Thanks, Nicholas, for doing the “heavy lifting” and summarizing the Smashwords’ Survey results, here. Question: until today, I read many places that it’s after Book 3 in a series that authors can expect to do better/become more “visible.”
Today, you said Book 5 and I want to tear out my hair (I’m halfway done with Book 3 and have done everything else on that survey already and correctly).
Tell me that “5” was a typo???? Please????
Best to you. Sally
All my author friends spend sleepless nights agonizing over one question: how can I best promote my books? Well, Smashwords recently attempted to answer that question through a survey examining what works and what doesn’t in terms of ebook sales. You can read the whole survey on the Smashwords blog, but, as always, I’ve made a helpful list of the most important (to me) points. So, here are the takeaways from the survey:
- A few titles sell really well, and many don’t sell that well. However, a lot of Smashwords authors earn a good income from their books. This agrees with Hugh Howev’s Author Earning surveys.
- It’s important to climb in sales ranks, as this leads to geometrically increased sales. This is what some people sometimes call reaching a critical mass of readers.
- Readers prefer longer books. A few days ago, a reader gave me 4 stars for The Power of…
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Sally Ember, Ed.D. 
Many thanks for the reblog! And sadly, no; most people nowadays say you need 5 books for a series to succeed… 🙂
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That cannot be good news for trilogy or four-volume series writers!
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To be honest, I think this applies to new authors more than anything. 🙂
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