The year’s about to end, and I’ve neglected this blog, so I thought I’d spend some time talking about a few things I’ve learned from this year’s launch.
Outlaw Mage came out last August, and it’s interesting because it’s my first title that went through the Kickstarter route first. It was supported mainly by people who have already bought things from me already, which was very nice to see.* (If you are one of those waiting for the special edition, by the way, please bear with me. The progress moves an inch every few weeks, but we’ve at least sent files over to the printer now…)
*Ahem* anyway, my point is…this is the first title I’ve released myself where I saw the pattern of what “organic sales” looked like…and where I saw, for the first time, the algorithm work for a little bit. “Algorithm sales”–that is, sales that happen because of increased visibility through retailers–can be spotted by its consistency. Once a day, once every two days, etc. The sales chart is nice and smooth. Kindle Unlimited titles, if they aren’t doing well in the environment, still have a smoother landing. “Organic sales” happen after an announcement, a push, a good review, and so on. I spot them due to how erratically spiky they are…e.g., three sales in one day, and then none for a few days after. They fall off a cliff once that visibility is gone, and thus, look exceptionally bad with ranking even if they ARE selling well.
Where algorithm sales shine is through programs like Kindle Unlimited. You see titles maintain almost consistent day-to-day rankings with no ad spend, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, but more or less predictable. Remember, with a program like Kindle Unlimited, every “borrow” is tracked as a sale, and because for Kindle Unlimited users, a “sale” is free…visibility is often rewarded if the title is pushed to the right people.
That last part is what makes or breaks title launches. Book retailers, but particularly Amazon, pays attention to the people who buy a title. It will push your book to “similar people” who buy similar things.
When authors build fanbases, depending on their approach, they start to gather a group of people they can easily reach via their mailing list and their social networks. But also, people can follow you on Amazon. There’s a little button there, on each author’s profile. Usually, people who follow you are the ones who really, really like your work.
When you do a book release, all these people will be notified of the new title. They’ll buy it and affect what metadata the algorithm says, based on their buying preferences.
This is why you don’t “prime the pump” from your personal connections. Your mom, who only buys romance novels, should not be buying your fantasy book to support you. Neither should your uncle or aunt, who are mostly into thrillers. If you only push your book to people from your knitting class, and none of those people are readers, your book might appear briefly on Amazon in yarn and needle pages! If your book is not relevant to any of those people…it’ll sink in the charts faster than you can say “Well that was a bad idea.”
Kindle Unlimited readers love Kindle Unlimited books. So it stands to reason that if you’ve been in Kindle Unlimited for a while, your followers are mostly those kind of people. When you do a book release that your fans can easily grab for free if they’re in the Kindle Unlimited program, and those fans get alerted first that your book is available…then you rise up the chart as the algorithm gains confidence on the type of people who will buy your type of book (e.g. Kindle Unlimited readers who also like your subgenre).
I’ve seen this happen, by the way. In early 2019, I did a boxset release of the then-titled The Agartes Epilogues and made thousands of sales and tens of thousands of page reads in a month. I believe I made $2k in one month alone. That was the best Kindle Unlimited has ever done for me, and hasn’t since, and I’ll tell you why…
My social network and mailing list grew by several times over hereafter, but it was a “wide” audience. My “also boughts” changed from titles by Kindle Unlimited authors to traditionally published authors, to coincide with the release of The Wolf of Oren-yaro through trad pub. This isn’t necessarily bad; I’ve never done well in the Kindle Unlimited ecosystem because my titles are not niche enough for it (they do well after a promo push, but will fall in ranks by the next month). But it does mean that I can’t do the good old fashioned “throw an ebook out there and pray for the ranks to rise”–my sales since then have had to be supported with a lot of elbow grease and making them available everywhere. I saw this when I released my self-published books on KU after my trad pub release…I actually sold less than I did of that boxset in 2019. I couldn’t, not even with ridiculous ad spend, get that audience back.
What does this all mean?
Well, going back to the release of Outlaw Mage–by all accounts, I saw a significant growth to my platform and audience reach despite not being tied to Kindle Unlimited this time around. It’s the first time I’ve ever gone on the green with a release. I saw consistent sales for a few weeks before it dropped off (titles will always drop off without a source of visibility, and I’m still on experiment mode here). The only “pattern” I’ve noticed with my readers is that they tend to like character-driven stuff. It makes them difficult, probably impossible, for the algorithm to really pinpoint, but it does give me a lot of flexibility–I can write whatever I feel like (as long as it’s broadly fantasy probably), package it appropriately, and reach a new, fresh audience each time. There are and will always be crossover readers!
So if you know where your audience is, by all means, keep publishing and growing your fanbase. An audience you can reach is like your lightning in a bottle for each book release, and the more you can refine it to suit your purposes, the better. Know that every book release you make will be advertised by internal mechanisms outside of your control, and your job is to just make sure that the right people are picking up your book–by advertising to the right crowd, picking the right cover, and understanding subgenre when you talk about your book. If it’s cozy, don’t go swinging an ad around the grimdark forums is what I’m saying, unless maybe it’s supported by ten ads targeted to cozy readers.
But strong, consistent, scalable sales on a single title depend heavily on either an insane marketing push or an algorithmic wave targeted to a niche audience. If your audience is that niche crowd, you need to be very careful about introducing “outliers” to that system. By that I mean that switching between audience sources, e.g. changing from Kindle Unlimited to wide and then back again–will degrade your audience and make each launch worse than the last. I’ve seen this discussed time and time again in forums where people make a lot of money launching their titles wide–it takes a few years to build up an audience to make book sales in the six figures, and shifting back to KU erodes progress. The opposite is also true–if you are trying to build an audience in KU (and it is a viable audience in KU), then switching to wide “just to see” will make it worse. It probably doesn’t matter if your plan is to forget about those titles and never do any promotional pushes to them. Sales from either are not necessarily transferrable to the other. Switching could force you to start all over again.
Love it or hate it, in 2023, algorithms drive a big chunk of book sales.
