75,000 Books Sold!!!

It’s been a while since I did a sales update, but wow, this year has already been so amazing! I posted back in February that I had hit a sales milestone of 60k sales. I didn’t expect to hit another milestone so quickly, but as of this month, I’ve officially sold 75,000 ebooks in my Peachville High Demons series!!!!

The two biggest boosts in sales for 2012 so far this year have been 1) the release of Rival Demons, book 5 of my Peachville High Demons series back in January and 2) Beautiful Demons (book 1) going free in all stores. I had heard other Indie authors raving about going free and how much it helped them get their series off the ground, but I never knew the full power of it until I set my own book free through Smashwords.

I think I set Beautiful Demons free on Smashwords back in February (maybe? I can’t quite remember). It took some time, but eventually they ‘shipped’ the free ebook to Barnes & Noble, Sony, and iTunes. I saw a boost in sales at B&N, but it wasn’t huge. I didn’t realize how much of a boost I’d had on iTunes until I saw the numbers come in. Having the first book in a series free on iTunes seems to be a very powerful sales tool over there. In April and May combined, I sold about 4,000 books there.

Then, miracle of miracles, Amazon price-matched Beautiful Demons to free on April 10th. Beautiful Demons rose all the way to #13 free in the Kindle store, getting over 35,000 downloads in the month of April and just over 7,000 so far in May. Of course, these free downloads aren’t sales. They are giveaways, so they don’t count toward any sales milestones. However, a certain percentage of the people who have downloaded the book for free actually read the book, liked it, and decided to pick up the next books in the series. This is where the sales boost comes in, and I couldn’t be more grateful to everyone who has supported the series and continued to read.

Since it had been a few months since my newest release, I was actually expecting a very modest sales month. Instead, here’s how it turned out in April:

• Beautiful Demons – At least 36,752 Free downloads (even though there are really more since iTunes doesn’t report free downloads and I’m not sure how many I got on Sony or B&N either) and 86 sales (before it went free).
• Inner Demons – 2321 Paid Sales
• Bitter Demons – 1642 Paid Sales
• Shadow Demons – 1459 Paid Sales
• Rival Demons – 1554 Paid Sales

Total Paid Sales: 7062

(*This figure doesn’t even include the roughly 2500 sales from iTunes that I got in April. I just haven’t taken the time to go through the Smashwords report yet, so the real total is more like 9500 paid sales.)

To my delight and extreme surprise, April 2012 ended up being my very best month of all time. I made over $13,000 last month, which believe me will come in handy since we’re having our first baby in about 3 weeks, haha. It’s honestly hard to believe this could all be true!

So far in May, I’ve already sold 4330 books (not including Apple since they report late through Smashwords). When you combine all of my paid sales since I first self-published in late October 2010, it comes to an amazing 77,516 paid sales!!

I honestly never dreamed this could be my life. I always wanted to be a writer, but I never imagined so many people would be interested in the stories I had to tell. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of you who have picked up my books and continued on through the series so far. You have truly changed my life.