Hive Post-Release Update
Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!
Hive has now been out on the market in Kindle form for five days now, with a Christmas Eve release. And although the book has been on the market in a digital form for a few days, the paperback version is heavily delayed. Its release date is, as of now, a mystery.
Hive‘s Kindle release was not as strong as I anticipated it would be, with a rather insignificant launch day. Despite being available for pre-order for several weeks and despite a big sales push for Iris ahead of time, launch-day sales were the lowest yet for any book in The Color of Water and Sky series.
I attribute this fact to a lower book-to-book retention rate than I initially expected. While people who buy Cassidy are extremely likely to buy Iris and people who buy Iris are likely to buy Kholvaria, the likelihood of the customer buying the next book begins to slip between Kholvaria and Veznek, which are books 2 and 3 in the series. Up until recently, I just figured the drop-off in sales between books 2 and 3 was simply because the customers were taking time to get through all the books and therefore they hadn’t finished reading the book yet before buying the next one. But now I am starting to see that the retention between books 2 and 3 is just plain lower than I originally thought. This fact is likely to blame for book 4’s less-than-anticipated sales numbers on launch day.
I suppose in hindsight it is not surprising that there is a major drop in customer retention between books 2 and 3. While the book does increase in price between 2 and 3, I genuinely don’t think the price is a factor. Instead I attribute the drop-off to the fact that the story changes rather drastically after the second book. After all, the main character of the first two books is killed at the end of book 2, leaving the majority of book 3 to shift the focus on the non-human characters instead of the human ones. It’s certainly a big change. I can see how readers would be put off or intimidated by the story changing so dramatically.
Still, all of this is not to say that there are NO sales of Hive. The book is selling. In fact, the bulk of Hive‘s sales so far have been on the 25th and the 27th, a few days after the book’s official release date. Veznek continues to sell too. And I anticipate both books will continue to sell.
Once Hive comes out in paperback, I do expect sales to pick up then too. The fact that both versions of the book are not ready at the same time may also be hurting my numbers. This is the first time I have released the Kindle and paperback versions so far apart.
The delay in the paperback’s release is incredibly frustrating to me. I would love for it to be finished already, but I have been dealing with a LOT of issues with KDP Publishing, the company that I am using to print and distribute my books.
This is my first time using KDP Publishing to print any of my books in The Color of Water and Sky series, though I did use this company to publish Kangblabla! In the past I have used a company called CreateSpace. This company was incredibly easy to work with and wonderful. Unfortunately CreateSpace was bought out by KDP Publishing earlier in the year and therefore CreateSpace IS more-or-less KDP now.
I will go into more detail on my agonizing frustrations with this company in a later post here on this site, but for now I will summarize my disappointment by declaring that Hive will no doubt be the final paperback book I choose to publish through this company. In the future, I will look to others.
And speaking of future books, I have two projects underway at the moment. The first is Battle Planet, a book I have written about here on this site already. The Cold-War-Era-gladiators-in-space novel is sure to reach new readers and help with my series retention-rate issue. Though I have not had much chance to work on Battle Planet in these last few weeks due to so much of my time being taken up by this KDP Publishing nonsense, I do anticipate that progress on this novel will progress quickly once my current work with Hive is out of the way.
The second project I am working on is a short story that I plan to submit to an upcoming anthology collection for a publishing group called Keystroke Medium. This story will be incredibly short. The submissions call for a story between 6,000 and 8,000 words. By comparison, the submissions for the Pew! Pew! collections called for stories of between 15,000 and 20,000 words.
Despite these other projects, my current focus is still on getting Hive‘s paperback version finished. Just yesterday I received beta-copies in the mail and today I distributed them out to my beta-readers, who will edit the book for formatting and content issues. I will be beta-reading too. This will be fun for me, as it will give me a chance to read through the whole thing all at once, which is something I enjoy.
Hopefully when I get the beta-copies back, I will be able to make the edits rather quickly. It would certainly be great to get the paperback out there as soon as possible.
Those are the main updates for now. My next post on this site will go into more detail about my troubles with KDP Publishing. Stay tuned for that in the coming days.
And if you have not yet downloaded your Kindle copy of Hive, check it out now HERE on Amazon.com!
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