Let’s open 2014 with a look back to the recent past.
This morning I was updating the links on the top of this blog, in order to send them directly to the source of information. In the case of Books, you are now going to see the page on the iTunes Store where all my four titles are published. While doing that I had the curiosity to check how many downloads my books were still receiving, so I went on iTunes Connect to check.
It has been a while since last time I checked those numbers, so I decided to download the totals from the web and run them through Numbers to make some sense out those tables.
Before we get into the details, let me make a quick digression on Numbers. With the release of Mavericks, Apple updated the entire productivity suite. It was my first use of Numbers and I have to say that it’s definitely more difficult to use then before. To achieve a “clean” and “modern” design (as they said), they ended up hiding many useful tools in places where you wouldn’t naturally go to check. It took me a while to edit to simple tables of numbers, especially to re-order the charts that I’ve created as a summary.
Anyway, in the end I was able to create a nice and simple summary for the 2012-2013 activity.
Let’s start with a Year-Over-Year comparison:
As you can see the general trend was a clear decrease in the number of downloads. The only title going against this trend is “A Tea With The Queen“. If I have to guess the reason for this I would say that it’s because I’ve published this title in December 2012, so it was the “freshest” among all.
If we have a look at the cumulative columns, we can easily see how “Lost In The UK” and “Torino Is Magical” are the main cash-cows ((All my books are free to download, so this is just a funny expression in this case)) for me. If we use a slightly different view for the cumulative series we can highlight this fact:
The main surprise was that despite all my books were published in 2012 they were still going strong in 2013. Above all, the book about Turin is still the one that is achieving the best results in terms of popularity, being featured in many European Countries on the top spots in its category ((This is the link on App Annie where you can check all the categories in more details if you wish)):
Looking at these numbers had the effect of sparking again the desire for publishing, so I’m already thinking at different possible ideas for a new project.
I’m looking forward to 2014!