https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year

and THAT’S who your competing against, even if their quality of writing is abysmal. There’s just A LOT of books out there and many more to bury those keep coming. It’s like a waterfall. It’s doubtful that many of the old classics would be “successful” today. Swiss Family Robinson? No way. Gulliver’s Travels? Nope.

Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware says that by far the most the average self-published or print-on-demand book sells is 200 copies:

https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2011/1209/Writer-Beware-the-watchdog-of-the-publishing-world

My experience: I’ve tried about everything practical (except the dubious “Just keep writing!” meme, ‘write a million books and you’ll make a million bucks’ I guess). But for the most part, they just don’t work. What kind of works – mediocrely – (besides just knowing somebody in the industry, or your just incredibly lucky) for the average Joe or Jane is promotions, such as this site offers, and book giveaways. But Goodreads now charges big money for Giveaways, so forget them. And the last I checked, Amazon doesn’t do Giveaways anymore (though who knows if they’ve changed their minds again). Anyway, even with these marketing ploys, my experience is the money is nill.

I know this sounds like sour grapes, but I just want to be honest with you. Don’t let these sites stress you out, cause they will. If you want to write, write something that you know and love. Eschew the advise here to tailor your writing to the audience. To make the dollar your aim. I’ve never liked that, advocating writing as some kind of business. Yuck! That’s why we mainly have just a few topics that sell. Vampires? Check. Dragons? Check. Romance hot off the mill? Check. Gawd! And if you just have always wanted to write one stand-alone book, cause it’s on your bucket list, just write one and move on.

Got numbers?

I found this article to be very ebcouraging. I just released my debut novel and the first in a series in December and have been seeing a steady but slow amount of sales. It was discouraging through January, but I am networking like crazy and trying to,enjoy the ride while I get myself out there. I am also a romance/PNR writer AND a very speedy writer with the 2nd book of the series in final edits and the third nearly there as well as a stand alone scifi that I am turning into an audio book myself. So many of these pointers make me excited to try new things and push hard. This is some thing I have wanted for so long and I am willing to stay up long nights after my day job to get my books off the ground. Haha. Thank you for the tips!

@Faleena…..thank you for your info & for your blog post link. Great resource to check out.

Just my two cents worth which isn’t based on much other than personal experience… In my case, I have found genre plays a bigger role than marketing in terms of sales my sales. My first book was in a genre that sells really well and with hardly any marketing that book did great right off the bat. My sixth book has had far more marketing, but is in a slightly harder genre, and is not selling even a 20th of what my first book did.

A query though – Let’s say your first book hits 1,000 paid downloads and 1m KU reads in 6 weeks from launch. Where does that put the autbor? FSA or EA? I do know of somebody who did exactly that. Fantasy genre.

Thanks.

I definitely fall into the EA category and am working on pushing my way to the FSA. I understand it will take a lot of work and dedication. I’ve started to do my research on understanding the industry and I hope that by the time I have 5+ novels under my belt I can be a successful FSA in the making.