Fast-Track Friday articles are those in which I give insight into the key knowledge and skills you need to have as an independent or self-publishing author. The topic will usually be one which greatly influences the rate at which your books are placed in front of readers.
If you’re brand new to independent publishing you will receive a huge boost in market knowledge by following the “Writer’s Essentials” post series, and you will also learn how to avoid costly mistakes and misunderstandings. If you’re already years in, but not seeing the results you’d like, this series may well give you the missing pieces of various hidden puzzles.
In this first premium article I show you how to figure out the reader retention rates for your series, and give examples of what you can do if the rates are dropping off from book to book. If you’re a series writer, this is essential knowledge.
Please note that this article uses the Amazon KDP platform and its reports as a worked example of how to assess your reader retention rate. The principles can be transplanted quite easily to other platforms, but the details of that are not specifically described here.
Premium articles on this site are accessible permanently for a one-time fee of £3.
As a sample of why you would want to learn about this topic, here is one of the charts I built for my current series when I started to look into it. The bars represent the percentage of my book one readers who moved on to each subsequent volume in the series.
Blue is what was happening when I was puttering along oblivious to the idea of measuring reader retention.
Green is what happened after I looked at my figures, figured out some problems, and took action:
Why is this an important metric to keep an eye on? Because if only 13% of the readers who read the first book in your series ever make it to book five… think how much revenue that is, which you could have earned but did not. Think how much time you have spent writing, editing, and marketing, for works with a diminishing audience.
There will be reasons for people dropping out of the series, and they will be reasons you can fix. To determine how necessary (and urgent) this is you need to look at some key data.
This article will teach you how to assess reader retention rate for your series. It will also give you examples of how you can address the issues which most commonly affect it…
…At the time of adding this article to the web site, my total revenue from 2023 so far is twenty times greater than my revenue from all of 2022!
The Outdoors Author 