Macmillan CEO has been awarded the Nimble Books Baton of Glory in honor of his superb service to the publishing industry in the recent Amazon-Macmillan tiff.
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.
| Event |
Impact |
| Mentioned in book review in Financial Times, which is the English equivalent of the Wall Street Journal; the book is one of four books mentioned in a general review of a topic; the comments about the book were concise and neutral |
27 additional UK sales in four months |
| Title surfing: an ”unauthorized analysis of X” where X is a top 10 bestseller, book is a thoughtful but very short take on X |
1600 copies in eight months |
| Announcement of book on community forum of ~ 500 members where author is a “big cheese” and known expert on topic |
59 copies in first month |
| One-hour appearance on EWTN, the Catholic TV channel–it is available on hundreds of cable systems worldwide, but I couldn’t figure out viewership numbers |
15 copies to EWTN store plus 10 sales that month |
| Several book signings a month, appearances on local radio, TV, & podcast, by former local news anchor in top 20 market |
1,100 copies in seven months |
| Adoption as required book for a course |
60 to 80 copies for each course |
| Promotion by a mini-network of 8 to 10 bloggers who all write on a similar topic |
100 copies in a month |
| Foreword to book is by best-selling author “Q” who has not yet written very many other books, so book X shows up high in the search results for author Q |
~12-15 copies a month |
| Bookstore at HistoryNet.com picks up a series of books |
50 copy initial order for each book in the series |
| Glowing review from prominent blogger |
~ 50 copies per month for several months |
| “Table copies” at a convention |
75 in four days |
Good post, and very possibly true.
Publishers are in the process of discovering that we’re in a shift from a product-centric world to a community-centric one. The new challenge arises from the fact that it is simple to pay royalties for sales of a product; it is a lot harder to pay somebody for their contribution to a community.
The author-publisher deal needs tweaking – The Shatzkin Files
A little late to the party.
I hate when people discover “new” methods and trends that are actually old news to anybody who relies on primary sources for news. To be sure, there’s an argument that it’s still news to a lot of people, but that’s the same argument that the lame old media use to explain why they’re doing feature stories in 2009 about new-fangled stuff like Twitter and Facebook.
Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual, Volume 2: How to Write, Print and Sell Your Own Book (Paperback)
via Amazon.com: Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual, Volume 2: How to Write, Print and Sell Your Own Book: Dan Poynter: Books.
This is a “pricing cloud” on all Nimble Books — y axis is lifetime revenue per month in print and x axis is $ price. I’m not sure what if anything it tells me!
This is lifetime unit sales (logarithmically) x price — only for LSI books, and not adjusted per month in pub (because, idiotically, LSI does not include the pub date in its financial reporting).
Official Google Blog: Knol is open to everyone
A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we’re making Knol available to everyone.
The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.
The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.
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