The Glory Of A Sale

Yes, I am talking in the singular. One. Uno and whatever the first and the lowest number is in other languages.

As many fellow indie writers will no doubt attest to, it’s painfully easy to go days, sometimes weeks, without the merest sniff of a single sale.

Those stubborn, obstinate goose eggs that refuse to hatch on the sales dashboard become a source of frustration. Annoyance. Why won’t they go away?

But when they do, boy, is the world a completely different place. You feel when you go out and walk the dog that someone might stop you and ask for your signature. All on the back of one sale. Whether its page reads or freebie downloads, or please, yes please a bona fide sale, just one, it has the power to make all the effort of writing and the suffering of not seeing sales worthwhile.

For a while.

Because most sales dashboards only display daily stats. You can see how many copies you’ve shifted (or not) today and yesterday. But if you go a couple of days without any activity, you’ll be back to seeing zeros across the board.

That’s why it’s important to cherish those fleeting moments of success. Moments when someone has decided to invest their hard-earned in your hard work. They could have chosen any one of another ten million books, but they chose yours. Why? It’s not your place to question, merely to accept that for a moment in time, yours was the writing they wanted to read. Yours was the book they wanted to buy.

Whether it’s your only sale of the week, month, or year, it was a sale nonetheless. And no one can take that away from you, unless we get into the murky waters of refunds, which I don’t want to do here. 

Let’s wallow instead in a world of positivity. Big name authors will scoff at single-figure sales, and so they should. We’re not likely to worry anyone whose work reaches the lofty heights of the best selling lists. But as any writer knows, it’s possible to infiltrate the big players with even a modest amount of sales, even if it’s just for a few hours.

Allow me to prove this by ending with a reminiscence about the time in December 2024, when my horror short novel The Ghost of Christmas Threeve rose to just outside the top ten best sellers in the Young Adult category, despite having zero reviews (evidence below). What a joyous hour that was. An hour I spent alongside the great Edgar Allan Poe in the sales charts. An hour in which even the mighty Stephen King couldn’t match my sales.

What glory!