Slogging Through Mud

Last Friday I did the first time ever free promo for Call to Selah. I might do one for books 3 and 4 next week and the week after and see what happens. The problem with promos is I don't have enough reviews to run them on a promo site yet. The people who find my promos are random. To do the really good promos, I need reviews. To get reviews, I need the really good promos.

I found a camera I could sell for $90 profit. Amazon won't let me sell it. The same with the $35 profit one. Lumix DMC-FZ70 for $175. Sells on Amazon for $297.99. It has a good sales rank, too, and not a lot of sellers.

I had another sale this week. The bad news is it came out of the handful of non-software items I sent in. None of the software has sold. None. Remember the one I mentioned last week I hoped would be my best seller that didn't show up in any of my searches and ended up not having a good price? I found out the reason. It wasn't showing up in searches at all. I submitted a help ticket. It shows up now but is listed as unavailable. People can't look at the sellers for it. Apparently, I need to do another ticket, although they're supposed to be working on it. However, there might be a silver lining. The item just like it that has a different cover was ranked #688 in Software last time I checked. If they get mine fixed, I could advertise it and hopefully get the sales rank up, get the low-priced ones sold out and then sell it at a higher price like the #688 one.

All of the software I have for sale have decent sales ranks. They're just not selling. Part of it could be that I'm a new seller without feedback yet. But I think the problem is that sales rank means different things for different categories. A 3,000 rank in one category might be a steady seller while in another category 3,000 is a slow seller. Maybe trying to sell software is a mistake. Or maybe it just takes longer to sell. I wouldn't care too much about how long it takes if Amazon didn't charge $39.99/month to let me sell things. My plan was to put the shipment up for sale and concentrate on writing the rest of the year. Now I'm forced to either find more inventory or not worry about losing money for a while.

I found a particular type of computer memory that seems to sell fairly well. I might import about 20 of them from China. The problem is it feels like a gamble. If it sold, great, my Amazon fees are covered, and I make money. If it didn't, then it would be just like the software.

I don't have health insurance. This is the year the Obamacare penalty jumps up. I have to get some kind of extra revenue coming in. I could use some prayer. :)