CSS Appomattox Update

I am closing on five months since the book has gone live. I changed my relationship with Amazon and am no longer exclusive on Kindle. This had a dramatic impact on sales. I think they have dropped by half. Putting the book up on Kobo, Google Play and Nook have gotten me no more than a handful of sales each. Google Play has been better than the other two so far but its only been a month since I changed that.

Still, I am closing in on 900 copies sold. I have not done any more advertising and will not until I finish getting the book professionally edited. So far I am very pleased with my editor. She is doing a fantastic job. Once she is done, I hope I will have a draft of the sequel to throw her way as well. It has been a slow process but I think it has been very good.

In terms of what an author has to work with, I really like the simplicity of the Kobo and Nook author interfaces. They are simple and straightforward. Amazon's are very good and offer much deeper details. Google Play is surprisingly the worst of the bunch. To find out your sales, you have to run a report and open it in Excel. There is not a web interface to show you your sales for the day. There are three reports to choose from.

My attempts to go live on iTunes has been a complete non-starter. In order to upload a book you have to have a mac and their publishing software. It took longer to get to the point where I could (if I had a Mac) upload than any of the others. Amazon by far was the simplest and easiest to get up and going with.

The other site that I originally had the book on was DriveThroughFiction. It is great in terms of reporting that is available. Definitely more cumbersome than Amazon, Nook or Kobo but still better than iTunes. I just brought that listing back alive today.