Yes and no.
Yes: I upload all books published by Nimble Books to Google Book Search, Amazon Search Inside the Book, and Amazon Upgrade. There is a lag of 1-4 months after nominal publication date before the book actually appears in those places. As you may know, once the Google author settlement is closed, Google will begin offering PDF downloads of “their” books.
No: my stance on e-books is that I am waiting until I can deploy my entire list (which includes many color books with high production values) to a device that can read and display near-full-size (~ 8 x 10) color PDFs. Tech-savvy readers will be aware that the Kindle DX claims to have a native PDF reader and a low-res (150 pixel per inch) grayscale display … but at this writing, Amazon has not yet answered the $64 million question: whether there will be a way for publishers to deploy their PDFs to Kindle via the Amazon DTP system or their Mobipocket subsidiary.
Dear Authors,
I have decided to do a better job of keeping all of you informed about what’s new at Nimble, because I have observed that there is something of a tendency for authors to feel that you are “inside a bubble” that is wrapped tightly around author and book, when, from my perspective, you are all tightly connected to a thriving enterprise that is doing a lot of interesting (and related) things at a fast tempo. This “inside Nimble” info may or may not be of any great practical significance to you, but I hope that it will at least be energizing and thought-provoking. February has been a busy month.
On a strictly procedural note, a few days into February (slightly after the official due date, sorry!) I sent out Form 1099-MISC for all of you who are US taxpayers and received income from Nimble Books in 2008. I used http://www.paycycle.com, which did a great job for this small business at $39 for the whole project. …
Late in January, I cranked out the second volume of Joe Hind’s ten-volume THE SHIP KILLERS: THE DEFINITIVE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE TORPEDO BOAT. The cover image of the first Confederate torpedo boat, the CSS David, wraps around the spine in a pretty cool way. The series has been picked up by the online bookstore at the Weider History Group’s HistoryNet.com, which has 2,500,000 unique visitors a month and growing. Now it’s on to volume three–Joe and I are chugging out a volume a month until we’re done!
The first four AGE OF OBAMA books finally made it all the way onto online bookstores, and they should be showing up on Amazon Search Inside the Book and Google Book Search sometime next month.
Tom Myer and I redesigned the cover of his FROM GEEK TO PEAK, a terrific book about your first 365 days as a technical consultant–very pertinent in the current climate! You can seethe redesigned cover here. The old cover (still up on Amazon — it takes a while for these changes to percolate through the system) got too many complaints about being a travel guide to Michigan! I will be the first to admit that I am not the world’s greatest cover artist, although I have my moments. I am generally open to helpful ideas, although it usually doesn’t work well when authors want to do everything themselves, as there are both technical and substantive reasons why I need to be hands-on, so that I can get the persnickety details right and so that I can maintain some common look and feel over all Nimble titles.
Pete Jones and I changed the trim size and re-launched his We Tried to Warn You: Innovations in leadership for the learning organization, his insightful monograph on what it actually takes to succeed at developing innovative products inside a large organization. (Hint: socialization). Pete is a PhD expert in user interaction and product design, and he will be editing a series for Nimble called Designing Organizations that Matter. I became interested in interaction design when I managed the “HF” (human factors) group at LexisNexis, and I continue to believe strongly in the value of the people who fill that role and provide their skills to the product development process. (I like to use Nimble to “put my money where my mouth is”, as I did with my very first book, BASIC DOCUMENTS ABOUT THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES AT ABU GHRAIB AND GUANTANAMO, which was motivated by my outrage and anger at the stupidity and wrongness of those unfolding scandals.)
I am always looking for books on technology and business because I enjoy the topics and think that the “best of breed” in those genres can be very valuable indeed, although, to be perfectly honest, I have not yet cracked the code of how to identify the books on those topics that will be strong sellers in the Nimble business model.
- Dark Navy: the Regia Marina and the Armistice of 8 September 1943 by Vincent O’Hara (author of The German Fleet at War, 1939 – 1945) and Enrico Cernuschi
- Secrets of the Modern World: F.W. Maitland and Yukichi Fukuzawa by Alan Macfarlane, professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, author of more than twenty books and one of the great social anthropologists of our era.
- Eclipses of the Sun by Jay Pasachoff, Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College
- The Cold War Saga by veteran diplomat Kempton Jenkins and
- The Ultimate Guide to Harry Potter Fandom by Erin A. Pyne
Coming in March:
I hope this finds you all well, and please don’t hesitate to drop me a note if you have any ideas or questions.
Best regards,
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.
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