Good Numbers

by wjw on January 25, 2017

So my 99-cent sale on The Rift has generated good numbers, and it is now officially an Amazon bestseller, or as they call it, Best Seller. Its Amazon number was 28 this morning, and they’d probably declined overnight from an even better number. (For some reason these sales seem to generate their best numbers in the early hours of the morning.)

I’m also #9 on the Barnes & Noble list, and if I didn’t know how few sales that actually means, I’d be deeply impressed with myself.

The sale is by no means over, so if you want to get yourself a bestseller Best Seller, you can find it in all the usual places: Kobo, iBooks, Amazon, Nook, Smashwords, and Google.

IronOre January 26, 2017 at 11:04 am: So do you actually make any money off this kind of sale, or is this more about getting people reading your books and generating future sales?
wjw January 26, 2017 at 8:15 pm: I make money on them, but nothing like a fortune. Exposure is one of the main goals.
Robert January 29, 2017 at 1:39 am: Picked it up on smash words (you mentioned once that you get a better cut there and I like that I actually get a file) was a little disappointed that it wasn’t there in kindle format. I have Google books, but the OCD in me wants to keep all my books in the same place, lol.
Steinar Bang January 29, 2017 at 2:37 am: That’s not a problem, since the books on smashwords don’t have DRM:

Install calibre
Start calibre, and:

Click on “Add books” (top left) and browse to the epub you downloaded from smashwords
Connect your kindle to the computer running calibre with an usb cable (calibre should detect the kindle and set the desired output format)
Select “The Rift” in the list of books, and click on the reader icon that appeared on the top when you plugged in the kindle, and select “Send to device”

There are other neat stuff you can do, eg.

Improve the metadata of the book before conversion
Use calibre’s web server instead of a USB cable

(but that’s left as an exercise for the reader)

That said: are you sure the book is not available in kindle format? My ebooks on smashwords list epub (what I use), mobi (for kindle) and PDF (I don’t have “The Rift” on smashwords. I bought it on Amazon to help boost WJW’s sales on the previous sale).
wjw January 29, 2017 at 2:27 pm: This is the first that I’ve heard that the Kindle file wasn’t available! Let me see what happened there . . .
Margot January 31, 2017 at 2:09 pm: I have this book in hardback, but hey, I picked it up as an ebook too (since I carry my tablet on the train anyway).

What a good book. I’d forgotten a lot of it, and the technical details are more interesting to me now. It’s nice to be able to follow along on Google Earth.

I found out where the gas tap is on our house, and worried again about the stuff in our earthquake preparedness kit.