Checking Ebook Sales

The excitement for finally having my book released, after 16 years of working off it, took about three days to wear off. The first thing I had to overcome after that passed, was to stop checking my sales.

I checked to make sure everything had been uploaded properly and to see how all the reporting worked. I admit, I felt giddy seeing that people bought my book. I also learned that if you use Opera, when you check Amazon, your sales will look like they're under the Units Returned column.

There's no reason to check your book less than once a month. However, if want to check more because you can't resist, check at least weekly. I'm amazed and confused that there are people that don't only check once a day, but multiple times a day or even hourly. What's the point of checking so much? To stroke your ego. However, unless you're selling a lot of books, your ego will be deflated.

You want to check your sales to try to deduce trends or why you're selling or not selling. You want to see if the guest blogs, book reviews, advertising, cover change, price adjustment, or releasing a new book is having an affect on your sales. You can't get that by checking daily or hourly. The patterns don't emerge and you don't get a big enough sample size.

Granted, you're still estimating why your sales are either up or down for that month, but at least you have reasons of why they MIGHT be affected. If you didn't sell a book yesterday, today, or the last hour, what does that tell you? What does it tell you if you did sell?

Asking these important questions and trying to figure out why is far more important than the actual results. Without the why, you won't know what you need to do to adjust or what you're doing well.

Remember, you're not a businessman, you're a business…man.

Marc Johnson