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  • Writer's pictureBill

"Profits" From Sale of New Novel

Sales results for paperback of Baby Doe for one month of first quarter of 2021 (publication date--March 1) are in. Royalties are a percentage of the wholesale price of book. Retail price for paperback is $ 15.99, wholesale price is $10.47, so author royalty for each paperback sold is 25% of $10.47 or $2.60 per book.


Ebook sales were negligible since it was published for only the last two weeks of the first quarter of 2021 (on March 14) The wholesale cost of the ebook is $6.37 NS and royalty to author is 50% or $3.18/ebook sold.


Bottom line? Author gets more from sale of ebook than for sale of paperback.


Results of Initial Amazon ads for Baby Doe run by Wheatmark (publisher) that started after publication, March 1, 2021:


Impressions: 131,704 Clicks: 349 CTR (click-through rate): 0.26% Orders: 10 Sales: $153.54 Percentage of ad budget spent: 17%

Impressions are the number of times that your book was shown to potential customers on an Amazon web page. Clicks are the number of times potential customers responded to an impression by clicking through to your book’s Amazon page. CTR (click-through rate) is the percentage of times someone clicked on one of your ads. Orders are the number of times the book was purchased as a result of the campaign. Sales is the dollar amount of the orders attributed to the campaign.

"New campaigns typically are not immediately profitable because it takes several months to find out which keywords do and do not work for your target audience. Wheatmark monitors the campaigns at least twice a month (usually more often), adjusting keywords based on Amazon’s data indicating which search terms prospective book buyers are using."

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