One thing a lot of self published erotica authors don’t do is to analyze their sales data.
Yes, I know it can be tedious and a little boring sometimes. However, it is a great opportunity to improve your sales.
In fact, I’ve used some of the strategies I’m about to share with you to increase my sales by over 10%.
If you ever watched Shark Tank you’ll hear the judges say “know your numbers” over and over again. What they mean is, you should know what makes your business tick.
Selling erotica on Amazon is no different. If you can figure out what makes your publishing business tick, you can easily improve sales without much effort.
The #1 tool to analyze Amazon KDP sales data
As much as I love Amazon, I can’t love the KDP sales dashboard too much. I don’t think they have enough tools to help publishers/authors analyze sales.
That’s why I LOVE Book Report.
Book Report is a great tool that organizes your KDP sales into easy to understand graphs, charts, and numbers.
The great thing is if you make less than $1,000 per month on Amazon KDP, Book Report is 100% Free.
If you make more than $1,000 per month, Book Report costs $19 per month – but hey, if you’re making that kind of money, you can afford it!
Book Report analyzes your kindle sales and makes it very easy to see what is going on.
Book Report will:
- Summarize your daily sales
- Aggregate weekly, monthly, and yearly sales into charts
- And show which books are your hottest seller
I look at my Book Report a few times a week to search for trends.
How to analyze Amazon KDP sales data
When I’m looking through my sales data, I’m looking for a few things.
First, I obviously want to know which books are my best sellers.
Second, I want to know which books are my worst sellers?
By figuring out which books are doing well and which aren’t you can begin to analyze why that is.
Is it the book cover? Maybe it’s the keywords or maybe the description. Obviously, you want to try to copy the success of the books that did well.
Another thing you want to look for is the day of the week where you generate the most sales (on average).
One underrated thing most authors don’t do is average out their daily sales. I do this so I can see what day is the best to publish on.
I find that weekends are the best time (I typically see a 5 – 10% increase in sales from Friday through Monday.
One last thing to note is you should wait for at least 3 months of sales data before doing a big dive like this.
Bundles vs. Single stories
One final exercise I like to do is compare the sales of my bundles and single stories.
If you have been a long-time newsletter subscriber, you’ll know that I love bundles. Bundles are a great way to generate extra sales on old books without actually writing new content.
Now, obviously you should only bundle books sparingly.
But nevertheless, bundles can be a great money maker.
I like to see which bundles are selling the best and then try to bundle similar books within that niche. If all goes well, the new bundle should sell a ton of copies!
Final thoughts on analyzing sales data
Overall, analyzing Amazon KDP sales data is a really important part of being a great erotica self published author. It doesn’t really take much time (a few hours every few weeks) and you’ll be able to make meaningful adjustments that will boost your sales. Give it a try and I’m sure you’ll be surprised at the results!