Below are the before and after title analysis reports for my latest Deal of the Day.
At the end of the deal you get the following email.
$1.39/day
In that email, you will see the quoted earnings per day of $1.39 and 0.53 copies per day. There are two things about those numbers. Firstly, they don’t match up with DTRPG’s own report prior to the DotD which reported 2 per day and 61.3 per month.
I assume that the £1.39 is based on a shorter and more recent time span than the title analysis report, which probably includes the rush of sales you get on launch day.
But, when I went into this publishing game, I looked at these title analysis reports and thought something along the lines of “If I can earn $1.39 per day per title, how many titles do I need to create a living wage?” Those earnings are based on 7 days a week, and I would rather not work a seven-day week.
I started with figures like that and just multiplied them up. Some of my titles are more popular than that, and some are less. I kind of thought of this as a brute-force method, but I have since learned that the nicer term is Longtail. There is an excellent article on this from Raging Swan; it is well worth a read.