Dead Weight has been available for a few weeks now and it’s already profitable. That’s something a lot of authors, let alone first-time ones, cannot state, ever, and so I’m obviously ridiculously grateful. I figure this puts me in a select group of debut writers, especially self-published ones, who make any money at all. I’m really lucky, particularly since I’ve gone about this business all wrong from the start. Case in point, who the eff releases their book and then copyedits it retroactively? A moron, that’s who.

Luck doesn’t begin to cover it, though. What made all the difference for me was a blessing from the gods. Apple iBooks picked up Dead Weight and featured it on the front page of their store in the ‘popular fiction’ section. When that happened, my sales spiked, and they have continued steadily. I won’t be sailing the seas alongside King Trump in my newly-purchased yacht any time soon, but I have a steady stream of incidental income, and more important, people are reading and reviewing the book. Mostly positive reviews, too, and I’m going to dedicate another post to that.

Without going into sales specifics, take a look at these two charts. One, iBooks, is a relatively healthy graphic showing normal decline and growth. The other, Amazon, with only word of mouth in support, is all over the place, but the overall performance hugs zero. So far, my iBooks sales have outperformed Amazon by a margin of ten-to-one.

iBooks:

Amazon: 

In the Amazon chart, the red line represents eBook and the black paperback sales. The biggest surprise here is that people buy more paperbacks than I figured they might.

I think I’m rapidly headed toward a future in which Dead Weight rotates out of iBooks featuring, and then these charts will probably look similar and my sales will plummet. At that point, I will actually have to do some real marketing and consider price drops for future opportunities. But I’m relishing the interim.