First: if you haven’t already bought Dystopolis, you can do so here. It’s currently $8.99 in paperback, and $4.00 as an ebook. Quite a few people seem to like it. What follows is a breakdown of sorts of the first month-and-a-bit of sales, which probably won’t interest anyone who isn’t interested in the publishing side of all of this, but I’m guessing there might be one or two who are. So. Here we are.
In the last five weeks, I’ve sold 44 books. This includes 8 print copies (18%), 13 full price digital copies (30%), and 23 discounted digital copies (52%). When it comes down to royalty breakdown, however, I’ve earned by far the most from full-price digital copies (46%), followed by the copies sold during the recent discount (28%), followed very closely by print copies sold (26%).
The reasons behind this are fairly straightforward, of course - I make the most from digital sales, despite the fact that the retail price of Dystopolis in ebook form is less than half of its print counterpart - ignoring the fact that the Kindle publishing program allows for 70% royalties, it actually costs a substantial amount of money to produce and ship a print book in the first instance. Additionally, Amazon (as a third-party seller, despite owning Createspace, where the book was originally published) takes a decent cut even after the costs of production are taken away. Not that you should be discouraged from buying a paperback if that takes your fancy. It’s nice to hold something in your hand, after all, and I spent quite a lot of time on the typesetting.
The thing that maybe surprised me the most was the surge in interest over the last week, helped mostly by the fact that the book was being sold for a fraction of its original price (99 cents for two days, followed by $1.99 for another two, and so on) and possibly also helped by the fact that I was pushing it fairly aggressively.
Promotion has to be factored into all of this, actually. Most of the original batch of sales came from the few who know me well enough to trust this blog, and then a small sampling of the large number of people who follow Arden’s online presence. With the recent sale, I have no doubt that quite a few sales came from Ashton Raze, the lead writer of Starbound, retweeting this fairly desperate plea to over 3,500 people. The flip-side of this, of course, is that even ignoring the various other fronts on which people were highlighting the promotion, that creates a ratio of one sale for every 163 people.
I suspect the message of this is that only so much comes from exposure; initially, you need to nurture an audience. Which I sort of do - of all of the people I interact with on the interact with on the internet, I think most of them have bought my book (and if you haven’t, shame on you), but at the same time don’t. There’s an element of dialogue in the way I interact with computers, but it isn’t quite as two-way as it could be; this whole medium, for me, is still fairly one-way.
There are no grand conclusions, here. This is more of a data-dump, and I’ll need some time to figure out what it all means. But it’s interesting. And gratifying. Holy hell. The final point of all of this is that forty-four people have bought Dystopolis, and that’s pretty damn lovely. I hope you’re enjoying it.