Recently we became able to bring up a graphic of all of the books we’ve sold through Amazon.com since we started this crazy ride. We officially created our KDP account at some point in 2008. In the very beginning, it was just me. David Dodd hadn’t come on board yet, and you’ll see in the first image that most of the sales were my own books. In 2009 we made our unauspiciuos start with a grand total of nine. What I want this short series of posts to get across is how frighteningly fast this business grew. It was just supposed to be me, selling my out of print books. In 2009, that’s all it was.
2010 was a jump. It was about this time that David Dodd and I began reaching out to the authors we knew and soliciting those who might be intersted in bringing their backlists to eBook. Dave has a huge collection of paperback books… not missing much horror. A lot of people were still skeptical about eBooks, whether they would last or be a phase, but there was enough interest to keep us busy. And keep in mind, this is only Amazon.com. In the very early days of Nook we had some amazing successes with their promotions that got you into their weekly newsletters. Amazon is a good gauge for the type of growth we experienced though. We added Chet Williamson, Bill Crider, Ronald Kelly and Steve Savile in the early days. You can see the jump from 9 sales to 2,106 in just a year. Still small numbers… but believe me when I say hold onto your hats. This is also where we began to perfect our earliest methods of scanning old books back into text. There were definitely growing pains.
During the early days, promotional opportunities came and went. Many authors didn’t have much of a web presence. Most didn’t have digital or even a manuscript copy of their old titles. Every post we made on popular message boards got more responses hating on eBooks and unrelated to the what we were posting about they did interest. Our answer was to continue to grow. We learned better formatting, and the other Dave began to teach himself to create covers in Photoshop. We were off the to the races. The next post will cover 2011 and 2012. As we push through, remember that the total number of sales is not necessarily fully aligned with the total dollars earned. There were free Bookbubs that (at the time) counted as sales. There were additions like the Stargate Books we picked up, cut in half, and eventually lost the rights to… growing pains. We’ll cover the types of books that were the most trouble, the things that were game changers. We’ve been at this a long time. Stay tuned!
And don’t forget – even though only a few books are listed on our Review Arc tab (top of the page) you can request a digital review copy through that page for ANY of our titles. We can’t guarantee all will be available, or the quantities that we’ll have, but we want readers, reviewers, and new customers. Sign up for our newsletter on the right. And thanks for reading.
David & David
Wilson & Dodd