u/beefrburg

Just to be clear, this is celebrating a revenue milestone. It's not profit. I need to sell waaaaaaaay more books to make up for what I've spent on editing, artwork, advertising and the party I put on to celebrate the launch of book 1. But seeing that number tick over $1000 (with more to come because I'm not counting the royalties from Amazon until I actually receive them) still felt like it was worth celebrating and sharing what it took to get here.

So, first book of a planned trilogy, released Sept 1st. I'd been promoting it pretty heavily through my social networks leading up to the release. No ARCs to speak of, just beta readers. I had about fifty people asking about getting copies before I launched.

Had a mini-launch party Sept 3rd, sold 12 physical copies and 7 ebooks.

Went overseas back to my country of birth for the second half of September. Sold 28 physical copies and got another 9 ebook sales.

Returned to the US and held a more official launch party. Sold 18 physical copies and 5 ebooks.

There have been a few other sales here and there which weren't tied to any particular events.

I set up a small ad campaign on Meta, experimenting with just one type of ad on FB for a month. It has resulted in a handful of additional ebook sales and 6400 KENP read. I'll be trying a campaign on IG and TikTok for one month each moving forward. Not sure if I'll try Amazon.

Total: 101 physical books, 37 ebooks, 6405 KENP (equates to 17 full book reads). All up, that's 155 copies in just over five weeks.

Lessons learned so far. Book sales are great, but those KENP reads excite me the most. To see people actually reading the book is the best part, especially because those reads are more likely to be strangers taking a chance on me.

The Meta ad was initially targeted at 18-35 year olds (the book is YA) and I got some ok click rates on it, but when I expanded to all ages, the number of clicks improved substantially.

Getting reviews is soooooooo hard. Trying to think of how I can gently encourage people to leave an honest rating to get those numbers up.

I'm trying to view the first two books in the trilogy as a giant ARC campaign. When the third part comes out, I'm hoping that there are enough reviews that will allow me to hit the ground with a larger ad campaign for the entire series.

Happy to answer any questions. I know some others have done better than this, so I'm certainly no expert, but just throwing the above into the discussion so you can see what's possible.

I was expecting it because so many people here warn you, but, wow, these scam and spam emails come through so quickly. Within hours of going live, I received an email trying to flog promotion services. I don't even have my email published anywhere, so this person had to find my website, get AI to scan my book and prepare a lengthy AI summary in his email and how wonderful my writing is.

Point of the post is more to thank everyone for sharing their scam stories on here. I'm absolutely wary of any messages I receive now. Hope I don't fall for any of them.

My book goes live on Amazon next week and Amazon is telling me I need to set the age range (which I had left blank) to improve its discoverability.

While the book is certainly more YA, I’m hoping to also target new adult readers as well. Amazon seems to want me to select an age range up to 17 only. Any thoughts on whether I should leave it blank and be at the mercy of the algorithm or should I set a 13-17 age range and potentially limit it from being shown to those in the 18-23 range?