Tuesday Tidbits: End of an Era

Leon Stevens
3 min readMay 30, 2023

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A bit dramatic, don’t you think?

Well, I made you look, right?

At the beginning of February, I received an email indicating that book one of my sci-fi trilogy was selected to be enrolled in Amazon’s Prime Reading program, meaning it would be available for free to any Prime members. After some research (making sure it wasn’t a scam and what benefits other authors felt it gave them), I decided to accept.

No royalties are given to the author, and At one time, authors got a monetary compensation to make up for lost royalties until Amazon realized that many, or most, would do it for free. Since I was giving The View from Here away, my hope was that many or most would choose to purchase the next two books.

From March until the end of May, it has hovered in the high top 100 science fiction books, reaching #49 briefly.

If you are wondering about the spike at the left side, I ran a 99 cent sale that week.

Now, true to form, Amazon won’t divulge the number of downloads the book has received, so my best guess it that since it takes about 100 sales/day to reach the top 10, my book has been averaging about 10/day. With that estimate, I should be looking at about 900 books (10 books x 90 days).

That sounds high, so let’s be conservative and say 500 books were “sold”. If half of those readers are compelled to continue that adventure (I do consider it a stand-alone book, but with unanswered questions), I should see 500 more books sold (250 each for books 2 and 3).

Time will tell.

-Leon

Leon Stevens is a multi-genre author, composer, guitarist, songwriter, and an artist, with a Bachelor of Music and Education. He published his first book of poetry, Lines by Leon: Poems, Prose, and Pictures in January 2020, followed by a book of original classical guitar compositions, Journeys, and a short story collection of science fiction/post-apocalyptic tales called The Knot at the End of the Rope and Other Short Stories. His newest publications are the novella trilogy, The View from Here, which is a continuation of one of his short stories, and a new collection of poetry titled, A Wonder of Words.

My new book page: http://books.linesbyleon.com/

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Originally published at http://linesbyleon.com on May 30, 2023.

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Leon Stevens

Leon Stevens is a writer, composer, guitarist, songwriter, and an artist, with a Bachelor of Music and Education. www.linesbyleon.com