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SciFi Promo Conclusions – Be The Four Percent

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I spent three months tracking the sales of every SciFi/Fantasy book with a new publication date that was promoted with free days through the KDP Select program. The biggest problem with this data set is that Kindle has taken to updating publication date when they are changed on the details page, meaning that many older, established books end up showing up in the new books data.

The only experimental difference between the data set from the first month of the trial and the set from the second month is that I didn’t wait as long for the ranks the sales ranks to decay to their ultimate average, meaning that there no way to tell the difference between a book that may never sell another copy and a book that is selling just a copy a month. While that makes a difference to the author, it’s not significant from the business perspective. Since the data all points the same direction, the real reason I bothered to post was to list the books that came in high, for the sake of showing it can be done.

Of the 302 titles in the second data set, a single book was in the top 10,000 on Amazon, seven came in between ranks of 10K and 50K, and four between 50K and 100K. That’s pretty much the limit of commercial viability, falling in the top 100K, which came to a total of a dozen titles out of the 302, or about a four percent success rate. A couple of the top titles weren’t new books, they were simply republished with a new publication date. This is something I missed in the first data set because it only shows if you look for the dates on customer reviews.

The eight books that finished in the top 50K were:

A Switch in Time by John Paul Bernett (Currently ranked 18K, this book only has 3 reviews, which is a low number for a strong seller)

War of the Black Tower by Jack Conner (Book has since slipped from top 50K, but author 11 published books, including a title that was one only eight I read cover to cover during this experiment)

Radioactive: A Dirty Bomb Survival Story by B.J. Knights (B.J. Knights has authored over 30 titles on Kindle, a mix of fiction and nonfiction)

Wake The Dead by Gary F. Vanucci and illustrated Carlos Cara (This book just missed the top 10,000 is one of nine by the author)

FORT LIBERTY: VOLUME ONE by M. ORENDA (Military SciFi currently in top 10K by an award winning author who apparently writes different genres under different pen names)

Circles in the Dust by Mathew Harrop (Currently ranked in the 20K range, first novel by the author, priced $2.99 with six reviews)

ADAM:  Close Encounter with a Cosmic Visitor by J. M. Smith (Selling in the 20K range, a first novel by a retired Physics teacher that apparently tries to stick to the facts)

The Grim: Midnight Squad by J.L.M Visada (Good example of a book that was really published last year but showed up in the data set due to an updated publication date)

A new author trying to break in with a promo might want to take a look at “Circles in the Dust” and “ADAM” to try to guess what they did right to raise them above the crowd. The author of “Circles” is obviously Internet promotion savvy, I noticed a Kickstarter effort (unsuccessful, though he did have $647 in pledges) among other digital traces. A promotion for “ADAM” appears on an NBC science news FaceBook page, but that was the only trace I found.

A four percent chance of success really isn’t bad odds when it comes to something like publishing fiction. While it’s obvious that multi-book authors have a much higher success rate than newbies, there’s a way for a new author to fix that. Write more books.


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