It’s been a little over a month since Full Coverage: An Action Comedy launched so I thought it would be fun to take a look at how well my first attempt at self-publishing a book went. Here are the overall totals between launch on 4/1 and today 5/9:

Ebooks sold: 32

Paperbacks sold: 15

Kindle Standard Pages Read: 2,402

Full Coverage is 234 “Kindle Standard Equivalent” pages long so that 2,402 pages read means that 10.26 people (2,402/234) read it on Kindle Unlimited. Why the 0.26? Because Kindle Unlimited only pays authors for pages read, and a few people started it without finishing the whole book.

That gives me 57 readers total in the first month, sweet!

The total income for all versions came out to $109.90. Not too bad for a first attempt, but not nearly enough to break even on even just the marketing costs so we’re still in hobby territory at this point. Hopefully as I publish more books and add an audiobook version to this one that number will creep up over time.

The kindle version peaked in the rankings on 4/28, getting all the way up to #38,054 out of the over a million books on Kindle (top 3.8%), which was good enough to get me into the top 100 for Satire for a few hours and all the way up to #86! Amazon updates their rankings hourly so you need a good sustained push of buyers every hour to stay up top, which is really hard if nobody has ever heard of you. So I feel pretty good about hanging with the likes of Chuck Palahniuk and Kurt Vonnegut, even if it was just briefly.

The paperback version did quite well and peaked at #80,206 out of over 8 million paperbacks stocked by Amazon (top 1%). This is probably because Amazon sells a lot fewer paperbacks than kindle books, but it’s still pretty cool.

All in all, I’d say this was a pretty successful first book launch. I think next time I’ll wait till the book is actually on sale before telling everyone about it since about 1/3rd of my kindle sales were pre-orders and it would help me more in the rankings if those came later in the month. Next time I might be a little more aggressive with my marketing budget earlier and try to get on some podcasts or something to spread the word, but overall I think this method worked pretty well.