I just had my best month of Amazon royalties

I just had my best month of Amazon royalties in my publishing career. It was five times my normal monthly average. It’s quite simply because I started advertising on Facebook. I did so well that it flattened out a lot of my other bumps and increments along the way. I created this graph to show how each book release and event affected my royalties.

It started with my nonfiction book about the cause of the American Civil war. My royalties were just a trickle after that. The first bump came from my first novel Rampage on the River.

There’s a little bump from my writing book and then a spike when I released The Perils of Perryville. That came out in 2020 just as the pandemic shut everything done. After a few good months, things plummeted back to where they were before.

It makes me wonder how it would have been if it hadn’t been such a bad year for business because things really took off when I published Blood for Blood at Nashville. My monthly average pretty much doubled after the initial spike. I think that was because a lot of people just bought the whole trilogy outright once it was done. All the books started selling well. I learned later from the experts that readers like to see a finished series and are leery of starting something that has no end.

It’s hard to see on this graph because last month was so big that it makes all the other increments seem small but I doubled my monthly average in royalties once I took Bryan Cohen’s “5-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge” where I learned how to effectively create and manage Amazon ads. I highly recommend it. He does it every three months. It’s free but there is some low-pressure pitching of his Author Ad School, which I’m sure is well worth the time and money.

Mexico my Love came out the day after Thanksgiving and to be honest, I was a little disappointed in the response. After the initial round of friends and family buying it (Thank you very much!), sales fell flat. The trilogy was still selling well but I went weeks without any sales on the new book.

I wondered if it was because it was not about the American Civil War or maybe because it was the Christmas season and nobody was buying books for themselves nor were they buying books from relatively unknown authors as presents for others.

I decided I’d go after the after-Chistmas gift card market. It also happened that I took a free webinar called the Successful Writers FaceBook Ad Seminar through one of Cohen’s partners. I created and ran an ad for Rampage, as I am told it is best to advertise the first book of a series and then hope they come back for the rest. It did so well that I created ads for Mexico, My Love in both the US and the UK. That book is a prequel so it functions as another entry point into my series.

From there my sales exploded. Since then, I had a consultation call with Meta. They recommended that I run an ad for the whole trilogy that features my fiddle playing. I started running that yesterday and am still waiting for the results. Hopefully, January was a sign of things to come! Thanks if you’ve bought any of my books. Please give me a review if you did!