While I was busy with TDOR, my wonderful Finnish friends were concocting a plan to cheer me up on what is a very sombre day. They organized this Facebook event to encourage Finnish fans to buy from the Wizard’s Tower Bookstore. The results were incredible. We had 76 orders yesterday, and 4 more have come in this morning. The running total is £841.45 in gross sales, and 230 individual books sold. The best selling books have been Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck, Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear, and Silently and Very Fast by Cathrynne Valente. I’m also delighted to see that we sold 34 individual issues of Clarkesworld, and a bunch of other books published by Neil Clarke’s Wyrm Publishing imprint.

Huge thanks are due to Ellen Kushner, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Jeff VanderMeer for promoting the event on their own Facebook feeds.

Although the bulk of the sales came from Finland, there was a substantial chunk from Sweden, and also sales from Australia, Germany, France, Latvia, the UK and the USA.

I guess I need to point out that this was not a pile of money in my pocket. Online bookstores only take a small amount of the gross revenue. Even Amazon gives the publisher 70% of the retail price in most cases. I have to beat that to stay in business, and pay fees to PayPal and Shopify who make the store work. To put things in perspective, in one day I did more than twice as much business than I have done in the best month I have had since the store opened. It is also the first month in which the store has made enough money to pay the hosting costs, so after 2 years in business this is our first month where we’ve made a profit.

Kevin and I are just stunned at what has happened. We are lost for words to explain how grateful we are, especially to Jukka Halme, Tero Ykspetäjä, Marianna Leikomaa and Aleksi Kuutio who organized the event.

And now, of course, being a good bookseller, I have to work out how I can capitalize on this and continue to sell more books. I can’t see the single day record being beaten for a very long time, but it would be nice to continue not losing money.