Lulu.com Books on Amazon: 6 Month Analysis of Sales Rank

The following research is based upon a source of 506 Lulu.com published books. The books were selected based upon Amazon presenting over 1000 books ranked by their current Sales Rank on May 23, 2009. This list was then reordered for the top 500 books at that moment in time. Since then, 6 additional Lulu.com books were independently added for a total of 506 books. It’s also important to note that every book must have sold at least 1 copy on Amazon to be given a Sales Rank. This is an analysis of the 6 months of data from June 2009 through November 2009.

Statistics: Lulu.com Published Books on Amazon.com

Average Sales Rank: 836,811
Standard Deviation: 817,044
Best Ever Sales Rank: 1,811 Guild Leadership by Jeon Rezvani
Worst Ever Sales Rank: 5,024,215 Discovering a Lost Heritage: The Catholic Origins of America by Adam S. Miller
Best Seller: 384 copies – Forty Years a Speculator by Fred Carach
Average Number of Sales per Month: 7.5

On Average, a sale occurs every 4 days for a Lulu.com book.

Be aware that these statistics are only for Amazon.com, not for sales that occur on Lulu.com, which most authors would prefer due to higher author revenue (241% in my book’s case). That sales data however is locked to only the author’s account, and while Lulu offers sales rank information, it falls into the same category as Barnes & Noble in usefulness: not updated frequently enough and not accessible enough to allow for tracking by NovelRank.

If you are a Lulu author who used the Published by Lulu.com option when purchasing/given your ISBN and your book is found on Amazon, chances are that your book already exists in the NovelRank database. ~~Grab your Amazon.com link and enter it into~~ Search for your book on the Sales Rank Tracking page (updated January 24, 2010). Alternatively, you can see a list of all tracked books with Lulu.com as the publisher.

Book Sales Data Breakdown – Days and Hours

I’ve been looking forward to this post for a while, so I’m excited to release it as a New Year’s gift for 2010. I’m going to provide a quick breakdown with charts of book sales data with consideration to three criteria:

Days of the Month
Days of the Week
Hours of the Day

The following data encompasses information collected from June ’09 through Dec ’09. There was no consideration for newly added books (daily occurrence) as over a long enough period this should provide some balance. There also is no consideration for books with sales ranks trends, which is the focus of this study.

Finally, this only includes Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk as these domains have the most activity as well as the longest history within NovelRank. Now, without further adieu…

Book Sales Data by Days of the Month

I love graphs. I don’t think there is much to say for this category, so let’s start with the charts:

This data was collected near the end of December and to ensure it was not too heavily skewed, it was limited to June through November ’09. What I think is completely shocking is that nobody likes the 6th of the month. In the UK, the middle of the month is hot, but overall both charts show a trend towards the end of the month for shopping for books.

Book Sales Data by Days of the Week

This chart was altered slightly as the numbers were almost 4 times higher for sales on Amazon.com over Amazon.co.uk, but only to allow a closer comparison between both of the line graphs. While the UK line is smoother due to the lower volume, the overall trending is the same. Monday is the largest shopping day for books, followed by another spike on Thursday. Completely surprising to me is that Saturday’s are not a day to go shopping for books!

Book Sales Data by Hours of the Day

One quick note about the times. The times are in PST for both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Thus, there is an -8 hour shift for UK times. Thus, 00 for Amazon.com is 16 for Amazon.co.uk (midnight in both locations) while 12 for Amazon.com is 04 for Amazon.co.uk (noon in both locations). This is a poor oversight on my part to not correct for this in the graphing directly.

The buying cycle is very different for both sites/location. Granted, there maybe some error based upon Amazon’s failure to update sales rank data every single hour sometimes, notably for Amazon.com. This is a limitation of being dependent on Amazon’s updates to actually accumulate the data. However, I have not compiled (because I’m not collecting it in a way that is easy to analyze, yet) an outage log for each domain. I will begin tracking that information in 2010 and come back with more results in Q3 of 2010.

Final Thoughts

I’d like to approach this data again with a bit more scrutiny in 2010 and include the graphs I mentioned previously. I would definitely appreciate feedback in the comments below regarding the data itself and considerations for making the data more useful or accurate (I’m not a statistician). However, I can say that your book marketing efforts are best spent Sunday night or Monday morning near the end of the month to maximize book sales potential. Without the numbers to back it up (just an observation), if you sell less than 24 books a month, you will notice that a sale grants greater weight and exposure to your book (thanks to category rankings on Amazon) and typically lead to more sales in clusters. I hope to gather some data regarding number of sales after X number of days without a sale to back this up, but that requires a lot of data analysis which will have to wait till Q3 2010.

Thanks in advance, and I hope this proves at the very least interesting! Consider supporting NovelRank by tracking your book and sharing it with your friends!

Add Your Book Sales to iGoogle using RSS Feed

I love RSS Feeds, and even moreso, I love the book sales RSS feed. It gives me an easy way to know when I last sold a book on Amazon, what domain it was on, and how many copies were sold. However some people don’t know what an RSS feed is nor the benefits of them, so I decided to add a quick tip on how to get the RSS feed into your iGoogle homepage. This allows you to start your computer and browser and be immediately met with the recent sales information. You can even click through the links in the book sales results and see your page on NovelRank. Here are the easy steps.

Create your iGoogle page

Go to http://www.google.com/ig. You will then create a homepage or click the sign in link in the bottom left if you have a google account (I have a gmail account). All of these widgets can be dragged and moved around the page so you can get the most important stuff up top. You can also remove any you don’t want to keep it from being too cluttered. There’s lots to explore here, so let’s just jump right into the next step.

Get your book sales rss feed from NovelRank

Go to your book’s page on NovelRank. Click on the RSS Feeds box near the top to expand out the list of available RSS feeds.

You can right-click on the Books Sold RSS Feed and choose “Copy Link Location” (Firefox), “Copy Link” (Safari), or “Copy Shortcut” (Internet Explorer) to copy the link to your clipboard. We’ll be using it in just a moment.

Adding an RSS Feed to iGoogle

In the top-right of the iGoogle homepage, click the Add Stuff link. The next page has a ton of widgets, but you are interested in the Add feed or gadget link near the bottom of the left column. Click the link and it will expand to a box where you can now Paste in the link that you copied earlier.

The link you are pasting will look similar to this (don’t copy in this link, example only!):

http://www.novelrank.com/asin/143571590X/rss

Click the Add button and the small window will update to tell you it was successfully added. Click the « Back to iGoogle home link in the top-right. You will now see the new widget/box in the top-left with the contents of the RSS feed. Be advised that this box may be empty if there have been no sales yet tracked by NovelRank.

That’s it! Keep selling your books!