In the last post (Here) I tried to graphically present how many ebook sales per month you could roughly expect for a particular sales ranking. This was fine for those shifting 1000’s a month. For those with a sales rank under 10,000 it was useless. The resolution on the graph was simply not up to displaying the highs as well as the lows. The long tail ebook sales rank in the USA just blurred into the x-axis.
Here’s long tail sales rank in USA in excess of 10,000.
You can see the very rapid rate of sale decline with increasing sales rank. It is easier to get a gauge on this by using a logarithmic scale on the x axis (Sales Rank)
The (even longer) Long Tail
Again we lose resolution for those on a sale rank higher than about 100,000. So here is the even longer tail.
What this tells us is that to sell one ebook a day you need a sale rank of around about 125,000.
If you have a sales rank of 1,000,000 then you will be selling about 30 ebooks a year. If the sale rank is 2,000,000 then you will be at the end of the long tail. You will be selling around 15 ebooks a year.
Bear in mind that at these very low sales it is highly likely that a couple of sales will massively shift that sales rank for a short period of time. So these estimates are very much for sales figures over a long time – like a year.
There are over 5 million ebooks on Amazon. So it would militate that over a year a large number of these ebooks, (maybe half or more) are selling virtually no copies at all.
This of course, only applies to the long tale sales rank USA. Ebook sales in the UK are approximately one fifth of those in the USA. As you can imagine this significantly changes the number of books you can expect to sell for a given (UK) sales rank. See my next post for some more graphs. This time relating to UK ebook sales.
Here’s the link to the next post: eBook Sales Rank for the UK
Thanks for your time.
Regards
Chalkie
Googlegroups.com says:
Wonderful blog! Do you have any tips and hints for aspiring
writers? I’m planning to start my own blog soon but I’m a little lost on everything.
Would you recommend starting with a free platform like
Wordpress or go for a paid option? There are so many options out there
that I’m completely overwhelmed .. Any ideas?
Thanks a lot!
Chalkie says:
Hi,
Sorry about the delay in replying. This blog got pushed to the back burner for some time but I will be updating it again soon (when I transfer it to a reliable host).
Sure.
Your Q’s are good ones.
This blog is actually a pretty good example of how things can go wrong!
At the time of writing this, the response times are so dreadful everyone gets bored waiting for the site to come up and so it loses a lot of traffic. All thanks to a host that has sadly gone down the pan over the last two years.
So the first thing I’d suggest is get a host that has lots of credible reviews (see example: https://uk.pcmag.com/web-hosting-services/40055/the-best-cheap-web-hosting-services + search on google for other as well aka “web host reviews 2018”)
I am literally about to move this site (today or tomorrow) so I’ll get back to you when I have and see if there’s a suggestion or two I can make. As you can probably gather my current host (hostpapa – as today 31/12/18) is NOT recommended.
Thanks for the query.
Regards
Chalkie