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Sales Figures

3K views 31 replies 21 participants last post by  SomeoneElse 
#1 ·
A super quick question here. From time to time I see Kindle writers publishing how many copies they have sold - "100,000" etc. My question is to anyone who has done this - are these including Kindle Unlimited borrows?

I ask because a borrow is technically a sale because the reader paid to read your novel, but sometimes I see writers saying instead - "50,000 sold & 25,000 Kindle Unlimited Borrows"

I'm thinking a lot of writers are throwing their KU borrows into the their "sales" figures - am I right or wrong? Is this dishonest or not?

Thanks R
 
#2 ·
I don't think it's dishonest. It's up to each author how to tabulate their sales. Personally I have 3 totals. Sales. KU reads and the two combined. I divide my pages read by the KENPC to approximate a sales number. In reality, that's a conservative number of "sales" since it presupposes a full read before its counted, when most people probably don't read all the way through. If I added sales + borrows (assuming Amazon ever told us that figure) then my total sales would probably be a lot higher.
 
#4 ·
I do not include borrows in my sales figures, but I don't use sales figures as a marketing tool either. I don't for one second think that all my borrows would be sales even though I know that borrows cannibalize sales. I'm not sure bragging that "more than 1.5 million books sold this year" propels readers as much as insight into the character and story does.
 
#5 ·
Amanda M. Lee said:
I do not include borrows in my sales figures, but I don't use sales figures as a marketing tool either. I don't for one second think that all my borrows would be sales even though I know that borrows cannibalize sales. I'm not sure bragging that "more than 1.5 million books sold this year" propels readers as much as insight into the character and story does.
Thanks everyone for your views and experience. In reply let me say that I haven't used KU yet at all, and the reason I'm asking is that I know it can "cannibalize" sales, so I was wondering how many writers would include it in their overall sales figures to make up for that. FWIW I don't think it's dishonest at all, so long as you are being paid for the borrows.

Because I don't use KU I don't know exactly how it works - I presume an author knows how many people borrow the books, and how many get paid for? I say this because I saw a writer the other day declare she had sold 100,000 copies and also 75,000 KU borrows, so the figures must be available, right? Another writer simply proclaims 500,000 "sales" but is on KU so I presume this author is either not bothering to tell people of the hundreds of thousands of borrows (which I think unlikely) or is incorporating those borrows into the 500k "sales".
 
#6 ·
Redgum said:
Because I don't use KU I don't know exactly how it works - I presume an author knows how many people borrow the books, and how many get paid for?
No. Amazon won't release number of borrows, they keep that data to themselves. Authors only see number of pages read for each title. I keep track of total pages read, and approximate that as a number of sales. Or perhaps the author you saw was dividing pages read by KENPC and calling that "borrows"? Which would be a conservative number, since not every borrow will result in a full read through.

Personally I don't use sales/pages read/borrows as marketing copy. I track those numbers purely for myself and so I can make business decisions about Select vs wide.
 
#7 ·
How do you "know" that KU cannibalizes sales? I'm not being argumentative... I'm genuinely interested in any info along these lines. My albeit very modest sales have declined and I cling to my trickle of page reads. The idea that leaving KU might bring my sales back up at all is intriguing, but at the same time why would anyone subscribed to KU buy any books? Aren't KU readers and non-KU readers two different targets altogether?

Cheers!
 
#8 ·
I don't give numbers of books sold, I give income earned for this exact reason. To me, number of books sold by itself is a completely useless metric. Still, other people's numbers aren't anybody's business, so... I don't think it's right to critique anyone that voluntarily gives their numbers.
 
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#9 ·
Redgum said:
FWIW I don't think it's dishonest at all, so long as you are being paid for the borrows.
Authors are not paid for borrows. Authors in Select get a rank boost from borrows, with 1 borrow being equivalent to 1 sale as far as the book's sales rank goes. Authors are only paid based on number of pages read** of those borrowed books. So if someone borrows but never reads it, you get a momentarily sales blip but no payment.

** The number of pages read is based off a number called Kindle Estimated Number of Pages (KENP) that Amazon calculates for every book in KDP Select. It is not the same as the number of pages displayed on the books info page and while a few various attempts at calculating it have been made, there is no precise or proven one that works on figuring out what it is based on. The closest ones seem to be looking primarily at number of characters, with something factored in for the underlying code.

Redgum said:
Because I don't use KU I don't know exactly how it works - I presume an author knows how many people borrow the books, and how many get paid for? I say this because I saw a writer the other day declare she had sold 100,000 copies and also 75,000 KU borrows, so the figures must be available, right? Another writer simply proclaims 500,000 "sales" but is on KU so I presume this author is either not bothering to tell people of the hundreds of thousands of borrows (which I think unlikely) or is incorporating those borrows into the 500k "sales".
No, Amazon does not tell authors how many borrows they have had or if they have even had borrows. The author you indicated may have made an estimate based on number of pages read/KENP for each book, or by using day-to-day calculators that estimate borrows based on rank movement, i.e. if you had a rank jump of X, which will generally take Y sales, you can guestimate number of borrows by subtracting your actual number of sales from Y.

For example, I don't sell much, so if my book's rank jumps up to the 100k range on any given day but I had no sales, I know I had a borrow.
 
#11 ·
All my sales (and borrows) numbers are estimates. I stopped tracking around 300,000. At that time 95% were sales as it was pre-KU. I write very long so can earn as much on a borrow as a sale at $4.99, and many sales are traditionally published books or audiobooks or books on sale, on which the royalties are very low. Audio, for example--my royalty on a unit can literally be 30 cents in some cases. Also, Amazon Publishing pays the same royalty whether it's a sale or a borrow, so there's no point breaking it out. I've found the only number that really counts is income. I divide that number by an average to come up with an approximate number of books/audiobooks sold or borrowed. Same difference as far as I'm concerned. And KDP puts the units sold and pages read in the same column, which makes it virtually impossible for me to count them up anyway. So I just look at the bottom line.

Yes, borrows cannibalize sales, at least they do for me. I was out of KU for about 6 or 7 months last year, then put my books back in, so I can state that with some precision as I could see the before/after numbers. Unless it's a new release, about 60-75% of my units moved come from borrows. An average book for me is about 500 KENPC, which gives me about $2.50.

People do it differently. I don't see why you wouldn't count borrow-equivalents. The money spends the same, and people are reading the books and you're being paid for it. But for my own purposes, I only really track dollars. Any "sales/borrows" figures I give are approximations, because I can't see any way those numbers matter.
 
#12 ·
Cannibalize - to me it means that if the reader can read in abundance for only ten bucks a month, they won't spend money on books that are not in KU. Why would they?  A lot of us old timers are losing big bucks because of KU and it makes it harder for the new authors too.

The thing is, how many books I sell doesn't mean a thing unless it simply lets other authors know it is possible. Too many variables otherwise.
 
#15 ·
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#16 ·
I have to agree with PhoenixS on the inflated numbers promotion sites quote. I have long suspected they count email signups that include authors that have to open an account even if they only want to buy a promotion.
 
#17 ·
Martitalbott said:
I have to agree with PhoenixS on the inflated numbers promotion sites quote. I have long suspected they count email signups that include authors that have to open an account even if they only want to buy a promotion.
My thanks to everyone who has replied here with your experience and knowledge. I have not personally used sales numbers for marketing but I was just curious what the general feeling was about KU borrows being counted as sales etc. Very interesting stuff here about only receiving page reads info as well. I'm actually going to have a go with KU later this year because I think the proof of this pudding really is in the eating.

Thanks all , R :)
 
#19 ·
RightHoJeeves said:
Seeing as I'm just about to start this whole process, I'm curious as to why one would stop tracking. If Amazon send out payments every month, surely they send a report of how many sales each book has had?
Because half the time, we're selling at .99 with a promo just to maintain visibility, and that only makes us .32 - .64 per sale, minus the cost of the promotion. The other half of the time, we're selling at 2.99 - 7.99. All sales are not created equal.

Net profits are a far better indication of return on investment, and also of the profitability of your writing venture as a whole.
 
#20 ·
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#21 ·
Graeme Hague said:
How do you "know" that KU cannibalizes sales? I'm not being argumentative... I'm genuinely interested in any info along these lines. My albeit very modest sales have declined and I cling to my trickle of page reads. The idea that leaving KU might bring my sales back up at all is intriguing, but at the same time why would anyone subscribed to KU buy any books? Aren't KU readers and non-KU readers two different targets altogether?
I look at it like this:

Sales are from people who like to read the same books over and over.
KU2 reads are from people who read once, and never go back to a read book again.

They are polarized ends of the reader spectrum.

Between them are the people who use KU to vet read something new, who then buy what they like, or buy to support an author they want to keep writing.

I dont see KU2 as cannibalizing sales. Instead, its providing a different way of obtaining books, which gives the reader more choice. If anything, I think it boosts overall reading, by making the cost to the read only once people much more reasonable, allowing them to choose to read what they may not have chosen before. For us authors, the bottom line is as long as a full read pays about the same as a sale, it makes no difference if its bought or KU read.

I use a spreadsheet daily, where I enter in sales and pages read for each book, and it calculates the number of full reads for the day, and the grand total.

Borrows is a completely different thing, internal to the Amazon ranking process. While it would be good to be able to compare actual borrows with full read stats, thus showing us how many true full reads we get, Amazon is not likely to give us this info.

Borrows only mattered with KU1. But they didn't tell you how many full reads you had either.
 
#22 ·
I actually have a pretty good idea about my full reads. I went back into KU about 10 days before KU2 started with one series (3 books). I saw their number of borrows per day over that period, and then, once KU2 began, I saw the page reads. The page reads divided by the number of KENP/book gave me . . . right about the same numbers as for the previous week. That and reviews (I very rarely get "DNF" reviews) told me that most readers read my books all the way through. They may hate a character, they may write a dissertation about it, but they read the book.

I've also been able to see, because of being out of, then in KU, how much cannibalization KU causes. In my case--a LOT. At least 50% of my sales. On the other hand, I get borrows that would NOT otherwise be sales. Net gain.

I don't track because the numbers of "sales" or "reads" are kind of meaningless due to money. For example, I did track the first 3 months of two releases, one tradpubbed and one indie, last summer, and another set of two releases, also one tradpubbed and one indie, last winter. Each of these was two books published about a month apart. Overall, I found I had 40% more borrows/sales (both counted the same--earning the same) on the tradpubbed books, but made 60% more money on the indie books. That has changed over time, as the tradpubbed books get more push.

What matters most to me? How much I make on a book. Besides, tracking is kind of meaningless. I can tell, broad-brush, everything I need to know. For example: I have one series that is sort of "evergreen" without promotion, and also performs the best in audio. I have one series that does consistently well because it gets pretty consistent promotion. I do very well in German. My audio drops precipitously when I haven't had something out for 3+ months, and I need to fix that. Etc.

I used to do corporate stuff where I looked at figures a LOT. I found that unless I were drilling way down, the macro level tended to give me the most information. Actually, I probably get my best information from reviews--the qualitative--rather than the quantitative, beyond general level of rank/money.

Besides, what I really care about is that I make enough so I don't have to get a real job. My income has actually been surprisingly consistent over the past 3 years, much as I always fear it will fall off a cliff. So I don't track.
 
#23 ·
Oh, and those Amazon reports are very long and complex, and like I said, they put the number of sales into the SAME column as the number of pages read. I'm sure I could set up pivot tables and pull things out and re-sort it, but I'd have to refresh my memory and work at it, and it would take a bunch of time. I only have 20 books, but there are however-many stores and a bunch of lines for every book in each store and...no, thanks. Pain in the neck.

Do I wish they would provide year-end reports with total sales and pages read for each book, and total dollars earned on that book? Sure. But I don't wish it enough to do the work to get that info myself. :)
 
#24 ·
I don't see the value of quoting sales figures in promotion unless you're selling Stephen King kinds of numbers, and even then, I don't think readers care. When figures are quoted someplace like kboards, to help other authors, I think it's nice if you're willing to break it out into more detail when possible, just to give a fuller picture. X sales, Y page reads, and then a full-read equivalent by dividing your Y page reads by the KENP number assigned to your book. But no one cares about stuff like that but you and other authors.

As for assumptions about KU readers and cannibalization, there is more than one type of KU subscriber. You can assume that almost all of them are avid readers who enjoy the types of genre fiction most readily available in KU, but it's harder to generalize on buying habits. For some, they spend their 10 bucks a month and that's the sum total of their book budget. For others, they also buy titles outright in addition to their KU reading. Some may limit their extra spending to deep discounts like from BookBub. Others are willing to spend full price for something they really want that is not available in other ways. It really depends on the individual and on the genre. In a popular genre, I think if you become a very well-known author, more people would be willing to pay specifically for your book than if they have no idea who you are, so you have to be more aware of the cannibalization. Or, if you are a lesser known author but in a very niche genre where prices are higher and choices fewer, there may be KU subscribers who would pay full price to read your book simply because they get to the end of the KU choices in a month and are still hungry enough for material that it's worth it to them. So, yeah- the more popular you are or the more limited the offerings in your genre, the more KU cannibalization is a real concern. Otherwise, those KU page reads are probably just gravy as very few of those readers would have given your book a chance otherwise.
 
#25 ·
I only joined Select last year so I've always been in the habit of counting sales separately from borrows. Of course borrows count towards income (significantly, for many people), but I'm pretty proud of my unit sales number, and it's just not the same to say "x sales plus maybe y sales equivalents, I'm not quite sure."  :D
 
#26 ·
Graeme Hague said:
How do you "know" that KU cannibalizes sales? I'm not being argumentative... I'm genuinely interested in any info along these lines. My albeit very modest sales have declined and I cling to my trickle of page reads. The idea that leaving KU might bring my sales back up at all is intriguing, but at the same time why would anyone subscribed to KU buy any books? Aren't KU readers and non-KU readers two different targets altogether?

Cheers!
For some, this may be true. I think a lot of people take it as an article of faith. I was wide until KU2, and sold about 70% on Amazon. After I went all in, my sales stayed about the same, but my revenue jumped considerably. Right now, I sell about 2-3 times what I did when I was wide, but sales make 35% of revenue. The page reads now provide 65% of revenue on top of more sales than I had when I was wide. Would I do better wide now? I don't know. I do know that the visibility of KU has helped both sales and revenue.
 
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