In 2014 and 2015, my book sold well on Kindle. They sold the odd copy on Kobo and Smashwords, but mainly on Kindle. Around that time, I was selling 1000-1500 books a month at .99c but now I sell about 1 or 2 a day. Some days I don't sell any.
I remember reading lots of Kindle marketing books when I started out - get the keywords right, and I really benefited from Johnny B Truant and Sean Platt's book "Write, Publish, Repeat." I also read lots of books on writing, which I've commented on elsewhere.
But as 2015 grew old, my sales dwindled. The basic e-book marketing premise then was - create a "funnel book" which is free, then use that to promote your books which aren't free. I had some trouble doing that. One time, Kindle made my best selling book free when I didn't want them to, and when I tried to create a free book by asking them to price match, they politely wrote back and said they didn't have to do that. This is true. No hard feelings, but God loves a trier.
I had a gap in publishing anything, mainly because I didn't write much: I had a new relationship (with Dungeons and Dragons Online).
When DDO and I fell out (don't worry we'll get back together at some time in the future), I turned again to writing and was like what the heck! Look at my sales! I thought it was because of frequency of publication so I published four new stories. Free ebooks went okay, in slightly less numbers that previous years, but the sales stayed near the bottom. Even stuff that had sold well, didn't.
I figured with that Kindle must have an algorithm that favours newly published books. But this didn't seem to work with my new stuff. Of course the new stuff could just be dire, that was certainly on my mind. Still I had good unsolicited reviews both on Kindle and via social media. Then I wondered whether it was the length of the story.
There had been a glut of the so-called Kindle Gold Rushers who put together 1000 words of click-bait crap and sold it for .99c, but Kindle got wise to this and they definitely included something in their algorithm about length. But I have a couple of novel length works which also aren't moving.
So, that left me with the thought that maybe my stuff wasn't selling because it didn't appeal to people.
Then, while trawling through Twitter and the Blogsphere, I came across articles suggesting that all indie e-books were suffering (let's not say all, but most) drops in sales. The problem is that Kindle is so engorged by indie books and that they are not filtered or selected by the agent to publisher selection process, that many are of indifferent quality. People don't know what's good.
I am a man of mature years now. I remember when I was a kid listening to bands there were probably only about 50-100 bands that everyone the world listened to. And in your genre far fewer - so we listened to Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, UFO, then there was Jethro Tull and I liked Horslips (unusual in that in the UK I guess) and then of course Hawkwind, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Wishbone Ash and into Prog land. My friends listened to similar. People into Soul liked their bands. There were bands in the charts but the number overall was small. Now there are millions.
On Soundcloud (oh, yes, deft plug there) now I have some discovered some fantastic bands. Really, really talented, but their listener numbers are small. The Internet has done a wonderful thing for people in that they can get access to an audience, but the potential audience is so huge, your voice is drowned out by noise, even if your voice is lovely.
So maybe we will have to stop thinking we can do it for the money, and just do it for the love of art.
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