An old boss of mine once insisted I kept a diary on the subject of the weather. This was from day one of my new job in the merchandise office of a very large UK retail chain. The diary was actually a simple record of the weather, split into geographic sections, e.g., Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, North-East England, North-West England, Midlands, South-East England… well, you get the general idea. My boss wanted to be able to look back on any given day and say, “Ahh, that’s why we sold a lot of umbrellas in Cumbria.”
But it’s not always weather that affects sales. In the case of an indie author with books on Amazon, sales will not easily be affected by the weather, though you may sell more books prior to the beginning of summer or before the Christmas period.
But there are other, underlying factors that can affect your sales if, like me, you use content marketing to sell your books. Content marketing in its simplest terms is you writing about your subject(s) on a blog in order to gain views and in that process also sales of your books. It’s actually quite a sedate method of marketing, where you offer your readers information, amusing stories etc., and in return you may sell a few books. It’s a game of numbers. On average I sell to 2% of everyone going onto my blog. So, in its simplest form, if I get 10,000 people a week on my blog I can sell 200 books… that by the way is a rarity, in fact, it’s never happened, but I live in hope. Like I said, it’s simplistic but on average, looking at the sales data since 2011, that’s what it averages out to. But there have been dips and one of those was 2013.
In 2013 sales dropped dramatically and while looking at my sales spreadsheet today I was a little confused as to why. Then I remembered in March 2013 Cyprus hit a brick wall. The Cypriot financial crisis of 2013 actually started to take hold in 2012 and was an economic crisis brought about because of the exposure of Cypriot banks to over leveraged local property companies, the Greek government-debt crisis and the unprecedented downgrading of the Cypriot government’s credit rating to junk status by international credit rating agencies. All this led to the closure of all banks on the Island for an extended period of time. The first we heard about it was on a chilly Saturday morning at the market we used to have a stall at. The guy next to us announced the news that had been on the local Radio. Sure enough, come Monday, all banks were closed. The Island was in turmoil and for a few days nobody could gain access to their money in the banks. And for months, Cyprus was shocked into a doom and gloom scenario.
My wife and I and our two English Springer Spaniels came to live in Cyprus from England in 2008, when the world was having a banking crisis. It was a bad time to move but circumstances dictated our actions and it meant we lost a lot of money and had to fight hard to establish ourselves here. Now we were in the midst of another financial crisis and this affected us quite a bit, not as bad as some and better than others, but our main business lost sales and as such my writing and our mood went into decline. The consequence of that was sales dropped all round and before we knew it, we were in recession.
It was a trying time but thankfully Cyprus has pulled itself together and we’re in a much better place. Just in time for retirement and to sit back and relax with a glass of wine… but who knows what lurks around the corner. Don’t take life for granted, it can bite!
Tom Kane (c) 2016
A Pat on his Back tells the story of our move from England to Cyprus.
Reviews
Andys Scribbles on WordPress: “…believe me everyone thought I was insane when I spat out my newly-bought smoothie onto the guy sitting near me in the bus because I was laughing so hard…”
4.0 out of 5 stars on Amazon
Similar Experiences
By Sylvia on 20 April 2016
“I enjoyed reading the book as I also have a house in Cyprus and have come across some of the same problems as Tom and his wife. Most of what he says I can relate to quite well. He has an entertaining way of describing life in Cyprus for a non Cypriot.“
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