Consider Us Even : Two months in

It was two months ago today that I uploaded Consider Us Even to Smashwords. I didn't know what would come of it. I hoped it would do well. I hoped it would get people clamoring to read Chasing Filthy Lucre.

So far there's been very little clamoring, but overall I'm happy. As of today 207 people had downloaded the book and 10 people had added it to their Smashwords library. That's 217 people who thought enough of it to take the time to at least download it or mark it as something they want to read. That's roughly three people a day. Not too bad.

And I have two people say publicly that they liked it. First was a very glowing review from Daryl Sedore. I posted that here. The second was Sabrina Ogden, who told people who read her blog about the book and how to get a Smashwords account so they could read it for themselves. Then she graciously gave me a day on her blog for a guest post. Got to interact with a few of her readers and they seemed excited about the book.

I may be thinking too much of my little story, but I'd imagine that if the story could be on one of the more popular sites -- like Amazon or Barnes and Noble -- I'd have more downloads. Folks looking for ebooks go to those sites more often because they have ereaders associated with them.

Want to run some numbers? I do. If I were to have charged 99 cents for this story and had the same number of downloads (and I know that charging for the story would actually reduce the number of people who downloaded a copy) then I would have earned $204.93 total. Smashwords pays a royalty of 85 percent on books sold through them. That means I would have made $174. 19 so far. Not much, I know that. But the key to success in the ebook world, at least from what I have been able to tell, is volume on my end and on the readers end. I need to have several books available. So if I had five books available and they all had the same modest success, I would have made more than $800 by now. That doesn't sound ad bad, does it? Not to me at least.

I promised a few weeks ago that I wouldn't turn this blog into nothing but updates on Consider Us Even, and I'm going to stick to that. I just figured that today was a good day for an update.