Where do my ebooks sell? (graphs and everything)

by theworm · January 26, 2015

Just had a little look at where my ebooks tend to sell. I tend to sell the most ebooks in the UK, but I get the most free downloads in the US. I also get very few sales outside of Amazon as a whole.

PAID SALES

In total, that’s 186 Amazon sales vs 18 everywhere else (iBooks, Smashwords, Nook, Sony (now gone), Google and Scribd). So 90% of my sales are on Amazon. From reading some other (better selling) author’s sales figures, this scales up too, with figures between 80-90% being common.

I knew it was big, but this puts it into perspective. It also makes me wonder that if at this stage in my writing career, it’s worth having my books on ‘as many sales shelves as possible’ versus enrolling in Kindle Select for three months, getting my books in Kindle Unlimited and seeing how things go? I would feel slightly guilty about ‘locking out’ those using other platforms from my books, but then there aren’t many of them anyway, and this percentage split seems consistent however many you are selling.

Also, even though most of my advertising has been US based (not deliberately, it just falls that way thanks to US-centric websites and social media), most of my sales have been in the UK. Yes, my books are set in Britain and written in British English, but is that such a turn-off? Or are US readers, just not finding my books for some reason?

FREE DOWNLOADS

As for free downloads of Making Gods, this shows a completely different trend. Now, the short story collection has only been free on Amazon since December, whereas it had been free everywhere else for years. This was my own fault as a result of not knowing the price-matching feature of Amazon never matches to free.

Anyway, through Smashwords and a handful of their distributed sites, I had over 200 downloads last year (approximate figure only). However, having only been free for less than a month, I had almost reached the same number of downloads on Amazon!

Interestingly, almost all of those were on Amazon US. Some of these were organic sales, but the big boosts were my promotions of the links on the Reddit pages KindleFreebies and FreeEBOOKS. This means, the biggest traffic for those Reddit pages is American, and that UK ebook buyers don’t really seem to go for free ebooks as much as their US counterparts (most organic sales were US even before I did the promotions). I can’t seem to find any UK-specific promotion sites, so it looks like it will stay this way.

PIE CHARTS ARE GREAT

I have just made the ebook free on all other Amazon sites, so I’ll soon see if any other countries seem to go for free stuff more than the UK.

Oh, and I’m well aware that my books sell in such low numbers (small sample size) that it’s not worth reading too much into this data, but it’s still interesting to try and spot trends and figure out where I would get the most bang-for-buck for advertising or where I need to put more effort in to promote myself.

Other than that, I just need to keep writing! 😀