Sunshine Deals and Amazon Million Club

As you all can see I'm extremely busy at the moment, and hence not posting. But one of the things I've been doing is analyzing data from the Sunshine Deals (600+ low priced books that ran during the first half of this month. I'll be posting a full analysis at some point but here are some quick notes:

• The promotion was a huge success for the participating publishers - 24 titles went from relative obscurity to breaking the top 100
  
  
• The Sunshine Deals completely changed the make up of the Top 100 as a whole. Usually there are a number of slots occupied by games and periodicals but during the promotion 98% were books. The ratio restored directly after the promotion ended.
  
  
• Indie staples were displaced. John Locke typically had 6 -8 titles in the top 100 but all were displaced during the promotion as readers flocked to buy the newly reduced books. The promotion kicked all 10 of John Locke's titles out of the top 100 and none of them have returned (though his new "how I sold 1 million copies is #3 on the Movers and Shakers list (was 18,039 yesterday and is 51 today) Amanda Hocking's books were pretty much "out of" the top 100 when the promotion hit and is showing similar rankings as Locke (around 105 - 500)
  
  
• The number of Sunshine titles on the list since the promotion (25, 21, 8, 7, 6, 6)
  
  
• The ratio of Sunshine by price was: 10 - $0.99, 7-$1.99, 7- $2.99 (42%, 29%, 29%)
  
  
• Directly after the promotion all books restored to their original price: 2 - under $5, 10 - $5.01 - $8.99, 12 - $9.00-$9.99 (8%, 42%, 50%)
  
  
• 5 days after the end of the promotion 33% of titles reduced their price (1 - $0.99, 3-$1.99, 1-$2.99, 3- $7.69-$9.34)

I'll be doing a more complete accounting later - but this gives you some data to mull over in the meantime.

It was announced today that John Locke became the first indie to reach the 1,000,000 sales mark. He's only the 9th author to do this. I'm going to be reading his book on the subject and blogging about it here - But the secret isn't that hard - write a ton of good books and price them all at $0.99 ;-) Personally I think he left a ton of money on the table and should have raised the price on some of his books but that's just my opinion.

Authors in the 1,000,000+ club:

• Stieg Larsson
• James Patterson
• Nora Roberts
• Charlaine Harris
• Lee Child
• Suzanne Collins
• Michael Connelly
• John Locke
  

Well that's all for now - as I said I'm very busy at the moment but I wanted to get out a quick post.