Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Challenged

The writing challenge begins tomorrow and I have not made up my mind on which direction I will go. I still need to go through a vertical file that I have on my mom's family to see if anything in there aids in my decision. On the one hand, pieces of my life have been flitting through my mind in an effort to assert themselves into a memoir. On the other, a couple of family members have expressed an interest in the Crusham Chronicles (my working title if I go with the family history). And when I slip on my publisher's hat I recognize the fact that doing a family history could ultimately result in a book somewhere down the line. Decisions, decisions...

Today was the deadline for paying sales tax to the state for book sales in 2011. I keep the sales of my books in separate Excel spreadsheets. At the end of the year I put them all together in a Word document, separating the taxable from the non-taxable sales, so that I have my back-up documentation for the beloved government. Over the weekend I did one last check on Internet sales because I knew that an acquaintance had purchased "From Buckeye to G.I." at the end of the year and I wasn't sure if it had shown up on my Lightning Source sales sheet yet. Just for fun, I then checked my Amazon Author Central account to see what was going on. Lo and behold, 8 copies of my ebook "Keys to Unlocking House History" have been sold! Of those, 7 sales occurred in 2011 and 1 in January of this year. How exciting is that?!? I guess Amazon doesn't feel the need to notify its authors when sales are made, and they will not issue an author payment until they owe you $10 or more. They owe me more than that now, so I should be receiving a payment from them. Knowing how they operate it will probably be after the end of the first quarter before they pay anyone.

What is interesting is that while my ebook has been available through Smashwords and all their affiliates since the summer, not one copy has been sold through them. The ebook has only been on Amazon since October. Besides the fact that it is Amazon, I wonder what they do differently that has enabled my ebook to be found on their site?

1 comment:

Mrs. Wryly said...

Congrats! You go, Amazon! Yeah, I had to wonder about that Smashwords. Sounds good, but who would really know about that except those who are familiar with the self-publishing industry. Lots of sellers, not so many readers.