Nimble Books LLC

First, you might want to review Understanding Your Amazon Sales Rank … , if you haven’t already.

The way I understand book performance begins with the concepts of  “intrinsic” demand and  supply. Simply put, there are a certain number of people who, without any prompting from anyone, are already actively browsing for books about the topic of your book.

Then there are a certain number of books that come up in response to that search or come to mind as a result of prior marketing. Where your book ranks in the digital answer set is the result of a variety of complicated factors including keyword relevance, sales, publication date and so on; where your book ranks in “share of mind” is basically a function of your visibility.  The sales you’re seeing now are the intersection of the intrinsic demand and the supply of competitive books. This is what I think of as the book’s organic performance.  

 Figuring organic performance ahead of time is always a roll of the dice and I have been surprised quite often. For example, one of my most profitable books has been a 32-page color monograph called BB-67 Montana: Why She Matters Today about a never-built US super-ship.  While there are some clever and innovative things in the book that I continue to believe in, it is admittedly pretty darned short and that has sparked some negative reviews.  Nevertheless, it continues to sell steadily. Why?  I believe the book’s strong organic performance is the result of the intersection of supply and demand:

• There is a large population of people who browse for books about battleships;
• There are not a huge number of books published per year about battleships (24 in 2008 per Amazon search, only about half of which are actually on that topic); and
• This is the only book specifically about this particular ship.

You can boost organic performance by generating extrinsic demand, i.e. doing things to get  get the book in front of people.  There is one fundamental problem with book marketing as opposed to, say, marketing cars or houses, which is that the total net revenue per unit is generally under < $10. That means that if you are paying anywhere near $10 in marketing to acquire each new sale, you are probably losing money. 

We are not operating at the scale of Proctor & Gamble where their  ad spending is so great that they can afford to drum up sales for detergent that costs $14.99 a bottle.  (And they probably have better margins on liquid soap than we do on books!)  

So you really have to watch your pennies with generating extrinsic demand.  Free is by far the best price, and fortunately, many of the most effective ways of generating extrinsic demand are in fact nearly free, such as making media appearances.