How Do You Maintain Steady Book Sales at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.?

Whether you’re self-publishing or releasing a novel with a traditional publisher, when you first launch your book, you’re excited to promote it. You jump onto forums, you get active on Facebook, you blog, you guest blog, you sign up for book tours, you try and fail to get onto Oprah, etc. And, we hope, you see a payoff for your efforts. Amazon, in particular, makes it easy to monitor your results with sales rankings and up-to-the-minute sales reports (available for authors self-publishing through the KDP platform).

But what about the months and years after you release your book? With ebooks, a title need never go out of print, but it’s not doing you any good if people aren’t finding and buying it.

On Amazon, if you can hand-sell your first 1,000 books or so, their algorithms kick in and help with the promotion (your book may appear in some category Top 100 lists and it’ll show up in the also-boughts of other authors’ books). But even once-popular books can and do fall off the radar. Sometimes that fall is steep, too, if the author doesn’t continue to promote the book. Now that I’m coming up on two years of publishing, I’ve seen a lot of this.

About a year-and-a-half ago, Ridan Publishing was making waves by taking its newly signed authors to the tops of the Amazon bestseller charts. Marshall Thomas’s Soldier of the Legion Series was one of their hits with sales in the tens of thousands a month for a while. As I write this, the first book in the series has a sales ranking of 60,000+, meaning it’s probably not selling even a copy a day now. I’ve seen other authors, who sold fewer books during their peak periods, fall much farther, to 500,000+ sales rankings or more.

So, what’s the secret to maintaining steady sales at Amazon (and Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, Smashwords, etc.) month after month? I won’t pretend that I have all the answers, but I’ll share what I’m doing here. I’ve gradually increased my sales over the last two years and, at Amazon, tend to sell 400+ books a month of each of the titles in my core (Emperor’s Edge) series. During book release months, I’ll do better, but I can’t bemoan steady sales that pay the bills every month. My sales at Barnes & Noble and the other stores chug along too.

Here are three tactics I’m pursuing to keep sales going:

1. Don’t “check out” after the launch

This one’s obvious, but I see it all the time. If you get tired of promoting your book after the first month or two and completely abandon all of your marketing efforts, it’s natural that sales are going to decline.

So how much work do you have to do to keep that from happening? You’ve already put the effort into getting a big boulder rolling, so you needn’t continue on at full steam (I’m full of locomotive references today, aren’t I?), but you do need to put a little effort into keeping that boulder rolling.

Here’s what I do (none of which take more than a few minutes a day):

Seek out occasional advertising opportunities — Some indie authors poo-poo on advertising because it hasn’t worked for them (they haven’t broken even), but it’s the easiest and least time-consuming marketing you can do, and it can pay off if done correctly. I advertise the first book in my series, which, through price-matching, is permanently free at Amazon as well as in other stores. If a number of people go out and download it in one day (which is what tends to happen when advertising on a popular site), I not only get all of those people to give my series a try, but this moves my book up to the first page of the Top 100 free ebooks in epic fantasy. There, other people browsing Amazon are more likely to notice it. This gives me a nice boost in downloads for a while, and some of the people who like the freebie gradually buy the other books in the series. A one-day sponsorship on a popular ebook site can increase my sales for a month or two. Here’s a list someone put together with the best book sites out there right now (some of them only promote free ebooks but others have paid sponsorship options for non-free ebooks).
Update my Facebook author page about three times a week – As I’ve mentioned before, at the ends of my ebooks, I encourage readers to come say hi or “like” me on Facebook, so there’s actually someone keeping an eye on that page. Being active there (and trying to get others to interact with my comments) can bring a trickle of potential new readers by (when people post comments on your page, their Facebook friends will see those comments and maybe check you out).
Stay active on Twitter — I’m not big on posting constant promo tweets (though I’ll plug something when it’s new), but by interacting with readers and posting interesting links that people “retweet,” it’s another place where new people can find out about me. In my bio, I tell people exactly what I write and have a link to my blog and also to my first ebook at Amazon.
I post regularly on my blog — I used to think I was blogging for the sole purpose of selling books, and that does happen to some extent (I use affiliate links, so I can tell how many sales originate here), but I’ve come to realize that the benefits of blogging are less tangible. By being out there in a (I hope!) helpful manner, I get people interested in helping me out in turn. I’ve received quite a bit of free advertising, in one way or another, because I’m out here, talking about my journey and offering advice for other authors. I’ve been mentioned on other people’s blogs, podcasts, and I’ve had my books plugged on other people’s sites. If all you’re doing is writing and publishing books, these opportunities might pass you by.

2. Publish often

With each new book you put out, you’ll increase the doorways people can find into your world. Someone might stumble onto your fifth book, enjoy it, and go back and buy everything else you’ve written. When you publish more often, your regular readers are less likely to forget about you as well. A lot of authors just assume that people will remember them, and remember to check for new releases, but voracious readers go through books like chocolates at Halloween, and you’re just one of many authors they’ve tried this month.

How much do you have to publish? Well, that’ll depend on what’s feasible for you. Not everybody can fit in thousands of words a day (and I question the overall health of you people claiming to do 10,000 words a day, ahem!), but you can be a prolific author if you can manage to write 1,000 words a day. That’s a full-length novel every three months. Even allowing for editing time, that should allow you to produce two novels a year and perhaps some shorter works as well (shorter works are excellent for keeping your name out there and giving fans new material in between novel releases).

I’ll admit that 1,000 words can seem like a lot in the beginning (it did for me — my first novel was about seven years in the making!), but there are lots of tricks out there for improving your productivity as a writer. Perhaps the most basic thing I’ve found is that, like anything, it gets easier with practice. Another perk with writing more quickly is that it’s a lot easier to keep an entire novel in one’s head when working on it over a couple of months as opposed to a year or more. When I took longer, I’d forget what I’d written in the first half and end up having to go back to re-read often.

3. Have your work out there in many places

I know, Amazon’s KDP Select (which requires exclusivity) has been the soup de jour this past year, but there’s a lot to be said for rejecting the short-term gains that may (or may not) come with granting a merchant exclusivity in favor of the be-everywhere approach to marketing. The more places you are, the more ways there are for people to stumble across your work.

In my first year, I didn’t make much at Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, or Apple, and I made next to nothing from Kobo and Sony. These days, those stores combined still don’t come anywhere close to my Amazon earnings, but they are significant enough that I wouldn’t want to leave that money on the table. In these last few months, I’ve reached a point where I could make a modest living as an author even without Amazon. Of course, I hope Amazon will continue to give me the lovings for years to come, but it’s comforting to know that I don’t depend 100% on them. Also, it’s worth pointing out that I sell just fine there without being in KDP Select.

In addition to being in all those other stores, it helps to have a free offering. I’ve already talked about how I use my free Book 1, so I won’t go into that more here, other than to say getting that freebie into Apple and Barnes & Noble, in particular, has made a huge different in my overall sales there.

All right, another monster Monday post. Do you have any tips you’d like to add insofar as maintaining book sales month after month?

Related Posts:

Beyond Smashwords — My Plans to Upload Ebooks Directly to Apple & Kobo
How to Improve Your Ebook Sales at Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and iTunes
Ebook Pricing Strategy for a Stand Alone Novel?