Statistics

 Time to do some stats.

I am no mathematician, but statistics fascinate me.

With almost more stats than I can cope with now that I've found Book Report, I am having a ball.

Perhaps it is time to take a peek at my career as a published author. I tinkered with writing for years, but grew disenchanted with early indie book publishers who kept running into financial difficulties and collapsing. Amazon came along at just the right time. With one book published via KDP in March 2012 and one in December that year, I recorded  20 sales and earned £25.68 in royalties.

73.5% of those came from the US and 26.5% from the UK.

From then on I was hooked, and I am happy to say that sales have improved since then!

Predictie text and Amazon changes.

Amazon have changed their stats system yet again. I don't know if their method of "counting" has changed, but certainy their way of reporting to authors has, and in a way I find most unhelpful. Bar charts are all very well in their place, but I much prefer the old method of numbers of books sold against each title, and number of KENP pages read against each title.

Now it seems I have to check through each titles infividually to find out what is happening to it. I looknat the bar chart and see for example that two books have sold, but I don't know which one or in which country. I have to go and do some extra work to find out.  Might be easier for Amazon, but it certainly isn't easier for me.

Must be in a growse mode today, because I'm getting annoyed with predictive text too.  DH has found a way of switching it off, so I must do that when I have a moment. I have enough mistakes of my own to correct without predictive text incorrectly guessing what I want to say.  I'm in the washing, ironing, tidying, hoovering stage of getting ready to go on holiday so I live in turmoil. Perhaps that's my problem!

The pic? The laburnum has faded now, but it was glorious while it lasted. 

How am I doing?

I’ve spent several hours collating stats only to come to the conclusion that I cannot compare like with like due to the many changes Amazon have made in the last few years. 

In 2011 books were sold and we authors received a royalty. In December of that year, the first change appeared - books were either sold or borrowed. By the end of June 2014 we had the introduction of KU/KOLL units. I understood that KU stood for Kindle Unlimited, but I was never sure what KOLL stood for. (Now I know it is Kindle Owners Lending Library)

By July 2015 we saw the introduction of “Net Units Sold or KENP Eead.” Otherwise explained as:  Net Units Sold or Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP) Read. According to Amazon people bought books but never read them, so this was an attempt to pay only on pages read in an effort, so they said, to weed out the dross that was self-published. 

When KU came in, KENP made some kind of sense. Members of KU didn't buy the book, but "borrowed" it, so no royalty accrued to authors. KENP means that for every page read the author is paid a tiny amount, something like 0.0016 of a penny. On a 400 page book that would amount to 64p. It was as much, sometimes more, than the original royalty payment on low-priced fiction. 

So far, KENP Read is still holding. The only way I can see that I might be able to tell if I am doing better or worse is by tracking the money. Is the money that comes to me via KENP pages read better, worse or equivalent to my payments back in 2011? Who knows? Looks like another few hours doing stats. Even then,  other things have moved and changed since those days, so I won’t ever be certain whatever the stats tell me.

Statistics

I'n currently obsessed with statistics. Mine. No, not the hour-glass kind, but my blog stats. I began my blog in 2008 and the stats have been rising steadily year on year - except for last year. They dropped through the January to November period and suddenly started to rise again. Now the worrying thing is were my posts so boring, or was there another reason? Does anyone else check their blog stats?

I'm also trying to find records of my book sales, to see how I'm doing and what sells. I should be able to co-ordinate it with the amount of PR I do, but that may be a step to far. Certainly I record where I promote, so I don't overwhelm one promo site, and I try to vary which title I promote, but it would be a horrendous task. I think I'll save it for a day when I'm really bored and stuck with my writing. First of all, I've discovered a gap in my records, so it would be good to find the missing sheets. Given that my study is a bit of higgledy-piggledy mess, that might not be too easy. Wish me luck!

In case the pic puzzles you, it's a wave coming gently ashore.

Tudor population figures

If my sums are correct, the French king was not niggardly when he sent the 30,000 crowns to Scotland in 1543. In today’s terms he sent £15 million in Scots currency, and £3 million in English currency. (But I still haven’t discovered which currency was the right one.) It was to be used as bribes to persuade Scots nobles to turn against Henry of England and cleave instead to France and the Roman Catholic church.

I’ve been searching the internet for Population figures for Europe in sixteenth century, and though the figures differ by a couple of hundred thousand in some reports, and remembering that pre 1800, most are best guesses, here is what I found:

Europe 105 million,

France 10 million,

England 4 million

and Scotland half a million.

Even today the Scots number only 5,222,200 against England’s 51,809,700. Northern Ireland comes in at 1,788,900 and Wales 2,999,3000. Amazingly, there are almost as many people of Scots descent living in the USA as there are in Scotland – four million plus, and in the current generation alone 800,000 people born in Scotland now reside in either England, Wales or Northern Ireland.

What does all this add up to? Nothing much, except that I am so easily carried away by facts and figures!