Archive for the ‘Amazon and POD publishers’ category

How Many Copies Must an Author Sell in Order to be Considered Successful

June 10th, 2008

Selling books is hard… I don’t care if you’re Simon and Schuster or a self published POD author. The competition to sell books is FIERCE.

With this in mind, many authors have an unrealistic expectation of “success”.

One way to rephrase this question is “How many books will I have to sell to break even?”

If you’re self publishing, then this question is of utmost importance. After all this is YOUR money which you’ll be investing to publish your book. However, it’s also an important question if you’re a traditionally published author. After all, if you don’t sell enough books to cover your advance, what do you think your chances are of getting another advance from that publisher?

Basic math is what’s required here. For the self publisher, it’s simply A + B. Simply take the costs of publishing your book and add the cost of promoting your book. Take this answer and divide the amount you’ll make on each book sale and THAT is the number of books you must sell in order to be a “success”. (Remember, many, many traditionally published books do not achieve “break even” status!)

If you’re with a traditional publisher, there’s a third variable to be included in the calculation and that’s your advance.

Tess Gerritsen gained nationwide acclaim for her first novel of medical suspense, the New York Times bestseller Harvest. She is also the author of the bestsellers Life Support, Bloodstream, Gravity, and The Surgeon. She writes in her post the sad financial truth about writing:

So you want to be a writer and become rich and famous? You might want to dial down your expectations a bit — at least, in regards to the “getting rich” part.

She goes on to quote some pretty depressing figures released by an organization called Novelists, Inc. (NINC) whose membership is restricted to multi-published authors. In a recent survey, members were polled and asked if they could support themselves strictly with their writing. An astounding 52% said “No!”

The Effect of the Public Outcry on Amazon

May 13th, 2008

Things have really settled down on the Amazon/Booksurge front and I wondered if this whole “consumer outcry” was having any effect on Amazon’s web traffic, so I headed over to over to Compete.com and entered amazon.com in one box and for kicks and giggles entered barnesandnoble.com in the other.

For those of you who don’t know, Compete.com allows you to compare web sites. It’s most accurate with “big” sites that get lots of traffic. Here’s what I got when I entered the terms above for “analysis”":

The graphic above shows the scope and the magnitude of Amazon.com’s internet presence. The figures on the side, those are measured in MILLIONS. You can see how large a presence Amazon has compared with Barnes and Noble.

Not only does the graph above show that Amazon isn’t being affected, the analysis below confirms it.

Date: 04/2008 People Month ?   Year ?  
amazon.com 52,327,360 2.0% 9.9%
barnesandnoble.com 4,393,557 -3.7% 17.2%

The statistics above are what Compete calls “people accounts”.

People Counts are also known as unique visitors – they only count a person once no matter how many times they visit a site in a given month. People Counts are typically used to determine how popular a site is.

You’ll notice in the figure above, Barnes and Noble’s people counts are down…. almost 4% during March while Amazon’s figures rose 2%.

It doesn’t appear the outcry has had any effect.

What I’ve noticed in my own promotion efforts is that my Barnes and Noble affiliate links aren’t generating anywhere NEAR the sales that my Amazon affiliate links did.  Same promotional efforts up front, different results on the back end.  I even tried changing the presentation of my blog to “jump start” the sales on the Barnes and Noble end… clicks increased but sales did not.

Why Authors Choose Amazon To Promote Their Work

April 14th, 2008

When you fish, you want to place your baited hook where the fish are… because that way you’ll catch more fish.

As an author, there are two avenues to promoting and selling your work: bookstores and online sales. To plug that into our “fishing for book buyers” analogy… as an author you can choose to fish in salt water or fresh water… but your efforts need to be concentrated on large bodies of water.

Think of book store sales as “salt water fishing”. Bookstore distribution like salt water fishing while online sales are more like fishing in fresh water. If you’ve chosen to promote your book “online” then you have a LOT of options. However, just like fresh water fishing… there are countless bodies of fresh water in the United States alone where you could choose to fish. Of course there are fish in the small pond behind a farmer’s house on a dirt road… but there are more fish in a huge lake like Lake Okeechobee in central Florida or in the Great Lakes.

Amazon is the big lake on the internet for book promotion. Sure, Barnes and Nobles also has an online presence, but take a look at this graph to see the difference between these two sites when it comes to traffic:

The figures are staggering. During the month of March 2008 alone Amazon had 160,930,576 visitors. That “M” in the graphic above stands not for thousands, but for MILLIONS of visitors.

In comparison, Barnes and Nobles had a mere 7,440,278 visitors during the same time period… according to Compete.com.

In the recent post, “Amazon isn’t backing down” I pointed out that Amazon provides a lot of “social networking” tools to promote online sales. I personally have ADORED Amazon’s business model from the beginning. Amazon truly offers a “better way to buy books” thanks to the social networking tools that they helped pioneered.

Allowing book buyers to write reviews on the site is, I believe, the foundation of Amazon’s success. It was the online “solution” to a book buyer’s dilemma: You can’t judge a book buy it’s cover. While Barnes and Nobles offers comfy couches which potential book buyers can “plop down” and get a “feel” for a book… the online book buyer did not have that option. (Amazon has recently begun offering readers the opportunity to “preview” a book’s content.) How do you make a purchasing decision when you can’t pick up and thumb through the pages? You can start by reading the reviews of what other readers have to say about the book.

Over the years, Amazon has increased it’s tools offered to authors, even including the ability for an author to blog on Amazon’s site. This is a win/win for both the author and Amazon. Amazon gets GREAT content to attract book buyers thanks to blogging authors. Authors get a place to harness the power of blogging in a place which makes it easy for readers to buy a copy of their book.

The problem occurs when authors depend too heavily on the kindness of Amazon. Don’t get me wrong, an author who maintains a blog on Amazon is utilizing a POWERFUL marketing tool. Bravo to each and every author doing so on Amazon. However, if that’s the ONLY online home you have… you’re putting an AWFUL lot of your eggs into a basket you don’t have ANY control over.

Case in point… the recent uproar over Amazon’s strong armed tactics with POD publishers.