Dynamics of book sales

[Suzanna]

Dear writers!

I'll be very grateful, if you tell me where I can find information about  the mean time of selling a book?

How much time from the release and almost to a stop, the book are selling? 
Half a year? During the year evenly? Or the first few months of "boom" and then a sharp decline?

Can you help me to find information about the dynamics of book sales please?


I hope very much for your help!
And thank you in advance!!!

[Wren Emerson]

I think everyone has had pretty varied experiences with selling. One trend I've noticed amongst the people who found early success was that they had their books up for a few months without any phenomenal sales, although they generally had a gradual increase over time, and then saw a sharp increase in December of 2010.

My own personal experience was that I worked hard to promote my book when it initially came out. I can track almost every sale to my marketing efforts. Once I stopped hand selling copies, my sales plummeted to the point where I was getting around a sale a day (I'd sold around 100 copies, iirc, in both of the first two months). Which is where I've been ever since, around 9 months later.

The KDP Select program is shaking the dynamic up again. Once upon a time you could catch a reader's attention by pricing at $.99, but it was soon flooded with everyone pricing that low. Now people are using KDP Select's free days to find readers, but I'm guessing that within a few months that'll just be so much extra noise to consumers too.

[S.A. Mulraney]

If there was a magic formula, we'd all be millionaires. Unfortunately, there's no 1 particular ebb and flow and much depends on visibility and sustainability:

1. Is your book getting publicity on a regular basis?

2. If it gets a push up into the top (whether through a paid ad, or free day), can it hold its own amongst the big names?

The great thing with ebooks is that there's no finite market. There are literally millions of ereader owners out there. With that many potential readers out there, your book will always be new to a portion of the market (unless you sell millions...then not so much  ).

[Wren Emerson]

The great thing with ebooks is that there's no finite market. There are literally millions of ereader owners out there. With that many potential readers out there, your book will always be new to a portion of the market (unless you sell millions...then not so much  ).

Then you just write another book that you can market to all those millions of readers. As long as you keep writing, you'll never run out of sales.

[S.A. Mulraney]

Well, that too.

[Pearson Moore]

Suzanna,

Book sales and trends are influenced by so many factors it would be impossible to give you a "typical" book sales history.  I sell both nonfiction and fiction and I see quite different trends in each category. 

I marketed my first nonfiction book, LOST Humanity, by spending over 500 hours over a ten-month period writing some 64 five-thousand-word essays--and then giving them away, for free.  By the time I announced my book, I had thousands of fans worldwide waiting to purchase a copy.  When it was published, LOST Humanity held the #1 position in its category for eight consecutive weeks.  Now, sales did decrease for several months, but I kept the book alive with announcements and interviews and price manipulation.  Then, in late November, LOST Humanity again began rising in the rankings.  It was again #1 in its category through most of December and January.  In fact, it has been #1 for the entire month of February so far.  Note well:  The price on LOST Humanity never fell below $2.99; for the last four months the price has been $4.99 for the ebook, $12.95 for the paperback, yet sales are better than they were when I charged $2.99.  Sale price probably has little or nothing to do with sales volume, at least for the kinds of books I write.

On the other hand, my novel, Cartier's Ring, sold five or ten copies a month in the first several months.  But I continue to plug it whenever I can, and sales have been steadily rising.  I broke 50 sales in December 2011, and last month I sold 72 copies.  This month is on target to again give around 70 sales for the month, and I hope to be in the low hundreds per month by the end of the year, when my second novel comes out.

I also write on Game of Thrones, and you might expect it to do as well as my LOST books.  Not at all!  The Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire) crowd is very different from the LOST crowd, with a well-established 16-year history before HBO decided to bring the novels to television.  I'm lucky to get 100 or 150 sales per month of my Game of Thrones books, and Game of Thrones Season One Essays was the #1 bestseller in its class for only one day.

In my case then, book sales have not peaked, even for a book which was an immediate bestseller 11 months ago.  Sales of my books have depended on marketing, interviews, mentions at well-known websites, and most importantly, the book audience.

[Suzanna]

Thanks you all a lot for such detailed answers! And good luck with your publishing!
If I'll have more questions - I'll ask you)