I came across a recent discussion on a review of Sara Gruen’s Ape House at Amazon with remarks to publishers setting the price of Kindle Ebooks to the same (if not more) than the list price of the actual hard copy book itself. For example, the list price of the hardcover book is $26.00. Amazon discounts it by 42% making it $14.99.
I’ve always been a cheerleader for investing in copies of your own book for various reasons. This always becomes part of the great debate of how much money an author should invest in their book to make it successful. Remember, if you are a self-published author, you wear many hats: writer, editor, publisher, and marketer. Before considering self-publishing, you should consider how much money you are willing to spend on marketing your project.
Check out this article by Isia Jasiewicz from The Books Issue of Newsweek (first posted only July 30th, 2010): Boyd Morrison was finishing a Ph.D. in industrial engineering when he wrote his first novel. Five agents rejected it. Nine years later he tried again, and this time he did get an agent—after nearly three years [...]
In March 2009, I began writing an article for LLBR about how to market your book on Amazon. The result of that article turned into a longer project that I decided to publish as a small book. Taking advantage of Lulu’s free ISBN at the time, I released it as a 93 page guide that included my POD Diary which I wrote throughout the first year of marketing my book, Stealing Wishes.
For those who might have missed it, best selling author John Grisham was on the Today show this morning to plug his new book, Ford County, but also had a thing or two to say about the recent web war with book pricing that’s been taking place amongst Amazon, Wal~Mart, B&N, and Target. He believes printed books are an endangered species and that the surge in popularity of EBooks isn’t helping.
It’s been a busy summer for me! Working in the textbook industry for me is like the month of December for retailers, except our rush season starts July 5th and lasts for almost three months as college bookstores prepare for students to return to campus. After coming home from a grueling day, the last thing I wanted to do was to look at a book, much less anything related to books. But Facebook and its many “Oregon Trail” like games helped to distress my busy mind supplying a numbing sensation and much time wasted watching virtual crops grow.
Yesterday, I posted about an email blast I got from Lulu saying my book had been picked to be part of the Amazon Marketplace program. Today, I have more information to add to that for the authors who are in the dark just as much as I am over the information presented in this Lulu email, or lack thereof.
Back on May 12th, I did a random search on Amazon.com for my book, Stealing Wishes, and found an odd separate listing for my book. It had no picture and only had one copy for sell by a third party seller. I promptly clicked on this link only to find the seller’s name was LuluPress. You can view the listing here, although the copy that was for sale and even the name of my book has since been removed from it. You can view LuluPress’s profile here. I decided to email LuluPress asking if their authors received royalties for these Marketplace sales. They replied two days later with a simple “yes.” So, I left it at that.
Today, like every day, I checked my Amazon.com sales rank and discovered it had bumped up quite a bit. I’m now at 101,491. Now as I’ve discussed in the past, this might very well mean I’ve sold just one copy over the weekend, or even up to 5 copies. And chances are the rank will fall fast unless another copy sells today.
From mid-March to mid-April, LLBR held a poll asking you how many copies of your book sold the first year if your book had been published for at least one year. The blog received a total of three thousand hits during this time, and only thirty of you voted in the poll. So, 1% of our visitors voted in the poll, and I think that’s actually a fair comparison to how those 30 people ranked in sales.
