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First Week Wrap-up - Miscellany


In our first week we sold 52 copies of the eBook and 8 copies of the paperback.  I am only including eBook sales in this report, as this is the version we're marketing at the moment.

During this week, we reached as high as #52 on the American Anthologies Bestseller chart, which is pretty darn good. There are a surprising number of these books, in the thousands.  So #52? I'll take it.

Of the copies sold:

  • 12 were copies redeemed by pre-readers, and were given for free.
  • 5 were copies that I gave away for free to 3 family members and 2 other friends.
  • I assume the remaining 35 copies were legitimate sales.

Consider The Following

I don't know what personal efforts were made, but I looked at everyone's social media accounts and made an effort to figure out what goes into selling 35 copies of our book.  Here's what I found:

8 posts on personal Facebook pages.

2 active on Twitter with 4 different accounts, including the Word Addicts Twitter account. Several retweets and a few originating posts. Word Addicts Twitter had nothing new posted since the 21st and nothing about the book. We did retweet a couple of things. We had 447 followers.

Word Addicts Newsletter went out to 97 people.

4 were active on Instagram, with a total of 4 posts about the book and/or Word Addicts

Word Addicts Facebook Page has 563 followers. I posted 6 times. 2 times about the book, 1 time linking to an article on Word Addicts blog, 1 time copying the Instagram post about Cortney, and 2 times posting questions or little one-liners.  

Quantifying The Social Media Efforts


I created a points system to try and quantify what we did, and I assigned 1 point as follows:

  • Personal FB Pages: 1 point or each Facebook post to a personal Facebook page = 8
  • Word Addicts FB Page: Multiply the number of Word Addicts followers by each sales post to the Facebook Page. Each 100 units gets 1 point = 11
  • Instagram: 1 point for each sales post on Instagram = 4
  • Twitter: For the group Twitter, multiply the number of followers by the number of sales tweets, and each 100 units gets 1 point = 0
  • Blog: 1 point for every 10 newsletter recipients = 10
All-in-all, we score 33 on social media presence. We are still quite a small presence.  Imagine what may happen when our score is 300, 400 or 1,000? 


There are things that could improve

  • Gather more followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
  • Make sure everyone is selling the book on social media in some way or another (2 writers didn't make a single mention about it on social media). I liked Amy j's approach, where she gave the background to her story. It wasn't, "buy my book!" but, "I wrote a story for this book based loosely on..." There are various ways to "sell" a book on social media.
  • Follow the schedule Jenna outlined in her July presentation.
  • Gather more subscribers for the monthly newsletter.
  • What else?

What can't quite be quantified?

  • The orientation of the audience toward buying our book. Each one of us has a different audience, and our group accounts have different audiences.  The best we can do is try to gather people who buy books or who are interested in contributing to Word Addicts or sharing our content.
  • Individual efforts to sell the book.
    • For example: I scoured my FB friends list and made a short list of 200 people that I will reach out to personally, or in small groups on Messenger. I messaged 13 people today.  I'm sure some of you did other things that helped sell books.  This would be hard to quantify.






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