The Woods Report #3

MY GOD! The Woods has sold 5 copies on amazon and 1 copy on B&N! I'm going to be freakin' RICH!

Yeah, so that's a bit of hyperbole. But hey, the month of March is now over, so consider this the first "end of the month" report. THE WOODS went live on B&N on the afternoon of 3/29 and on Amazon sometime on 3/30, so the six sales are two and half days of B&N and one and a half days of Amazon. Still, there's been no huge surge of hungry readers desperate for my brand new tome -- in fact, Denise is responsible for the lone B&N sale herself, and she's already read it... FWIW, the best sales rank I notice on Amazon was in the 16,000s; on B&N, Denise's purchase pushed it to 325,000 or something like that in sales rank...

I am so going to rule the self-publishing world! Look out, Amanda Hocking!

I'll admit there is a temptation to check every hour or so to see if anyone else has bought the book, but so far I'm resisting gamely (and a good thing, too, since I'd usually be thrown into the Pit of Bookish Despair). As far as working with the two markets: the jury's still out. My first impression is that B&N has the better sales tools, though I've yet to see what each market's monthly sales reports actually look like. No customer reviews are up on either site yet -- don't know if the lack of reviews also has an impact on sales. Maybe I should have seeded a few friendly people with the manuscript???

BTW, I'm not going to report sales every few days -- but as I said in the first report, my intention is to be upfront about how things are going with this little venture in order that others might learn what to expect. I'll give you the sales figures each month, but it won't be until the end of April that we'll have a full month of sales to report.

At the moment, I still haven't heard back from Apple on the application I filled out to provide THE WOODS for iBooks. So that's still hanging fire... C'mon, Apple -- hey, I used to work for you; give me some love! I wonder if I should put it up on Smashwords as well... any thoughts on that?

And that's enough for now. When I have something interesting/new to report, I'll let you know!

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-- learn more about THE WOODS here.
--Buy THE WOODS in Kindle format here from Amazon
--Buy THE WOODS in Nook format here from B&N

Hee

My friend and fellow writer jimhines  sent me this screenshot.  He searched for "Stephen Leigh" on B&N and this is what came up...

My secret career as a sex illustrator has been outed... Man, I should have used a better pseudonym!  :-)