April 1st: No joking! March was a great month for me and the book. Sure, I didn’t make the Lambda Literary Award finals, but that’s okay. Read an Ebook Week definitely ignited something in me. I started by making the Ebook version of Stealing Wishes free on both Lulu and on Smashwords. I’ll admit…not one single sale! You heard me…I couldn’t give the book away.
I probably didn’t market it as much as I should have, but that didn’t keep people from buying it on the Amazon Kindle. My Kindle sales for March were my best month yet, totaling $248.50 for the entire month. I won’t tally this money in my running total for another two months though since Kindle pays out 60 days after the month ends. (January sales will be paid out in a few days.)
After Ebook Week was over, I decided to try something new. I went to the Stealing Wishes page on Amazon and clicked on the first community that appeared on the page which is gay romance. Here, I posted a discussion offering 5 free hard copies of the book to the first 5 people who replied in exchange for them reviewing the book on Amazon for me. In less than 2 days, I ended up giving 6 copies of the book away and people were still replying to my offer. To all the others, I offered a free ebook version of Stealing Wishes through Smashwords. The book has now been downloaded 11 times on Smashwords and it is still free there if you are interested. Two days ago, I received another 5 star review on Amazon, the first as a result from my free offer. While I hope that every person who got a free copy or downloaded it will post a review, I’d settle for half. (fingers crossed)
I also finally took the time to sign up on Tag My Book on Amazon in March. This exposure has bumped my book up to #20 in the gay romance community and #7 in gay fiction thanks to all the authors and readers who participate on this awesome blog.
Now for the money… January Kindle sales will be hitting my account this week which was a total of $69.13. My Amazon Associates account also earned me $49.24. That’s a total of $118.37. Let’s update the figures, shall we?
Total money invested on this project to date (after book sales only): $149.14 (debt) I subtracted the $69.13 in Kindle sales only from the previous total. Note this figure will be wiped out when March Kindle sales pay out in May!
Profit made to date on this project after all sales and services: $417.23 I added the $118.37 total for the month to my previous total.
So, what do we have to look forward to in April? Two things: I hope to have more reviews posted on Amazon and to continue moving up the charts thanks to tagging. And there will be an $86.45 Kindle payment at the end of April for February sales.
The book turns 1 year old in June, and at that time I plan to end my updates here in the POD Diary, but it’s nice to see I will at least be out of the red with this entire project unless I choose to invest more money in it between now and June.
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