*If you don't know what I'm talking about please click here to find out more from a previous blog post of mine.
"But wait, Virginia, why is it BookBub week? I thought BookBub featured deals were just a single e-mail sent out on a single day," you say, not unreasonably.
And you're not wrong. The actual BookBub featured deal is just a single e-mail sent out to a giant mailing list on one single day. However, BookBub is kind enough to feature your promotional price on their website for as long as it will last, so one can experience a nice increase in sales numbers for as long as one is inclined to keep the promotional price in place. Accordingly, I decided to keep Blade's Edge at 0.99 across all retailers until June 9th. I have since raised the price (or at least tried to, but Amazon has yet to bring the US price up even though all other retailers have done it) and sales have slowed, but I am pleased to report that sales have not stopped all together. Indeed, they seem to have leveled out a bit at a level that is quite a bit higher than the 0 copies per day that I was selling right after I took my books out of Kindle Unlimited and indeed it's even better than the average of two copies per day I was selling prior to that.
Indeed I've sold an average of 16 copies a day from the 10th to today. Of course, part of that is affected by the fact that Blade's Edge is still 0.99 on Amazon, so we shall see how it changes when the price finally adjusts, but I'm heartened to see that Traitor's Hope has been making up a larger and larger portion of my daily sales each day. It makes me think that a. people are willing to pay "full price" for my books and b. that people have actually been reading Blade's Edge and enjoying it enough to buy the second book.
Anyway, I'm sort of starting at the end here. Most of you probably haven't been following my stats posts on KBoards, so you have no idea how the BookBub itself went. If you'd like to read that stats post, you can find it here. That post details how many sales I made per day, per retailer, from June 4th to June 9th and also mentions the rankings that Blade's Edge and Traitor's Hope both had over the course of the week.
For the link averse, here's a brief summary:
On June 4th Blade's Edge sold 976 copies across all retailers and Traitor's Hope sold 33 copies across all retailers.
Between June 4th and June 9th (the dates that Blade's Edge was listed on the BookBub website as a 0.99 deal) Blade's Edge sold a total of 1464 copies across all retailers and Traitor's Hope sold 70 copies.
On Amazon Blade's Edge's highest ranking was #1 in the category of Children's Sword & Sorcery Fantasy Books (which is a weird category for it to be under at all, but hey what can I say, Amazon is weird sometimes). That meant it had the awesome orange bestseller tag on it for most of June 4th and June 5th. Of course, I took a screen shot:
And you may not find that particularly impressive, but check out the company that Blade's Edge was keeping that day:
Its highest overall ranking was #312 in the entire store, which is, of course, the highest it has ever been.
But it also kicked butt on other retailer sites! Blade's Edge was #29 in the entire iBooks store! And it was #1 in Sci-Fi & Fantasy. Seriously, no other sub category. Just Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Number 1. Boom. Don't believe me? Check the screen shot.
And on Barnes&Noble it was #5 in Sci-Fi &Fantasy
(Yep, that's Blade's Edge outranking The Handmaid's Tale... Appropriate company, too.)
Those were some of the most exciting moments in Blade's Edge's life to date, and I feel like an obnoxious parent showing off pictures of my child doing something only I find impressive, but there you have it. June 4th was an amazing day, and the past week has been excellent as well.
So far, the effects of the BookBub have been even better than I expected, and I am very curious to see their long term ramifications. The BookBub has more than paid for itself, and the number of people who have paid for a copy of Blade's Edge has increased manyfold.
If you want more details with exact numbers, I really do recommend the KBoards stats post I made. For now, I am off to get back to writing Victoria Marmot, which I have sorely neglected for a few weeks out of excitement and nerves for Blade's Edge's performance in this promotion. Meanwhile, the time tested truth for authors remains, nothing sells a book like writing more books. So, off I go! To write three more books to release this year.
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