Blogger: Wendy Lawton
Location: Books & Such Central Valley Office, CA
On Friday we’re going to talk about some of the specific things authors can do to help market their books and themselves, but in the meantime I want to address some of the frustrations we face as we roll up our sleeves to get the buzz going. Today let’s talk about measuring results. After all, can’t we approach this as a science of sorts? We should be able to plan a particular campaign, track the results, make a few adjustments, revisit results and decide if the expenditure of time and resources was worth it.
Simple, right?
Let’s say, for example, you’ve written a book about faith and fellowship in the Nascar community. That should be an easy book to market since there is a clear demographic– Christians who are Nascar enthusiasts. It’s a large committed fan base who probably read certain periodicals, maybe even subscribe to specific parachurch literature having to do with Nascar. Let’s say your publisher is marketing to the usual suspects– Christian bookstores, CBA trade journals, maybe purchasing space in the Parable catalog and even buying prime placement in Indiana bookstores during the Brickyard race. Nice!
But you’re the expert on the Nascar faith community. That’s why your publisher contracted the book from you, so you want to effectively get the buzz going for this book at all the racetracks– to all the race fans. Who better to do this?
Because you are a statistics junkie you decide to apply all your scientific expertise to this endeavor. You take out a half-page ad in the Motor Racing Outreach newsletter to coincide with the opening race of the season and the launch of the book. Perfect. Now to track the results.
You turn to Amazon rankings. Wow! The first days’ rankings were amazing. So amazing, in fact, that you call the marketing director at your publisher to share the good news. Her response is pretty underwhelming as she explains that the salesmen have been selling this book into the stores for weeks and Amazon has been pre-selling the book and these first week sales represent the whole sell-in and pre-sales. It’s not possible to extract the effect your ad had on sales. She then tries to explain that though it can be fun to track your sales on Amazon, the data is meaningless. Meaningless? You are stunned but you do some research and find out she’s probably right. When you googled “Amazon Rankings” you came up with a number of articles like this one and this one and this one. Even the legendary Miss Snark weighed in on it.
Okay, so Amazon rankings don’t work as reliable feedback. How about BookScan by the famous Nielsen ratings people? They rely on point of purchase information. Surely you’ll be able to see how well your book is doing there, right? Wrong. BookScan numbers are not reliable in the CBA (Christian Booksellers Association) where your book is selling. And they do not track numbers from the big box stores like Walmart, Sams, Costco, Target, etc. Rats! That’s where the majority of your sales will take place. Besides, you find out that the cost of BookScan reports is more than your entire publicity budget.
Okay. Plan B. You’ll just call the publisher each week and get sales numbers so you can track the efficacy of your efforts. Being a model client, you call your agent first, just to let her know the game plan. She sputters and aspirates the coffee she was drinking as you unfolded your plan so it takes a few minutes for her to catch her breath. She uses words like “career killer,” “high maintenance author,” and threatens to have you put in restraints.
You realize she’s resorting to hyperbole to make her point, but if she’s right no publisher wants to give out weekly or even monthly sales figures for a number of reasons. For one thing, it takes up time they need to be investing in making sales. Some publishers consider this proprietary information and are anxious to keep it close to the vest until royalty reports. But even more importantly, books are sold on a return basis. One hundred books may leave the warehouse but sixty could come back. If you’ve been told that 27,000 books went out the first week and they had to go back to print three times, you’re going to be very disappointed when your royalty report only shows sales of 18,000 books.
So how can an author be an effective marketer if there is precious little feedback?
We market on faith just like so many other things in this business. We’ll be able to see patterns after a while and get a real feel for what worked and what did not. For instance, at Books & Such, we noticed significant spikes in three different clients’ books. Same great writing, same publisher but for some reason, the numbers were higher than expected. On one author, her next book was back down in the normal range. What was different? All the publishers used one particular outside PR firm for these titles. Impressive! We were able to figure out what made the difference, but it took seeing a pattern that didn’t make sense until we examined it more closely.
Earlier this year Books & Such launched our library marketing database, Library Insider. This is an exception to the rule. The feature that impresses publicists and publishers most is that we are able to generate reports that track the results library by library. That kind of specific before-and-after tracking is almost nonexistent in marketing. It’s what’s made Library Insider so attractive to professionals and authors alike.
But that kind of feedback is a rare thing. As authors who are trying to get the buzz going for our books, we simply need to devise a plan based on our strengths, our book’s unique selling proposition and our intended audience and trust that, over time, we’ll see a difference.
I promised you another book recommendation: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Although not a prescriptive handbook for writers getting ready to market a book, this is a page-turner– a riveting scientific and cultural examination of what turns something into an epidemic. Should be required reading for author/marketers.
Your turn. Do you obsess over Amazon rankings? Are you surprised that the rankings are pretty much meaningless? Are your frustrated by the inability to know how your book is selling, especially when you’re told that much of the marketing needs to come from the author? What techniques have you developed to keep writing, keep marketing, keep your chin up when you can’t really get a feel for how things are going?
Yes, Wendy, I’m surprised that Amazon rankings are meanliness, and disappointed. My book is set mainly in China, so I check every week the rankings of similar books to know what is selling and what is not. But your knowledge in this area is by far greater than mine, so sadly I accept your conclusion. Best wishes,
This is without a doubt the most frustrating thing for me to accept. When Little Shepherd came out last year, I became an Amazon rankings addict. I checked my rankings every day–even posted them to a spreadsheet while I was on my virtual book tour. I blogged each time my book hit the Amazon bestsellers list. Then, low and behold, Amazon added sales information to Author Central. You mean I hit the bestsellers list because I sold 4 books one day? What!
I gave up trying to judge my sales, but that brings up one important question: how can I tell if my publisher makes a mistake in paying me royalties? I don’t have access to reliable sales data, so how would I know?
Thanks for another great article, Wendy.
Not being able to effectively track promotional efforts to sales results reminds me of the old quip:
“Half of my advertiser dollars are wasted — I just don’t know which half.”
While I’d love something more tangible to measure the efficacy of my efforts, I’m reminded of how a farmer plants seeds and trusts that they will grow. He does not dig up the seeds to check how well they germinated or analyze the root system. As he waits for the sun and rain to do their job, he tends other crops, always trusting that planting seeds yields fruit (or veggies or grain).
Just as sooner or later there is a harvest, I want to believe that as long as I keep sowing seeds, sooner or later books will sell.
Now, I need to go pull some weeds!
I wish I was to the point of compulsively checking rankings to track sales. Yet knowing this information beforehand will be a big help in expectations should the time come when I need to judge positive marketing strategies.
Tahnks!
Very interesting!
It’s nice to know other authors share my frustration with not knowing how to tell which marketing efforts work and which ones don’t.
Timely post, Wendy, as I have been noodling on either blog post, or as part of my next writing book, a whole new definition of success for writers. We have become way to numbers and ranking obsessed. It’s absurd, because you cannot control outcomes. You can only control what you put on the page. We have become a nation of comparison hogs. Ridiculous! It’s a self-imposed hair shirt we’re dressing up in.
I loved The Tipping Point, so much that I went out and read Outliers too. Malcolm Gladwell writes fascinating books!
There are so many triggers for our writer insecurities and Amazon rankings must be high on the list! We desperately want validation and success–but maybe we need to redefine both? I don’t know. I try not to get too caught up in worry, but I often fail!
I’d love to see your whole new definition of writer success, Jim. You are right, we can’t control the outcome. We have to try to affect the outcome with our best effort– keep taking next-steps– and trust God for the impact.
Why do we make ourselves so crazy!
When my first book went on Amazon I was a little obsessed with rankings & numbers but I now mark that down to “new author syndrome.” Admittedly when I released my most recent book I was more than a little dismayed to see it sitting in the 5000s for two weeks. My previous books have all held solid in the 1000s for several months or more but I just checked for the first time in two weeks and I’m at #918. I know exactly how many copies that is via the backend. But what I find more important than any ranking is the number of newsletter subscribers I get each day. When I see a wave of new sign ups I know that my sales are up. Thus the reason I had to check Amazon today. *g* The same goes for Nook as well.
I also note Facebook Fans. Those seem to jump when my sales increase as well. Twitter doesn’t mean as much for some reason.
As for defining success, that’s easy. Getting letters from my readers and having them interact with me on line. Not only do they take the time to read my work, they take the time to talk to me about it. That, for me, is success.