Please note, this post was originally posted February 5, 2014 on our MandMMonsters.com website before we started this blog!
So this was our second week of writing a Kindle book a week for a year (these posts are one week behind the actual launch). Have seriously considered making these a regular feature so that when we write our opus about writing books, all the bits will be in one handy-dandy timeline!
Honestly, that is a big part of the reason we write, to keep track of all our amazing flashes of brilliance (joking!)
So onto this week’s book, Real Estate Agent Selling Tips: How To Close 98.7% of Your Listing Appointments, Safeguard Your Commission and Sell Houses Faster. She was not as fast a starter, getting up to only third in her category (as of today she is #31 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Investing > Industries & Professions > Real Estate > Buying & Selling Homes)
Couple of notes, we LIKE the graphic nature of seeing our book looking all cool there on the top line! Also, Amazon will not tell you what rank you are in or when you get to the top so you have to obsessively click refresh to see if you are trending. My husband especially likes that aspect of my being an author.
The next awesome thing is that we sold some books! January sales looked like this:
- How To Succeed At Stock Photography – 10 sales, 1 refund, 1 borrowed
- Real Estate Agent Selling Tips – 5 sold
Real Estate Agent Selling Tips also got our first one star review by a troll, I sort of feel like we have made it! They bashed the grammer, and me personally (Tara) and used an anonymous account to do it. As no one has requested a refund on that book yet, I am assuming that it was just a nasty person!
This is something that we definitely knew was coming. Yesterday Rebekah and I met to review our process for writing books which has definitely become more refined in the whole 3 books we have written so far. The one coming out this week will for sure be a more high quality product…BUT if we had waited to start until we had something brilliant, we would SO not be getting better.
The other nice thing is that there were three more sales this month for this book so we are up to a total of 18 sales for our first two weeks.
Some thoughts:
First off, it would be SO depressing if we were doing this on a longer timeline. Say we made “perfect” books and launched one a month or one every couple of months. That would mean that our sales growing thing would be happening on a much more drawn out timeline (and we wouldn’t get the trolls out of the way so fast!)
Secondly, from listening to a number of podcasts about self publishing (our favorites are The Self Publishing Podcast and Rocking Self Publishing), it seems to show an overwhelming number of self published authors say that they have increased sales based on the frequency of publication.
Now, it is probably backward that we are publishing to learn the ropes, but how else would we do it? Theory is great but until you put pen to paper and the go through the process of uploading, screwing up, getting great reviews (and bad reviews), you are never going to get better.
So this is about it for this week. Highs and lows (more highs than anything!) The new book is in the can, just waiting on some edits until we upload her TODAY!!!
Happy Wednesday everyone…the Monsters
Leave a Reply