Publishing is full of surprises - what sells, what doesn't - and despite following certain "rules" that make perfect sense, as writers, we are at the mercy of a reader's personal tastes. There is no magic formula – either for writing or promoting books - that will work for everyone.
However, statistics can at least inform our marketing decisions.
I'm grateful to fellow writer and blogger Deborah Jay http://deborahjay.wordpress.com/about/ for responding to one of my recent posts called Readers: Does size matter? by sending me the link to the results of a recent Smashwords survey which analysed the common characteristics of bestselling (and poor-selling) Smashwords ebooks. Some of the questions they posed were:
- Do frequent price changes help authors sell more books?
- Do longer or shorter books sell better?
- What's the average word count for the 60 bestselling Smashwords romance books?
- What does the sales distribution curve look like, and how many books sell well?
- How many words are the bestselling authors selling for a penny?
Click on the link to read the full list of questions and survey findings.
http://blog.smashwords.com/2013/05/new-smashwords-survey-helps-authors.html
Related posts
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/the-business-of-writing-part-1.html
http://janefriedman.com/2013/04/21/how-to-publish-an-ebook/
Hi Jane,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the mention, it was a good coincidence I'd seen that post so recently.
The survey makes for very interesting reading, doesn't it?
Good luck with your price restructuring - look forward to hearing the outcome.
Hi Deborah - yes, the survey was very interesting and thanks so much for sending me the link! I will be monitoring the pricing strategy over the next few months to see what difference it makes.
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