I checked the Kindle Unlimited dashboard and discovered that my publishing empire has expanded to two pages.
Two pages is a very small statistic and a very real reader action.
Two.
Not two thousand. Not two hundred. Two pages read.
I considered immediately purchasing a yacht, but the accounting department has advised against it.
Joking aside, I loved seeing that tiny number.
Kindle Unlimited can turn reading into a stream of page counts, which makes it very easy to look at the dashboard and immediately compare yourself with enormous authors, established series, and people whose launches have marketing teams attached to them.
That is probably not a useful way to spend the morning.
Two pages is a microscopic business statistic. But it is also evidence of a real action. Someone opened Shark Protocol and started reading.
That matters more to me than pretending every early number has to be impressive.
One of the things I want to document honestly with these posts is what a small independent launch actually looks like. There may be quiet days. There may be numbers that would make a spreadsheet yawn. There will be experiments that work and others that clearly do not.
The interesting part is what happens next.
Can a cover turn a browser into a click? Can a blog post introduce the book to the right reader? Does an Amazon ad produce curiosity or simply produce an invoice? Do early readers continue? Do reviews begin to appear? Which channels actually send people to the book page?
That is why I built more campaign tracking into the SlushBucket site. I want to learn rather than simply shout into every available social network and hope something happens.
For now, though, the official Kindle Unlimited milestone is two pages.
Every large page-read total in publishing history had to pass two eventually.
I am choosing to consider this excellent strategic positioning.