Analysing book sales

Book sales

I was doing research recently and looked at sales figures for my books breaking them down as follows:

Book (and order they came out)	Numbers sold	Younger/ older heroine	Sexual orienta-tion	Genre	Type of story
Submissive Training (4th)	12,600 (by far my best selling book!)	Younger	MF	Contemporary, BDSM	Novella
The Submission Challenge (2nd)	5,500	Younger	MF	Contemporary, BDSM	Novella
Retraining the Sub (8th)	2,400	Younger	MF	Contemporary, BDSM	Novella
Wife for Three (7th)	2,200	Younger	MFMM	Sci-fi	Novella-novel
The Sub Who Switched (6th)	1,500	Younger	MF	Contemporary, BDSM	Novella
Just Good Friends (1st)	1,400	Younger	MF	Contemporary, mild BDSM	Novella
Collared by Wolves (11th)	1,000	Younger	MFMMM	Paranormal (werewolves), BDSM	Novel
Friendly Seduction (3rd)	640	Younger	MF	Contemporary, mild BDSM	Novella
Alien Manhunt (15th)	520	n/a as MMM	MMM	Sci-fi	Short story
Retraining the Dom (12th)	450	Older (YAY! AT LAST)	MF	Contemporary, BDSM	Novella
The Last Werewolf (10th)	440	Younger	MMF	Paranormal (werewolves), suspense	Novel
Friend or Foe (5th)	390	Younger	MF	Contemporary	Novella
Chasing Emily (9th)	330	Older	MFM	Sci-fi	Novella-novel
Marital Duties in Men for Hire (19th)	250	Younger	MF	Contemporary	anthology
BDSM Weekend (18th)	150	Older	MF	Contemporary, BDSM	Novella-novel
Bounty Hunters’ Captive (13th)	140	Younger	MFM	Sci-fi	Novella
Alien Manhunt 2 (17th)	110	n/a as MMM	MMM	Sci-fi	Short story
Kink After Dinner (16th)	105	Older	MF	Contemporary, BDSM	Short story
Torn Between Two Lovers (14th)	80	Younger	MFM	Paranormal (werewolves), BDSM	Novella-Novel
Alien Manhunt 3 (20th)	50	n/a as MMM	MMM	Sci-fi	Short story
Naughty Christmas Wishes (21st)	50	Older	MFMMM	Fantasy, mild-BDSM	Short story

So why don’t books with older heroines sell? At least mine don’t, even though I enjoy writing about the older heroine – I am in my mid 50s myself; I can relate to older heroines.

Maybe because I didn’t do an ‘older heroine’ story until I had written several others, although some more recent books have sold better and it clearly has nothing to do with the length of the book – the short stories may be at the bottom of the list but that’s because I’ve only written short stories more recently.

It could, of course, be down to the genre but they are fairly mixed in the chart. It is misleading to think that MF sells better than menage or MM when the reverse is usually true. I think it is just that ‘Submissive Training’ sold so well that the others in the two sets of trilogies that were linked, sold well on the back of that book and they were all MF.

I suspect a large part of why the older heroine stories don’t sell is due to the fact that women in their 30s-50s (who are our main readers) like to envisage themselves going through the ‘falling in love’ process all over again preferably with a tall, handsome, hunk of a man who doesn’t resemble their husband in the slightest and who is demanding sexually (possibly unlike their husbands in that respect, too! LOL)

Maybe the question really is – why does Submissive Training sell so well? Each quarter it is still the best selling of all my books and when it came out it was the number one best seller for my publisher on amazon UK for six weeks.

Part of the reason for that is it came out at the same time as FSoG – but also, I suspect, people may think they are getting a training manual when they read the title!