I’ve decided to take Saturday away from the computer. I’m going to get the Christmas tree with my family, maybe go see a movie and buy a grill cover.
I’m writing this at 8 p.m. on Friday night, so unless something miraculous happened that I don’t know about, the sales on Friday for my new book did not go as I hoped. The truth, as I always try to bring it to you, is that they did not go at all.
It’s disappointing. Truth is, I was conservatively hoping to sell three and optimistically hoping to to sell six or seven. I really wanted to get the book to the top of the new releases for sexual health recovery, which doesn’t need many sales, but allows me to have a little ribbon that says “Best Seller.” It’s cheesy, but it’s the kind of thing that helps sales. Instead, at the moment I’m writing this, a sure-to-be-classic tome sits atop that chart called, “How To Eat A Banana — The Art of Oral Pleasure: Learn How to Give Head Like a Porn Star.”
I remember when I was running my magazine, we promoted many events in our office space, which also served as an art gallery. I got frustrated easily when half the people who RSVP’d on Facebook that they were coming didn’t come and 99% of the people who said “I’m not sure” didn’t come. Those were the ones who annoyed me the most because they couldn’t commit to not being there. They’d even say, “I’ll try to come” to your face.
Friday was actually a good day for visitors and hits to the website, with both numbers probably 15% to 20% above normal. I’m also sure that there were quite a few additional people who never made it to my site but read the entry as several people shared it. I thank those of you who did that. It was a kind gesture.
Maybe the audience that reads me every day and those that stumble onto the site are not the audience for the book, although I felt like it was even more narrowly targeted than my first book to this crowd. I’m disappointed.
I’m going to do an Ask Me Anything on Reddit on Sunday and next week continues the long list of podcast interviews still to be recorded. I’m also going to target the professionals I’m connected with on LinkedIn come Monday. Hopefully when my co-author begins pushing the book next week, he has a few aces up his sleeves, too.
It can only go up from here, right?
If you’re interested in learning about the book or purchasing, click HERE
If you’d like to see the top new books in sexual health recovery, click HERE
I wonder if this shows that the whole area of sex addiction and recovery from sex addiction is still a relatively taboo topic. Very sad, and it means a lot of people are left unsupported.
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Oh yeah, it is still taboo, but I thought that a couple people might buy it just to support me. Oh well, lesson learned. Pick myself up and pitch it to the next group.
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Hope you saw my comment that I would buy it if it was available on eReader.
I do think that this a very expensive time with Christmas coming up unfortunately.
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Yeah, the time of year does suck, but as I mentioned to Ashley, I looked at the sales for my first book and the two best months were the 4th and 5th month it was released. I think that’s when libraries were discovering it. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. I need to stop entering the 100-yard dash, and eventually it will be on e-book.
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Yeah it’s not a pleasant feeling. I can think of one person I know who’s done well with presales, but aside from that I wonder if a book not quite being available yet poses a bit of a psychological barrier to potential buyers. I hope this is just a slow start and things start to pick up; it’s certainly a book that meets an area of need. And being in such a specific niche I can see it doing really well with an Amazon ad campaign.
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I’m feeling much better now than I did yesterday at this time. If you look at the rise and fall on sales of my first book, there was a small burst up front, but I’m guessing that was family and friends who knew the book was being released. I was also lucky enough to get a couple of pieces in the news locally about the book. I think some people just wanted to see if their name was in my first book. That was memoir. This is more self-help, so I’m not going to get the low-hanging fruit of family and friends. Hopefully, it’s embraced more by the professional community I’ve cultivated on LinkedIn and libraries are as interested in it as they were with my first book.
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Yeah I can definitely see it being well received in those areas.
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