So in Part 1, (over here) I discussed what it was like getting my story ready to put it up for sale. Now let's discuss what happened afterwards.
As I said before, I put it up with no intentions of advertising the book in any way. I didn't really expect anyone to buy it at all because of this, so I was surprised in the first week that it actually managed to sell 5 copies. Doesn't sound like much (and at a royalty of 35c for each book, it really wasn't :D )but it was still entertaining to see.
So the next couple of weeks it did about the same, a few copies selling each week. I then discovered that Amazon has a special program called KDP Select, where if your book is sold by them exclusively for 90 days, you are given 5 days of your choice during that time where you can give your book away for free.
This sounded like an intriguing prospect to me so seeing as I was only selling it on Amazon anyway, I figured I'd sign up and put it up free for the weekend to coincide with the start of The Walking Dead, figuring that might be a good time for it.
So over the course of that little offer, the story was downloaded I think almost 300 times or so. Quite a large jump from the previous weeks, to say the least. It just goes to show what a barrier even such a small amount as 1 dollar can be to selling a short story like this. It makes me wonder what the difference would be if it was a full sized book I was selling for 1 dollar...
This little promotion had an impact on sales afterwards for a while too, with it selling about 3-4 times as much for the next 2 weeks before settling back down again to a few sales every week. All in all I think I've made about 20 dollars in total from the story. Not enough to reach Amazon's threshold for paying me yet (I think that is around 100 dollars or so. It could be a while....), but certainly more than I expected, and enough to make me happy about the experiment in general.
So there we go. I don't exactly think I'm going to be earning a living from this story (nor did I entertain any illusions of such) but it was fun testing out the waters, and for a quite short story I thought it's done well for itself. Next up is to see what happens when I do more promotion for the story (i.e. something rather than nothing). Will this have any effect on sales or will it just continue along the same route? It'll be interesting to find out.
And speaking of promotion...
The story is free this weekend, to coincide with the season finale of The Walking Dead! Isn't that nice! Go get it, now! :D
Click here to find it on Amazon: Inside: A Zombie Story
Oh, and please, leave a review if you enjoyed the story. (Even if you didn't, I don't mind if you pretend that you did, anyway!)
Catch ya later!
James
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