I’ve been selling my books of the The Time Travel Diaries of James Urquhart and Elizabeth Bicester on Amazon Kindle since 2015.
So, I thougt it might be worth looking at how well I’ve done on sales.
Luckily this isn’t my day job!
Advertising the Time Travel Diaries
Firstly I haven’t spent a penny on advertising, publishing or graphics on KINDLE.
And apart from advertising on Facebook Groups and Twitter, the only other incentive to buy has been to give them away FREE on AMAZON KDP SELECT.
However, I’ve created an Authors Page on Amazon (FREE) and put all my books on Goodreads.
This “excellent” strategy sold just 226 books in 7 years!
Despite this rather low sales figure, 33.799 pages of the books were read by customers who borrowed my books from Kindle Unlimited (KU)
which equates to about 122 books making a total of about 350.
So, about a third of my sales were downloaded by those who subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.
However, to get these ‘amazing’ sales figures, I’ve given away over11,000 of my book on Kindle for FREE since 2015.
This gave a success rate of about 3% or one book sold for every 33 given away!
The Best Year
The best year was last year, 2022, was when I put 5 of my books together for free on KDP.
This was picked up by ukhotdeals which resulted in nearly 4,000 downloads on the first occasion and made 3 of the books No 1, 2 and 3 on the Free Romance Time Travel Category on Amazon Kindle.
The second time about 3,000 were downloaded and all 5 books were in the top 30.
The knock on effect of this was I sold some books .
Of the 7643 books downloaded in 2022 I sold 61.
And nearly 15,000 pages were read on KU – equivalent to about 60 books.
Making a total of about 120 books paid for.
However, this didn’t improve the ration of Paid to Free books and still worked out at about about 3% of total downloads.
Or 1 in 30 books.
As I said at the begining, this not my day job.
REVIEWS
As well as not paying for any advertising I did not ask for any reviews.
Nevertheless, I’ve received 56 star ratings on Amazon and 26 stars ratings on GoodReads for the 5 books of the Time Travel Diaries.
47 were 5 star ratings and 4 were just 1 star ratings with an average rating of 4.2!...encouraging!
I also managed to get 9 positive written reviews!
Conclusions
So all in all, despite not spending a single penny, I have managed to get a fairly encouraging response to my book writing.
And this was just by.
giving books away Free on Kindle
Setting up an Authors Page on Amazon (Free)
Creating a page on GoodReads (Free)
Of course if you want to make real money, and not just write for a hobby, then I’m afraid, you will have to spend some serious cash
Luckily this is not my day job.