I was previously with a traditional publisher before they went out of business, so I was very used to not having a clue how many of my books I'd sold beyond quarterly. I published my backlist on Amazon recently including Kidle Unlimited, and I can't help myself from looking at my stats every day (it doesn't help that I'm a Data Analyst by trade). For those of you who have self-pubbed on Amazon, how often do you check your reporting?
Depends on if I know what to expect or not. If I just published something, I check it a bit compulsively. If not, then about once a day.
are you advertising ? if so you need to keep a careful eye on the KDP dash because the data there is a lot more reliable than the AMS dash if you're not advertising then it doesn't really matter (but don't expect to make many sales unless you have a big mailing list of similar)
Right now I'm not doing any advertising - honestly, the self-publishing was more about making my books available again than trying to generate a lot of sales. So far I'm selling 1-4 ebooks per day and averaging a bit over 1K in KU page reads daily, which is a lot better than I expected! To be fair, I expected nothing so the bar was pretty low. I know it's only been a week and that will likely slow down, at which point I might look into advertising - I'm definitely open to the idea and will likely be here looking for help with that when the time comes. I think I will at least do a price promotion (probably to 99 cents based on what I see other authors in my genre promoting on social media) after my first 30 days are up for each book.
Thanks for all the responses! Right now I'm tracking ebook sales and KU reads on a daily basis, which seems not too crazy - I know it's all there in the KDP Dashboard/Reports, but as a Data Analyst by trade I prefer my own spreadsheets for analyzing trends and drawing conclusions.
I like bookreport for looking at my numbers. It links to kdp and breaks things down in a better way. https://www.getbookreport.com/ Oh and it's free, as long as you aren't making over $1k/month I believe.
Oh, I LOVE this!!!! I'm a real data visualization nerd and this looks like a great tool to add to the mix. Thank you so much for the suggestion!
thats decent for no advertising - I would speculate that you have a following from your trad days. Both Michael Ridpath and Barry Eisler reported similar results when they switched to self
I think a good part of it too is that Gravity was only available for purchase for three weeks, and a fair portion of people who wanted to read it either couldn't buy it at the time or missed the announcement that it was going out of print. Nearly 64% of my ebook sales and KU reads have been for Gravity so far, which makes me incredibly happy. Poor thing barely had a shot last summer! My price point is also quite a bit lower than LT3's - obviously they were a business who had to cover overhead, so my books were listed with them for $6.99 for the two novels and $4.99 for the novella. I've priced them at $3.99 and $2.99 respectively, as I have no costs to recoup with all of the editing and cover art completed and ready to go. And they didn't participate in KU, which is where about half of my earnings are coming from so far. In retrospect I wish I hadn't waited so long, but none of what's happened over the past year can be changed now, so I'm focusing on moving forward.
