Zero Sales Since June 2023

 

Updated cover for U-1215 Smashwords version

Sales for U-1215 has become zero since June of this year. It's strange because I had consistent sales almost every month prior to this.

Quarterly sales of U-1215 from 2016 to 2023

I don't know what happened so I sent off an inquiry to Smashwords. They said that it's probably due to a "long tail distribution." What is that?

A long tail distribution is a type of statistical distribution that seems to explain what probably happened to my book.

A book may do very well at the beginning but over time, will start to slump, meaning sales will start to slow down. There may be many reasons why this happens so I won't try to give examples. Eventually, sales drops to a much lower level than at the start and it may drop down to zero or stay at a low level indefinitely.

If a book is very well written, sales may increase sharply and then plateau after some time. In this case the vertical part of the long tail refers to increase in sales rather than the total sales.

I'm not sure if this is the case with U-1215. If you look at the quarterly sales chart, sales started to increase in 2018 and did very well during the pandemic years (2020-2022). In 2022 it seemed as if the sales volume was starting to go down but in the first half of 2023, sales spiked (much to my delight) and suddenly dropped to zero (much to my disappointment).

Yesterday, in a bid to try and solve the problem, I changed the cover of U-1215 (Smashwords edition) to see if that will restore sales. 

The last sale was in June 2023. It's almost December 2023 and the sales report is still zero. Is this a long tail distribution phenomena? I have no idea. (".)

Update 08 Feb 2024: 

In December, I received a notification that I had a sale, six months after the last, and received $2.05 in my Paypal account. There have been no other sales since then. I need to write another novel but I'm not getting any ideas at the moment. (".)