End of Tour Report

So the grand blog tour is over.  As my brain is very tired, I confess, I’m quite glad.  I had some fabulous hosts.  So let’s do a recap:

• Winner of most faithful follower, who commented on almost EVERY post: Deniz!
• Winner of most prolific host, who had me guest/crosspost on (I think) 7 blogs: NL Gervasio!
• Winner most amazing/flattering review (on a blog I mean): Shannon Collins!

Now, let’s talk results.

Prior to the tour, I’d sold 41 copies in the 5 weeks Forsaken By Shadow was out.  I am happy to report that for the month of May I sold 59 copies, bringing my total known sales to 100 copies! I am ecstatic.  Thanks to all of you who’ve supported me! I know I’ve sold a few copies on Barnes and Noble, as my ranking has been climbing (albeit very slowly), but I don’t have those confirmed yet.  I did get it confirmed from a Twitter friend that it really IS in the iBookstore.  It hasn’t shown up at Kobo or Sony yet, though it shipped quite a while ago.  Not sure what’s up with that, but it’ll be there eventually.

Rankings:  Prior to the tour I swung wildly, ranging anywhere from a low somewhere in the 80k range to a typical high occasionally in the teens.  During the final week of the tour, I maintained a fairly steady ranking below 10k (with a few dips).  After the last burst of sales last night, I achieved my highest ranking yet (though I expect that to drop again).  It may have been higher at midnight, but my little head was asleep on my pillow.  (UPDATED with higher ranking from this morning)

Also, my conversion rate. When I first released Forsaken By Shadow I had a crazy high conversion rate in the 80% range because almost everyone who bought it at first was a friend helping me out.  That was artificially inflated.  It dropped to a low of 48%.  Post tour, my conversion rate (the whole what customers ultimately buy after viewing my book thing), is 62%.

I’ve seen a 12% increase in blog traffic from last month.  My name has finally trumped the post I wrote opining about tramp stamp, which I consider to be a massive improvement.

Now, Amazon reviews.  I can’t remember where I started the month, but I’ve had a lovely response to the blog contest.  We’re up to 16 reviews posted, with a few more incoming.  The contest will continue to run until we get to twenty, then I’ll draw a winner from all the entrants.

In other news, I met my MayNoWriMo goal of 10k and a full plot on Revelation, which made me very happy, considering that life kicked me in the tush.  In even more positive news, the poison oak is finally clearing up, and I have to declare my eternal love for Ivarest, which did more in 12 hours today than a zillion other products since last weekend.  Yay for no itching!

Oh, and as proof that I have arrived as an author, Forsaken By Shadow is being requested on torrent sites.  My response was to register and post a response with all the legitimate places to purchase, as well as more pimpage for my blog contest.  Heck, if Joe Konrath is to be believed, it might even boost my sales.  He’s certainly putting his books where his mouth is. I’ll be interested to see the end results of his latest experiment.

Either way, I have to say, I feel that mine was a success.

Some things that might have improved my results. Things could always be better.  One of the number one things that would have improved my results would have been picking a month without a major holiday.  Weekends are huge buying times (at least from what I can tell) and both Mother’s Day and Memorial Day weekends took a hit on purchases because folks were off doing things other than reading.  I could have targeted blogs with a wider audience.  Most of my hosts were exactly like me–aspiring or newbie authors still getting a handle on stuff.  But I’m good with that.  I hope they’ll let me return the favor and host them sometime.  I could have given a tutorial on scheduling blog posts.  Apparently a lot of folks either don’t know that you CAN do this or how to do it, though I have no idea how I’d have gone about this without insulting anybody’s intelligence.  But it would have helped things go live at the appropriate time despite the inevitable life and technological disasters that befell assorted hosts.  But hey, live and learn.  Everybody bent over backwards to fix it when things went wrong, so I certainly have nothing to complain about!  Offering free review copies sooner.  This didn’t occur to me until the month was more than half over when Zoe did it on her blog and had good results.  I’ll definitely be doing this as soon as Revelation comes out.

I’m sure there were others, but I’m not caffeinated yet, so that’s all I can think of so far.