Status Report: Best Launch Ever

[renegadefolkhero]

I'm so annoyed lol.

I recently yeeted a full novel. Meaning, I dropped the book, did a newsletter announcement, and walked away with essentially no promo. There was no anticipatory chatter or anything. I've yeeted a few shorts and novellas to this point, but not a full novel.

It was my best launch by a significant margin. Best first week, and I sold 70+ books the first month (about $250 in royalties, more than double what my last novel earned) during a time of year my sales typically run a little dry. It continues to sell so I would not be surprised if it ends up being my bestselling book on this pen.

• I figured I'd be lucky to move 20-30 copies in a month and it would drop like a stone after that, so I had low expectations.
• I did not put this book on Amazon. Even though it's technically Amazon-safe and people have published far riskier books there, it skirts close enough to known gray areas I didn't think it was worth it.
• It is not in any of the niches I traditionally see the best sales in
• It's not on Goodreads/etc so there's no chatter, no reviews, I have NO IDEA if readers were satisfied with this book.
• I did whatever the fuck I wanted, so it's a kitchen sink of things I think are funny, sexy, or deranged. My goal was to do something different because I was dissatisfied with what I'd read.
• I got no NL signups but I didn't include a call to action (CTA) in the back of the book BECAUSE I DIDN'T THINK IT WOULD SELL so that might not mean anything. Organic NL signups without any kind of CTA & cookie are rare.

Postmortems suck in a situation like this. I have no takeaways, man. The only thing it had going for it, IMO, was the length. It's the longest book on this pen. No reviews and no active marketing, so that means the passive marketing sold it. I GUESS?

So I'm annoyed on two fronts. First is I don't know why it sold better. Second, this seems to confirm allllll that launch work and $$$ I spent before amounted to jack squat.

The conventional wisdom is that novels sell better, and longer novels sell better than shorter ones (understanding the people saying this are often in KU, which rewards length). Erom is not a conventional genre, and I traditionally write a pretty tight book, but I think I might loosen up a bit for the next one, aim for higher WC, and be less ruthless with my edits.

I have a hard time NOT editing the bejesus out of a book, even when it's a "this won't sell" weird-ass erom. I would like to get more comfortable with less work for these types of books. Final edits are by far the most tedious part of the process for me, and if I could cut that out and just write, have a good time, and yeet, that would be swell.