those two sites, but the long-term result is still a quarterly payment.

The real challenge will be tracking the sales for the Premium Distribution channel. All those web sites report sales roughly quarterly. My fancy little price change for testing won't yield any measurable results for those channels until October. That's a very long waiting game.

Advice to the other self-publishers out there - just be ready for a long game - this is not a quick one-handed poker challenge, it's a long yacht voyage around the world.

We'll table the discussion of where the book ranks in sales for another day.
Artemus

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