How Do You Maintain Steady Book Sales at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.?

Whether you’re self-publishing or releasing a novel with a traditional publisher, when you first launch your book, you’re excited to promote it. You jump onto forums, you get active on Facebook, you blog, you guest blog, you sign up for book tours, you try and fail to get onto Oprah, etc. And, we hope, you see a payoff for your efforts. Amazon, in particular, makes it easy to monitor your results with sales rankings and up-to-the-minute sales reports (available for authors self-publishing through the KDP platform).

But what about the months and years after you release your book? With ebooks, a title need never go out of print, but it’s not doing you any good if people aren’t finding and buying it.

On Amazon, if you can hand-sell your first 1,000 books or so, their algorithms kick in and help with the promotion (your book may appear in some category Top 100 lists and it’ll show up in the also-boughts of other authors’ books). But even once-popular books can and do fall off the radar. Sometimes that fall is steep, too, if the author doesn’t continue to promote the book. Now that I’m coming up on two years of publishing, I’ve seen a lot of this.

About a year-and-a-half ago, Ridan Publishing was making waves by taking its newly signed authors to the tops of the Amazon bestseller charts. Marshall Thomas’s Soldier of the Legion Series was one of their hits with sales in the tens of thousands a month for a while. As I write this, the first book in the series has a sales ranking of 60,000+, meaning it’s probably not selling even a copy a day now. I’ve seen other authors, who sold fewer books during their peak periods, fall much farther, to 500,000+ sales rankings or more.

So, what’s the secret to maintaining steady sales at Amazon (and Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, Smashwords, etc.) month after month? I won’t pretend that I have all the answers, but I’ll share what I’m doing here. I’ve gradually increased my sales over the last two years and, at Amazon, tend to sell 400+ books a month of each of the titles in my core (Emperor’s Edge) series. During book release months, I’ll do better, but I can’t bemoan steady sales that pay the bills every month. My sales at Barnes & Noble and the other stores chug along too.

Here are three tactics I’m pursuing to keep sales going:

1. Don’t “check out” after the launch

This one’s obvious, but I see it all the time. If you get tired of promoting your book after the first month or two and completely abandon all of your marketing efforts, it’s natural that sales are going to decline.

So how much work do you have to do to keep that from happening? You’ve already put the effort into getting a big boulder rolling, so you needn’t continue on at full steam (I’m full of locomotive references today, aren’t I?), but you do need to put a little effort into keeping that boulder rolling.

Here’s what I do (none of which take more than a few minutes a day):

  • Seek out occasional advertising opportunities — Some indie authors poo-poo on advertising because it hasn’t worked for them (they haven’t broken even), but it’s the easiest and least time-consuming marketing you can do, and it can pay off if done correctly. I advertise the first book in my series, which, through price-matching, is permanently free at Amazon as well as in other stores. If a number of people go out and download it in one day (which is what tends to happen when advertising on a popular site), I not only get all of those people to give my series a try, but this moves my book up to the first page of the Top 100 free ebooks in epic fantasy. There, other people browsing Amazon are more likely to notice it. This gives me a nice boost in downloads for a while, and some of the people who like the freebie gradually buy the other books in the series. A one-day sponsorship on a popular ebook site can increase my sales for a month or two. Here’s a list someone put together with the best book sites out there right now (some of them only promote free ebooks but others have paid sponsorship options for non-free ebooks).
  • Update my Facebook author page about three times a week — As I’ve mentioned before, at the ends of my ebooks, I encourage readers to come say hi or “like” me on Facebook, so there’s actually someone keeping an eye on that page. Being active there (and trying to get others to interact with my comments) can bring a trickle of potential new readers by (when people post comments on your page, their Facebook friends will see those comments and maybe check you out).
  • Stay active on Twitter — I’m not big on posting constant promo tweets (though I’ll plug something when it’s new), but by interacting with readers and posting interesting links that people “retweet,” it’s another place where new people can find out about me. In my bio, I tell people exactly what I write and have a link to my blog and also to my first ebook at Amazon.
  • I post regularly on my blog — I used to think I was blogging for the sole purpose of selling books, and that does happen to some extent (I use affiliate links, so I can tell how many sales originate here), but I’ve come to realize that the benefits of blogging are less tangible. By being out there in a (I hope!) helpful manner, I get people interested in helping me out in turn. I’ve received quite a bit of free advertising, in one way or another, because I’m out here, talking about my journey and offering advice for other authors. I’ve been mentioned on other people’s blogs, podcasts, and I’ve had my books plugged on other people’s sites. If all you’re doing is writing and publishing books, these opportunities might pass you by.

2. Publish often

With each new book you put out, you’ll increase the doorways people can find into your world. Someone might stumble onto your fifth book, enjoy it, and go back and buy everything else you’ve written. When you publish more often, your regular readers are less likely to forget about you as well. A lot of authors just assume that people will remember them, and remember to check for new releases, but voracious readers go through books like chocolates at Halloween, and you’re just one of many authors they’ve tried this month.

How much do you have to publish? Well, that’ll depend on what’s feasible for you. Not everybody can fit in thousands of words a day (and I question the overall health of you people claiming to do 10,000 words a day, ahem!), but you can be a prolific author if you can manage to write 1,000 words a day. That’s a full-length novel every three months. Even allowing for editing time, that should allow you to produce two novels a year and perhaps some shorter works as well (shorter works are excellent for keeping your name out there and giving fans new material in between novel releases).

I’ll admit that 1,000 words can seem like a lot in the beginning (it did for me — my first novel was about seven years in the making!), but there are lots of tricks out there for improving your productivity as a writer. Perhaps the most basic thing I’ve found is that, like anything, it gets easier with practice. Another perk with writing more quickly is that it’s a lot easier to keep an entire novel in one’s head when working on it over a couple of months as opposed to a year or more. When I took longer, I’d forget what I’d written in the first half and end up having to go back to re-read often.

3. Have your work out there in many places

I know, Amazon’s KDP Select (which requires exclusivity) has been the soup de jour this past year, but there’s a lot to be said for rejecting the short-term gains that may (or may not) come with granting a merchant exclusivity in favor of the be-everywhere approach to marketing. The more places you are, the more ways there are for people to stumble across your work.

In my first year, I didn’t make much at Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, or Apple, and I made next to nothing from Kobo and Sony. These days, those stores combined still don’t come anywhere close to my Amazon earnings, but they are significant enough that I wouldn’t want to leave that money on the table. In these last few months, I’ve reached a point where I could make a modest living as an author even without Amazon. Of course, I hope Amazon will continue to give me the lovings for years to come, but it’s comforting to know that I don’t depend 100% on them. Also, it’s worth pointing out that I sell just fine there without being in KDP Select.

In addition to being in all those other stores, it helps to have a free offering. I’ve already talked about how I use my free Book 1, so I won’t go into that more here, other than to say getting that freebie into Apple and Barnes & Noble, in particular, has made a huge different in my overall sales there.

All right, another monster Monday post. Do you have any tips you’d like to add insofar as maintaining book sales month after month?

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37 Responses to How Do You Maintain Steady Book Sales at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.?

  1. Lindsay, what an excellent post & full of helpful advice. Thanks for writing it.

    Your comments re free & B&N are especially helpful. Something I plan to do.

    I also agree re advertising. IME a spot on one of the prominent ereader sites is a substantial sales boost that often (but not always) carries over for quite some time.

  2. Lindsay, for what it’s worth I picked up your first book because I read your blog and was impressed with it. As a blogger myself, I know it’s not easy to come up with genuninely useful and fresh content regularly without resorting to filler.

    I found the blog via one of The Book Designer’s carnival posts. I’ve now bought all your books and recommend you to anyone who will listen, so putting a link in that carnival was definitely worthwhile for you.

    • Lindsay says:

      Thanks for letting me know how you found me, Mike! Yay, for blog carnivals. 🙂 Part of my be-everywhere strategy (also known as being blind-folded and throwing darts at a board and seeing what hits :P).

  3. Kelly Polark says:

    Thanks for the very useful tips!

  4. Jim Self says:

    I hear you talk about hand-selling the first 1,000 a lot, Lindsay, and it makes me wonder what you did for your first 1,000. All of the places I’ve gone online to try to find readers has already had the feces spammed out of it.

    I’d do more promo offline, but I live in a pretty lightly populated area. I guess I could do a bit of driving and hand out fliers, but I don’t know how useful that would even be.

    • Lindsay says:

      Hey Jim,

      I did book blog tours, guest blog posts on sites more popular than mine, a Goodreads giveaway (you need a paperback version for this), gave out review copies in forums (probably didn’t result in sales but got me some early reviews), submitted to review blogs (the Fantasy Book Critic did a nice write-up of Encrypted and left a link in the side bar for a week, which resulted in quite a few sales at Smashwords, in particular), put out a free short story and promoted it on Twitter, wrote articles for ezinearticles.com with links back to my blog, submitted posts to blog carnivals, tried schmoozing folks on forums (but quickly decided that was a waste of time because everyone and his grandmother was doing the same thing), had a friend hand out flyers at a popular SF/F con, built Squidoo lenses to highlight my free short story (and other freebies in my genre), and, uhm, probably lots more stuff I’ve forgotten! 😀

      Oh, I also bought ads on Goodreads (here’s a link to that post — my numbers are outdated, but the information should still work: https://www.lindsayburoker.com/book-marketing/goodreads-advertising-results-and-tips-on-creating-campaigns/) and Kindle Nation Daily (I’d forget them now and do Pixel of Ink, Bookbub, or Ereader News Today, as those are the biggies right now).

  5. E.S. Ivy says:

    Thanks! Your post earlier about maintaining sales had me worried… nothing ever goes into auto-pilot, does it? But it helps to know there are ways to keep going! Of course, I am just borrowing trouble here when I haven’t even done a full launch yet.

    The tiny bit of wisdom I could add is that since I basically haven’t done any promoting yet, I would say that being in the “published in the last 90 days” at Amazon does get a tiny number of sales. After that, I think it gets incredibly hard to be seen if you haven’t climbed the charts. A tiny trickle of sales went down to nothing at the end of 90 days. I didn’t realize the cause until later. So a good starting strategy might be to have 3-4 books ready to load every 90 days?

  6. Shannon says:

    Lindsay, can you direct us to the list of best book sites? I went to your FB page (as that’s where the link took me) but I didn’t see the list you mention there. Thanks.

  7. Personally, I haven’t done much in the way of marketing, since I wanted to have a full series out before really trying to sell people on it. However, now that I’m done with book 3. Here are a couple of the things I’m trying right now that may or may not work…

    Songs and Poems: Getting the attention of book review sites as an unknown indie author can be a bit of a challenge. As such, I’ve started sending my requests in verse, and, in some cases, uploading silly songs to YouTube requesting reviews. Thus far the response has been pretty positive… so I guess I’ll find out how well it worked in a couple months when they get around to reading my book.

    Leeching off the Fame of Better Known Authors: So I post comments on other author’s websites and… just kidding. Actually, I’ve been in contact with Patrick Rothfuss’s charity, Worldbuilders, and they’ve been kind enough to list me as a supporting author for the 2013 drive.

    Trying to be a Good Person: Let’s face it, most up-in-coming authors don’t rely on their writing to pay the bills. So I try to be generous with what I have to offer. A few months ago I (and a handful of other indies) donated short stories to an anthology raising money for a girl dying of cancer to go on her dream vacation. Until the end of the year, I’m donating 100% of my book revenue to Worldbuilders (because it’s an awesome charity).

    Will any of that stuff help? I don’t know… but it sure is cool to post about it on a Better Known Author’s website. =P

  8. Great tips, Lindsay. I do feel a bit of burnout after a book launches, and once two or three months have past, I fall into the non-advertising ditch.

    I find that working on a new book helps me along, but by far, Twitter has helped me. It’s easy to dip in and out of so doesn’t take up a huge amount of time. The best thing is it keeps that advertising ticking over, especially with the help of other readers and writers RT.

    Geoff

  9. K Gorman says:

    Just wanted to add something about Kindle, from a reader’s perspective.

    I have a Kobo instead of a Kindle. The Kindle app on my computer corrupted, and any attempts to download it again also result in corruption. Since I’m currently living in China, I am unable to download the Kindle App for my phone.

    This is likely something I’ll need to fix when I need to format my books again, but until then I can’t be bothered.

    So I am excessively grateful that you’re not in Kindle Select!

  10. Great post, Lindsay. As always.

    I had a grand opportunity to market when I released my first two books within a month of each other in the Summer of 2011. But that failed because I had some family members fall ill and it was bad enough I had to help out. The resulting stress derailed anything but some basic linking.

    Then when I had a huge one-month boost from Kindle Select, especially with Storm Dragon, I dropped the ball. Was stiill recovering from stress and wasn’t all that sure what to do. Was hoping Select would carry me through, but those were the days of swiftly changing algorithms.

    I’m a terrible blogger, though I love to read other people’s blogs and comment. (Nearly one quarter of my direct traffic last month came from me commenting here. Nearly half from blog comments in general. Bad blogger, but I know how to use Analytics! Most comes from Wattpad.) I just can’t write helpful posts. When I do, it takes a ridiculous amount of time. Honestly, I can’t write much of anything that isn’t narration and characters talking to one another.

    But your character interviews inspired me to start doing something. (Interviewing characters blew my mind.) If all I can write is fiction, then fiction it is. I just started doing what I hope is an amusing series of interviews with the “actors” who play the characters in my books, as well as the producers, directors, writers, and maybe I’ll throw in makeup or the gaffers as well. I have this need to complicate simple ideas.

  11. Lindsay, thanks for the tips. I’m still on the fence about the freebie but I’m taking it all in and will decide soon.

  12. Linsay, thank you for the tips, it is tough to get the flywheel rolling…but hopefully Johnny Dreamcatcher will be discovered soon on Amazon.Thanks! Dave

  13. Lindsay, thank you for the tips, it is tough to get the flywheel rolling…but hopefully Johnny Dreamcatcher will be discovered soon on Amazon.Thanks! Dave

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  16. Thanks for the advice Lindsay

  17. Thank you so much for the great advice as always, Lindsay! It’s been about a month since the publication of my first novel, and already my motivation has started to wane slightly as sales have decreased after launch. Your post is very inspiring and reminds me that we all feel this way from time to time–even those of us making a living at it. Thank you again for sharing your experiences.

  18. Allen James says:

    Lindsey…This is my first forage into the world of marketing. My books were released last month (self published) and my website/blog launched today so in in a headspin to say the least. Thanks for the useful info…however my question is are the tips the same forthe non-traditional genre? My books are daily desk calendars in hardback and paperback book form.

    AJ

    • Lindsay says:

      Allen, I don’t have experience with anything like calendars. Is a fun hobby or do you hope to make a business out of selling them? How much time do you want to invest and how much do you hope to make? There may be some places to advertise such things, but it may be a matter of building up a blog and/or podcast related to the niche (organization? getting things done?) and then selling the calendars to those who come to read your posts and listen to your advice. Through a blog, you could collect people’s email addresses (perhaps by enticing them with a freebie), then sell the calendars to those people year after year.

      Building up a blog and attracting traffic is quite a bit of work though, so it depends on your goals as to whether it’s worth it.

  19. Allen James says:

    They’re more of a self-help motivational calendar book than calendars. There are only days of the week and dates of the months with no years. Each day has a maxim, quote, etc. to encourage a positive attitude and success in life. I’m hoping to find an audience with one of the five. I have a bit of a following thanks to 35 years as a teacher and psychotherapist.

  20. Salma says:

    I am interested in getting my book promoted which is available at Barnes and nobles and also at amazon.

  21. Liss Thomas says:

    Publishing often is hard in the beginning but once you get that epic first novel out of the way, the words flow easier and you can crank out more pieces. Join Nanowritmo and learn how to crank out 50K in one month! That’s a motivator to do that more than once a year!!!

  22. Thank you for the list! I’m just creating my first series (launch in October), and I’m so happy to learn more about building and keeping momentum. Making the first book permafree seems like a great idea – maybe not from the start, but as soon as I have a few sequels up.

    I also have to thank David for mentioning character interviews. I had a whole bank of light bulbs light up in my mind!

    Awesome blog!
    – Hannah

  23. Kate Sparkes says:

    Thanks for this! I’m starting to get into marketing now (actually paying for ads/Bookbub et al instead of just maintaining my blog/twitter/etc), so this information is so valuable.

    I also appreciate all of your advice on being a prolific author. Right now I’m only releasing one book (120K to 150K) every nine months, but you give me hope that I’ll get faster as time passes and I gain experience.

  24. Bill Bradley says:

    I would also like to add that I have sold most copies of my book “Foods of Crete: Traditional Recipes from the Healthiest People in the World” by doing talks in the real world.

  25. Rick Canton says:

    Helllo Lindsay,

    Thank you for sharing this wonderful post. I just like to ask, since most of my books are in Amazon (enrolled in KDP Select), does that mean I can’t publish the same books to other sites like Lulu, Smashwords and Scribd? Or if I can, can I just create a different promotion dates in these sites other than the ones I scheduled in Amazon?

    I really wish to earn more and make my books rank really good and I think I need help with this or if you can just provide some sites, I can post to? I’d appreciate it a lot. Thanks! 🙂

    • Lindsay says:

      If you’ve enrolled in KDP Select, you can’t publish your ebooks anywhere else. You can still do paperbacks through Lulu or CreateSpace that are distributed everywhere, but if you agreed to exclusivity with Amazon, they’ll give you the boot if you upload elsewhere. If you’ve just published on Amazon through the KDP dashboard, without choosing exclusivity, you can put the ebook in other stores.

  26. Great advise. We are always under the impression that things will magically happen but, just like anything else, it’s all about being persistent with the little things–it adds up. Best, and most honest article I have read about increasing book sales. Thank you for your honesty!

  27. Kacy Andrews says:

    I think the key is consistency, on more than one platform. It’s crazy to go out and try to use every social media site out there (I mean, how will you ever have time to write when you’re busy updating a status everywhere…), but it’s important to pick two or three and get consistent. Whether that’s Facebook, a Blog and Twitter for you, or Pinterest, and Instagram, keeping your name out there and easy to find is key. It’ll also slowly help boost your SEO ratings. This way people are more likely to find you when they dig up that book they read ages ago and wonder if perhaps you’ve written anything else.

    I do agree that writing more books is huge too. I just left KDP Select and am slowly publishing my books to Smashwords as their KDP 90 day periods are up. In the last few weeks I’ve seen a huge bump in sales at Barnes and Nobel, but it’s a case of various books in my most popular series selling. My stand-alone has not been touched…

  28. There’s some good advice here, especially for newer writers. I’ve been published for about a decade now and it still feels like a push to get the books out there and read. There was a time when I thought getting published was the hard part!

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