Tracking Sales Without Losing Your Mind

by @JeffeKennedy

This week's topic - Tracking Sales: Do You Do It and How? - is apropos as I have a book release tomorrow. Yes, Rogue's Paradise, the third book in the Covenant of Thorns series, comes out Monday, September 8!

A book release day can be so fraught. It's the final goodbye to the book in many ways - like sending your kid off to college or waving farewell on their wedding day. You're full of hopes and dreams for them and also teeming with nervous dread that something awful will happen. With a book, of course, a huge part of this is WILL IT SELL?

It's the inescapable metric, particularly for those of us who are not independently wealthy and are trying to make a self-supporting career of writing. At the same time, tracking sales feels - to me - like focusing on the wrong thing.

I've been having this ongoing conversation lately with my friend, Anne Calhoun. About making career decisions and what our goals as writers really are. Both of us agree that, if it were all about making money for us, we'd be stockbrokers. There are easier ways to make a lot of money. Last week on Word Whores, too, I talked about valuing personal happiness and how I work towards that. Part of that for me is not focusing too hard on sales.

So the answer to the first part of the question is, I don't track very closely. I don't try for real time much at all. Sometimes I see my Amazon ranking if someone points me there, and that's because it's good news. Really, I only want to see the happy-making stuff. Like when a bunch of tweets alerted me to Rogue's Pawn, book one in the Covenant of Thorns series, making #2 in Fantasy Romance on Amazon. After Dean Koontz, well-known Fantasy Romance author. *cough*

I sometimes look at the Amazon rankings for book one in my Twelve Kingdoms series, The Mark of the Tala, because I continue to be bemused - and pleasantly surprised - by how high the rankings are. There are a lot of people out there who perform the dubious alchemy of translating Almighty Amazon's sales rankings to copies sold and dollars generated, but I am not one.

That said, I *am* the Spreadsheet Queen. I do track my sales there, both by book and overall totals. I have charts that show which venues sell the most of each book and that track my sales by month (where I have that much detail - some of my royalties are reported quarterly or longer) for copies sold and my revenue. It's gotten more complicated now that the statements are funneled through my agency as well, but I input all the data. The most interesting metric is one I set up that calculates the total amount of money a book has earned for me divided by the number of days elapsed since its release. This gives me essentially a "dollars per day" metric. This ranges from, as of this posting, $100/day for a book I received an advance for (which complicates things), to $4/day real time sales for my longest-published book, to $0.09/day for my poorest performer. I like that way of parsing things, because it gives me a more objective sense of which books earn the best.

But I still love each and every one. I cry at all their weddings and graduations.

Wacky Sidekicks - the Barnacles of Fantasy

The topic of the week here at the Bordello concerns groups, much like our own. We'll be talking about The Protagonist's Posse: Who Are They, Why Are They There, How Many Is Too Many?

It made me think of this  picture, from a family birthday celebration in Galveston. As the protagonist of my own life, I'm often by myself, or go about as a couple, with David. Far less frequently am I part of a group. This is part of the Introvert Way, I suspect. My stories reflect this, focusing tightly on the protagonist and her lover. (I'm pretty sure all of my protagonists so far have been female.)

This is particularly true of my romances. I very much like to focus on the couple and their developing relationship. In fact, Publisher's Weekly gave my most recent romance, GOING UNDER, a terrific review that hit all the right notes for me, but added at the end "The secondary characters, however, are little more than archetypes..." A comment that left me bemused as I'd never intended the secondary characters to be much more than foils. The story is about my heroine and her relationship with the hero.

In fantasy, however, my heroines seem to accumulate connections like an ocean-going vessel accretes barnacles over time. I don't plan it that way - (faithful readers know I don't plan much of anything) - the characters just turn up and insist on having their part in the tapestry. That word, tapestry, might be a key difference. My romances tend to be more portraits, whereas the fantasies are bigger pictures, with more complex parameters.

In Covenant of Thorns, which finishes with ROGUE'S PARADISE on September 8, my heroine has a substantial posse of wacky sidekicks by the end. This is vivid in my brain, because they all end up assembling for the final conflict. Due to the snarky worlds reflecting upon worlds nature of that series, she even refers to them as her wacky sidekicks, which amuses me no end.

In the Twelve Kingdoms series, I knew more from the first book who the ensemble cast would be. The premise is there from the beginning: the high king, three daughters, their lovers and a companion who is faithful to all three. However, by the time I finished the third book, THE TALON OF THE HAWK, when I turned the overall series arc over, I found a hell of a lot of barnacles on that hull, too.

So, to answer the question of who they are and why are they there - I think the answer is that they're who the protagonists need to complete their journeys. Much like the Buddhist concept that the people we brush up against all have an effect on our lives, the heroine's posse are those who hand her the keys to the puzzle of her life. In a romance, the unlocking falls to a lover and possibly a trusted friend. In fantasy, the puzzles are larger, more complex and require many more hands to work the wheels of the machine.

As for how many is too many? When there are more hands than wheels, more keys than locks. When the weight of the barnacles becomes a drag and threatens to sink the ship.

But then, I'm an intuitive writer, not an analytical one.

All this said, I'm ending on a bit of a Promo Ho plea. If you're a fan of the Twelve Kingdoms books, there appears to be a good chance I could do three more after this. But a great deal depends on presales of book 2, THE TEARS OF THE ROSE. (I know - I hate this. Blerf.) So, I'm drumming up a bit of social media support here. Kind of an interesting idea, called a Thunderclap. If you feel like playing, please do! Or if  you're so inclined, and you want to pre-order (bless you!) you can at these links:

for paper:
Amazon, B&N, BAM, IndieBound, Bookish.com, Target, Walmart

for ebook:
amazonkindle, Apple, Google, Kobo, Nook

Thank you all and may your barnacles be only the best!

Experiments and a Sneak Peek from ROGUE'S PARADISE

My colleague/friend/boss, Laurie, visited us in Santa Fe this weekend. She and I went on a whirlwind road trip to Oklahoma City to pitch a scope of work for a proposed project and then she spent a couple of days with us. It's always fun to have people visit, because we go out and hit the sights in a different way than we otherwise do.

(Read: crucial errands and otherwise pretty much never leaving the house.)

We took her to the San Marcos Cafe (and Feed Store), which is this very funky, out of the way restaurant. Not the usual Santa Fe scene. Not just because there are peacocks in the desert.

The word of the week is experiment. Which should make it an entertaining week, as I anticipate much experimenting.

However, the word makes ME think of one person: Gwynn, the heroine of my Covenant of Thorns trilogy. She's a scientist by inclination, training and profession - even if she has become a sorceress after being trapped in Faerie. She frames her observations in terms of hypotheses and experiments, a mental discipline that helps her wrestle with the whimsical and horrific vagaries of the magically alien world she's found herself in.

Coincidentally (is anything TRULY coincidental??), yesterday I received copy edits for book 3 of the trilogy, Rogue's Paradise. People who've been following the series know (or hope!) that this book will see the culmination of Gwynn's complex, frequently difficult, and always passionate relationship with the fae noble, Rogue. After many adventures together, they've finally gotten to a point where they understand each other better.

Which means, he often teases her now about her scientific thinking - which he can usually hear quite clearly from her thoughts. I had a lot of fun with this.

So, here are a few sneak peeks, that I hope are not spoilery. But - FAIR WARNING - if you don't want any spoileryness (yes, that's a word) at all, stop now!

*  *  *

Going back to the original section, I sketched the facial pattern as it had been the last time I remembered looking. When had that been? Back at Walter’s castle maybe. I should have kept a better record of it. But there hadn’t been that much to it—a curl on my temple, a suggestion of branches, a hint of a curved claw at the high point of my cheekbone.

“There she is.” Rogue’s hands caressed my bare shoulders, soothing my little start of surprise. “My scientist in her natural habitat.”

I turned my head to look up at him. “You listen to my thoughts more than is healthy.”

“But I find you fascinating, my studious Gwynn.” He leaned down and kissed me, a sweet kiss that rapidly deepened.

*  *  *

I traced another line, that forked over his abdomen—like walking a meditation maze—and thought back to the moment when the inspiration had hit me to tell Rogue to shift into the Dog, which was more like setting it free from his flesh than anything, to shake Titania’s grip on his mind. “Because the Dog can cross the Veil and Titania cannot. Therefore, the Dog possesses an ability that transcends her. Also the Dog isn’t bound by vows and agreements—thus it logically follows that the Dog is beyond her reach.”

“Only to your mind.” He sounded admiring, which I secretly loved.

“Do you think my cat will be the same way?”

“It logically follows,” he replied, making me laugh. “We can experiment some more.”

My face flushed hot at the intimate reminder of how he’d played with me. Learning me.

*  *  * this one is somewhat explicit (though smexiest part is redacted) *  *  *

“No thinking,” he instructed. “I have an experiment to perform.”

...

“Now what would my Gwynn say?” he mused. “My hypothesis is that you can do this again. Over and over. I theorize that even you will stop thinking. What say you?”

I glared at him, hovering on the edge of another climax, yet suspended there, exactly where he wanted me. “I say you can’t have two hypotheses.”

He laughed, low and sinister. “Can’t I? I think I can have whatever I want.”

*  *  *

See? Now you, too, will never think of the word "experiment" the same way, ever again. You're welcome.