After My First Book, I Got Exponential Growth – How?

After My First Book, I Got Exponential Growth – How? Today I’ll show you how random marketing efforts and some luck led to more than tenfold sales growth.

I forget to tell you about starting my Youtube channel. I haven’t gotten much traffic, but the videos cost me $500 to produce. Here’s the first one, from November 2016

Exponential Growth – Year 2018

Following Zombie Turkeys conversion to an audiobook, I published My Undead Mother-in-law as an audiobook.

May

My book Paranormal Privateers was published in ebook and paperback formats. This book had two covers. My first one is here:

The intent was to show a woman’s torso in a wetsuit with a bloody bullet how. This was the Undead Mother-in-Law in the first chapter. After a lack of sales, I switched it to this:

I was excited because now I had a trilogy! Throughout the year, I’d see multiple books sold in person and online. Few things feel better than having a person buy three of your books at a time.

Not that the story ended in Paranormal Privateers. I left it open for more books.

This book cover sold better.

Events:

Book launch at I Know You Like A Book on May 19th where I sold 4.

I began using Mailchimp for my newsletter. I had built my list to over one thousand and it was quite unwieldy mailing this through Yahoo! By the end of the year, using newsletter-building ads, I grew to over 1,600 subscribers.

You can join my mailing list AND get FREE audiobooks by clicking here.

Charitable Book Sale at ‘Books to Benefit’ on July 7th where I sold three books, one of each.

PennedCon in St. Louis on September 21-22nd, where I sold ten books and made contacts with many authors. I got reviews and contacts and most importantly, ideas for marketing.

Book Nook Bookstore, where I sold three books on October 27th.

First Friday, an arts promotion in Peoria every first Friday of the month. At Wheel Art, I sold four books on November 2nd.

The next day I sold six books at the Peoria Library Author Fair.

Chambanacon in Bloomington – I sold thirteen books, my best convention ever.

Also in November I reduced my Zombie Turkeys ebook to .99. The idea was to sell the first and get people to buy the second and third books too.

I finished the year with 173 sales, a 107% increase of cumulative sales over 2017, which in turn had a 73% increase over 2016. The green areas in the table below indicate increases over the previous year.

It turned out I was just getting started.

Quick question

How much do you think I’ll sell this year, 2022? I’m at 561 so far, but I have four book events coming up. Tell me by clicking here and the closest person will get their choice of books from me in January 2023. Or you can email me at [email protected].

Here’s my second video:

Exponential Growth in 2019

I was tired of writing zombie books. I decided to pursue the middle-school readership with a superhero book. So I wrote Secret Supers and published it on March 29, 2019. It’s all about four disabled seventh-graders who get superpowers. I got the idea from my own daughter who has cerebral palsy and wanted a flying wheelchair. I got a flying wheelchair and car in here!

Paranormal Privateers audiobook came out in January as well. I had nine products: three books in three formats, soon to be twelve products with Secret Supers.

Events:

At the first ever PeoriaCon in March 2019, I sold 24 books, a new record for me. I also used my new Square credit card reader for the first time.

In April, I sold my books at the Peoria Mall for two days and sold eleven. Later that month, I sold another 24 books at Quadcon in Peoria. Wow!

In May, I went to the Springfield ComicCon and only sold 2 books. It was purely a comics room–except for my books. Later I went to the Midwest ComicCon and sold three books.

Appropriately, I went to the Tremont Turkey Festival in June and sold 21 books. Later that month I went to the Book Nook in Washington and sold one book. Oops! I also sold one at the East Peoria vendor fair. Not every event is a home run. Finally, I closed the month at Geekfest and sold five books.

In September I had an author signing at I Know You Like a Book and sold seven books.

I went to Archon near St. Louis in October and sold twelve books. That barely covered my table costs and the gas. Quadcon came bad to Peoria in late October and I sold nine books.

In November I realized I can give my audiobook promotion codes to my newsletter readers and I’d get paid for them. This led to 18 audiobook sales and reviews.

Later in the month, I sold 12 of my books at the Washington High School Star Wars event.

Finally, after Thanksgiving, I sold twelve more books at Chambanacon 2019.

What Happened in December 2019 and the Secret of Exponential Growth

That was it for book events, but in December 2019 I sold 55 books through Amazon and Audible. Exponential growth was happening!

As you can see from the graph below, my sales increased 108% over 2018, more than double. That is 356 books sold versus 171 the previous year.

The circle size represents the percent increase (or decrease) from the previous year.

So, why were my sales growing? I thought of these reasons:

1. The more books I write, the more books I sell. Seems obvious, right? But now I saw how books would sell each other.
2. The more formats I have, the more I sell. I publish each book in print, ebook, and audiobook. The audiobook promotions with Audible allowed me to give away free books and get paid for them.
3. The more events I attended, the more I sold. Again, it’s obvious.

From these conclusions, I decided to promote my audiobooks even more, attend even more events, and write even faster.

What happened next? Sorry to spoil the surprise, but 2020 turned out to be even better. I’ll put that in my next blog post. Get all my posts through my newsletter. Click here.

Here are the previous posts in this series:

My Sixth-Year Anniversary as a Self-Published Author

What Happened After My First Book Was Published?

Let’s close with my third video: