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A review of BookScan sales statistics for books about torpedo boats shows that the Release To Date (RTD) sales for books with the words “PT boat” or “torpedo boat” or “MTB” in their titles would produce revenue for me that would fall within a range between 0.5X and 20X, where X is my average unloaded breakeven cost.  Average unloaded breakeven cost only includes direct costs, excludes labor and overhead costs, which, properly speaking, should be accounted for, but, given the shoestring economics of my scheme, currently aren’t. When I look at publishing a book, I ask myself whether the likely sales would produce revenue > AUBC. AUBC translates into average unloaded breakeven unit sales (X) as X = AUBC/(revenue per unit). I have been pleasantly surprised by Twitter’s cost-effectiveness as an advertising medium. For little or no cost (the effort in composing a 140 character message) the system has been routinely generating 10-20 mostly US-based clicks to the Nimble Books Store per tweet. By way of contrast generating the same number of clicks via Google AdWords costs me anywhere from $3 to $10. (I don’t have good data yet about conversion rates). For 2010 I am going to experiment more systematically with an extensive Twitter-based ad campaign. Accordingly, if you Twitter, please: a) forward me your Twitter handle and follow http://twitter.com/nimblebooks Here’s the 1-2-3 of how to get into book stores. 1) print at least a 5,000 copy offset run so that 2) have a sales force that is credible with Barnes and Noble and with major indie stores and can hit every region of the country. 3) have a substantial number of good marketing events occur so that the stores actually believe your sales force and place significant orders for your book (and here, for everyone, including the big publishers, you also need luck). To accomplish all those things, you need a major publisher to buy your book. Unless they pay a high 5 or 6-digit advance, you are going to be the person primarily responsible for item 3. Even if your publisher gives you “a big laydown”, there are no guarantees; your book has about six weeks to “sell through”, then it’s off to remainders. I follow a different “no inventory” model. I don’t offer advances, I don’t do offset runs, and I don’t stock inventory. But I am not a service provider like Booksurge, CreateSpace, Alibris, or Lulu–I only publish books that are interesting (to me) and that (again, in my judgment) offer a significant and important perspective. The key advantage of this approach is that it frees up enough capital that I can make lots of bets on books I like. In essence, I am a singles hitter; almost all of the books I publish are profitable (for me) and all of them are interesting (to me). Some of the books I publish wind up being “doubles” or “triples.” I just don’t have enough capital to hit “home runs.” On good days, you might consider me a miniature Ichiro Suzuki. I thought I would report the results of some experimentation with Twitter. I I can’t help but observe that this seems to be more cost effective than my Google AdWords campaign, which costs me ~$0.50 CPC and doesn’t seem to be as effective at converting. I am thinking about discontinuing the Google Adwords at the new year and switching entirely to a Twitter-based program. Henceforth I will be setting (and communicating) publication dates only after the book is completely proofed and typeset, the cover is completed, and the book is “available for printing.” In most cases, the nominal publication date will be three to six months subsequent (although the book will have a soft launch and gradually become available on Amazon, etc. quite a bit earlier than the nominal pub date). This will a) dramatically reduce my opportunity to establish inaccurate expectations and b) provide more lead time for prepublication reviews and publicity. It also means that there will be a prolonged and rather annoying (to the writer) lag time from when the complete manuscript is submitted to when the publication date is established. That is a pity, but this seems like the best strategy all factors considered. This month’s projected year over year retail sales (i.e., how are things going this month, excluding direct sales). Every month in fiscal 2009 saw better sales than the average in 2008. The peak in May represents results from the introduction of the AGE OF OBAMA books beginning Jan. 20. Twitter has rapidly become a key source for real-time news recommendation and dissemination. Twitter results will often show up in the top few results on a Google search for [x]. I like sending scheduled Tweets — one a day or week — about the books in our stable. I make sure to point to the Amazon or Nimble pages about the book via the URL-shortening service bit.ly (which allows one to track click-throughs). With about 500 “followers”, I get about 15 click-throughs to a book per Tweet; don’t know about sales impact. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can set one up at http://twitter.com. I recommend the web-based service www.hootsuite.com, but there are lots of other services that will let you send scheduled tweets. If you include the phrase @nimblebooks in your Tweets, I will re-Tweet them (RT). Over time I have had the chance to observe the numeric sales impact of a wide variety of marketing “events” (some planned, some not) on the sales of Nimble Books and I thought I would provide some actual data points for authors to contemplate. Remember that Nimble Books uses a low-risk, low-inventory model and focuses only on online booksellers, who now account for somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of all US book sales. In all cases these numbers are fuzzy, arrived at by observing sales immediately following the event and subtracting an estimated number of normal “background” sales based on the title’s historical track record. What this all tells you: a) no one is getting rich here b) certain types of events have more impact than others c) the more of these events that you make happen, the better your book will do. The impact of these events is at least additive, and at some point becomes more than linear.
Bookstores *can* indeed order POD books, they do it all the time and can do so with 24 hour delivery provided by Ingram, the largest distributor in the US. Bookstores *prefer* not to order POD books because they have to take the business risk of paying for them up front. Also, bookstores prefer not to buy “nonreturnable” books, again, because they have to take the business risk of owning unsold books, rather than shifting the risk of returns back to the publisher, which was the historic norm in the US bookselling industry. If we were to use sheer unbridled logic to attack the problem, the logical thing for a bookstore to do would be to adjust their orders downward — from an optimistic x copies to say, a more prudent 1/3x copies — so that they are buying slightly under the number of books they think they will actually sell, while accepting a modest amount of risk that it won’t happen. Human nature being what it is, bookstore employees and even policies often default to a “no POD, no risk” policy. This means that buying a box or two of the books and carting them to your signings is probably the most expedient thing to do. it’s not that terrible to carry 10 or 15 copies to a bookstore. It’s the low-cost, low-risk nature of selling nonreturnable POD books that enables me to make bets on lots of commercially risky books rather than only publishing a few “sure bets” every year, so I can’t modify these policies. You can also direct booksellersto the Direct Purchases page http://www.nimblebooks.com/wordpress/direct-purchases-and-quantity-discounts/, which explains that if they don’t want to use Ingram, I will sell direct to them for 35% off, with additional quantity discounts beginning at 50 units and stepping all the way to 500+. |
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