Projections and Goals for E-book Launches | E-publishing | Writing Forum

I don't generally set month to month sales goals for my e-books. Then again, I don't heavily promote them. I tend to let word of mouth marketing do most of the work. That won't always be the case. But they've sold pretty well that way for me. The thing is, I tend to think of them as a blog monetization stream more than independent income sources. So I focus my promotional work on the blogs, and the blogs in turn build the audience and sell the e-books.

I don't see a problem with setting sales goals in and of itself. It just doesn't always make sense. For example, I have a platform where word of mouth works. Not everyone does. You (Ev) focus on fiction. Maybe that tactic makes less sense for authors of fiction whereas a nonfiction author might have more hard stats to pull from when setting goals (easier to say XXXXXX people have some disease and are therefore in the market for a book on the topic than to try to pinpoint who exactly reads one genre or another, or books that might cross genres).

I don't know. I'm just hypothesizing. I imagine I'll set sales goals for my nonfiction book even though I don't for the shorter e-books. But it will be less about agonizing over specific numbers and more about tracking the trends and aiming for improvement (and later knowing when it's time to update the info or put out a new version to get sales back up).

I'm not sure where the 100 number came from, as I haven't written about e-books here in quite a while. My best guess is that I would have used it as an example (such as selling 100 e-books could earn you more than you'd make writing the same amount for low paying clients or content mills). But I wouldn't say 100 should necessarily be their goal. I'm not in the position to tell individual writers what their goals should be. That would depend on their niche, the size of the market, their pricing strategy, and numerous other factors. 

The main thing is just what you said. You should have demand before you release an e-book. If no one would pay for what you have to say about a topic, you can set all the goals in the world but you're going to struggle to reach them. Platform first. After that, you have to customize your own marketing plan. I gave a few examples of tactics they could try to use in this post.

Haha. Just found an lovely typo in that one. Old posts are always fun.  I swear some day I'll actually have time to go back over all the old posts to clean them up. 

Almost everything you do pre-launch is technically a part of platform building anyway. So I'd say check out 30 Ways to Build Your Writer Platform too. It's for freelancers, but all the tips there could apply to authors as well. 

Was there anything specific you were curious about?

It's just a part of the business. I'll get to it eventually. And hiring a proofreader wouldn't work. A lot of them need formatting clean-up more than anything, plus most of the old ones need proper meta data added for better SEO. I go through them now a few at a time based on popularity (so the posts getting the most visits get cleaned up first). 

As for sales figures, your best bet would be to track down sales numbers of similar books. But with e-books (especially in the information product e-book market -- like the nonfiction ones I write), there aren't good stats available to the public. In that case, you can always see if similar authors have shared sales numbers on their blogs. But if you do look for that kind of information, I'd focus on authors in a similar place in their careers. For example, there's no point setting goals based on what a bestselling author did if you're brand new. You're not going to have their reach or marketing budget. So the numbers are moot.