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Inside Hawley Lodge

Monthly Archives: February 2011

A small milestone

28 Monday Feb 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in Indie writing, Sales

≈ Leave a comment

I reported back in October that The Roman and the Runaway was available at Amazon’s US and UK stores. The level of interest in the book has been, well, disappointing. I gave up regularly checking to see if I’ve had any sales on Amazon months ago. It was still getting downloaded fairly frequently from Smashwords and the sites it distributes to, as well as from Feedbooks. I figured that it was probably my own fault for not really spending much time promoting it. I just don’t take the whole thing seriously enough, I suppose. I’m happy that the book is out there and that people seem to be enjoying it, but I’m not hugely motivated by the financial aspect, or even the kudos-of-being-an-author one.

But today, when I checked, the report page had changed.

First sale

The way the numbers are lined up, it took a moment to work out that this was a sale and not a refund. It’s taken nearly five months, but at least I now know that the book is actually visible on Amazon. And that one person at least has taken a chance on it.

More stats

25 Friday Feb 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Libraries, Websites

≈ 1 Comment

I’ve been diligently adding the books I’ve read since I’ve been living in Canada to LibraryThing and (more recently) Goodreads. I should probably just plump for one or the other, but each has features that the other lacks. I find LibraryThing more intuitive to navigate and Goodreads has some cool elements such as the ability to display statistics on your reading habits.

My Goodreads stats for 2010 and 2011 tell an interesting story. I’ve read the same number of books in two months of this year as I read in the whole of 2010. A large percentage of them have been ebooks, read on the ereader I got for Christmas, although there are a fair few library books in there, too. With the exception of the two Percy Jackson books, which I bought as a gift for my daughter, I haven’t paid for any of them: I’ve either downloaded them from free ebook sites, used coupons from Smashwords authors or borrowed the books in audio or ebook form from the public library’s OverDrive site. I was dismissive of audio books in an earlier post, but I’ve listened to three since then, mainly because they weren’t available in any other format through OverDrive. Listening to an audio book has turned out to be a pleasant way of making a usually private activity into a more social one: my husband and I are enjoying listening to a book together in the evenings.

More books have become available through OverDrive since I first posted about it at the end of December. The figures are now:

Audio fiction Audio non-fiction Ebook fiction Ebook non-fiction Total
December 2010 4,202 1,060 1,185 139 6,586
February 2011 4,534 1,089 3,297 505 9,425

An increase in availability of all content of 143%, then, and a particularly big rise for the ebooks, with a 278% rise in available fiction titles. No wonder I’m reading so much…

Free ebook

The Roman and the Runaway

Ebook: $2.99

The Viking and the Vendetta

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