One Year of Gratitude

A year ago today, I published Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064, and I still pinch myself when I think what this little book has done for itself.  If you’re one of the 4,000+ readers it’s gained since then, thank you for giving it a try.

[image error]I’ve learned a couple of things in the last year, but not what I hoped to learn.  Firstly, KDP Select is a worthwhile route for an unknown author to try.  Repulse‘s readership is split 48/48 between ebook sales and pages read by Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library readers (KENP), with the remaining 4% made up of paperback sales.  For years, I refused to have anything to do with KDP Select because I regarded it as Amazon trying to corner the e-book market.  Be that as it may, I also believe one’s morals may occasionally need some flexibility, so by the end of last October, all of my books were in KDP Select.  Secondly, selling ten e-copies a day in the US is not enough to get a book inside the top 10,000 in the whole US store, which I thought at the time was a little amazing.

The thing I didn’t find out is how Repulse began to sell, so I could replicate that tactic with my next book.  For the first few weeks after publication, Repulse trundled along selling two or three copies a day.  My own social media promotion blitz finished at the end of September, at which point I expected the book to sink without a trace.  Instead, with me doing nothing at all and the book having just a couple of good reviews from my most loyal supporters, it began to sell more.  By the second week of October, Repulse was moving 15 to 25 Kindle copies a day, with a similar and equally sudden increase KENP pages read, up from almost nothing to between 4,000 and 7,000 pages per day (equivalent to 10 to 15 copies).

[image error]In the UK, the book was assured of further readers: it went to #2 in the Hard Science Fiction category and stayed there for weeks, clearly visible to any casual Sci-Fi fan (it did make it to #1 for a couple of hours on a Friday night in December).  But in the US, even with those sales it seldom broke the top 100 in the Hard Science Fiction category, so I assume Amazon must have decided Repulse deserved a break and used its vast marketing power to tell people about it.  The good times lasted through the winter before tapering off in the spring, but even now the book still finds around 100 new readers every month.

However, the thing which vexed me was that I couldn’t work out how Repulse had started to sell in the first place.  With the idea of trying to build on its modest success, I pulled down two of my older titles and rewrote them as a new book, Time Is the Only GodTime fell in the same category of Hard Science Fiction, although it is time travel/multiverse whereas Repulse is military.  Nevertheless, Time crashed and burned, and has sold just a handful of copies in the six months since I published it.  There are probably many reasons why that happened (and of all them, it’s important not to discard the possibility that Time just isn’t very good), but I’m not going to start navel-gazing here.

In a couple of weeks, I will publish my next novel, The Repulse Chronicles, Book One: Onslaught.  The eagle-eyed among you will spot the familiar words.  Among the dozens of reviews Repulse has had, a few have mentioned that it would be good to read novels dealing with the events described in Repulse, and I think it’s important to take valuable feedback on board.

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[image error]Onslaught is the first in a series of novels which will tell the full story of the war described in Repulse.  I don’t know how many novels will be in this series, because that depends on what happens next.  Will Amazon tell the readers of Repulse about Onslaught?  Will those readers be sufficiently interested?  Will Onslaught be good enough?

While those questions remain to be answered, I do have one more option: to switch genres.  The hugely talented author and my dear internet friend, Carol E. Wyer, spent several years enjoying great acclaim as a funny lady who could always make you chuckle.  A year ago, she turned her hand to contemporary thrillers and has seen her books hit the stratosphere, shifting hundreds of thousands of copies.  So, people, it’s important to bear in mind that there are always options.
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Published on August 28, 2017 12:39
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