Hi – it's time for another book update!

(As a reminder: I'm planning on sending these updates weekly-ish. If you get sick of them, you can hit "unsubscribe" at the bottom and it won't affect your access to the other freebies I've promised you.)

Pre-order update

I've started receiving weekly pre-order figures, which unhelpfully are always a week behind.

As of a couple of days after the original announcement, there had been 543 orders.

Am I happy with that? I'm not sure yet – I'll want to see the next week's data, to get a sense for whether it totally drops off a cliff after that first spike. (Normally when you're selling anything, you get an influx at the beginning and at the last minute, with very little in the middle.)

Interestingly, 40% of those sales were NOT for the hardback. Most of those 40% were audiobook sales, with some Kindle mixed in .

So where does this leave me in terms of my overall goal?

What does it take to be a best seller?

I mentioned last week that everyone's a best-selling author now: briefly hit the top of an obscure Amazon category, and start bragging. Or don't even bother with that – no-one will ever check!

In the UK, the only list that really matters is the Sunday Times list. I hit #6 on this last for the release of The Price Of Money, which is what allows me to make the "best selling" claim with a relatively clear conscience.

(But it only stuck around on the list for a week, so maybe my conscience shouldn't be that clear.)

Because the world of publishing hasn't moved on much since Gutenberg kicked it off, the Sunday Times list is divided up between hardbacks and paperbacks – with sales of digital copies and audiobooks not counting at all.

This works against me, because my audience leans heavily towards audio (as you can see from the stats I shared) – so for "best seller" purposes, those sales never happened.

And of course, as audiobooks become ever more popular, the chart itself becomes less representative of what books really sell best.

Anyway. On a less moany note, the number of sales you need to get onto the list is also highly dependent on the time of year, with the Christmas run-up being the most competitive and January the least so. This works in my favour.

So: To cut to the numbers, my target for hardback sales specifically is 2,500. According to my editor, based on a typical January sales week that should be enough to land comfortably at around 5 or 6 on the list.

(Probably less than you thought, hey? There really aren't that many hardback sales in general: The Price Of Money has sold way, way more in paperback than it did in hardback despite a lack of any promotional hoopla.)

Pre-orders are included in Week 1 sales, which is why I'm pushing them so hard: it's my only chance of making it onto the chart. This isn't a Prince Harry situation where there will be window displays, plentiful copies on supermarket shelves and other such things that will generate a huge volume of sales in the first week in itself.

So given the proportion of audiobook and digital sales, I need to get up to 4,500-ish total sales to hit the chart.

Does hitting the chart truly matter? Somewhat. It may make retailers more likely to stock more copies, or to display it more prominently.

But I need some kind of goal to push me to do all the promo (which I don't enjoy) and give the book the best possible start in life, so a chart-based goal seems as good as any.

Ultimately though, having a good launch helps but the eventual success of a book is down to whether it's good enough to spread by word of mouth. And... well, there's not much I can do about that now...

That's it for now!

I'll be back next week with another sales update, and I'll talk a bit more about my plans to keep the book riding high beyond the launch itself. This is something I've perfected on past books, which surprisingly few authors seem to have figured out.

Thank you again for your support, and do please spread the word!

Thanks!

Rob