I've now been published for 2 months. I haven't had a full royalty statement yet, so I have no idea how many books I've sold (not a whole lot, I suspect), but I have found various ways to figure out if people are even interested.
Firstly, there's Goodreads. I pop in there every few days and every time more people have added An Unstill Life to their TBR piles or whatever they categorize them as. Which is good. Especially when they're not people I know in real life or through the online writing community.
I check the book's page on all the sales sites for reviews too, but there aren't a lot. Whether that's because people don't like leaving reviews, or if it's because no one is buying it, I don't know.... If you buy a book from any retailer that allows you to leave reviews, even just a line or two makes a huge difference. It's hard not knowing if anyone is reading it.
The the best thing I've found, is that by Googling my title and my name, I can see if anyone has mentioned my book anywhere. I've found several blogs where readers have listed my book as being one they're looking forward to reading. And that's really exciting! Of course I have no way of knowing if they actually buy the book unless it's mentioned again later, but just knowing that the blurb/cover/gossip has made them want to look further is cool.
There are sales tracking sites like Novelrank too, but because they only track sales from certain Amazon retailers, I don't think it's a 100% accurate indication of sales. But maybe that's just denial on my part because I don't want to believe the numbers I see there....
Do you have any other ways to gauge interest in your book? Please share!
I can tell you for sure that Novelrank is low. As far as I can tell, it only counts each time your amazon ranking goes up as a single sale. So I bet you're doing better than you think :)
ReplyDeleteI'm sure it's just people not wanting to leave reviews. They don't think what it might be doing to nervous authors.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I got some of that denial going on 'coz my NovelRank numbers suck. ;)
ReplyDeleteI have your book on my Goodreads TBR list and I'm looking forward to reading it. In the past I haven't been great at leaving reviews, mainly because I'm not confident about doing it, but it's one thing I'm hoping to work on this year.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought about Googling my book title and name to find what it comes up with. I'm not very good at all about promoting myself or even trying Goodreads.
ReplyDeleteYour blog is giving me encouragement. Thank you.
I'm not a writer but *raises hand* I'm interested! :) Haha. I've just drafted a post on new LGBT releases that I loved/am interested in reading and An Unstill Life is on my tbr list. I've no idea when I actually get to it, but it will definitely happen at some point in the following months :)
ReplyDeleteBtw, thanks for signing up for LGBT Month!