I read yesterday on the forum about the magic number of articles to have in CC and then you hopefully start selling lots of them. But the magic number wasn't revealed.
Does anyone know what the magic number is? 50? 100? More? So far I've sold 1 out of 6.
Magic number of articles?
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Elizabeth Ann West
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Re: Magic number of articles?
Read the "How to Sell More Articles" and "How to Sell More Articles II" posts in the Author Exchange. They are stickied.
Basically the premise is this, if you sell an article, the more you write, the more you will sell. In fact, I look at it as once you have an article approved, it's good you can relax and let it do it's thing— sell. Not ALL of them sell, but a very percentage do, something around 87%. Their findings are pretty spot on, I'm right at 99 articles, with 76 total licenses sold. 55 of them were for full rights.
I like my own trend though. For example, since 1/7/10, I have had 10 articles approved. I have 2 more in review status (to replace the 2 I sold). Of those 10 articles, 2 sold, both within a month. I know for me, in general, with 10 articles, I sell 1-3 of them within 30 days, 4-5 of the original 10 sell within 60 days, and 7-8 of the original 10 within 90 days. The other 2-3 are what I call straggler surprises. They take their sweet time to sell so it's a surprise when I get the "Article Sold" email. Meanwhile, I keep replenishing, and that's the production rate I can handle right now.
This trend is only for me personally, based on how I write, and the topics I choose to write on. I've been here for over two years, so I have 99 data points to look at (I took very large periods of time off during that 2 years as I had a difficult pregnancy at times and a very bubbly 8 month old who crawls everywhere). Those straggler surprises were great during maternity leave. Anyway I use this as an extension of Celeste Stewart's production guidelines. She taught me to produce a set dollar amount per day. With baby on board, I have a set dollar amount per week I'm now shooting for, LOL.
Basically the premise is this, if you sell an article, the more you write, the more you will sell. In fact, I look at it as once you have an article approved, it's good you can relax and let it do it's thing— sell. Not ALL of them sell, but a very percentage do, something around 87%. Their findings are pretty spot on, I'm right at 99 articles, with 76 total licenses sold. 55 of them were for full rights.
I like my own trend though. For example, since 1/7/10, I have had 10 articles approved. I have 2 more in review status (to replace the 2 I sold). Of those 10 articles, 2 sold, both within a month. I know for me, in general, with 10 articles, I sell 1-3 of them within 30 days, 4-5 of the original 10 sell within 60 days, and 7-8 of the original 10 within 90 days. The other 2-3 are what I call straggler surprises. They take their sweet time to sell so it's a surprise when I get the "Article Sold" email. Meanwhile, I keep replenishing, and that's the production rate I can handle right now.
This trend is only for me personally, based on how I write, and the topics I choose to write on. I've been here for over two years, so I have 99 data points to look at (I took very large periods of time off during that 2 years as I had a difficult pregnancy at times and a very bubbly 8 month old who crawls everywhere). Those straggler surprises were great during maternity leave. Anyway I use this as an extension of Celeste Stewart's production guidelines. She taught me to produce a set dollar amount per day. With baby on board, I have a set dollar amount per week I'm now shooting for, LOL.
Re: Magic number of articles?
Thanks very much! 