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๐Ÿ“š Do books sell well here?

A topic by Dmitry Create created 1 day ago Views: 135 Replies: 9
Viewing posts 1 to 5

Wondering if books on itch sell good as far as genres like mystery, fantasy, and horror or if Amazon Kindle is any better?

How many sales did you get on which book in what time range with what price with how many views?

Thanks!

Books? On my itch.io?

I didn't know we were doing visual novels!

(+2)

I had a pdf book on here for a while - years ago. If I remember correctly, it probably had less than 10 views and definitely zero downloads. 

Unless it's adult content and illustrated you're unlikely to find an audience for it here (i.e. it must be a visual novel which is classified as a game - even when most of them have no interaction whatsoever). 

And although visual novels were among the top downloads in the early days of itch.io, I think that was more by accident than by design: It's on the popular list so you download it - see it's rubbish - delete it after a minute or two - but you had downloaded it - so that download makes it even more popular...

Try sites like Smashwords and draft2digital (the latter merged with the former).

This is very helpful, thanks!

It you want to know that "sells" here, you can just look. It is not hidden.

https://itch.freezing.top/books/top-sellers

But it took couples of years to get to that point with only around 20 buys?

I do not understand. If you want to know what is being sold, just look at the top sellers. There are no numbers shown, but higher up probably means more sales, maybe adjusted for recentness of the item.

But Itch is geared for games. If you look at top-rated, you will see most books having a lot less than 100 ratings, while top-rated games have several thousand ratings.

If you have a special interest item, it might look better. Like that game development book mentioned below. But selling books in general here? That's only gonna work, if you are known elsewhere. Like, you have a website and use Itch as a store.

I see, thanks for explaining this!

(+3)

In raw numbers for you. A Godot-niched game development book. Note that sales/bundles numbers don't get into account because they count as sales/bundle's revenue, not item revenue. Book was published on November 11, 2022.


(1 edit) (+1)

Interesting, thanks for showing this!