The Nimble Books Blog

This is the latest in a series of periodic updates of the Nimble Books Marketing Playbook.

When I think about marketing books online, I often think of principal components analysis, which is a mathematical technique that is used to reduce the dimensionality of a data set. When you have a phenomenon that is described by a large number of factors, PCA is a tool for identifying the smaller number of variables that account for most of the variance. PCA is often surprisingly effective, sometimes reducing dimensionality from hundreds to single digits. The same concept works for marketing books online: although there are a great many variables, just a handful seem to explain most of the variation.

There are four major variables that you can influence before publication:

1. Get the positioning right. Are you providing a substantial benefit addressing specific interests of a well-defined audience that likes to buy books?
2. Maximize keyword discoverability. Discoverability = the intersection of strong keywords with few competing titles.
3. Maximize quality.
4. Take a strong point of view.

There are four major variables that you can influence after publication:

1. Get as many readers as possible to write “real name” reviews on Amazon. Anytime anyone says something nice to you about the book, ask them to repeat it in a review. Reviews appear to every prospective buyer at the point of sale and are free.
2. Update your email signature, your byline, your blog, and your webpage to point to the book’s Amazon.com detail page.
3. Sign up with Amazon Connect, Amazon’s marketing service for authors, and create an Amazon blog for your book. But only do one post to the blog, and update it as needed. Knock yourself out on that post, because it’s the only place on your book’s detail page where you can speak directly to the customer and where you can modify your message in near real time.
4. Send as many review copies as you can to prominent journalists and bloggers who are actually likely to review the book. When there is a good review, plug it in your blog entry (see item #3). I can also incorporate pull quotes in the “editorial reviews” section of the detail page, but I am limited to 20 (!) words, which usually requires severe, Rex Reed-like truncation.

That’s it! This relative handful of activities seems to explain most of the variation in the efficiency of online marketing for Nimble Books.

In a future post, I will list just a few of the dozens of demonstrably cost-ineffective marketing tools that have been devised to separate authors and publishers from their money.

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Heroic Labor - washingtonpost.com

The publicity director at a major New York publisher once told me there probably aren’t more than 80,000 regular readers of literary fiction in America.

A well-received book of poetry might sell 2,000 copies.

Ron Charles is a senior editor of the Washington Post Book World, so presumably he knows what he is talking about!

Technorati Tags: royalties, writing, the business of writing, publishing

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I always enjoy reading about authors’ actual sales.

Book numbers (Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog)

ot my royalty statements from Putnam, dated up to last July.

I’ve sold roughly 90,000 copies of PNM (55k hard and 35k soft). That means I’m close to 80 percent of the way to paying off my advance (called “earning out”).

As for BFA, it sold 20,000 copies in its first nine months, which is roughly half of what PNM did in the same time frame. I’m only about 25 percent of the way toward earning out on that book, and it may take quite a long time there, depending on what we see with the paperback. The key will be whether or not BFA eventually picks up the regular school sales like PNM has apparently started doing.

The glass-half-empty thing is to note how long it takes to get beyond your advances.

The glass-half-full thing is to note I’ve sold about 110,000 books and all four versions seem to be hanging in there reasonably well on Amazon.

Of course, all of this is relative. My first book, a classic academic adaptation of my dissertation, has sold about 500 copies worldwide in the last decade and a half.

I have little idea about sales to date in Japan and Turkey. All I ever heard about Japan was that I sold about 9,000 units in the first six months there. That number could have been sales to stores but not completed sales to readers. Store typically return about 40% of the books they get from publishers back to the same publishers. Still, even if that were the case, I gotta admit I was stunned to even have a book published in another language, much less sell thousands of them.

Why bring all this up?

Well, simple answer is that I got the statement in the mail.

Trickier one is my recognizing that Vol. III needs to be a bigger seller than BFA. Otherwise I fall from the ranks at Putnam, where the standards are amazing high.

Welcome to the midlist!

Technorati Tags: Barnett, Pentagon’s New Map, royalties, the business of writing

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DUMMIES AUTHORS TO HOLD NATIONAL AUTHORS’ UNCONFERENCE IN SAN FRANCISO - Tech Benders

(PRLEAP.COM) San Francisco, CA … Alan L. Rubin, M. D. is pleased to announce that 150 authors of Dummies titles will be meeting in San Francisco from November 3 through November 5, 2006. The “unconference” will take place at the San Francisco Hilton Hotel on O’Farrell Street and will include For Dummies authors from across the nation. Literary agents and representatives from Wiley Publishing, the publisher of the For Dummies books, will also be in attendance. Several sessions will be open to the public.

The conference, or “unconference” as it is being billed by its organizers, represents the first time that authors of For Dummies books have joined together in an organized event. The popular book series includes books on such diverse areas as basic computing; advanced computing and the Internet; sports and leisure; travel; health, mind and spirit; making and managing money; and the home. The public will be invited to book signings at local bookstores, where groups of authors will be available to sign their books, and to “Ask the Expert” sessions at the hotel, where the public can get help with issues that the authors have written about.

According to Dr. Rubin, organizer of the event, “There are nearly two thousand For Dummies titles available to the public written by thousands of authors. It seemed only logical that an event of this sort would be beneficial not only for the authors but for the general public as well.” “We are limiting the event to 150 authors,” Dr. Rubin continued. “When I sent out the initial information to the authors the response was overwhelming. We currently have authors representing everything from acne and computer viruses to poker, gambling and money management!

A sign that the market for Dummies books has peaked?

Technorati Tags: Dummies books, computer books

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The Rank Economy: Publishing Business Books Ranked on Amazon
… The main thing I’ve learned from watching this list is how writers prioritize their work. Ignoring the style references for editors and academics, the main priority for writers is finding places to mail their manuscripts. Next comes a whole slew of books about how to get the editors and agents to actually look at the manuscript, rather than chucking it in the slush pile. A few publishing business titles are sprinkled in for writers who decide they’ll be better of publishing themselves, or simply give up on finding a traditional publisher. The lowest priority appears to be generating sales for books once they get published. I guess a lot of authors either just want to see their name on a book cover, or are too exhausted by the process when they get there to worry about sales. It could also be that most authors still believe that once a book is published, it will generate sales on its own through word of mouth or some passive means. Good luck!

Ouch. Well said.

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Good stuff. Links to each presentation are available at the BISG site.

BISG Making Information Pay 2006 Conference

BEYOND THE BESTSELLERS

How smart publishers, distributors and booksellers take advantage of growing sales opportunities in the “long tail” of the book market

JOSEPH GONNELLA, Chairman, BISG Board of Directors
Transcript: “Welcome”

TED HILL, President, THA Consulting | View bio
Transcript: “Opening Remarks and Introduction”

CHRIS ANDERSON, Editor-in-Chief, Wired magazine | View bio
Presentation: “The Long Tail of Books”
Mr. Anderson’s keynote address presented selections from his highly influential Wired Magazine article, The Long Tail, wherein he describes an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries.

KIRBY BEST, President & CEO, Lightning Source | View bio
Presentation: “New Markets for the Deep Backlist and Small Sellers”

IAN BRADIE, Press Distribution Director, Cambridge University Press | View bio
Presentation: “How to Keep Your Titles Alive with Print-On-Demand”

MARK SUCHOMEL, President, Independent Publishers Group | View bio
Presentation: “Best Practices for Publishing & Distributing Mid-list Books”

CAROL FITZGERALD, President, The Book Report Network | View bio
Presentation: “Best Practices for Target Marketing on the Web”

BORIS WERTZ, COO, Abebooks.com | View bio
Presentation: “How to Cost Effectively Sell Books to Micro-Markets”

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