Book Sales
As an author, I thought I could write and publish a book that everyone would like. What I found out is that even if you have a good book, if people don’t know about it, they can’t buy it. When I released Salvation and Doom, Amazon.com: Salvation and Doom: The Cathardi Prophecy eBook : Jones, C.Buck: Kindle Store, I figured people could search Amazon and find the book without any trouble. I learned that wasn’t the case and initially had a hard time finding it myself. Fortunately, my Kindle Direct Publishing page allowed me to go to the listing on Amazon.com where I could copy the link to my book’s listing which I could share.
The first page or perish, is a saying concerning sales on Amazon.com. In other words, if your item is not listed on the first page of the Amazon.com search, you sell anything. My understanding of books is, that Amazon uses recent sales and customer reviews to determine which books are listed first. The table below shows my sales for November 2023 – January 2024. From twenty-plus book sales, I have only four ratings with three of the four leaving reviews. Neither gets me on the first page. All the reviews, on both Amazon and Goodreads, are four and five stars.
| Month | e-book | Paperback | Kindle Unlimited |
| November 2023 | 5 | 10 | 1 |
| December 2023 | 1 | 5 | 0 |
| January 2024 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
Marketing Efforts
Somehow I need to let people know about my book, and the limited number of people within my Facebook and Instagram accounts are not sufficient to get any significant results. I am trying various methods to publicize my book to a broader, more targeted audience. I paid someone to post my book on several book blogs. The January posts resulted in one KU sale which won’t cover my costs. I have signed up for Online Book Fairs Hosted By Authors | eBookFairs which will show my book to a broad audience. The first fair is scheduled for February 9, 2024, and I will provide more details as the fair approaches. Next week I will visit our library, as well as the local Barnes and Noble bookstores, to see if they will carry my book as a local author.
Writing Update
In the meantime, I am continuing to edit my next book, a portal fantasy, that I hope to publish this year. I am also working on a sequel to Salvation and Doom. Word is that book sales increase if you have more than one book.
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