Conclusions from Smashword’s Survey: How to Sell your Books

Thanks, Nicholas, for doing the “heavy lifting” and summarizing the Smashwords’ Survey results, here. Question: until today, I read many places that it’s after Book 3 in a series that authors can expect to do better/become more “visible.”

Today, you said Book 5 and I want to tear out my hair (I’m halfway done with Book 3 and have done everything else on that survey already and correctly).

Tell me that “5″ was a typo???? Please????

Best to you. Sally

Originally posted on Nicholas C. Rossis:

All my author friends spend sleepless nights agonizing over one question: how can I best promote my books? Well, Smashwords recently attempted to answer that question through a survey examining what works and what doesn’t in terms of ebook sales. You can read the whole survey on the Smashwords blog, but, as always, I’ve made a helpful list of the most important (to me) points. So, here are the takeaways from the survey:

A few titles sell really well, and many don’t sell that well. However, a lot of Smashwords authors earn a good income from their books. This agrees with Hugh Howev’s Author Earning surveys.

It’s important to climb in sales ranks, as this leads to geometrically increased sales. This is what some people sometimes call reaching a critical mass of readers.

Readers prefer longer books. A few days ago, a reader gave me 4 stars for The Power of…

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