We indie authors can be obsessive stats-checkers. You know how it goes: “It’s been an hour… better check my stats. Maybe I sold another book!
“…Nope. But maybe I’ll have sold one in another hour…”
And on it goes. We tell ourselves not to check. We even realize that it’s a little depressing to check in multiple times every day to see that we haven’t sold any more books. So today let’s think about six things you can do to drive sales of your book instead of obsessively checking your stats.
Create a Social Media Post
It only takes a few minutes to create a social media post. The key to amassing a decent-sized following on any social media platform is quantity and quality, but quality very much depends on what your audience wants. If you haven’t figured out what they like yet, producing a bunch of content is a great way to do research.
If you redirect your stats-checking obsession into writing tweets, posting Instagram pictures, posting on Facebook, recording a vlog, or whatever else you like to do on your author social media accounts, you can generate a bunch of content very quickly.
What should you post? Here are five ideas:
- A link to a positive review of your book.
- A link to an article that inspires you.
- A link to an old blog post you wrote that is still relevant.
- A photo of your author workspace.
- A quick update on what you’re writing today.
Write an Author Newsletter
If you’re following my advice and sending out a monthly author newsletter to keep your mailing list engaged (You do have a mailing list, right?), you know that sometimes it’s difficult to spend time working on writing that monthly update. But if you’re checking your stats obsessively, you have plenty of time to make it happen. Close the stats, open a document, and get it done!
Spend a Few Minutes Finding Reviewers
A steady stream of book reviews is a great way to increase your book sales. If only you had time to find those reviewers—oh wait, you do! Spend the stat-checking time looking for just one more reviewer to contact. There are literally hundreds of bloggers out there doing book reviews. All you need to do is cull through the lists and find the ones who might be interested in your book. If you looked at a couple reviewers’ sites each time you thought about checking stats, you’d have a sizable list of prospects in no time.
And of course, once you have a list of potential reviewers, you can use that time to contact them and get your book’s reviews going.
Schedule a Promotion
Sales are a great way to promote your book, so why not take a couple minutes to set one up? If you have some KDP Countdown days, put ’em to use. The best part of this one is that while you’re on KDP creating a promotion, you can check your stats! 😉
Bonus: Submit your sale to Kindle deal sites. You can do one each time you think about checking your stats.
Optimize Your Book’s Keywords
Optimizing your book’s Kindle keywords can do wonders for its visibility on the Amazon store. The problem? Doing a good job selecting keywords can take a lot of time, since generally you have to manually type all the options into Amazon’s search box and evaluate them. But what if you did just one keyword every time you wanted to check your stats? Soon you’d be through the whole list and have all sorts of data you can use to pick the best keywords.
Work on Your Next Book
Let’s face it: Sometimes the whole stats-checking routine is just procrastination from actually, y’know, writing a book! Put on your big author pants, buckle down, and write that book.
Besides, once you have another book written, you can obsessively check your stats for one more book!
Wrapping Up
Okay, so maybe I’ve been a little bit snarkier than usual in this post, and maybe I’ve insinuated that you have gobs of time lying around that you’re just wasting checking your sales stats. Let’s assume that’s not the case for a minute. Have you noticed that many of the ideas in this post are directly related to boosting your sales? Even if you only check your sales stats once a week, you can still benefit from putting some or all of these ideas into daily practice. These constant small actions build up over time. Be diligent! Your stats will thank you.