Category: Writing

Explosive Book Sales during 2020 – How? In this blog post, I show you the actions I took in 2020 and how they led to more than doubling my sales.

Here’s the fourth video I made from my Youtube channel. Subscribe if you dare!

Explosive Book Sales During Year 2020

In case you forgot or didn’t read my last post, After My First Book, I Got Exponential Growth – How? let’s review my 2019 sales growth, over 100%.

I won’t leave you in suspense: here are the 2020 results.

During 2020 I went from 359 to 859 books sold! What in the world happened in 2020? Let’s review the year:

During January – New Audiobook and Explosive Growth

I published the audiobook version of my disabled 7th-grade superhero book:

The audiobook proved to be so popular, I gave away over 100 review copies and used up my free audiobook codes. Don’t worry; you can still get it for free by joining Audible here.

I also began pushing all my other audiobooks. That led to many sales through the review codes I get from Audible. I get the codes for free and then Audible pays me when someone redeems them for free.

I still have a lot of audiobook codes. Get yours here.

Explosive Book Sales during March

Take a look at what happened in March.

Month Book Sales

The green color means the monthly sales are above average for my six years of book sales.

What’s going on? Take a look at my audiobook sales:

That’s 337 more audiobooks sold than in 2019! That’s half of the 139% growth. Where did the rest come from? Let’s look at ebooks.

There are another 148 ebook sales, mostly from Zombie Turkeys. Also, the rest of the Life After Life Chronicles all increased from the previous year. Then there are the sales from my two new books.

My Zombie Turkey ebook was priced at .99 and the price reduction led to new sales during 2020. Also, I changed my Amazon ad campaigns to focus on categories, not keywords. That led to me online sales than ever before.

Explosive Book Sales – Two New Books Released during 2020

During 2020 I released Oops! Tales of the Zombie Turkey Apocalypse on January 2, 2020 and Villain’s Vacation on August 27, 2020.

I now had a short story collection. I gave away free short stories to promote it. The book also promoted the rest of my series.

Also, I now had two books in my Secret Supers series. The sales of one book led to the sales of the other.

Two books, each in two formats, plus the new audiobook, gave me five new items to sell.

My fifth video:

Book Conventions

I had the following conventions in 2020:

That didn’t seem to be the source of new sales! How about print sales during 2020?

I only sold 15 more print books than 2019, probably since I only had three book conventions, compared with seven the year before

During 2021 Book Sales were up and down

I went back to book conventions. I ended up selling fewer books (731) but making more profit. I sold more of the profitable print books, but not as many ebooks.

I attribute this to the end of the lockdowns during 2021 and being able to attend more conventions. I also introduced my Square Site where I sell my autographed books, just like I do at conventions. Click here to get your autographed book now.

Get Your Free Book With Your prediction for 2022 Total Sales

How many books do you think I’ll sell during 2022? I’m at 561 so far, but I have four book events coming up. Tell me by clicking here and the closest person will get their choice of books from me in January 2023. Or you can email me at [email protected].

Get all my posts through my newsletter. Also, get free books by clicking here.

Here are the previous posts in this series:

My Sixth-Year Anniversary as a Self-Published Author

What Happened After My First Book Was Published?

Let’s close with my sixth video:

After My First Book, I Got Exponential Growth – How? Today I’ll show you how random marketing efforts and some luck led to more than tenfold sales growth.

I forget to tell you about starting my Youtube channel. I haven’t gotten much traffic, but the videos cost me $500 to produce. Here’s the first one, from November 2016

Exponential Growth – Year 2018

Following Zombie Turkeys conversion to an audiobook, I published My Undead Mother-in-law as an audiobook.

May

My book Paranormal Privateers was published in ebook and paperback formats. This book had two covers. My first one is here:

The intent was to show a woman’s torso in a wetsuit with a bloody bullet how. This was the Undead Mother-in-Law in the first chapter. After a lack of sales, I switched it to this:

I was excited because now I had a trilogy! Throughout the year, I’d see multiple books sold in person and online. Few things feel better than having a person buy three of your books at a time.

Not that the story ended in Paranormal Privateers. I left it open for more books.

This book cover sold better.

Events:

Book launch at I Know You Like A Book on May 19th where I sold 4.

I began using Mailchimp for my newsletter. I had built my list to over one thousand and it was quite unwieldy mailing this through Yahoo! By the end of the year, using newsletter-building ads, I grew to over 1,600 subscribers.

You can join my mailing list AND get FREE audiobooks by clicking here.

Charitable Book Sale at ‘Books to Benefit’ on July 7th where I sold three books, one of each.

PennedCon in St. Louis on September 21-22nd, where I sold ten books and made contacts with many authors. I got reviews and contacts and most importantly, ideas for marketing.

Book Nook Bookstore, where I sold three books on October 27th.

First Friday, an arts promotion in Peoria every first Friday of the month. At Wheel Art, I sold four books on November 2nd.

The next day I sold six books at the Peoria Library Author Fair.

Chambanacon in Bloomington – I sold thirteen books, my best convention ever.

Also in November I reduced my Zombie Turkeys ebook to .99. The idea was to sell the first and get people to buy the second and third books too.

I finished the year with 173 sales, a 107% increase of cumulative sales over 2017, which in turn had a 73% increase over 2016. The green areas in the table below indicate increases over the previous year.

It turned out I was just getting started.

Quick question

How much do you think I’ll sell this year, 2022? I’m at 561 so far, but I have four book events coming up. Tell me by clicking here and the closest person will get their choice of books from me in January 2023. Or you can email me at [email protected].

Here’s my second video:

Exponential Growth in 2019

I was tired of writing zombie books. I decided to pursue the middle-school readership with a superhero book. So I wrote Secret Supers and published it on March 29, 2019. It’s all about four disabled seventh-graders who get superpowers. I got the idea from my own daughter who has cerebral palsy and wanted a flying wheelchair. I got a flying wheelchair and car in here!

Paranormal Privateers audiobook came out in January as well. I had nine products: three books in three formats, soon to be twelve products with Secret Supers.

Events:

At the first ever PeoriaCon in March 2019, I sold 24 books, a new record for me. I also used my new Square credit card reader for the first time.

In April, I sold my books at the Peoria Mall for two days and sold eleven. Later that month, I sold another 24 books at Quadcon in Peoria. Wow!

In May, I went to the Springfield ComicCon and only sold 2 books. It was purely a comics room–except for my books. Later I went to the Midwest ComicCon and sold three books.

Appropriately, I went to the Tremont Turkey Festival in June and sold 21 books. Later that month I went to the Book Nook in Washington and sold one book. Oops! I also sold one at the East Peoria vendor fair. Not every event is a home run. Finally, I closed the month at Geekfest and sold five books.

In September I had an author signing at I Know You Like a Book and sold seven books.

I went to Archon near St. Louis in October and sold twelve books. That barely covered my table costs and the gas. Quadcon came bad to Peoria in late October and I sold nine books.

In November I realized I can give my audiobook promotion codes to my newsletter readers and I’d get paid for them. This led to 18 audiobook sales and reviews.

Later in the month, I sold 12 of my books at the Washington High School Star Wars event.

Finally, after Thanksgiving, I sold twelve more books at Chambanacon 2019.

What Happened in December 2019 and the Secret of Exponential Growth

That was it for book events, but in December 2019 I sold 55 books through Amazon and Audible. Exponential growth was happening!

As you can see from the graph below, my sales increased 108% over 2018, more than double. That is 356 books sold versus 171 the previous year.

The circle size represents the percent increase (or decrease) from the previous year.

So, why were my sales growing? I thought of these reasons:

1. The more books I write, the more books I sell. Seems obvious, right? But now I saw how books would sell each other.
2. The more formats I have, the more I sell. I publish each book in print, ebook, and audiobook. The audiobook promotions with Audible allowed me to give away free books and get paid for them.
3. The more events I attended, the more I sold. Again, it’s obvious.

From these conclusions, I decided to promote my audiobooks even more, attend even more events, and write even faster.

What happened next? Sorry to spoil the surprise, but 2020 turned out to be even better. I’ll put that in my next blog post. Get all my posts through my newsletter. Click here.

Here are the previous posts in this series:

My Sixth-Year Anniversary as a Self-Published Author

What Happened After My First Book Was Published?

Let’s close with my third video: