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Numbers

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Want to know what a year in the sales life of a very small-time author looks like? Let me nerd out about numbers for you.

Due to several factors,  mostly relating to my retirement last year, 2026 has been the first year I've made a serious push to participate in in-person book sales at events, mostly local Pride events and book fairs. Since the in-person season has come to a close, I thought I'd share what that looks like for a small author who doesn't do nearly enough book promotion. (I plan to work on that, but it's the hardest part for me.)

I'm a numbers geek. I like tracking and trending things. Crunching data is one of my self-soothing mechanisms. Twice a year, I get the cold hard feedback on how my books are selling. There are indicators I can follow on a more day-to-day basis: review numbers at Amazon and Goodreads, sales numbers at Amazon (though I can only approximate them based on fluctuations in the sales ranking). But in the final analysis, there's data that's only available from the semi-annual royalty statement.

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