It's possible the only people who bought were technothriller enthusiasts, but I think it's likely that at least some of them are not.
Traffic spikes are actually a common occurrence in book sales. My understanding is that some of the most effective marketing is through paid newsletter inclusion – sites like BookBub/Freebooksy/Fussy Librarian. These newsletters absolutely drive big spikes in traffic, and the conversion rate is going to correlate well with how well the book will sell overall. It's possible Amazon does something with the referrer to try to segment these kinds of traffic, but impossible to know from the outside.
If you just want to move copies, you should look at the Facebook group 20BooksTo50k. It has lots of informative posts by self-published authors doing six figures in annual sales. I can distill it down for you though. The people finding "quit your job" levels of success generally:
- write to market
- in a consistent genre
- for several years
- and publish five or more books per year, mostly in a series.
Some people reach that level of success faster, though they tend to be in the largest genres (mainly romance), or publishing at truly breakneck speed (a book or more per month).
Personally, I write things that don't slot quite cleanly into a genre, and I have a tendency to genre hop. I know it's sub-optimal, but I'm pretty sure I'd just burn out trying to do it the other way.
I'm also not yet at the point where I can write work I'm proud of at that velocity; the last book I wrote took me two months to get a first draft, and it's probably going to take another two months to get it to a "finished" state. So I'm on a "three books a year" pace, and it already feels exhausting/I may need to slow down.
Traffic spikes are actually a common occurrence in book sales. My understanding is that some of the most effective marketing is through paid newsletter inclusion – sites like BookBub/Freebooksy/Fussy Librarian. These newsletters absolutely drive big spikes in traffic, and the conversion rate is going to correlate well with how well the book will sell overall. It's possible Amazon does something with the referrer to try to segment these kinds of traffic, but impossible to know from the outside.
If you just want to move copies, you should look at the Facebook group 20BooksTo50k. It has lots of informative posts by self-published authors doing six figures in annual sales. I can distill it down for you though. The people finding "quit your job" levels of success generally:
- write to market
- in a consistent genre
- for several years
- and publish five or more books per year, mostly in a series.
Some people reach that level of success faster, though they tend to be in the largest genres (mainly romance), or publishing at truly breakneck speed (a book or more per month).
Personally, I write things that don't slot quite cleanly into a genre, and I have a tendency to genre hop. I know it's sub-optimal, but I'm pretty sure I'd just burn out trying to do it the other way.
I'm also not yet at the point where I can write work I'm proud of at that velocity; the last book I wrote took me two months to get a first draft, and it's probably going to take another two months to get it to a "finished" state. So I'm on a "three books a year" pace, and it already feels exhausting/I may need to slow down.