Amazon sales ranks explained

One of our authors sent a mail today, asking whether we could double check his sales figures. He had checked his amazon ranking and according to those numbers he felt that his sales could be higher.
Unfortunately the amazon sales rank has little to do with the actual number of sales a book has made. Instead it is, amongst many other factors, both an indication of how well a book doing against other books and projection of future sales.

Steve Rhodes writes:

Later he reveals "One sale a day can put a title in the top 10,000 sellers; a sale every few days can land a title in the next tier of 100,000. When the rest of the list is updated each month, rankings are determined by a complex mathematical formula based on the most recent sale and the time between sales."
The article concludes by showing even a small number of books ordered can have a big impact on the rank: "...wishing won't make it so, but action can work wonders. Lew McCreary saw his well-reviewed thriller 'The Minus Man' (Penguin Books, 1994) locked in Amazon.com's dark middle kingdom since the start of the rankings. He regularly checked the ranking over several weeks. It barely budged. Last week's slot: 680,281. 'I just want to know what to do to get under 500,000,' he said last week.
"After some thought, Mr. McCreary, whose day job is editorial director of CIO, a magazine for chief information officers, rallied the magazine's staffers at lunchtime. He told them he would reimburse them for the book's $9.95 purchase price if they called Amazon.com and placed an order. Five hours later, 10 books had been bought, and Mr. McCreary was making a run for glory.
"By 5:35 p.m. his rank was 368. 'I feel like I have the bends,' chortled the author, preparing for a night of celebration. 'I surfaced much too quickly. I just hope I can stay up this high until morning.'"

Fluff has an in-depth information and graph page available, although you need to be a bit of a geek to understand it. Another explanation can be found here.

Spire Publishing on Facebook

There is now a Spire Publishing group active on Facebook. If you have a Facebook account just log in and search for the Spire Publishing Group. If you don't have an account please send a mail to me and I'll invite you in. We discuss all aspects of self publishing and would love you to join us.

Store Update

Today we cleaned up our stores. As some of you may know, we maintain a Canadian Bookstore, a UK Bookstore and a US Bookstore. This means that Canadian orders are shipped from Canada, UK orders from the UK and US orders from the US, minimizing shipping costs and delivery times.

The old set-up was not as clear as we wanted it to be, so now we cleaned everything up and put the entire store into it's own separate area. We hope you'll like it.

Congratulations to Alastair Humphreys

This just in: Alastair Humphreys, author of Moods of Future Joys which we published some months ago, has been offered a contract with a major travel publisher for his second book. I'll be posting more details later. This is further evidence that self publishing a book can open doors that would otherwise stay forever closed.

Brick Lane, the movie. A short review

My wife and I had tickets for the world premiere of Brick Lane yesterday. The premiere was part part of the Toronto Film Festival and as I had liked the book very much I was keen to see what the movie had to offer. During my time in London I had lived very close to Brick Lane. I know my way around the area and I am reasonably familiar with the lives of the Bangladeshi community who lives there.

I left the cinema somewhat disappointed. The thing I liked most about Monica Ali's book was that it managed to paint such a vivid picture of Brick Lane. The smells, the music, the hustle and bustle of Banglatown, as that area of London is also known as, jump off the page. Nazeen, the heroine, is alive in Ali's book. Her being married off at age 17 to a man she has never met, a man who lives in London - a city half way across the world from her native Bangladesh - is one of the most heartbreaking stories you can ever read. The movie skims these issues. There are too many scenes of wistful window gazing, too many flashbacks of Nazeem and her sister playing catch as children and not enough reality, not enough grit, not enough down and not nearly enough dirty. The comedian Eddie Izzard has a wonderful sketch parodying the difficulty UK films have with portraying emotions and Brick Lane too suffers from that very British disease.

Nazeem's initial suffering and her consequent growth into independence and freedom are pleasantly, at times beautifully, shot but ultimately a wonderful story is blandly told. Nazeem's sister, who is of such importance to Nazeem's development in the book, is reduced to writer of letters from faraway Bangladesh. Had I not read the book I would have had serious problems to understand what her significance was. Her failure to live an independent life in a society that treats a woman as the possession of her husband and her consequent slipping into prostitution is barely touched upon and when it finally becomes clear what is happening it comes as a total surprise for the audience.

So was it worth it? If you haven't read the book before seeing the movie then be prepared for a whole new depth of storytelling when you do read it. If you've read the book already, like I had, I suspect that you'll leave the cinema feeling slightly empty.

Are press releases worth the effort?

It is definitely worth sending out a press release when you first publish your book.

But, not one that is directly about your book.

There are lots of books being launched so another new book isn’t much of a story. So, you’ll need to find a news angle. Was there something special that happened when you were researching your book? Did you make a great sacrifice or overcome any obstacles when writing your book? It could be that your local paper may be interested just because you’re a prominent member of the local community.

Take a little time to think how your release can be different. Then weave information on your book into the release. Try to keep the release down to a page or so – and always include contact details!

A pint of milk and a book please

Good news for our UK authors: All of the books published with the Spire Professional Package are now for sale from the Tesco website. This adds yet another sales channel and helps make your books available to the biggest audience possible.

Good bye, Publish and be Damned. Hello, Spire Publishing

It was a dark and rainy Saturday afternoon in November 2002. At the time I lived in London, England, so nothing out of the ordinary so far. I was working on a Christmas present for my parents, designing and writing a cookbook, from recipes collected from my family. Suddenly I thought that it would be a really neat idea to actually publish the book, not just print and bind it. How hard could it be? So I went online and started researching. And researching. And researching. There were a handful of self publishing companies around but they weren't what I was looking for. Some were too expensive, some were too far away, some didn't offer features I wanted. The evening looked like it would end in frustration.

Then it hit me: Why not start a small publishing company myself. The name for the new venture, Publish and be damned, was decided upon, with the help of half a bottle of red, before bedtime.

The next I went to Companies House and registered a new publishing company, my own. I bought my first set of ISBN numbers later that week and then started looking for a printer. Many listened politely, then started talking about print runs and warehousing and numbers that made no sense whatsoever for me. All I wanted was to publish a book, not to own a warehouse full of paper. However, something else happened during that time. As word got around my circle of friends that I was trying to publish a book, several other authors and designers came forward and asked if, while I was at it, I could publish their books for them too. And after searching for weeks and weeks I finally found a printer who was willing to take my business, on terms that made sense to me.

Publish and be dammed went into overdrive. I joined forces with two partners and together we built a website, a manuscript submission page, a CMS and a bookstore. We all had day jobs but were working all the evening hours we could and we were having a lot of fun. After a year we had published nearly 100 books. What we hadn't done was make any money. In the words of our accountant at the time: "You haven't got a business, you've got a hobby."

Several things happened next. I moved on to live in Canada and my partners decided that they wanted to explore other opportunities. I then got introduced to somebody who had what I didn't have - business sense. That person had just sold a company and was looking for a new challenge. She took a good look at Publish and be damned, decided that it had promise and started to invest both time and money. And on the strength of that new partnership we've moved the company from being a hobby to being a business. The quality of our service went up. We added international distribution, colour printing, managed to lower our prices, increase the quality of our books and still, finally, make a profit. That was several years ago. Since then we've done a lot of growing up and this summer we decided that it was time that this was reflected in a name change.

Many authors had told us that they, while they loved the service, would have preferred a less flippant name. Especially in North America few people know about the Duke of Wellington and how he coined the phrase "Publish and be damned". As a result, Spire Publishing was born. And today we've switched off the servers for pabd.com and all traffic is being forwarded to Spire Publishing. It's the end of an exciting time, and the beginning of something new. Even lower prices, free author websites, more and better self publishing services for the independent author - we're all looking forward to the next five years and I hope you'll join us.

Interesting Yahoo Group

I just stumbled across an interesting Yahoo Group today. Here are the details:

This group focuses on book marketing, promotion, and publicity. In other words, How do authors go about finding readers and building their fan bases?

This is an international group of authors, publishers, editors, publicists and other involved in the book industry. Posts primarily deal with the final stages of book production and pre- and post-release marketing strategies. All questions relating to traditional, self-published print or ebooks are warmly encouraged.

Feel free to post tips, innovative promotions, new marketing avenues and, by all means, share your successes to inspire others. Please do not post excerpt texts, instead post a URL where your excerpt can be found.

Debate is a great thing provided we all remember that we're on the same side. Flaming is not allowed. We're all here to learn.

I just signed up for membership myself, so we might see each other over there.

More on blogging authors

Three authors who have just started using their free blogs are Steve Barton, Emma Carlton and Susan Wilson. Take a look, there's some good writing to be discovered.