EDEN: the first week!

It's been seven days since I uploaded my treasured self-published novel Eden onto Amazon's Kindle service. At this time it has sold 71 copies so far and is settling in nicely at around 10 copies per day, which places it around the 6,000 mark in the rankings on Amazon's UK chart. This is all very interesting to me as it gives some kind of perspective on what the rankings really mean to an author watching a particular book.

Remarkably, after just two days, Eden received an unsolicited review from a Top 1000 Amazon reviewer in the USA, who gave a glowing testimony and a 4-star rating.

So far, so good. There has been absolutely no publicity for this title except for me to post here, on my Facebook Fan Page and on Twitter, so many of the initial sales are likely to have been made by fans of the Ethan Warner series. But behind the scenes I've been hard at work sending out review requests to book bloggers on both sides of the Atlantic. So far, I've had three confirm that they will be reviewing Eden ( one had already bought it! ) so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for good reviews, which help to move new titles up the ranking as prospective buyers gain their confidence in a title by the reviews of others.

I think it's fair to assume that my traditional publishing success has given me a better launch-pad than an author starting out from scratch with a self-published title. What I have to do now is build upon that initial success and try to generate momentum around the title - the more positive reviews the book gets, the higher it will climb in the charts, provided I keep working at the publicity side of things.

I think also that the success of The Chimera Secret, which is selling fast at the moment and at the time of writing has eight reviews, all 5-stars, may be helping people to spot my bargain priced thriller on my Amazon Author Page. Speaking of price, it's still at £1.02 - I want it at £0.99, so will tinker again with the pricing structure tonight to get it right.

I'll be keeping that price for the foreseeable future, and watching the ratings with interest to see if the arrival of reviews affects the book's position. I suspect that reaching the top ( if the book can and does ) will be a long-haul rather than a meteoric rise, but it will be worth it for me to have broke through in both the traditional and the digital publishing world...