Various & Sundry

Backstory

There are several new backstories up at my other blog, including David Hewson's, Laura Lippman's and Luanne Rice's. Please hop on over to Backstory.

The Oxford American

Oh the woes of the magazine business. The Oxford American has gone out of business twice for lack of funding. How can they find the readers who might love the magazine, but have never even heard of it?

Some great word of mouth might help. The new issue is about music and rocks.

Amazon Numbers

After my post last week about Amazon numbers I got several interesting comments - especially these two:

This from anonymous: I work in publishing on the sales and marketing side, and I pulled together these figures about a year ago. It appears little has changed since.

1. Last Thursday, one of our books zoomed from a sales rank of 32,154 to 872, peaking at 665 on Friday. How many copies did we sell in total last week? 17.

2. Another book hovered between the mid-6000s and 14,000s during the week. It ended up selling 37 copies in total.

3. Finally, a publishing colleague shared that one of their authors had appeared on NPR's Fresh Air program that same week. Before the interview, the book ranked 36,162. The day of the interview, it hit 300. The following day, it reached 80 and appeared on the Movers & Shakers list. And, after all that, how many did it sell at Amazon? 47 copies.

Another note was from Laura Lippman:

I gave up checking my numbers more than a year ago. I also stopped Googling myself and learned to give only cursory reads to all media about myself, even the good stuff. I don't know what I'm doing with the time, but I know I'm happier.

Here's what got me to go cold turkey. I had a book out and I was plugging my name and the title into a Google search when I realized I was undergoing physiological changes. My heart was beating a little faster, my stomach was flipping. It felt, in fact, like what I'm told gambling addicts feel. And that's when I said: "I'm through."

My motto is: Good news will out. Bad news, too. And it's ever so interesting to discover who brings you what.

But here's one thing I do recommend that writers read carefully: Royalty statements. I used to just shove them into a file. Then, several years ago, I decided I had to be more responsible about every aspect of my financial life, so I had to face those pages. I discovered that a very large reserve was being carried on my first novel and my agent went to bat for me, got it reduced -- and got me a very nice check.

I got also got a note from some readers telling me about a $2000 seminar that promises to make you an Amazon bestseller. The point of which is so that you can market your book as an Amazon besteller. Which I'm personally not sure is meaningful to anyone.

I don't believe in manipulating sales.

But for those who are, I would suggest that if there is some reason you are dying to buy your way onto the Amazon bestseller list, you can take that same amount of money and buy a whole lot of your own books all at once, in the middle of the night where there's not much book buying going on.

You'll get your low Amazon number and you'll get a lot of books for your money, which you can use for promotional purposes.

Comments

[Carolyn Howard-Johnson]

The subscribers of "Sharing with Writers" have been discussing this issue recently. "SWW" is a newsletter that came about because the readers of THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER: HOW TO DO WHAT YOUR PUBLISHER WON'T continued to e-mail me for publicity help so I knew there was a need.

At any rate, I suggested in FRUGAL that authors not pay too much attention to the ratings and certainly readers should not. How can the number of books sold in the last day be relevent to the readability of a particular book?

However, I do think these numbers can be helpful. If an author checks back occasionally--say once a month--and finds that the numbers have jumped from say, 30,000 to 800,000, it may be time to hop into the promotion fray again. You know, give your book a boost with one of the many thrifty ideas in THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER, some of which ustilize Amazon's very own perks that take nothing but time!

Very best,
Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Award-winning author of THIS IS THE PLACE, HARKENING, THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER and a new chapbook of poetry called TRACINGS coming from Finishing Line Press this fall.

[kitty]

I first subscribed to Oxford American when it serialized Grisham's "A Painted House." Grisham had pumped money into it trying to keep it going. I'm not certain if he's still affiliated with OA or not. The music issue is my favorite because it comes with a CD.

[Skylar]

Thanks for this post--it was something I needed to hear. I'm one of those authors addicted to checking my Amazon sales rank...which I have discovered is largely meaningless.

[AG]

I have carefully monitored Amazon's ranking system- it seems to be partially based on the no. of clicks a title gets. It is also important to remember that a great no. of people do not buy books on Amazon on the same day as they place them in their shopping basket. Perhaps this might explain the issue of a small no. of sales but a large change in rank?

[un papier]

If you find the urge to keep checking amazon sales rank of your books or for that matter any book and want to do this quickly without scrolling through pages , here is a link http://www.unpapier.com/amazon/ranking.php

[EP]

I am the author of a recently released book who has not only been obsessively checking her own book's status on Ingram but her publisher's other books', too. I've also watched library sales through a library acquisitions database (OCLC). I've compared these to the Amazon ranking, and I can now say definitively that Amazon is hooey. Books that have been out for many months longer than mine and have sold far fewer copies have a better Amazon ranking, an utter mystery. There appears to be a great deal of misinformation circulated on the web about the meaning of these rankings. It's impossible to tell anything from either Ingram or Amazon because: 1. Books are distributed differently by each publisher. (My publisher, for example, does not use Ingram as its primary distributor.) 2. The information on the web about self-published books does not apply to books sold by a mainstream publisher. 3. Different kinds of readers mean different kinds of sales venues (a no brainer, really. . aren't we all supposed to know our "target market"?). 4. The process of ranking is completely opaque. (One site says Amazon gets its books from Ingram; another says it doesn't. One site says B&N takes into account its in-store sales; another says it doesn't). The truth is none of these self-styled experts know. It may be an interesting game, but obsessing about the rankings has about as much worth as watching the gems drop in Bedazzled. Have fun, but believe nothing.