Results After Two Years

With the end of my second year as a self-published author, I decided to go through and do a little counting. When I first started out, I was literally writing down the number of sales I made every day. As time moved on, I got to the point where I wasn't even checking it every week. So I was a little surprised when I looked through the results of two years. Well, it was actually closer to a year and a half, but I'm mainly just counting 2011 and 2012 without taking the months into consideration.

In June of 2011, I published Through the Flames. In December of the same year, I published The Shadows of Caldreth. And then December of this year, I published The Blood of Kirakath and Rise of the Champion, the latter of which is an omnibus.

In 2011, I sold 1,246 copies of Through the Flames and 137 copies of The Shadows of Caldreth. That excludes the nine refunds I received.

In 2012, I sold 863 copies of Through the Flames, 880 copies of The Shadows of Caldreth, 22 copies of The Blood of Kirakath, and 10 copies of Rise of the Champion. I also gave away a total of 1,969 copies of the first two through promotions and had 7 copies borrowed through the Kindle Owner's Lending Library. That excludes the thirty-six refunds I received, though I noticed that most of them seemed to pop up around the time I started a promotion.

So over a period of eighteen and a half months, I sold a total of 3,021 books, gave away a total of 1,969 books, had 45 refunds, and received 18 reviews.

All in all, I think it's been a pretty good start, especially considering how slow things started to get after June. When I first started, I never imagined that I'd get a single sale over on DE, so just seeing the 4 that I sold and the 46 that I gave away over there was pretty exciting.