It's been a whole week since Due Diligence went live.
During that week I've posted a new blog every day, tweeted and facebooked to spread the word and watched as the sales figures began to rise.
Let's recap.
I worked out, and none of you disagreed, that my book needed to sell about 24,000 copies for my investment in time and money to pay off.
Let's give ourselves a fighting chance, let's allow two whole years for those sales. That's 1000 books a month, about 250 per week. So we have our target.
The point of this exercise was to measure the effect of this blog, allied to Facebook and Twitter. How many could it sell in a week?
First I have to correct the figures for the friends and family effect. Obviously, as soon as they heard that Due Diligence was available, they couldn't resist getting a copy.
These are the ones I know about:
Pete's mother in law
Debbie's dad
Louise
Daragh
Simon's mate
Lesley
Rebecca
Debbie ( a different Debbie to the one whose dad bought it)
Dennis
Paul (Jane's Paul, not Sarah's Paul)
Tina
There's probably a few more family members that haven't bothered to admit they have it yet, so I'll assume three more have been bought by them.
Now for the reveal. The total number of copies sold is....
19
Take away the 14 accounted for above and we're left with...
5
So that's what we've sold through the blog. Three in the US and two in the UK.
I've spent about six hours writing blog posts and a similar amount of time on Twitter. I'm discounting the hours gazing at the Amazon sales report watching for any movement.
So, that's 12 hrs of work at £12 per hour = £144, i.e. £28.80 per book.
There were about 1000 pageviews recorded for the blog over the week, that means 200 visits per sale.
I've been tweeting to my 1,669 followers, so we can call it 340 followers per sale.
Ten tweets a day, say, 1 book every 14 tweets.
So, 24,000 copies will take about 96 years.
There's the numbers. Make of them what you will. Social media promotion is effective but it needs plenty of work.
I'm glad I don't have to do all the marketing myself, I'd have no time to write any more books.
