Jul
3
I mentioned a bit ago that I had put the last book I wrote, THE COMMITTEE, up for sale on Amazon’s Kindle platform to understand what authors’ experiences have been. I was surprised at the ease of the process and, once the book is available, how quickly changes can be made. The experience has given me some sales insight into the Kindle store as I have watched my sales ranking change with the number of books I sell.
The above chart shows my sales as of this morning. At first I saw a big spike as a number of friends bought the book based on the announcement, but with no marketing or promotional efforts, the sales quickly declined as the title was lost in the 750,000 titles that occupy the Kindle market. A sale of one copy would make a dramatic difference in the rankings, lifting the ranking to 100,000. From this I think we can say that of the 750,000 titles in the Kindle market place, less than 100,000 are selling a copy a day, which is a pretty low rate of sale for a traditionally published title.
Over the past few days I have done some small outreach to market the title and see if I could generate an uplift. As you can see by the past few days of sales, I have been successful in maintaining the sales lift. This is still only a unit or two a day, but it is enough to convince me with some concerted effort I would see a significant lift in sales. At some point I anticipate I would reach a ceiling dependent upon the quality of the content and external factors like the number of authors marketing their book heavily at that time.
As for tools, the single most important tool has been data feedback, in particularly the daily feedback on sales. This is something that is unavailable in the physical. Bookscan updates its point of sale information weekly, and POS information made available by accounts is offered on a similar timeline that does not allow for realtime feedback. The less time the feedback loop takes, the more precise the marketer can be in recognizing techniques that work and how well. And in the greater book market where 3 million new products were released last year alone, that precision is key.
