Kindle Backlist Sales, Now With Charts
I’m not sure if this is accepted wisdom everywhere, but certainly one thing I heard a lot when I started epublishing in 2008 was that you make the bulk of your money up front, and then it trickles in after that. You might get another bump when you get your first Fictionwise statement, or quarterly statements from somewhere else like ARe. You might get a series bump when a new book releases. But generally, there’s no month like the first month.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but over the last few months Amazon has been tipping that understanding of mine on its head. And because I’m the sort of person who has databases and charts for everything, how about I share one that just made my eyebrows pop. These are the kindle sales on one backlist title over the past eleven months: (kindle only)
I don’t have a hard time believing that a lot of people got kindles for Christmas. I didn’t do anything particularly different in December. I didn’t have a new ebook release on Amazon. This is one title inexplicably taking off over a year after its release. And it’s not the only one. I have similarly dramatic graphs for almost all of my books, and I have friends whose graphs make mine look like chicken feed. (4 digits in a month, guys.)
This is why I live and breathe and love the third party distribution. People want to buy ebooks. All we need to do is give them a nice, easy (affordable!!) way.
Categories: All Posts, The Writing Life · Tags: bree hearts numbers, Geeks are Good
I’m with you on this! I’m also digging the brave new world of e-books. Give people what they what, when they want it? Refreshing.
It’s the only way to go. Say what you will about Amazon, they know how to make consumers happy.
Ooohh, pretty chart. Now you realize I’m going to waste all morning colour coding and adding sparkles to MY charts.
Just because.
But back on topic, yup, 3rd party all the way. Show me someone who says third party isn’t the way to roll these days, and I’ll show you someone who’s pretty little graph isn’t so pretty– in fact I bet it has flatlined.
If you come up with a sparkly chart you’d like to add to mine…well, you know it’d be welcome.
Oooh, pretty graphs! It’s wonderful to see how things are really spiking for the e-book format. Congrats on riding the wave!
And thank you for sharing. That’s been one thing I’ve loved about the authors who are publishing their e-books themselves is how willing they are to share how they are doing as well as little tidbits of information. A lot of the nitty-gritty details (such as numbers) have been hoarded for so long. It’s great to see them coming out!
Sharing numbers is always tricky, but they’re one of the things we all desperately want to know. I’m always happy to answer questions about my experiences and share mine, with the caveat that my experiences are anecdotal at best.
I need to get myself a Nook. Do you get the same results from other sites like B&N? Or is this phenomenon exclusive to Amazon?
At the moment this is a kindle thing. Our B&N numbers right now look about as sad as our kindle numbers did over a year ago.
In fact, I’ll share our last few months of Nook sales across ALL of our titles.
July: 7
August: 8
September: 6
October: 10
November: 4
December: 8
January: 4
Right now? Not much. However, the Nook only went on sale in December, and a year ago I was talking about how kindle numbers meant nothing in the grand scheme of my paycheck. What’s true this year may not be true next year. :p
I wish I had charts! Lately my sales reports have been sorely mistreated (you know how you shove all your receipts in a shoebox? The equivalent of that).
However, just looking at the numbers sans fancy charts, I wholeheartedly agree. Mostly thanks to Kindle, on one book, my sales this month were very close to its first month release sales a year ago.
My Nook sales are similarly in the one digit range. In fact, this month, I only sold one copy of one of my books at BN. I’m hoping that will change just as rapidly as Kindle seemed to.
Yeah, I was scoffing at the poor little nook sales this morning, then I had this crazy deja-vu. Because when Amazon had the giant De-Ranking scandal and someone poofed our books from the main searches, I was like, “Oh noez, there go my 5 sales this month.”
Laugh now! In 2011 we might all be sitting around going, “Damn, remember when we mocked the Nook sales!” (Or maybe not. No one does convenience like Amazon, and isn’t that what ebooks are all about?)
You would think Nook would explode, since BN has the advantage of brick and mortar stores to peddle the device. I know my local store has a huge display right when you walk in, and I think most shoppers are like me: I want to touch something before I buy it.
Of course Kindle has the advantage that it’s been around a lot longer, Amazon is an internet MONSTER, and they ironed out a lot of the bugs from its first generation device. Maybe second-gen Nook in a couple of years will compare to Kindle right now? I hope so.
You know, Viv directed me over to B&N and I noticed that I have more ratings on our Samhain books than we’ve even sold, so I’m thinking maybe over the next few months we’ll see more sales?
Viv grins.
Muahahaha.
I am SO glad Samhain understands the power of free.
Indeed.
A couple random thoughts:
Maybe this exponential growth is due to Kindle’s increase in popularity, but maybe its due to an increase in Moira Rogers popularity? When a reader discovers a new author, THAT is the “first month’s release” for that author’s entire backlist, for that reader.
On another vector, when I read press from Amazon about ebooks and Kindle, I get the feeling that they’d rather sell ebooks than physical books. Kindle news is all over their front page all the time.
Thats NOT the sense I get from B&N. Nook feels like a “me too” play, and they have a lot of financial and emotional investment in the brick&mortar distribution paradigm. Sure Nook could take off, but I seriously doubt it will ever overtake Kindle.
Maybe B&N is trying to strike a good balance between brick & mortar, shipping books to homes, and the Nook, then. I would think that having all their eggs in the Kindle basket would be a considerable gamble for Amazon, no matter how popular eBooks become.
The biggest difference between selling someone a print book and selling them a kindle is that you can buy a print book from Amazon without having any particular reason you can’t buy your next print book from B&N, or Books a Million, or Borders, or the used bookstore. A kindle is locking a non-technically apt person into shopping almost exclusively at Amazon.
I think most of what Amazon’s doing right now is not so much targeted at selling ebooks. If they can take losses long enough to sell enough kindles, then they have locked consumers in. They’re securing future sales at the expense of present profit.
It IS a gamble, but judging by how many people are seeing massive increases in sales, it might be starting to pay off.
If that were a sample of my backlist I could consider that possibility, but this is just a graph of one title, so the “backlist glom” factor can not really add more than one sale per person. (Almost literally–an amazon account will only let you purchase a kindle book once with your account.)
I do agree with your second point somewhat. I don’t think kindle is going to be overtaken any time soon–it has a pretty good head start. That said, the Nook does have a few features that make it appealing to different sorts of readers, so at this point all we can do is wait and see.
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