Let's Talk numbers... Again

If you follow this blog you know about Vincent Zandri and his book "The Innocent." It made headlines by making it to #3 on Amazon Kindle and selling over 100,000 copies from Jan-June.

We if you want the skinny read the post a few down. This is the update, the "Experiment" as we called it. The book was prices at .99 and was ranked #10 at the end of April. We wanted to see if we could raise the price and ride the wave, maybe make some good money and so we jacked up the price to 4.99 and most of the month it sat at 3.99. So here is what happened.

We expected a huge drop but up till the 15th it was holding in the top 75. This was good news as we were sitting at 10k sold with a goal of 20k for the month. At this price we would stand to make about 70k.

But once it hit 75 in ranking it started to drop really fast. This proves that your sales rank will drive sales and is very important to how your book does. We ended the month with 13k sold and a ranking of 300.

The test did not go as well as we hoped but still ended up doing good. In the end we did better at the 2.99-3.99 price point as far as money goes but gave up the large fans base and mass books sold at the .99 price.

The end result was about a 5k increase to the bottom line, but a hugs loss on the people reached. The question is: Is it better to reach a huge amount of people for a time and give up sales, or try to make as much as you can no matter how many sell?

I believe in both. Put books on sale, test the market as each author will have different stats. Some will sell well at a buck and others it wont matter. I have one author that sells just as good at 2.99 as she does at 8.99. So we keep it at 8.99.

We thought that "Godchild" would rise to the top, as it was on tour last month, but it ran out of steam in the top 50. We are still testing to see if we can bring "The Innocent" back in the top 100.

This is still a guessing game but all we can do is keep testing and try to find that sweet spot. The trick is to find where we can reach the most people and make the most money all at the same time, and this all comes down to marketing and a little luck.

Cheers