Rotisserie Cookbook Update

I want to apologize in advance. This post is "inside baseball" about my self-publishing adventure. Today was supposed to be a story about the glories of fall grilling, with colorful descriptions of leaves falling around me. That will have to wait. I screwed up my domain name transfer over the weekend, and spent my blogging time trying to get DadCooksDinner.com back on the air. I hope all the problems are solved. It takes a while for the changes to travel to Domain Name Servers across the globe. Hopefully things have settled down by the time you read this.

I need to celebrate. My cookbook has earned enough money to break even. I actually covered my expenses! I have a stack of receipts for the IRS - from lights for trussing videos, proof copies, and review editions. My biggest expense? Meat. It took a lot of roasts to test the recipes. But every copy I sell from now on goes towards profits. Whoo hoo!

Well, OK, this does mean I worked six months for free. But I can finally calculate an hourly wage on the book. Hold on, I just sold a copy - what's $3 divided by six months? (On second thought, don't tell me.) I'm counting on the long tail of sales to actually earn me some money. Let's just say...I can't quit my day job any time soon.
Step 1: Self publish niche cookbook about rotisserie grilling. Step 2: ? Step 3: Profit!

Now for some statistics. After my Kindle cookbooks rant, I was sure the Kindle edition would outsell all the others. The Kindle edition (like my other eBook editions) sells for $5; the paperback is $10. The Kindle version has color pictures, unlike the black-and-white paperback. But…paper cookbooks aren't as dead as I thought they were. The paperback just caught and passed the Kindle edition in sales, even though the Kindle edition had a month's head start.

Currently, my sales are about 50% paperback, 30% Kindle, and 20% Apple iBooks edition. I'm impressed at how well the iBooks version is selling, considering it only is only readable on Apple iDevices. The Nook edition, however...sales are slightly greater than zero percent, but not by much.

Geographically, 90% of my sales are in the US, the remaining 10% are from England, with an occasional sale in the Eurozone.

What does this all mean? I have no idea. But I love my own little window on the publishing world.

When I released the cookbook, I was #1 in the Kindle Outdoor Cooking category...for a brief moment. (I should have taken a screen shot.) Now I bounce around the top 100, and the paperback is usually in the top 100 in the Barbecuing and Grilling category. Do I spend too much time obsessing over my Amazon rankings? Of course I do.

Thank you for listening to me toot my own horn. And thank you for buying my book, and reading this blog. I wouldn't be writing if you weren't out there reading.

What do you think? Questions? Other ideas? Leave them in the comments section below.

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Check out my cookbook, Rotisserie Grilling. Everything you could ask about the rotisserie, plus 50 (mostly) new recipes to get you cooking. It's a Kindle e-book, so you can download it and start reading immediately!

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