Sales of the Unexpected

30th. May 2020

Almost half-way through the year and there’s no let-up in Pat’s condition, and a worrying sign now of a progressive deterioration. We are now under the watchful eye of our local hospice, St. Wilfrid’s, and had a nurse round on Thursday for a general chat and more pertinent questions about Pat and the prognosis. We still live in hopes of some sort of stabilisation and control, but it’s doubtful. We have at least been able to enjoy the good weather. Pat has now been out with me and Tuppence for a walk at a local recreational field. I take Pat in the wheelchair because it’s easy to push her over the flat green while Tuppence goes chasing her ball and playing with other dogs. I’ve also taken Pat out for a drive twice this week. Yesterday we had a trip to East Wittering. Couldn’t get out of the car of course, because we had Tuppence with us, but it was another way of mixing up Pat’s usually boring day. Now that the lockdown rules are being relaxed, we can expect a few more visits from our family, social distancing notwithstanding of course.

As you know, I have been running an ad. Campaign on Facebook and BookBub. The ads are costing me money but showing some signs of life. Before that my sales were dribbling along and doing very little. This month though I have seen some significant change with my KDP sales on Amazon, averaging about 2 sales a day. On D2D my sales were not performing as well as last month, having only reached 17 by about the 24^th, six days ago. Then suddenly there was a jump of 19 in one day, from 17 up to 36. I was bowled over by that. Then the next day the figure leapt up to 47. I couldn’t believe it. So much so that I expected to see the figure corrected downwards within a day or so. But it has held on and I’m at 48 with one day of the month left. In fact, D2D is out-performing Amazon. The book that’s leading the sales figure is A Dangerous Game. I haven’t advertised that book in any way, so I’ve no idea why this phenomenon has happened. I’m not complaining though. My next task is to run another campaign but with a slightly different approach: I intend to test one country against another. Same ad for USA and for UK but separated. I will also be using the advice offered to Bryan Cohen’s Amazon Ad School students by Alana Terry, a Christian mystery writer who has turned FB advertising into an art form and increased her book sales exponentially. I hope she has something significant to offer that others in the FB tutorial world have not. I’ve watched about a third of the video so far and she has already given me some good stuff to work with.  I’ll be running a new campaign for the month of June, see how it goes.

My reading this week is still Glass Dolls. It’s growing on me, so I reckon I’ll get through to the end with this one.

I will be involved in a book promotion next week: first four days of June. I’ll be promoting 17 other authors covering about 60,000 subscribers. Hopefully my offer, No Time to Die will attract some attention. It’s already doing so with page reads on KDP because of my FB ad. I don’t want to burst my own bubble, but the interaction I’m seeing with sales, ‘likes’, page views and people looking at my profile, is definitely growing. It would be nice to think I can establish a firm, committed fan base which could push me into a significantly higher Amazon ranking. Just got to spend more money — no brainer!

That’s it then. I wish you all well and stay safe!