Hello lovelies! Today, Friday the 13th, marks one month since The Alpha Awakens released on Amazon. It's been...wild. I've been amazed at the outpouring of love from other authors.
Like...Ruby Dixon told people to read my book. My mind is totally blown.
In the beginning I decided to be transparent with my author journey, so I wanted to share my 30-day stats with you. In the future I'll likely do a quarterly post about this, so we can look at several months of the year side-by-side.
In the last thirty days, I did a couple of things to keep pushing sales of book one. I wrote a free bonus epilogue to TAA, which you can get if you sign up for my newsletter. I also finished book two in the Alpha Compound series. You can preorder it here, so I'm starting to track stats for that as well.
I'm working on book three now, but I probably won't release it until the new year. I've heard releasing over the holidays can go a little sideways.
As of this morning, I've got the following stats to share, then we'll dive into my Amazon dash as well....
1304 followers (up from 1070 on release day)
37 folks in the FB group (up from 18 on release day)
48 folks following my author page (up from 19 on release day)
TAA has a 4.6 star rating on Amazon last I checked, slightly down from release which, which I expected because most of those initial reviews are from ARC and friends!
146 ratings on Amazon
The book made it into the top 100 of new releases in paranormal romance, but it's fallen to #167 as of today
Now let's dive into the actual Amazon dashboard. We'll take a look at ebook orders, page reads, preorders and royalties.
As far as orders go, we can see a pretty big jump at the beginning, which I'd expect. When it started to drop off, I thought that drop would continue, but it's been relatively steady with only slight ups and downs since. I don't know if/when this will drop off further–but I'd expect it to? Only time will tell...
ORDERS
PAGE READS
I love this stat - almost 600K page reads in the first 30 days. I don't know what I expected. Well, that's not entirely true. I expected ten people to read my book, honestly. I know how long my own TBR is and I figured people would get to it when they get to it, and I was blown away.
I was lucky that I made a lot of author and bookstagrammer friends ahead of time (part of my platform strategy) and they shared for me quite a bit.
PREORDERS
Two weeks after release day I woke up and said to myself WHY DIDN'T I LINK TO THE PREORDER FOR BOOK TWO IN THE BACK OF BOOK ONE?!?!!?!
So I reformatted and added a preorder, pushing it way out. I didn't start collecting those until two weeks ago, but I'm liking this strategy. A more seasoned author who I look to for mentorship told me I should make my future preorders 1.99 and the ebook 4.99. That...scares me, and I'd love to know your thoughts. I'm considering it though, because on release day when these 121 preorders go out, I'll make like $30. Eye roll.....
ROYALTIES
....drummroll.....here's the new beta reports of the Royalties Estimator. Amazon pays royalties about 60 days after the month end, so I won't see any of this cash until September-ish (if I've understood that correctly). Below you can see the breakdown for ebooks/page reads and paperbacks. Paperbacks are a thing I wanted to do because I wanted to hold my book in my hands, but it'll be a while before I make my money back (since they cost me $150 to format). I am selling signed paperbacks on my site too, and that's not reflected in these numbers but I've sent 8 or 10 of those out at this point.
I hope it's helpful to get one view of an author's debut journey. I'm honestly blown away by the reception The Alpha Awakens got, and so incredibly grateful for the experience. I'm excited to see how these numbers shift and change as I release book two and push through the rest of the series.
Let me know if there are any questions or any other stats y'all wanna see in these posts, and I can include those in the future!
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