The Class System

It seems to me that there are two kinds of ebook buyers. There is the die hard read a book every few weeks reader. And there is the read every once in a while or when the weather is bad reader. When I look at my amazon and Barnes & Noble sales a few of things pop out at me.

The die hard readers read all types of books by all types of authors. But it looks like they tend to go after top sellers and or books from traditional publishers. Many of them will read indie authors books but some won't. I think this is why indie sales go down in the summer. Amazon is still selling lots of book, just not as many indie ones.

In the winter or when there is a spat of bad weekend weather, my sales and sales ranks go up.  This is when the every once and a while readers start to buy. This crowd seems to be more willing to give indie authors a try.

The weather was nice in NYC this weekend and it seems I couldn't give my books away. But on rainy weekends my sales seemed to jump even in the summer.

This may seem obvious to most of us, but some times we don't do things based on observations. More often than not our actions are based on emotions. Many writers got depressed and talked about wanting to give up during the summer. The extra competition, plus the fact that the die hard readers weren't that supportive of indie authors made them FEEL that it wasn't worth it. They stopped writing.

Now when sales for indies pick up in the winter they won't be ready with new books. They'll hear about all the indie ebooks that are selling and rush to write. The problem will be though, their books won't be finished until the spring when indie sales start to go down again. Again they'll be flooding the market when our type of books are not in season. Publishing like many other businesses is subject to seasonal cycles.

Just like there are two classes of regular readers, there are two classes of indie writers. Those that can get regular sales and those that can't. Both groups know that writing is an art. But only one seems to realize that publishing is a business.