Lesson Learned: Financial Motivations will Affect Book Sales

50 Conversation Starters Book Cover
Whether your intentions are good and your talents exceptional, if your motivations for writing are strictly financial, your book sales will suffer. Period.

It’s humbling, and it is hard, but it’s a lesson to be learned by established authors and new authors alike. A few months ago, I noticed that there was a price gap in the listed e-books for conversation starters or ‘book of questions’ style books. There were no books under $9.99, and thus nothing at the impulse $2.99 price point. So, since most who know me would agree that this was an area I was talented, I decided to design the type of book that would fit at that price point, write it, test the quality of the conversation starters using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and a SurveyGizmo survey, and publish it across Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the Apple bookstores.

Simple right?

  • Find price point
  • Write content
  • Publish
  • …
  • Profit!

The problem was my motivation for writing the book. Let’s be clear, I’m not giving up on it just yet (I have some great business cards that advertise the book in a unique way that I can leave around at social events), but the sales have been less than stellar. My goal was 200 sales per month, based upon some competition research and the price point. However, the best sales were the first few months, before 2 not-so-good reviews, and still sales were only at 30 copies per month. At that price point, I was still making more money and feeling better about each sale from my first book. Now, it’s not a direct comparison, because the books are not even in the same market or audience, but that’s not the point of the story.

Be careful of your motivations. Great books, regardless of audience; opportunity; or author, are written because they meet a need and were filled with the passion of the author. Sure, passion doesn’t sell books by itself either, but be careful that your goal isn’t, “To be the next Stephen King.” Rather, write about a topic that speaks to you and others, entertains, and you’ll be proud of when someone picks up a copy. Those are great authors, with smaller, sharper focus, driven by the content, not the dollar sign.

Amazon.de Kindle Edition Sales Rank Tracking Now Available

With today’s announcement from Amazon that Kindle Edition e-books will now be available for customers in Germany and worldwide who use Amazon.de, NovelRank has been updated to support this new store! You can now track your Kindle book sales on Amazon.de by going to the book tracking page on NovelRank and adding your URL, just like you did for the print editions. NovelRank’s second largest user base are books in German, published by German authors, and distributed exclusively on Amazon.de. Therefore, this update to NovelRank was made shortly after the announcement.

If NovelRank is already tracking your Kindle Edition book in other domains, just grab the Amazon URL again or the book’s ASIN (highlighted in the example below) and enter it again into the box on the sales rank tracking page, making sure to check the ‘Additional Domains’ box. The system will search whether a sales rank on Amazon.de is present, and add the book if it is available.

http://www.novelrank.com/asin/1234567890

Note: In most cases, your kindle book has not yet sold a copy, so no sales rank is present and NovelRank will not be able to begin tracking. As soon as you have a sales rank (a single sale will do it) on Amazon.de, it can be added to NovelRank using the method above. My personal trick? Buy a copy as a gift for a friend. About 3 hours later, you will have a sales rank and can add it for tracking on NovelRank.

April Technical Book Giveaway

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http://www.novelrank.com/book-giveaway

The April giveaway features 3 technical books by NovelRank authors:

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Sales Rank Check Frequency Changes – Growing Pains

Starting today, a new structure has been put in place to ensure the longevity and speed of NovelRank continuing through year two and beyond. This is based on the frequency that NovelRank will check the sales rank for a particular book on a particular domain (.com, .de, .co.uk, etc.). I thought long and hard about this, especially as an author who sells from 1 to 10 books a month in some cases, and I think this will be valuable and fair to everyone.

Here is the breakdown:

  • If a book has been sold in the last 7 days on a specific domain, it will continue to have its salesrank checked hourly.
  • If a book has been sold in the last 14 days (but not the last 7), the checks will occur every 4 hours.
  • If a book has been sold in the last month (but not the last 14 days) on a specific domain, the checks will occur every 8 hours.
  • If a book has not been sold in the last month on a specific domain, the check will occur once per day.

It’s important to note that as soon as a sale is made, the clock is reset and the book goes back to hourly salesrank checks! It is also domain specific, so in the case of some books (see my PHP book for example), it will check .com hourly, but .fr and .ca would be daily, thus it will vary between domains even within the same book, as many books are popular only in specific regions.

But WHY?

Two big reasons:

  • Less frequent checks allow the system overall to be faster at loading pages and data (more improvements coming soon on this)
  • More capacity for NovelRank to support tracking a larger number of books and benefiting more authors going forward. Amazon has limits on the amount of data you can request per second, so there is a raw limit to what NovelRank can provide due to these restrictions by Amazon.

I want NovelRank to always be useful, fast, and benefit as many authors as possible, and this is just the first step in continuing to uphold these goals. This slow down for books that are not actively selling but actively being tracked will be gradual and be in full effect by April 6, 2011.

What about new books?

When a book is first added to NovelRank for salesrank tracking, its last sale date is set to the day the book was added, so it will immediately be treated to hourly sales rank checks for at least the next 7 days (more if it continues to sell books!).

Final Word

When I use the term books here, I am referring to any paperback, comic, hardcover, kindle, etc. format that is tracked on NovelRank. For simplicity I just refer to everything allowed on NovelRank for tracking as books. The FAQ has also been updated to reflect this change. Photo courtesy of digitalmums.