As April closed out, I was left to wonder why my books are not selling like they used to. In April 2023, I sold 123 books. The year prior, 129. The year before that - 146. This April I sold a grand total of 42. Actually, this was better that the 28 I first thought that it was as I had forgotten to add in audio books! Now, I’m not a complainer but I am an analyst and so a bit of analysis seemed to be in order.
I have 50 odd books published ranging from poetry to paranormal and magic. My business book sales are not included in this tracking but I have a number of them out as well. Among these books, many hardly ever sell a copy - the poetry in particular barely sells. Either I’m a crap poet or that genre simply doesn’t sell. My magic books have always sold in small quantities each month and I know from talking to people like Dolores Ascroft-Nowicki (a wonderful lady who was Director of studies at the SOL for many years and has written many books herself) that hers sold about 800 in total each - she told me this herself. So my guess is that this is not a huge market. No, what sold were my paranormal books.
The paranormal true story books often became Amazon best sellers. You may not have an idea what a thrill it is to open Amazon and find your book is #1 in a particular category.I can tell you it is quite something. Then you see the book selling 20-30 copies a day for several weeks and that too is quite an experience. Even my first true stories paranormal book - My Haunted Life - did really well. But I haven’t really been that interested in adding a new book in this area for the last couple of years. The last two - Liminal People and Shadows & Strangeness did OK - not great - and maybe this is when the rot set in?
I haven’t written any new paranormal books because I get very few stories and experiences submitted to my website - My Haunted Life Too - these days. Where I used to get 2-3 stories a day, I now get a story every quarter. To me it seems as if Reddit killed off the focused websites for content like this? I maintain the website because it has a huge back catalog of submitted experiences and stories but I no longer try very hard to promote it. Too busy dowsing. Traffic has also dropped off as you may imagine so I think in part, the decline of the website and its visitors has meant less exposure for my books.
Another factor at play is possibly that books like Watched from the Shadows and Chilling Tales of Black Eyed Kids stayed in the top 20 in small categories on Amazon for months if not years. This meant they were more visible and they looked like they were selling well so others bought them too. Both of these books have sold well in excess of 1500 copies each and again, it may be that for this niche, they are sold out to some degree? They certainly have now both dropped out of these top 20 lists and sales are down. I am sort of working on a new book - Liminal Worlds - but progress is slow and I doubt it will appear this year.
The good thing is that my magic and dowsing books are holding up. These continue to sell in smaller quantities but each month, they move. For me, this is the good news as these are the books that are meaningful I believe.
I keep detailed stats on all of this stuff - yeah I know… boring. But, I love working with stats like this. I know that in 2023, my best selling books were,
Watched from the Shadows - 479
Liminal People - 95
Note that only two books sold well?
I guess I also need to do a bit more promotional work but I find that quite tough to do. I mean where do you market books of such different genres? And maybe in the end, this is my problem. I follow my interests and am all over the place like a shotgun in the dark and anyway, in the end, I do this as much for fun and because I can as anything else. However, as I reach the end of my career, it would be nice if my books were selling more not less for I had hoped that it would supplement what will be a rather meagre state pension - when I get to the appropriate age.
Have you bought any of my books? Which is your favorite? Have you reviewed any of them?
Here is a link to all of my books if interested - Here
Perhaps set up a paranormal documentary channel on YouTube or TikTok and do small docos (say 3-5 mins or whatever) on each story and you make money with advertising and in turn it promotes your books.
I wonder if the fact that most of your books are now available on Kindle Unlimited has anything to do with the reduction in sales? I don't know if Amazon counts those downloads in the sales figures. Just a thought.