Over the last couple of weeks, we thought about how to sell books the traditional way – print books sold through physical bookstores. The short summary: you try to amass retail footprint (via your publisher\u2019s sales team) then create a real density of awareness once you have it. The lethal catch: if you don\u2019t capture that footprint in the first place, there\u2019s essentially nothing that can be done to achieve sales thereafter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, we turn from a world of tweed, pipe tobacco and hardbacks\u2026 to bits, bytes and algorithms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This email (and the ones that follow) are of particular relevance to anyone self-publishing their books, but I think they\u2019re ALL of relevance anyway. No ambitious author should be without a mailing list under their own control. And the other tools we\u2019re talking about are so basic to modern digital selling that you can\u2019t afford to ignore them. And, to be blunt, plenty of trad publishing companies who ought to know better are still poor at digital selling. You won\u2019t be able to understand or modify those failures unless you understand the territory. So: listen up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The big question today is: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How, in theory, do you achieve huge sales via Amazon? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, I know that other online bookstores exist. But they\u2019re so small in comparison with Amazon that they barely count. Kindle Unlimited alone is about equal in size to all other non-Amazon e-stores combined. So, I\u2019m going to focus on Amazon. That\u2019s where the sales are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And\u2026 the answer to our big question is easy. It\u2019s: <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not going to talk about Part 2 of that very much. In a nutshell, you need a blisteringly good book cover. You need a strong blurb. You need to accumulate some reviews. You need a sensible price (which means a low one. My Fiona series is self-published in the US. The first book in the series normally sells at $0.99. The other books sell at $4.99.) And \u2013 have I ever mentioned this? \u2013 everything of course<\/em> needs to be perfectly in line with your insanely strong elevator pitch. You all know what a strong Amazon page looks like, because you\u2019re familiar with it as readers. Create that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So let\u2019s turn instead to Part 1 of the question: an altogether harder and more thought-provoking question. How do you drive traffic to your Amazon page? <\/p>\n\n\n\n The biggest source of traffic <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Before we start to answer it, I want to call your attention to the phrase \u201cstrong, steady traffic\u201d. What does that mean exactly? Also: who cares? If you had, say, 10,000 visitors to your book page, why would you especially care if they all came at half-past two on Saturday, or trickled out over a week, or trickled out over two months? If, let\u2019s say, one in ten of those visitors ends up buying a book, that\u2019s 1,000 book sales whichever way you count it, right? <\/p>\n\n\n\n But no: that\u2019s not right. That arithmetic is totally wrong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Because the biggest source of traffic to your Amazon page will be\u2026 tiny drumroll\u2026 Amazon<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s websites have more book-buying traffic than anyone else, by far. Amazon knows exactly who amongst their horde of buyers is likely to buy your book. Further, Amazon has any number of ways to advance or drop the visibility of different pages. For example, a really popular book page might feature on: <\/p>\n\n\n\n So, the best way to get traffic to your book\u2019s Amazon page is to get Amazon itself to boost your page\u2019s visibility. Essentially, you want to make sure that Amazon\u2019s algorithms and robots to decide that what they most want to do is feed traffic to your book page. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But how?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Strong and steady <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To answer that question, you need to know two things. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The first is that Amazon\u2019s bestseller lists are extremely sensitive to short-term movements. A classic bestseller list \u2013 the NY Times list, for example \u2013 reflects the total volume of weekly sales, and is updated once each week. Amazon\u2019s list, by contrast, updates every hour. What\u2019s more, the sales you\u2019ve made in the last 24 hours account 50% of your total ranking. The sales you make in the preceding 24 hours account for the next 25%. The prior day for 12.5%, and so on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That means Amazon is electrically sensitive to quite small movements, in a way that the NYT list is not. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That said, Amazon\u2019s little robots know that a one-off spike doesn\u2019t mean too much \u2013 it could be an email blast that gets a flurry of sales and nothing more before or after. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So, the Indie Author Hive Mind (which is exceptionally smart, by the way) says: <\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019ll note that this advice will NOT maximise your peak bestseller rank. If you wanted to do that, you wouldn\u2019t just try to get your sales compacted into a single day. You\u2019d ideally try to have them squashed into a single hour. And yes, you\u2019d have the pleasure and satisfaction of a salesrank you can boast about to your dental hygienist. But you won\u2019t get as many sales overall as if you follow the plan here. And sales matter more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What happens next? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n So let\u2019s say you follow the plan, and achieve that gently sloping uptick in sales over 4-7 days. What then? You\u2019ll have exhausted your mailing list. Your ad budget will be empty. What next? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, what next is \u2013 Amazon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you do this right, at about the four-day point, you\u2019ll see a sudden surge in sales as Amazon takes over the marketing. Its tiny little underpaid, non-union bots are essentially saying, \u201cOK, author-human, we\u2019re convinced that this book of yours is worth marketing, so we\u2019re going to start marketing it ourselves. We\u2019re going to sift through the MILLIONS of readers who come daily to our website, and we\u2019re going to show your book to the ones most likely to buy it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n That sounds exhilarating \u2013 and it is. But the exhilaration (and the sales) won\u2019t last forever. New books come onto the market, new sales surges are manufactured, those underpaid little bots are fickle \u2013 FICKLE, you hear me? \u2013 and they will start flashing their glossy metallic ankles at other books and other authors instead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So, over a period of about 30 days, you\u2019ll see sales tail off to a base level\u2026 then probably dwindle further as time goes by. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019ll do better in that 30-day period (and maybe extend it a little) if your Amazon page is all seven shades of fantastic: Amazon will prefer to send readers to a page that ends up in sales. You\u2019ll also do better if readers read and enjoy and finish your book. (How does Amazon know if you finish your book? Because it collects data from a gazillion Kindles.) But nothing lasts forever. Your sales surge won\u2019t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The arithmetic of sales <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Earlier in this email, I said: <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf you had, say, 10,000 visitors to your book page, why would you especially care if they all came at half-past two on Saturday, or trickled out over a week, or trickled out over two months? If, let\u2019s say, one in ten of those visitors ends up buying a book, that\u2019s 1,000 book sales whichever way you count it, right?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n You can now understand why that logic is flawed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you trickled those sales out over two months, your popularity on Amazon would almost certainly never rise to a point where you tickled Amazon\u2019s bots enough to get them involved. So your expected sales would indeed be 1,000 books, or something similar. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you took the one-off surge approach, I think that Amazon would respond, just not in a very powerful or sustained way. But still. Books sold? More than 1,000 anyway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And if you took the slow and steady over 4-7 days approach? You\u2019d easily generate enough sales to get a really good blast of love from Amazon and you\u2019d see lovely, organic sales for week, after week, after week. That\u2019s where you\u2019ll really make the money. That\u2019s also why smart indie authors are perfectly happy if their Week 1 ad campaign makes exactly zero profit. It doesn\u2019t have to make a profit in week 1. It has to make a profit in the somewhat longer term. The approach outlined in this email tells you how to go about doing that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNow look, you blithering idiot, you gibbering phytoplankton, you lumpen mass of curdled whey \u2013 why won\u2019t you answer the ONE QUESTION that I really want you to answer?\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I expect that most of you will be thinking along these lines \u2013 or a politer version anyway. Because of course, it\u2019s all very well setting out the theory of how to apportion your traffic to Amazon, but how do you secure that traffic in the first place? <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ll answer that question in some detail next week, with deep dives into a couple of further areas after that, but suffice to say that there are lots of things that don\u2019t work: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Some items on this list might be surprising: how could Amazon ads not increase sales on Amazon, for example? The answer is that Amazon ads may increase sales in a low-level, evergreen-type way. They are not well adapted to the kind of surge marketing I\u2019m talking about here. I also think that Amazon ads tend to work better as a phase two option: that is, once you have already generated some good book sales through other sources. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Or again: how could trad publicity not work, since it works perfectly well for trad publishers? And yes, of course it does: but they have a huge physical retail footprint. Trad publicity is pretty much hopeless for generating digital sales on demand. The two worlds \u2013 physical bookstores and all things Amazonian \u2013 are largely separate in terms of sales approach. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So I\u2019m only going to focus on three tools, but they\u2019re all important: <\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s it. That\u2019s what lies ahead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019re trad published, then knowing about promo sites is valuable, in that publishers should \u2013 these days \u2013 think of them when it comes to boosting your ebook. Author mailing lists are critical for everybody. And Facebook ads? Well, it will be essentially impossible to profit from them if you\u2019re trad published. But indie authors will rely on them heavily \u2013 and I do think that trad authors just need to know what their publishers could be doing, and in many cases ought to be doing. You can\u2019t even have the conversations, if you don\u2019t understand the territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Selling Strategies<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n An unusual task this week. Simply: <\/p>\n\n\n\n You might be talking about something that your publishers conceived and executed for you. You might be talking about something that you did yourself. Either way, let’s hear about it.\u00a0When you’re ready, post yours here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And? <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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