Trends

It’s been several weeks since I raised the price on First and Next Time, and let’s take a look at how they’re doing. In conjunction with the price change, I’m also advertising on BookBub only on weekends. Overall, the trend on sales this month is downward, which is not a surprise when you take the price and advertising frequency into account. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be, though. For instance, this morning when I checked the Amazon rankings, both books were up from yesterday, which means someone must be buying them without having seen an ad since Sunday. When that happens it’s a bit of a surprise, albeit a welcome one. The books haven’t made it to that self-sustaining sales level, whatever that is. It’d be really nice to get some word-of-mouth sales, but I tend to think that’s going to require more hard-won sales through advertising and promotions first. Let’s just say I’d like to be wrong about that. In the meantime, I’m fine with spending less on ads for a bit and getting higher royalties on fewer books. Once we get to the holiday season, that’ll be the signal to pump up the advertising and do some wheeling and dealing.