A good month for Nimble Books. Returns were down, a lot, and after this month, there will be no more (I switched all my books to non-returnable status last fall). Gross sales were up by a factor of about 2 and net publishers comp was up even more. As usual, the Harry Potter book accounted for about 70% of revenue by title, and e-books accounted for about 25% of revenue by medium. One interesting surprise was that my Google AdSense books started to sell.
I managed to put my Harry Potter and Dan Brown books in front of several good foreign rights agents, and they all passed. I think the moral is that these books really aren’t very well positioned for rights sales. They are very personal, idiosyncratic, and idiomatic, and the PDF update/”living book” approach doesn’t transfer well either. I will have to think about whether making future books look more “standard” might pay off in terms of rights sales.
Google Book Search announced that they will offer full paid on-line access to digital titles, with a 70/30 revenue split between publisher and GBS. I am pricing my 17 GBS titles just like e-books so the net revenue per sale should be about the same as with my current e-book distributor. My most optimistic assessment is that GBS on-line access will be essentially another e-book “superstore” along the lines of Amazon, which might mean up to a 25% bump in total revenues. My more realistic assessment is that a 5% bump is more likely. It will be interesting to see what happens when GBS turns on the on-line access.
This website continues to support itself. One quite remarkable discovery was that it appears that about 80% of my referrer traffic is coming from images.google.foo — Google’s Image Search in various countries. Who knew the images were so popular? As a result, I improved the 404 page to make it easier for users to find the images. This resulted in a higher AdSense clickthrough rate for the site as a whole but a lower revenue-per-click, since apparently “Airbus 380″ has a lower CPM than the typical ad content of the Nimble Books home page! Nevertheless, the changes are worthwhile: Google Analytics shows that users are indeed finding what they’re looking for much more efficiently.
Next month: mostly maintenance.
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Tags: About Nimble Books, Dan Brown, google, SF, Store
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