2018 was the year that I started to look seriously into buying ads for my books.

Book promotion is notoriously difficult. Most books sell based on word of mouth, or recommendations through various media, rather than by advertising. Because the product is inexpensive and even consumers who want it are generally only going to buy one copy, no publisher can afford to pay a premium for individual views or clicks.

Most advertising channels for books are Very Bad at selling books. There are many venues, most of which have negligible impact on sales. Back in 2017, I tried buying a Bargain Booksy ad for Silver Scales in the week after its release, and it had zero impact: I sold three copies the day before the ad, and three copies the day of the ad. That ad was for the book at its full price ($4.99). Bargain Booksy might be more effective at a lower pricepoint, but based on other authors' experiences, they are unlikely to be profitable. In point of fact, I unsubscribed from all but Bargain Booksy's "LGBT" category for my own reading, because Bargain Booksy accepts unlimited numbers of promotions per day and its daily emails are overwhelming: twenty or more fantasy novels in one email. I am not surprised it doesn't work.

I might try E-reader News Today at some point: they at least had a noticeable impact on sales for one author's ad, although not nearly enough to cover the cost of the ad.

The gold standard of book advertising -- the outlet most likely (though not guaranteed!) to turn a profit -- is Bookbub. Bookbub is a discount email newsletter. Readers sign up for the categories they want to see and pick whether they want to get emails daily, weekly, or not at all. (You can look at the site to see what's discounted in your genres instead.) Bookbub runs a single deal each day in each category, for a book priced between $0.00 and $2.99. Publishers pay for slots, with slots being cheaper the lower the price point they pay.

Because Bookbub is a discount-books outlet, much of the profit in advertising through them relies on follow-on sales. The book you advertise is a loss leader, and other books in the series or your catalog (hopefully) make up the difference.

Since Bookbub is committed to "one slot per genre per day", advertising space in their newsletter is limited. They turn down a lot of books: 80% is their advertised standard. I've applied twenty-three times for slots. All of my submissions have been for:

• One book (you can also discount a box set)
• Sale price of $0.99
• Both US & International (you can pick one or the other or both).
• Genre: either "fantasy" or "LGBT".

None of my books have been selected for a US Bookbub, but four of them were selected for international-only Bookbubs. In order:

• July: Silver Scales (fantasy, $188)
• October: Demon's Lure (fantasy, $188)
• November: The Moon Etherium (fantasy, $188)
• December: The Sun Etherium (LGBT, $52)

Conventional wisdom holds that you run discounts only on the first book in a series. Once people buy the first book, if they like it, they'll pay full price for the others. Some publishers make an exception for romance novels, because romance readers understand that a romance "series" can generally be read in any order and that each book is a standalone story. Moreover, since most ad requests are rejected, being able to submit more books than just the first in a series is helpful in getting your books out there.

That was partly my logic in submitting The Sun Etherium for a promotion. The other part is that The Sun Etherium is the queerest of my books: it features two genderfluid protagonists, both of whom most often present as male: one cannot mistake this for a heterosexual pairing. Part of me wanted to submit The Moon Etherium in the LGBT+ category, but The Moon Etherium is an M/F fantasy romance. Yes, the female protagonist is bisexual, and yes, the setting presents gender as a spectrum where individuals determine for themselves where they belong, not a binary that people are born into. But a 40-word blurb for The Moon Etherium is not going to capture why a reader looking for an LGBT book will want to pick this up.

Speaking of which: Bookbub writes its own blurbs for every book featured in one of its emails. These are short and punchy, and based on Bookbub's market research of what sells books.

These are the Bookbub blurbs for my ads:

Silver Scales: To escape the legions of hell, Sir Damon Kildare has to succeed in a seemingly impossible quest. But Zenobia, a dragon-slayer’s daughter, will stop at nothing to find the key to saving his soul…

Demon's Lure: When Sunrise agrees to help a team of hunters catch a demon, she thinks it will be simple. But the demon is nothing like she expects — and neither is the future that awaits her… An enchanting fantasy!

The Moon Etherium: On a quest to secure his father’s freedom from slavery, Prince Mirohirokon enlists Ardent’s assistance. Bound by duty, she agrees to help and soon the duo is swept up in betrayal and intrigue — with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

The Sun Etherium: Fey immortal Jino, ruler of the Sun Etherium, needs to make sure this year’s Founder’s Festival is a success. But will his trysts at a new club, coupled with his deepening desire for ex-prince consort Kireki, risk everything he’s worked for?

You'll note that The Moon Etherium's blurb doesn't even mention the romance -- it's an ad in the "fantasy" genre, so Bookbub is pitching its fantasy/intrigue plot.

Also, I was totally guessing when I said Bookbub's blurbs were 40 words, but looks like that is around their max length!

Anyway:

Most of Bookbub's subscribers are in the US. The other countries where they have a presence are the UK, Australia, India, and Canada. Their international-only ads usually, but not necessarily, include all four of those countries. In my case, I got all four countries for each promo.

Unit sales from each promo are a little squidgy, because some sales are clearly not from Bookbub and probably unrelated to the promo ("this was an international-only Bookbub and these were US sales"). Others can't be Bookbub but are probably Bookbub-influenced ("Demon's Lure is selling twice as well at its regular price, two weeks after the Bookbub, than it was before the promo.") And whether or not follow-on sales are due to the Bookbub is purely guesswork. So I am giving exact unit numbers, but honestly, they are guesstimates.

Translating unit sales into dollars is even squidgier, because these are international sales. The actual price was 0.99 in the local currency (or 65 rupees for India, but I only had a few sales in India so those have a negligible impact.) Amazon then gives 35% of that 0.99 of local currency to me, converted to US dollars, two months later, bundled with all my book sales in that market. Kobo, Apple, and Barnes & Noble give me between 60%, via Draft2Digital. And while D2D's markets are negligible for my non-promotional sales, they are significant during promos and releases. Kobo is especially a big market for an international Bookbub: in Canada, Kobo is a much stronger competitor with Amazon. The upshot is that a single unit sale could net me as little as US $0.22 (Australian dollars, via Amazon) or as much as US $0.63 (UK sale via Draft2Digital). That is based on conversion rates back in December; it will have changed again by now, and will probably be different by the time I am actually paid. It is theoretically possible to parse out exactly how much each sale made and add it all up, but I have not done so.

July
Silver Scales: 210
Golden Coils: 27
This was a modest failure. I lost probably $30-$40 net on this promotion. I am fine with this: it moved a couple hundred books into people's e-readers and bumped my visibility a touch. I am willing to assume I got some long-term vigorish from this.

October
Demon's Lure: 382
Angel's Sigil: 30
This was a definite success. The sales of Angel's Sigil are especially hard to calculate, because Angel's Sigil had only been out a couple of months and was still benefiting from its new-release bump. But percentage-wise, my guess is that the immediate sell-through on Lure was definitely worse than Scales. Nonetheless, very happy with this promotion and would be glad to buy a US Bookbub for this book.

November
The Moon Etherium: 110
The Sun Etherium: 2
This was just abysmal. Few sales and almost no sell-through. Big money loser.

December
The Sun Etherium: 83
The Moon Etherium: 12
In case you are looking at this and thinking "oog, that's even worse than The Moon Etherium": no, actually this is the best ROI of all four promotions. TSE was promoted in the LGBT category. Bookbub has many fewer LGBT readers than fantasy readers, and the ads are correspondingly cheaper. This ad was only $52, as compared to $188 for the other three. Moreover, the sell-through was unexpectedly good. 15% of readers either looked at the blurb for TSE and decided immediately that they wanted the first book too, or they chewed through TSE in under a day and then bought TME. Last: this promotion was on 12/31, so it's likely that a few more sales will still trickle in. So although this was comparatively low-volume, I'm excited about the possibilities.

~

The disparity in the performance of the Etherium novels in the fantasy vs LGBT categories makes it clear that I want to market these books as LGBT+. Which is how I've always wanted to market them, to be fair. On the other hand, marketing The Sun Etherium as LGBT+ and hoping people will then pick up The Moon Etherium is not, in my opinion, ideal. For one thing, just the blurb for The Sun Etherium has spoilers for The Moon Etherium. But The Moon Etherium is, as previously mentioned, difficult to position as an LGBT+ book.

So the logical solution to this problem is to write an EXTREMELY GAY prequel to The Moon Etherium, and then market THAT as the first book in the series. n_n

~

Overall, Bookbub works much better as a marketing outlet if you have several books in a single series. I haven't really seen an impact on sales of my other series based on a Bookbub promo. So because I only have two books in each series, I've lost a little money, net, on the four promotions I've bought so far. If I were promoting the first book in a series with four or more installments, it'd be much more clearly profitable. The good news is, I'm finally working on the third book in a series! The bad news is, it's a third Etherium book, and nothwithstanding the successful promo on The Sun Etherium, the Etherium books are my worst-selling series.

I still haven't landed a US Bookbub, and the US Bookbubs have a much bigger impact on sales than the international ones (and are correspondingly more expensive -- they cost about four times as much.) I am still submitting to Bookbub for one of these. Bookbub won't run an ad for the same book in the same market more often than every six months, so most of my catalog doesn't qualify for another international Bookbub yet. Except A Rational Arrangement; I am amused that I still haven't gotten a promo for it, since it's my most-reviewed and most-sold book.

Those who've been following my blog since I first released A Rational Arrangement may have noticed that none of the promotions reach the heights of my first couple of months of ARA's release. Alas, ARA remains an outlier in my catalog. ARA has received no promotions, and has sold three times as many copies as anything else I've written since. On the other hand, outside of promotions and recent releases, all of my books are selling 10 or fewer copies a month at this stage: it's not as if ARA is continuing to outsell the rest of my catalog now. It just has a big head start from 2015-2016. Arguably, I should be writing more books set in Paradise. I have not been inspired to write more books in Paradise, however. Also, Further Arrangements was not a stand out in terms of sales the way ARA is, and even ARA did not make full-time-writing-income money. Hence, I am continuing to write books based on my own interests rather than being strongly influenced by "what's selling."

My general experience with Bookbub has been positive: it sells books and it's low effort on my part. Yes, I have to submit a bunch of books for every one they accept, but the submission form only takes a couple of minutes to complete. There are other advertising options I should try, especially since Bookbub is so exclusive. But since Bookbub is the industry leader and even it has not been consistently profitable, I am still at the stage where focusing most of my effort on "write more books" feels right. Advertising one book will have a better ROI when I have more books to sell after new readers finish that first one.

In the last few days, I've had people ask "how do you attract an audience?" You can skip to the bottom for my advice, or read my rambling on the subject beforehand, as you prefer.

Prelude
Before I say anything more, I want to be very clear about my level of success, or lack thereof. My three books have, combined, sold around 2000 copies in the 21 months since I first published. I've made about $7000 from writing. Something like $5500 of that was from my first book, A Rational Arrangement, mostly in the first four months after publication. ARA's sales qualified me for membership in SFWA (which I joined) and the Author's Guild (which I did not). If I had to re-qualify on a different book (neither organization makes you do so), I could not do so.

Those sales are much, much higher than the $0.00 I made in the previous 20 or so years where I was earnestly writing stories that I hoped to sell and have readers for. It is "real money", in the sense of "I just paid off my mortgage a year early because of this."

It is not "real money" in the sense of "I could live on this". My current writing income is around $80 a month, which is enough to pay my Internet bill. It would not pay for groceries, much less all my other expenses. It does not amount to minimum wage for the many hours I've put into writing, editing, and publishing, or for the many hours my friends have donated to beta-reading, proofing, and typesetting my books. I am pleased with my level of success, but I am not making a living wage by any American standard.

There are a lot of people more qualified to give advice than me. Really, you should be reading them. But if you're still here:

On Failure
There is no path to a career in writing that has a high chance of success. There is no equivalent to the standard career path of "get good grades in school, get a degree in X, and you have a 80-95% chance of making a reasonable annual salary doing something in the general field of Y." Most people who want to make a living as a full-time writer do not.

Most people who want to be writers give up, at one stage or another. Before they finish writing their first book. Before they finish editing it. Before they finish a book they are happy enough with to try to publish. While trying to find an agent. While trying to find a publisher. After publishing their first book. After publishing their fifth book. That writer who wrote this one trilogy you loved and then you never heard from them again? Probably one of the ones who gave up.

Why do they give up? Because they're not inspired any more. Because they decided the odds of finding an audience were too slim. Because they're not making a living wage and they'd rather use their free time to play video games, or run RPGs for their friends, or garden, or whatever. Because publishing is too much work for too little reward, even if they're still writing. (Yes, I know of at least one author who kept writing after they quit publishing. The publishing side is a lot of work and mental energy.)

So those are some of the ways you can fail. There are many other ways to fail. Most people fail. My guess is, that of the people who have earnestly labored at writing for hundreds of hours, most will never produce a polished manuscript. Of those who do, most will never publish, not even self-publish. Most of those who publish will earn less than $1000 in writing. Most of those who make over $1000 will not earn enough to support themselves independent of a day job.

I don't know what those fractions are. No one really surveys for this stuff. Jim Hines did a "novelist income survey", and in theory the people who made $10 self-pubbed on Amazon last year could fill it out, but I strongly believe they self-select out of it. "I'm not a real author, this survey is for real authors." And that survey still puts the median income at under $20,000 a year.

I do not write this to discourage writers. This is actually my weird, roundabout way of encouraging you. Because if you feel like "no one will read my work!" then you need to know that this is a problem for 99.9% of writers. You are not doing something horribly wrong and everyone else can do this so why not you, what are you missing, why is this so hard? It is so hard for you because it is so hard for virtually every writer. Writers who fall into a career in writing are one in a million. (*waves to Ursula Vernon!* Who, it must be noted, worked incredibly hard to fall into her career in writing.)

Actual Advice

These are the things which are necessary, but not sufficient, to making a living as a writer:

• Write in an engaging, compelling manner. If you're writing fiction: tell a good story. In many forms of nonfiction, telling a good story will also help. Humans like narratives.
• Finish what you write.
• Make your work available to readers in some fashion (submit to publishers, or self-publish in some fashion)

Everything else is neither necessary nor sufficient, although it might help. If you're self-published:

• Cover: This is your main advertisement for your book. Make sure it is attractive, suitable for the genre of your book, and looks interesting at thumbnail size. If you are going to invest money in any part of the publishing process, investing it in the cover is probably the best place.
• Social Media: If you don't like using social media for its own sake, it is a waste of time and resources. Don't. I use LJ and Twitter because I like using LJ and Twitter. My social media presence for the last 15 years or so did help in promoting my books, but, y'know, that's $7000 for 15 years of activity. If I'd been doing it for the money, so not worth it. But if you like social media, being active on it and engaging with new people in a friendly manner can help you expand your audience.  Using social media primarily to say "Buy my book", however, is worse than useless.  
• Paid Advertising: If you have a body of published work (at least 3-4 books in one series), Bookbub is easily the best value in the business. You need to discount your book in order to submit to Bookbub, and Bookbub generally only takes books that are already at least modestly successful. There are a number of other advertising outlets, most of which do not offer a great return on investment (if any), but they might be enough to get your book into the "modest success" range needed to get on Bookbub. YMMV. I have not tried paid advertising anywhere, myself, entirely due to laziness on my part.

My Personal Favorite Advice

This comes from Kristine Kathryn Rusch: The best use of a writer's time is to write what you love, get it out there, and repeat, as fast as possible.

Does this work reliably? No. But neither does anything else, and at least this way you're spending most of your time and energy writing, which is why you decided to do this thing in the first place. Right?

These are the sale figures for my polyamorous fantasy romance novel, A Rational Arrangement. (Buy it here! Amazon ~ Kobo ~ Nook ~ iBooks ~ Print). With new, bonus sales figures for the second book, Further Arrangements!

Sales Graph from June 24, 2015 through February 29, 2015.



(This graph is only Amazon Kindle sales, because only Amazon breaks out sales by day. I generated it in Excel, though, since Amazon will only generate a graph for the last three months or less.)

Total Sales of A Rational Arrangement:

Pre-launch: 36
1st Month: 507
2nd Month: 292
3rd Month: 146
4th Month: 68
5th Month: 75
6th Month: 37
7th Month: 38
8th Month: 90
Total through 2/29/2016: 1289

Average unit sales:
1st Month: 16.9
2nd Month: 9.4
3rd Month: 4.9
4th Month: 2.3
5th Month: 2.4
6th Month: 1.2
7th Month: 1.2
7th Month: 3.6

Total Sales of Further Arrangements:
1st Month: 162

Average Unit Sales:
1st Month: 4.9

Miscellaneous sales: Draft2Digital sold 13 units of either FA or RA in February, and won't tell me which sales go with which book until next month.  You're a little behind the reporting curve here, D2D.

I am taking advantage of February being a short month to change these posts from "monthiversary"  numbers that run from the 29th to the 28th, to month-end numbers.

As expected, the release of Further Arrangements perked up sales for A Rational Arrangement. I put both books on sale for $2.99, which also contributed to the rise in sales. (RA got 3-4 sales at $2.99 before I announced the sale, after a week of zero sales).

This was a nice bump: more sales than RA'd had in four months.

As also expected, Further Arrangement outsold RA, though by less than I'd anticipated. Both books were priced at 2.99 for much of the month, because I goofed on sale pricing by forgetting to update the D2D prices, and Amazon price-matched RA at $2.99 for an extra 10 days or so after I meant to end the sale. Whoops. Anyway, total income is about what it was back in September (the third month).

I'd hoped FA would sell 50% of what RA sold in its launch month. Actual unit sales were 32%: not dismal, but not great.  The upside of this: I've been working on Birthright, an epic fantasy novel in a different setting from the Arranging Paradise books.  If RA and FA had combined to reach the sales hights of July/August, I would feel more like I ought to work on a new Arranging Paradise romance instead.  As it is, I feel free to try my hand at a different subgenre and see how what the market thinks of it.

These are the sale figures for my polyamorous fantasy romance novel, A Rational Arrangement. (Buy it here! Amazon ~ Kobo ~ Nook ~ iBooks ~ Print).

Sales Graph from June 24, 2015 through January 28, 2015.



(This graph is only Amazon Kindle sales, because only Amazon breaks out sales by day. I generated it in Excel, though, since Amazon will only generate a graph for the last three months or less.)

Total Sales:

Pre-launch: 36
1st Month: 507
2nd Month: 292
3rd Month: 146
4th Month: 68
5th Month: 75
6th Month: 37
7th Month: 38
Total through 1/28/2016: 1199

Average unit sales:
1st Month: 16.9
2nd Month: 9.4
3rd Month: 4.9
4th Month: 2.3
5th Month: 2.4
6th Month: 1.2
7th Month: 1.2

So the good news: sales has held steady for two months! At a non-zero number!

The bad news: Sales has also held steady for the last week, at exactly 0. Whoops.

But there's more good news! I'm releasing Further Arrangements next week! Typically a new book in a series will increase sales of the previous books, so this may perk up A Rational Arrangement's sales.

RA was priced at $4.99 for about ten days of the latest period, and then at $5.99 for the remainder. I plan to put it on sale again for the launch of Further Arrangements, perhaps even as low as $2.99. That will probably also increase unit sales.

I also noticed that Amazon doesn't show RA categorized as fantasy any more. It's now in "Bisexual romance" (I don't think this category existed when I first launched -- I think it was all "LGBT") and "mulitcultural/interracial romance". "Interracial" is technically true and I remember checking that box, but I think "romance -> fantasy" is more to the point. The presence of greatcats and Blessings has much more impact on the narrative than the difference in races. I may fiddle with the keywords to see if I can get it lumped back into romance -> fantasy.

In milestones: A Rational Arrangement got its first one star review! Which was basically "I thought this would be a fantasy novel, not gay romance". Okay then. I don't mind that it picked up a one-star review, but I am a bit sad that it's likely to be the most recent review when Further Arrangements goes live. If anyone out there has read A Rational Arrangement and liked it but not reviewed it on Amazon yet, now would be a lovely time to drop in a review. c_c

In better milestones: A Rational Arrangement has now earned enough in royalties to qualify me for membership in the Author's Guild! I don't plan to join the Author's Guild currently; I find membership in SFWA useful and informative, but a lot of that is because it's got genre-specific resources and advice. I may someday join Romance Writers of America for similar reasons, but the Author's Guild doesn't hold that attraction for me.

These are the sale figures for my polyamorous fantasy romance novel, A Rational Arrangement. (Buy it here! Amazon ~ Kobo ~ Nook ~ iBooks ~ Print).

Sales Graph from June 24, 2015 through November 28, 2015.



(This graph is only Amazon sales, because only Amazon breaks out sales by day. I generated it in Excel, though, since Amazon will only generate a graph for the last three months or less.)

Total Sales:

Pre-launch: 36
1st Month: 507
2nd Month: 292
3rd Month: 146
4th Month: 68
5th Month: 75
Total through 11/28: 1124

Average unit sales:
1st Month: 16.9
2nd Month: 9.4
3rd Month: 4.9
4th Month: 2.3
5th Month: 2.4

Woohoo! UNIT SALES DID NOT FALL! For the first month ever! I credit this to the sales price of $4.99 (down from $6.99) which began on 11/6: you can see the sales bump it created, and sales have been steady since. The halcyon days of summer have not returned, but I'll take it.

Draft2Digital sold a book, as did Createspace. Amazon didn't have any zero-sales days this month, so that was cool.

Net income is down from October, due to the lower price. But I will happily accept that! For one, I think more readers is better in the long term than more money is right now, and at $4.99 I figure these are buyers who plan to read the book, not people getting it because it's really cheap and they might read it one of these years. For another, it was not that large an income drop; less than 20%. Given that net income has been falling by 40-55% each month, having it drop by only a little is quite comforting.

Also, apparently the people who bought it on sale liked it!  RA picked up five new five-star reviews in November. ♥

The sale ends on December 11, so it'll be interesting to see if the monthly sales decline resumes when the price goes back up to $6.99.

It's been over three full months since the official launch of my polyamorous fantasy romance novel, A Rational Arrangement. (Buy it here! Amazon ~ Kobo ~ Nook ~ iBooks ~ Print).

So: sales data time!

I can no longer get Amazon to give me the full history in one handy chart! Here's most of it, from 7/1 to 9/28:


Total Sales:

Pre-launch: 36
1st Month: 507
2nd Month: 292
3rd Month: 146
Total through 9/28: 981

Average unit sales:
1st Month: 16.9
2nd Month: 9.4
3rd Month: 4.9

Sales continue to fall off by 40-50% a month. It's most of the way through the fourth month now, and that trend looks likely to continue in October. It's close enough to October 29 that I was tempted to wait and post months three & four at the same time. Then I realized I will probably be slow about posting month four too, so let's just get this one up. As always, the vast majority of RA's sales are from Amazon, though sales through Draft2Digital stayed flat at 6 copies so they've gone from 2% of sales to 4%. (Go non-Amazon bookstores! Provide some competition!) Despite the continuing drop, I remain pleased by overall sales and rather boggled that it hasn't fallen to zero yet. Not even for one day. O_o (Though that day is presumably coming, perhaps even this month.)

I've gone from checking on sales a few times a day (when it first came out) to checking a few times a week. Maybe my desire to check is tied to "whenever 5-10 copies have probably sold"?

I did nothing to affect sales in September, and have no plans for October, either. On November 6, I'll be putting the book on sale for $4.99; this timing is connected to events in the serial. I may buy some advertising at the same time, depending on whether or not Marketer Rowyn comes out from under the kitchen table.

In one last piece of sales news: RA didn't break 1000 units in September, but it did hit that milestone in the first week of October. \o/ SO EXCITED.

I'll close with a link for those interested in publishing numbers in general: Kameron Hurley's fascinating post on the average sales of published books.

It's the second full month since official launch of my polyamorous fantasy romance novel, A Rational Arrangement. (Buy it here! Amazon ~ Kobo ~ Nook ~ iBooks ~ Print).

That means it's time for DATA!

Amazon KDP Sales Graph:


Total Sales:

Pre-launch: 36
1st Month: 507*
2nd Month: 291
Total to date: 834

Average unit sales:
1st Month: 16.9
2nd Month: 9.4

Since I did a monthiversary post at the end of July, I figured I'd do another at the end of the second month, because I am still all excited about this whole "people are buying my book WHAT" thing. I will probably stop doing these at some point.

August sales were uniformly down from July: I went from having frequent days of 20+ sales and most days having over 10, to no days that were over 20, and most days being 10 or less. For the first few weeks it was an up-and-down seesaw from day to day: 17! 6! 19! 7! The last ten days flattened out to around 6-7 a day.

I have no good explanation for the flattening of sales at the end of August. My bad explanation is "the WorldCon effect": sf&f readers were attending WorldCon and have been buying/reading books they bought in person, and/or reading the Hugo winners, rather than buying new books online. This lines up with anecdotal reports from a few other authors who saw their sales drop in the same period, but I'm not sure WorldCon is the right explanation for the downturn. Sasquan's webpage shows 4,151 attending members, which is a pretty small slice of overall fandom. A huge media con like DragonCon (next weekend!) is more where I'd expect that kind of impact.

I have not systemically tracked RA's sales rank on Amazon. However my rough sense is that it correlates to sales as follows:

18-22 books-per-day: Sales rank around 10,000
10-12: Sales rank around 20,000
5-7: Sales rank around 30,000

This is highly unscientific. Also, while Amazon sales rank is heavily weighted by the most recent sales, it does take into account past sales in some fashion or other.

A Rational Arrangement picked up 8 more reviews this month (yay!) including the best 2-star review ever. Seriously, it starts out with "The author is talented and inventive". The complaint amounts to 'book was not clearly labeled as CONTAINS GAY SEX'. I am totally down with people who look at the reviews seeing one that warns them BOOK CONTAINS GAY SEX.**

In conclusion: I'm still delighted with RA's overall sales. In the next month or two, it's quite likely to hit four-digit sales, which is like WHOA. I would love to see it return to last month's highs, but it's vastly exceeding my expectations as it is. \o/ In September, I plan to buy a modest amount of Amazon advertising. I am curious to see if that will have a perceptible impact! (EDIT: Whoops, looks like a book needs to be Kindle Select in order to run an Amazon ad campaign. Never mind!)

* For anyone wondering why my previous post showed total sales of 550 while pre-launch and first-month sales on this one total 543: my last post included 7 sales from the second month, because I was giving totals to-date on July 30.

** In perfect seriousness, I do feel that the RA blurb should do a better job of establishing that the book is a polyamorous romance and two of the characters are bisexual. But I haven't thought of a way to do so that I like and find consistent with the rest of the book's style. The cover tagline, "It's not easy for individuals of a Certain Disposition to wed in Newlant. But surely three reasonable adults can come to a Rational Arrangement" was intended to suggest this in a way consistent with the book's themes. But it's still pretty subtle. Anyway, I don't actually want to trick people into buying a book they won't like, so I am totally good with a review that warns about it, especially one that does so in such a kindly fashion.

Want to be the 835th buyer of A Rational Arrangement? Find it here! Amazon ~ Kobo ~ Nook ~ iBooks ~ Print

As of today, it's been a full month since the public release of A Rational Arrangement.

Sales have far surpassed my (very modest) expectations. Checking the sales graphs and the Amazon rank is weirdly addictive; I am trying to cut back on the former to "once per day", and the latter to "only if sales levels are unusual." I do not presently DO anything with this information, and the sales data accumulates and I am not going to miss anything if I only check, oh, once a month I definitely don't need to be staring at it multiple times a day.

I plan to buy some advertising on Amazon at some point; I am curious what effect that'll have. Since the $4.99 sale ended, Amazon has been doing all the work of selling RA. iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble combined account for less than 5% of my sales.

My modest success thus far has been very motivational: after months of writing little-to-no fiction, I've spent the last three weeks working diligently on a novelette in the same setting as A Rational Arrangement. As I've noted in comments, I'll be putting out a collection of shorts in the setting. The collection will be much shorter than RA -- perhaps 50-80,000 words all together, instead of RA's 210,000+. I have this delightful fantasy in which I am able to release it this year. I am not convinced this will happen. But I do have about 30,000 words on it already (13,000 from this month and 17,000 that were written in 2013.) Of course, publishing a book has a whole lot more moving parts than just writing the first draft. But I am pretending this is the hard part (hint: it isn't) for the sake of keeping my motivation high.

I am tempted to write about specific numbers: how many books sold, royalties earned, what the patterns are like, etc. I am not sure if this is wise. I will do a poll! Vote in the comments if you like, and don't have an LJ. :)

[Poll #2018262]

I checked the suggestions from my name poll (all of which are IMO better than anything I offered) and terrycloth offered the BEST NAME EVER.

Seriously, I love this name. It is a name so good that I actually want to publish books*! I need to write more books JUST SO I CAN PRINT THEM UNDER THIS COMPANY NAME.

It is:

Delight in Books

Is it not nifty?

---

Okay, so it may be just me who thinks this is the awesome name of awesome. For those of you who don't know, I used to write a World Tree fanfic under delight_in_wt. The title character changed her name frequently (a common trait for members of her species in the World Tree setting), but her names had the general format of "Delight in [Whatever]". The name thus has personal meaning for me. Beyond that, it leads easily to imprint names: I can call the business "Delight in Books" and the imprint for A Rational Arrangement can be "Delight in Romances". ("Delight in Fantasies" might sound too erotica for a fantasy imprint, though. Still!)

But since I had some other new ideas too, and there's some small chance that someone could talk me out of "Delight in Books", I'm doing another poll.

After haikujaguar pointed out that it was not a great idea for the publisher name to be easily mistaken for the first book I'm publishing, it struck me that what I liked about "Rational Romances" was not just the alliteration, but the seeming (not actual) dissonance between the two ideas. So I'm listing some riffs off of that, which have the virtue of not sounding like my book title. But no alliteration. Not sure I like them.

And I'm including the other three suggestions I got from the last poll (thanks also to tuftears for "Vasilver Enterprises", siege for "Comfrey House" and whitefangedwolf for "Greatcat Press"). Because I was serious when I said all the suggestions were better than my original choices.

[Poll #2012575][Poll #2012575]


* The more time I spend on this whole "publishing A Rational Arrangement" thing, the more I am ahhhhh what am I doing why did I think this was a good idea ahhhhhhhhhhh