Market is extremely unpredictable and chaotic. A while back statistics were much more even. There was a rare massive difference between one day and another. Nowadays it can vary 50% from one day to another. Why? Well who knows, would would have to have detailed global themeforest statistics to analyse and try to figure out what went wrong in the meanwhile.
For example if a new item started to sell 8+ items per day you knew that it would continue this way for some time with a small up or down. Today its just ups and downs. The issue here is that business leans a lot of times on analysis of the past and current sales to predict future. Now days you cannot rely on that and again do not have a clue.
For example yesterday we had a great day, today 80% down will see closer to the end of tf time day. My head is just spinning from the confusion.
The only possible way today is to try to find what would make your item better than competition (but sometimes that does not work also) just keep on producing quality items and add them to your portfolio and cross your fingers.
To be honest that’s the best advice i can give you… overall new items and items that are not in most popular list have very poor sales. Popular list, all the way up to top 10, use to change quite often. Today i guess there is so much choice that its much simpler to buy items that you see have tons of sales.
Was watching a documentary called brain games and they made the test. The results showed that majority of people tend to go were the masses go even if they do know that the mass is wrong. The same thing is here once you see an item that sells 500 sales per week you think to your self this must be great. So if the competition is selling a certain amount, you have to have item which offers what they do not to change peoples minds. Which is good for that item and envato promotion but not good for market offering a fair competition.
Envato its not a no investment, hobby start earn big market anymore. To succeed it is good to have some seed money so you can devote yourself 100%. Those day are far gone its much now about stats, self marketing, advertising, analysis, research, competition, client managing, refunds, support, accounting, then being only creative.
Hope i did not come out to pessimistic it was not my intent. Just now days authors tend to go with great expectation and no preparation on this market. Again those days are gone.
Cheers