So how are my book sales after a week? Not bad, I suppose.
1st Week Sales for The Sad Girl
Given the I’m a brand new “indie” self-published author, I think 13 units isn’t bad. I released the book almost on a lark. I didn’t sit down last week and say, “Okay, today’s the day.” It was much more of a “Look, it’s ready. Why don’t you do it?” kind of thing.
I didn’t make any effort to build buzz at all. The only initial promotion I did last Sunday night was to put up a blog post. The next day, I sent out a couple of tweets, scheduled using Hootsuite. I also made a post to the Books Gone Viral Facebook group. Over the week, I’ve released about a dozen other tweets, and bought some ad space on a popular blog, and joined two other book promotion groups on Facebook. Yesterday I bought a 1-day Twitter campaign that will fire today. That’s it so far concerning promotion. We’ll see what happens. The big thing I need right now is reviews. I’m hoping some of the folks who have bought the book will review it soon.
How am I keeping track of my promotion efforts? I’m glad you asked. One thing I’ve done is to create a landing page, here. The first night, I was pointing everyone either to the Amazon page, or to the Sad Girl category listing. But I wanted more than just a category description at the top of the page, so I created a Page in WordPress, and dropped several links in there instead. Google Analytics will allow me to track how people arrive at the landing page, and where they go when they leave. For instance, I know that during the last week, 9 visitors have clicked through to the Amazon listing, and one clicked through to my Pinterest page.
The other thing I’ve done is build a spreadsheet. One page lists all my promo efforts. The next lists all the tweets I’ve sent. Then I’ve got a page for each language that I’m tweeting in. Those pages have formulas that count characters for me, so I know ahead of time if I’m over Twitter’s 140-character limit. I’ve always been a little anal about numbers, and tend to over-analyze things. I could probably make the spreadsheet a bit more simple if I put some effort into it, but it serves my purposes for now. If there’s interest, I’ll make it available on Google Drive.
So watch this space for more info, and buy my book. And review it.
Share your thoughts!