Monitoring the Situation

The atmosphere around the house is very different now that Clenise and I are no longer printing, binding, and shipping books. Not that things are quiet or restful - I have moved on to another book project that turned out to have a very tight deadline, so I've been working pretty steadily since Christmas. The good news, in a way, is that I have to be done with my draft by about January 18, so maybe there will be some breathing room at that point.

In the meantime, I've been monitoring sales of the book about the Leica D-Lux 4. I discovered a way to check on the Lightning Source web site to see how many books have been sold through their print-on-demand operation, and it said that about 215 sold in December, and about 82 in January. That's not bad for this sort of book, in my opinion.  Of course, those are probably the biggest sales times of the years, because of the Christmas holidays, when a good number of people may have gotten the D-Lux 4 camera as a gift and then wanted the book to help them learn how to use it.

There still are not many reviews of the book on Amazon.com.  Yesterday the first somewhat negative review appeared, saying the book is "not very informative"; the reviewer said he was disappointed based on his expectations after reading the earlier reviews.  That's fair; I imagine he is a more advanced user, and wanted more advanced advice. But most readers have reacted favorably; I think more of the people who want camera books are looking for more basic advice. Several of them have left me positive feedback through Amazon Marketplace, because they bought the book directly from me through that channel. I hope some of them may eventually leave reviews on the main Amazon site, where more people will see the reviews.

Today I again suspended my Google AdWords campaign, because, at $25.00 per day, the expense adds up very quickly, and I am not sure how much good it was doing at this point. I'm going to wait and see how sales are affected by stopping that campaign.