I haven’t written for a while. And had promised to talk about the marketing efforts I’ve
been putting together for Think Better.
First, I should tell you that my theory about the publisher’s business model has been
confirmed by a number of sources — published authors I have talked with, my literary
agent, and several independent publicists, all of whom may have axes to grind, to be
sure, but their stories are reasonably consistent — and they’re sticking to them!
In short, the model is this: buy as many titles you think might be successful as you can
afford, crank them out, throw them against the market wall, then throw (a little) money
against the ones that seem to be sticking, forget (that may be a bit harsh: have a warm
fuzzy memory of) the rest. I’ve also had some confirmation of the business model from my
own experience.
So the publisher has done relatively little. There’s been the standard
send-galleys-to-reviewers (not so standard any more, I understand — I may have been one
of the lucky ones), without substantial (or any) follow up. This resulted in a couple of
reviews or mentions. Once the book comes out, send another bunch to potential reviewers —
which resulted in a few more reviews, primarily on blogs and small periodicals of various
types.
However, in the meanwhile, I’ve been taking some action as well, which has born a little
fruit, and as a result, the publishers have also started to kick up their efforts (and
expenditures) a bit.
First of all I should tell you that the reviews Think Better has received have been
pretty good. Both the amateur reviews (18 so far on Amazon — all five-stars) and the
professional. If you are interested, see for example
innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com/2 … chive.html, which is fairly typical of
the blog reviews the book has received. I’ve pulled in a lot of favors and plumbed a lot
of contacts to get more of these kinds of reviews or mentions. Of the 12 - 16 media
mentions thus far, I’d say about 25% are the result of work done by the publisher and 70%
from my own efforts and 5% because of the dark matter in the universe.
Anyway, presumably because the mentions have been positive, the book has performed
reasonably well. It tends to hover around the 7,000 mark on amazon.com. Amazon uses an
arcane formula to rank its books, but I’ve been able to guestimate that that probably
translates into 12-16 books a day. Overall, according to BookScan (a paid tracking
service that the publisher uses and which covers about 80% of the market), the book is
selling about 200 copies a week (again that’s approximately 80% of the sales) in the US
market. That doesn’t sound like a lot (at least not to me), but it puts Think Better in
the top ten titles published by my publisher. What that means is that the publisher is
quite pleased. A book by an unknown author that’s only been out about six weeks is doing
pretty well at that level. And what THAT means, is that the publisher has now started to
invest a little more money in promoting the book. They have, for example, bought one of
those Amazon alerts (you know the ones, an email saying, “We’ve noticed that people who
have bought A also bought B, and we’d like you to know that B is now available.” The
alert has been making the rounds this week — with a small, but noticeable affect on Amazon
rankings.
Also, Think Better has started to appear on the “new release tables” at several of the
larger bookstore chains. These spaces are almost always paid for by the publishers. Just
because your book is a new release doesn’t mean it gets placed on these tables. In-store
positioning also helps a great deal.
Increasing sales also means that Think Better has started to appear on a number of
Amazon’s listmainia lists, which in turn increases its visibility and consequently its
sales.
It’s a slow slog though, and I’m finding it’s taking as much work to market the thing as
it did to write it in the first place.
But it’s not only sweat equity that I’ve invested. I’ve also contracted three independent
publicists who are just now starting to work on promoting the book. One of the key issues
is media followup. The publisher’s publicity people have hundreds of books they are
trying to promote, so followup phone calls are next to impossible. Independent publicists
get paid to do follow ups, so as a result media people get media kits, phone calls,
schmoozing, and so on, to encourage them to review or mention books. The old adage about
having to ask for the sale six times before the customer buys holds equally for book
reviewers. A simple press release essentially gets lost on their desks. You have to
contact them again and again in order to get their attention, then a few more times in
order to get them to say yes.
I’ll get into more detail on what the publicists are doing, how much its costing me, and
what the results are in subsequent posts.
By the way, I’ve mentioned the business market several times in this post. We (the
publisher, my agent, and I) struggled for a long time about how to position the book.
Although Think Better is clearly a hybrid (personal development, business, even general
interest) it was decided to pitch it as a business book. Why? because book stores don’t have
hybrid categories and you have to place it somewhere. One of the gratifying things so far
is that I’ve gotten lots of emails from business people I don’t know saying how much they
like the book, but the best one, by far, was from a woman who’s an exec at an ad agency.
She said, “Just wanted to let you know that I’ve been enjoying Think Better tremendously,
and I an see lots of applications to my business. But what I really wanted you to know was
that one of my children has been having trouble at school for the past year. We used your
process to come up with about 8 things we could do to improve the situation and an action
plan around each. Thank you so much.” I couldn’t have asked for better feedback.
Hope these posts are of interest to some of you. (Please do let me know if so)
All the best,
Tim
Bravo, Tim!