I agree it's a long game.
My first came out mid-December, and I've sold about 60 copies. I've priced it at $3.99/£2.49 to give me some wiggle room for promotional pricing. If you start at $0.99, you don't have much flexibility, and I've been seeing reports that say that people actually value a book more, are more invested in it, and are more prepared to leave a review, if they pay in the $2.99-3.99 range.
I paid a lot for professional copy editing, cover design, and layout, to make it as good as I could get it. My editor was expensive, but worth it. She does a lot more than just typos, as she looks at sentence structure and rhythm, and sends back comments like "This is dramatic stuff. Use a stronger verb here!" Her sort of expertise doesn't come cheap, though, and it will take me about 3 years to break even if sales continue at this sort of rate.
That said, everyone who has reviewed it says they want to read the second book, and I'm getting occasional tweets from people asking when it will be out, which is nice.
Many people have said it takes 4-6 books to get any sort of traction, so I'm just working hard and trying to forget about sales figures for now. I'd like to do some short stories in the world that I can use as freebies to help promote it, but I'm not great at short form just yet. I'm writing a couple of shorts each month, to try to develop that skill, and it's getting there, slowly.
ETA: Which reminds me, my book 2 cover design will be done in a couple of weeks. So I think I'll go back to my "me" avatar for a while, until that's available.