Sunday, March 04, 2012

This and That


Today starts "read an ebook week" - so go out and get a copy of your favorite author's books or download someone new and start reading those ebooks or dust off your "TBR" folders. Either way - read an ebook, support your favorite authors.


--------------------

Colds - you gotta love them, right? - Not really. They mess with your head, your breathing and your sleeping. Right now, I'm on the tail end of a cold to which I can say good riddance. I don't like being sick. This has been a rollercoaster week for me as far as being on game or accomplishing anything. One day I feel okay and can sit and concentrate for a few hours and the next I feel okay but can't concentrate on anything since I wasn't able to sleep the night before. The worst part of my cold is that I've never really felt bad enough to not do anything at all, just that in between stage. Last night was the first night in a week that I actually slept in the bed all night for what it's worth (not that it really was a restful sleep or cough-free one either, just that I wasn't pulling my computer chair over to the bed to use like a recliner to sleep sitting up and I didn't have to have a made up inclination of something to prop up on either).

Last night was the annual Anderson County Library's spelling bee and I participated again this year. We were a person down (someone was sicker than I am/was) but we did pretty good considering. We should have gone for a level 3 word right out the gate so we would have ended up in a tie-breaker situation and possibly could have taken the trophy. Our team got two words that I actually knew that the others didn't (thank you work) and one of them they wanted to mulligan (this is a lifeline to throw the word away and get a new one in the same level - the word being oligotrophic) and the other just happened to be something very common in the hand clinic fracture world so that one (comminution) came to me immediately. I've been asked to join the team again next year. So next March, I'll be spelling up a storm. The winning team had 24 points and we had 23 points - very close (if only we had started with a level 3 word, we would have ended with 24 - lol). The other teams weren't too close from there (three teams with 17 and then I don't remember from there on down).

So rollercoaster ride week, let's look at sales this week.

My friend, Faye (author of To Tell The Truth) emailed me Wednesday and said something to the effect that she wasn't doing as well this go round for her free download days. I had totally forgotten that she was offering her book for free the end of the month so didn't promote it as much as I did the first time. After receiving her email, I was curious as to how my sales were going. Imagine my surprise when I opened my reports page and saw that my month-to-date sales showed 78 sales for "The Tulip Kiss". Mind you this wasn't even early morning when I checked the report. I thought surely there was a mistake since I didn't remember scheduling a free day. So naturally, I had to go look at my bookshelf listing and check my scheduled days, and you guessed it, I had scheduled "The Tulip Kiss" for February 29 and March 1.

I did some quick advertising of the free listing and sent out an email but not very much promoting (nothing compared to what I did when "Bride-and-Seek" was first released and offered for free).

This morning, the results look like this:

Week ending 03/03/2012 (there are two sets of numbers for some because some of the downloads are counted on February and the rest on March for accounting purposes).

In the USA: downloads sales
"Bride-and-Seek" 0 1
"The Tulip Kiss" 220 (02/29) 0
89 (03/01)
in the UK:
"The Tulip Kiss" 56 (02/29)
12 (03/01)
In Germany (DE):
"The Tulip Kiss" 2 (02/29)
1

So my calculations show 380 downloads over 2 days of "The Tulip Kiss" and 1 sale of "Bride-and-Seek". This exceeded "Bride-and-Seek" by 20 when it was offered for free. Yay me! lol

My guests this week were Leslie Dubois and Sarah Renee. Leslie stopped by and offered a free ebook to the first ten commenters, of any of her books - what a generous offer. I think she only had five people comment not counting my one comment and hers. So if you visited her posting and missed the comment about a free ebook and haven't contacted Leslie (aka Sybil Nelson) for your free ebook, please do so. Sarah Renee had a few visitors but I didn't see any comments from Sarah herself, so maybe she'll poke in and leave a comment too.

I thought I'd offer free ebooks as well for those who left comments on either of their postings. So if you haven't already downloaded a copy of "The Tulip Kiss" or "The Proposal" and would like a copy, please email with your choice and whether you prefer a nook or kindle version or the PDF file.

There is a lot going on in the next couple of weeks, so I'll try to have my postings up and ready to go. Tomorrow I'll be talking about the Paypal censorship thing going (this will probably be a 2-parter because it is a pretty lengthy discussion); Wednesday will be another set of similar or maybe just one question from Mrs. Jurkowski's class and I'm going to work hard on gettting my Friday book reviews back on track (have a lot of them scheduled already but just haven't written them). Next week will be a whirlwind week as I will be in and out of the office (home), but more on that next Sunday.

See you all in the postings - E :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, Elysabeth. I'm glad to see you are still getting interest in your books with the downloads. Keep up the good work. You are getting your name out there.

Feel better soon!

Susanne
PUTTING WORDS DOWN ON PAPER

elysabeth said...

I hope I'm getting my name out there but those few downloads are nothing compared to what I've seen other folks brag about. On one of the forums I belong to, I saw this person talk about his downloads during his 3 free days and what his actual sales have been since then - something like 56,000 downloads during those 3 days and over 5000 more actual sales since he listed his book for free.

I don't know if it's because my stories are short stories and not novels or what the deal is but something has to give with my writing soon. I haven't had any sales of my YA novel since Christmas and that is frustrating because I lowered the price, both print and ebook wise, and this week being read an ebook week I've offered it at a 25% discount on smashwords and still no sales. I don't get it. How does one build a following and get the sales that all these other authors get?

Maybe next year my new novel will bring them in but only time will tell for that. So far what I've written and shared with a select few people has been praised very highly. I hope that will translate to readers when the story is published.

Otherwise, if something doesn't give soon, I may have to give up writing and not do all the things I want to - lol - not happening really - just saying.

Thanks for stopping by and helping me spread the word. E :)