Thursday, January 05, 2012

E-book sales down?

I'm hearing a lot of complaints from fellow indie authors about how their e-book sales are flat, or even down. A number of them (us) have been expecting a big sales boost right after Christmas, which is what happened after Christmas 2010, but it has not happened, at least not yet.

I hear concerns, fears and gripping.

Well, upon reflection, as far as I'm concerned, indie authors have only themselves to blame. When you go around giving away every damn e-book you've got for free, what do you expect to happen? Readers pick up all those e-books, and then they don't need to spend money to actually purchase e-books.

Even whores know better than this.

And yes, before you go look, I do have some e-books available for free at the moment over at Amazon. I thought I'd try out the new KDP Select program, which allows authors to give away e-books for free for up to five days every three months. So far my opinion is the program stinks. Select has not helped my sales. If anything, my sales have gone down since I started using Select.

But I'm sure it's just me and I have a bad attitude. That's what someone will think. I could give a rat's ass.

Why am I ticked? Why am I in such a foul mood? Because I'm really getting tired of indie authors giving away everything for free! Want to be a professional, act like one.

5 comments:

Adventuresfantastic said...

I agree, Ty, too many indie authors don't act like professionals. Kris Rusch has addressed this, most recently in her post today about authors working for cheap (http://kriswrites.com/2012/01/04/the-business-rusch-writers-will-work-for-cheap/).

She also had some comments about why indie authors aren't going to see huge spikes because of Christmas (http://kriswrites.com/2011/12/28/the-business-rusch-the-holiday-surprise/). Bottom, when everything is on sale, new readers are overwhelmed and buy what they're already familiar with.

My apologies for taking up comment space if you've read these already.

Ty said...

Keith, thanks! No, I hadn't checked out Kris' blog today. I'm looking forward to the posts.

Charles Gramlich said...

So far I've not fallen into the free giving trap. I know what you mean about the issue. as a kindle reader myself, I download tons of books that I see for free. And that probably does mean I don't 'buy' as many.

Ty said...

Charles, I'm the same way. I buy a lot of books and e-books, but I also get a lot of Kindle freebies, and I spend time in used book shops looking for oldies.

I think the e-reading phase has moved passed us, though. We're slightly passed, in my opinion, the stages of the early adopter and the heavy reader, and are moving more into general society. Those folks are mostly going to "purchase" two types of books, those from big-name authors, and the cheap or free e-books.

SBJones said...

My sales are up after using the KDP Select promotion. Way up compared to what they were before. Of course they had no direction to go but up. My sales have slown down from 40 books a day to 6-10, but they are still selling vastly better than prior to select. My last two updates to My Blog are all about my results after using select.