Sunday 25 September 2011

A brief spell in the clouds

I spent a brief spell high up in the atmosphere this week.

No, I don't mean that I was literally up in the sky. What happened was I had the most amazing run of sales for my ebook novella Doodling. For a while I was absolutely stunned, figuring the sales numbers Amazon was throwing at me were just some sort of error in the system.

Turns out that I was basically in for a stroke of luck. My friend Natasha Larry, the author of the YA fantasy novel Darwin's Children had her book featured on the site Pixel of Ink. Most likely, while looking at her site, they discovered mine and decided to feature me as well.

And that's when things started happening. I suddenly found that my book was leaping off the shelves (or the online equivalent) at Amazon. In a couple of days I tripled my total sales and suddenly found myself not only in the top 1500 books in the kindle store (out of over 750,000) but in the top 50 for both books and ebooks in the category of humor.

It was incredibly exciting. I could barely stop myself logging into the Kindle Direct site to see how many more I'd sold in the last couple of minutes. And to think that all those people actually wanted to buy a copy of my book. It was an amazing feeling.

Things are returning back to normal now. Sales have slowed and I'm gradually slipping down the rankings again. But for that brief couple of days, it was fantastic to see my book fly up into the higher reaches of the kindle store. And now that I know it really is possible, I'm determined to make sure it happens again. Not quite sure how at this point, but I'm going to make it happen.