Quantity

One of the questions my friends ask me the most about First is, “How many books have you sold?” I wish I had a good answer. What I’ve found is that the reporting of sales lags quite far behind the actual sales themselves. This in turn makes it difficult to see how effective (or not) an ad campaign turns out to be. For example, the release date for First was October 10th. I didn’t start seeing sales data until late December, about two-and-a-half months after that. I know that bestseller lists are tabulated weekly and Amazon sales ranks are updated hourly or so, but the actual sales should be quicker to put together than ten weeks after the fact. Granted, this is a minor complaint, but we do live in a world of computers where data can be processed in near-realtime.