What's the secret to successful book sales?

Morning gang,

The sun is shining here at HB Towers and the view across the bay is a reminder of why the houses here are so damned expensive. Today's' plan, after the Full English breakfast which the wife is preparing as I type this, is to take the dog for a tour of a doggy day care facility nearby. If he like it, we'll be leaving him there for a couple of days next week. If he hates, we might take him anyway.

After that, depending on the mood, we are going to test drive a couple of cars with a view to getting two new ones. We're just pondering the adult sensible option of getting two average, but well though of Fords, or chucking logic out of the window and me buying a Mercedes or an audi. The wife is being very patient as she knows I am essentially still a child and don't really understand that we might need the money for other things later on.

I want to be home by tea time because Federer is playing tennis today and you know how I like to watch Roger.

Quick blog update. As of today this blog has received 11786 views which is nice. It's only got about 33 subscribers though so there's work to be done.

As part of a project to relaunch all my paperbacks - I want them all to look the same i.e. be recognisable as my books - I have reformatted The Trust and decided to ponder a new cover, which is below. Do we like? The wife prefers the existing cover.

 Speaking of The Trust, it continues to amaze me. I woke up this morning to find it had climbed to number 14 in the crime thriller best seller chart on Amazon. If you follow me on FB and Twitter you'll be sick of the continuous and very excited posts about chart positions, accompanied by screenshots. But as I've said before, I've never sold this many copies of one book in such a short time so it's huge for me.

I've had a few days to reflect on this and decided there is no formula to it. The Trust has been available since Feb 2013. It generally sells a few copies each month as do all my books. I've done free promos before, you get a few hundred downloads, a small sales spike afterwards and then back to normal. So when I decided to do a promo for The Trust last week that's all I was expecting. But then it was downloaded over 4000 times in two days and went to number one in three countries. That was different.

Then the sales spike. Nothing in America. That's a bit different because I'd expect to see a few sales. But in the UK I did shift a few which was normal. Then a few more, and now, almost a week on the spike continues. That's not normal. I think a lot of it is down to visibility, though I'm guessing as I don't buy digital books. Since the book managed to get into the top 20 it has become more visible. Amazon display their best seller lists 20 per page. Most folk don't look beyond page 1. The people buying The Trust don't know me, and they only have the front cover and the blurb to go off before buying. But it's on the first page so that immediately tells a reader that plenty of other folk much be buying that book so it must be good, right?

I don't know. As I say this is new territory and I know enough writers to know that if we could figure out the formula for success we wouldn't all have day jobs.

As a test of this latest formula, when sales have levelled off a bit, and they will, I'm going to do a free promo for my new book Ballroom, Bars and Seawater Baths. It'll either take off or it won't.

Right, best crack on, breakfast is ready, the wife is also making a fish pie for tea!!!