LLBR: First, tell us who you are and why you decided to create NovelRank.

ML: I’m Mario Lurig and I published my first (and currently only book) over a year and a half ago, “PHP Reference: Beginner to Intermediate PHP5“. I did some of my own marketing on the book, but checking Amazon.com all the time to see if my sales rank was lower (and thus a sale) was just not a good use of my free time. I looked around to see what sales rank tracking sites were out there and I just wasn’t thrilled with any single one (I tested most of them). So for my own benefit I started to track my book and had it email me on a sale, because in the end it’s not the rank but the sales info that you really want. Eventually, I decided to make NovelRank a site for other authors and committed 180+ hours of time in 2009 designing, researching, and creating the site so that other self-publishing authors could get more real-time information about how well their book is selling and how well their marketing is working.

LLBR: What is NovelRank and how does it work?

ML: It’s a pretty simple concept: You add your book to NovelRank by providing the link to your book on Amazon, and it tracks your sales rank on Amazon every hour. It also uses that information to determine if your sales rank has changed in a way that means a book (or more than one) has been sold. It then reflects that data on the site. You can track by visiting the site directly, grabbing the widget for displaying your book’s sales rank on your own website, or grabbing the RSS feed so you can put it into your favorite RSS reader. The best part, and mind you I’m biased, is that you don’t have to create a login, and you can share your book’s link with your readers or friends by just sharing the link.

ML: I couldn’t charge a fee, because I know how it is to sell a handful of books a month ( I average 15 a month), and that was the exact audience I wanted to help, so the site is completely free. Yes, that means that my hourly rate for building and improving NovelRank is currently around $0.01/hour, but if an author is selling a 1000 books or more a month just on Amazon, you probably care a lot less about the details, just the fat check. I want to help the independents, even the authors who market their books but get limited information from their publishing company so they have no idea what works and what doesn’t.

LLBR: So how does NovelRank make money and stay online?

ML: Currently, the hosting for the site is paid for by the income my book generates, barely. However, if you click through to an Amazon domain from your book’s page and end up buying something on that visit to Amazon, I get a small percentage of that item’s price as a kickback from Amazon (around 5%) through their affiliate program. Costs you nothing. I also may run some NPR style ‘support NovelRank’ pledge drives once or twice a year, but this is a while away, if ever. I never intend to put ads on the site or charge. Clean design, useful information, and a supportive community has always been my top priorities.

ML: RSS feeds, spreadsheet downloads of data, twitter searches, sales rank widget, average sales rank for common time periods, some statistical info (best rank, worst rank, etc), and how long it’s been since you made a sale. Oh, and pretty charts as a visual aid for your sales rank (soon I’ll be adding charting for actually sales as well). This is just the beginning, what I considered the basics needed. In 2010 I have a whole list of new goals, including optional user accounts that you can use to track multiple books on one page (and still share that page with others). The complete chart of features is available on NovelRank.com.

ML: The lists are updated hourly, just like the sales rank. I thought of a few criteria that were interesting and tossed them all into a Top 10 Lists page, which feeds the frontpage of NovelRank with 3 lists, the 3 lists randomly changing hourly. I’m personally addicted to the ‘Recently Added’ list for obvious reasons. In the future I may add a few more lists, but I think there are enough for now: Top sellers, recently added, top Lulu.com books, and diamonds in the rough, a category of books that sold a copy recently, but it’s been a few days and they deserve some reader attention.

ML: Hourly, as long as Amazon actually updates. Sometimes an Amazon domain doesn’t provide new sales rank data, so nothing is updated on NovelRank’s site either. At one point I saw that Amazon.com and Amazon.ca were not updating a third of the day, over 8 out of 24 hours! Usually, this won’t effect much, unless your book has a sales rank below 400 where hourly changes make a difference in calculating the number sold. Of course, if your sales rank hangs out below 400, I’m insanely jealous.

ML: Every Amazon domain. I built it with Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in mind, but I was a little too prepared so switching on Canada, Germany, France, and Japan was actually really simple. I figured there was no harm in offering more information for authors, and it may prove interesting data to analyze later.

ML: Barnes & Noble is tracked by a few other tracking sites, but frankly I don’t see the benefit. Barnes & Noble isn’t as diligent in updating their sales rank, making the final results (estimating sales) difficult to make useful. They also don’t provide a convenient way to get at the data, and I just don’t think it benefits authors enough to warrant putting it above other features I’d like to add. I’d actually like to add back in the ability to track Kindle Edition books, since these are really huge sellers now, but Amazon removed the ability to get their information through the API (how I get the data), thus making it much harder for me get the hourly rankings. I want to resolve this, because it’s a market that is only growing each year.

ML: Sleep. I worked really hard for a few months to get it where it is now, and currently I’d give it a 7 on its usefulness for as many authors as possible. It can be better, and I want to get there, but I have to make time for it between my full-time job and the articles I post to the NovelRank blog that I think add some fresh information for authors. I really want to build an iPhone application that will make your phone ‘cha-ching’ whenever a sale is made; that idea alone motivated me a lot, and I don’t even have an iPhone. That will be late 2010 I’m sure, though other features will arrive sooner, such as the previously mentioned user ‘accounts’.
The other issue is that I’m a bit over halfway through my next book, a work of fiction about a sentient man trapped in his zombie body. Trust me, it’s awesome. I’m trying to finish that, revise it 2 or 3 times with some help, then get it self-published and in the public eye. I’m intending to donate 50% of the proceeds of that book to Child’s Play Charity, and use the other half to take a handful of friends living around the country on a group trip that none of us would or could do alone. I’ll need a bit of luck and a ton of sales, but I’m hoping the book and marketing will be good enough. Till then, I want to tell as many authors as possible about NovelRank; It’s nothing without them.

It all starts with sales reported to me from Lulu.com.  In order to keep the price of my book affordable, I opted for a lower royalty, just 67 cents per copy sold through a distribution channel outside of Lulu.  Here are the total copies sold through Lulu and the total money I made from each as of June 8, 2009.

Lulu:

23 copies sold through distribution channels – Amazon  (67 cents each x 23 = $15.41)

2 copies sold through UK distribution channels (67 cents each x 2 = $1.34)

3 Ebook downloads direct from Lulu ($4.00 each x 3 = $12.00)

1 print copy sold direct from Lulu ($3.86)

That’s a total of $32.61 earned direct from Lulu.com the first year.

Sad, isn’t it?  Not really.  Obviously, I sold more copies through Amazon than I did direct from Lulu. Perhaps I could have done more promotion.  Perhaps I could have directed more people to Lulu instead of Amazon to increase my earnings per copy.  However, the majority of readers are more likely to buy through a site they know and trust, such as B&N or Amazon, rather than buying direct from my Lulu bookstore.  Had I never once mentioned the book was available on Amazon, and had I only directed people to Lulu, maybe my earnings would be better…maybe not.

But don’t frown.  That’s just Lulu.  Let’s take a look at Kindle E-reader sales for the year.  For the sake of price changes, discounts, and the various number of copies sold per month, I’ll just show you how many copies sold each month and then give you the grand total of my earnings from Kindle alone.

Amazon Kindle:

June 2008: zero copies sold

July 2008: 2 copies sold

August 2008: 23 copies sold

September 2008: 25 copies sold

October 2008: 25 copies sold

November 2008: 29 copies sold

December 2008: 22 copies sold ( December/January show a decline in sales probably due to the holidays.)

January 2009: 17 copies sold

February 2009: 24 copies sold

March 2009: 73 copies sold (Release of Kindle 2)

April 2009: 33 copies sold

May 2009: 43 copies sold

June 2009: 7 copies sold as of June 8th

Grand total earned from all Kindle sales: $1044.80.  Not too shabby.

I invested in a total number of 30 author copies.  The majority of those copies were given away to friends and family or included in marketing kits.  I did sell five copies to coworkers and through the Amazon Marketplace at $10.00 each.

Total earned from direct author sales: $50.00

Last, we have sales through Smashwords.  A total of 23 copies have been downloaded since I published the book here back on February 18th, 2009.  However, I’d like to point out that I used Smashwords mainly as a marketing tool to help gain Amazon reviews.  Here, my book was offered for free in exchange for an Amazon review.  I only gained royalties from three sales totaling $5.81.  I have not yet been paid for these sales since Smashwords has a minimum requirement of $25.00 in earnings before they pay out.

This brings my total earnings across the board to a total of $1133.22.

That’s a far stretch from being able to afford my cost of living for one year.  Not really even enough for one month.  It is 3 car payments though; it’s even enough to pay my utility bill for 16 months.  As I reported in my last diary entry, almost all of this money was invested in marketing and review copies. But I have no debt as far as this project goes, which is more than some self-published authors can say.

Now, let’s take a quick look at reviews.

To date, I have 10 reviews on Amazon. Nine are from people I have never met face to face.  That’s important because reviews from friends and family are nice, but they are always going to be positive. The first review came from an Amazon Top 500 Reviewer who I sent a review copy to.  Three of the reviews were a result of my free Smashwords Ebook give away. And two of the reviews were cross posted from other review sites. My current Amazon rank is at 1.2 million, but has been as high as 101,000 although it fell fast. My current rank on the Kindle is 104,705.

My first review outside of Amazon came from Rainbow Reviews.  I was sorely disappointed in this review, not because it only gave me three stars, but because the quality of the review itself is horrible.  The reviewer just reposted my book blurb, then pointed out three paragraphs he liked and wrapped up the review with two sentences which pretty much anyone could have come up with just by reading a few pages.  Thankfully, this review was not cross posted to Amazon.

The second came from Floyd M. Orr at PODBRAM.    Floyd cross posted a version of the review to Amazon for me.  I have to admit its a nice critical and well rounded review, just as a review should be.

The last review I received outside of Amazon was from Cheryl Anne Gardner at PodPeep. Cheryl was the first to really point out a lot of my subliminal underlying tones of the book and to really embrace the humorous aspect of the story. Cheryl also cross posted the review to Amazon for me.

And this is where my year ends.  It’s certainly not where my story ends.  Like I said in my last post, this is a good place to end the diary even though my journey as an author is far from over.  I’m not going to recap my mistakes or what I’ve learned from this diary.  I’ll leave those things up to you to find out for yourself in all my previous posts. I have no philosophical words of wisdom to share with you. The diary speaks for itself. I’ll still be sharing news and thoughts about self-publishing in general from time to time on LLBR, but this is where the POD Diary comes to a close.

What’s next for me, you ask?  Well, I’ve often referred to myself as a literary medium.  There’s always another character or storyline in my head waiting to be born, usually several at a time actually.  I’ll still be promoting my book and seeking out reviews, and checking my Amazon rank every other day, and wait eagerly for more Kindle royalties, but it’s time to put my focus into something new.  Another story, another character is calling and I’ve ignored the messages long enough.

For the readers out there who took time to read my book, I thank you.  And for the writers out there who have followed my diary this past year for information or inspiration, I say to you what I say to every author I encounter who takes the self-publishing path:

Don’t give up!

16 of the 30 voters sold less than 100 copies.  That’s 53% of all voters.

8 of the 30 sold 100 to 200 copies.  27% of all votes.

6 of the 30 sold over 200 copies.  20% of the total votes.

Most blogs out there say the majority of self-published books sell less than 200 copies, including the sales statistics information at Writer’s Beware. The sales are mostly to friends,  family, community bookstores, and the author, what WB calls “pocket markets.”

POD services’ own statistics support these low sales figures. AuthorHouse’s online Fact Sheet, updated in September 2008, reported 36,823 authors and 45,993 titles. According to the New York Times, AuthorHouse reports selling more than 2.5 million books in 2008, which sounds like a lot, but averages out to around 54 sales per title.

The same can be said for information available at writing-world.com who reports the following:

In 2003, for example, Xlibris circulated a promo declaring that it had published 9000 books since 1997, and sold 300,000 copies. Punch those numbers into your calculator, and you’ll find that this gives an average of 33 sales per title. But that’s just the average. If just 20 percent of those titles sell 100 copies apiece, the remaining 80 percent are left with an average sale of 16 copies per title. In reality, a few books actually sell far more than 100 copies — which means that a great many titles must sell less than ten copies apiece.

Back to WB, Xlibris sales actually improved just 4 years later…

Things looked up in 2007: according to Xlibris’s own internal reports, recently obtained by Writer Beware, 4% of its titles had sold more than 1,000 copies. However, the averages still aren’t good. As of mid-2007, Xlibris had 23,000 authors and had published 23,500 titles, with total sales of over 3 million–around 127 sales per title.

The WB article ends with the following (opinionated) information about Lulu:

Lulu.com, one of the most popular and cost-effective of the POD services and still independent despite the apparent trend toward consolidation among POD services, is explicit about its long tail business model. In a 2006 article in the Times UK, its founder identified the company’s goal: “…to have a million authors selling 100 copies each, rather than 100 authors selling a million copies each.” A Lulu bestseller is a book that sells 500 copies. There haven’t been many of them.

Taking a closer look at Lulu, the following sales statistics were reported in the Lulu  Corporate Profile 2009 Update :

Lulu creations: more than 1.1 million
o Paperback books: 716,191
o Hardback books: 98,770
o E-books: 52,343
o Photo Books: 34,006
o Calendars: 54,862
o Brochures: 7,085
o Digital Content: 176,824

Exact Lulu $$$ sales figures are hard to come by since the company is private. Most information I found on the web was posted by authors on their blogs or in the Lulu forums about individual sales results.  However, I did come across this interview with Lulu CEO Bob Young at ABCtales giving a pretty broad spectrum of one title that has sold over 40,000 copies, then stating the average print run of a Lulu book is less than 2. When LLBR was created, I remember reading on another blog that the average sale of a Lulu book was 1.8, meaning most authors probably bought 1 copy for themselves. The End.

Sales figures continue to be skewed by the fact that the “Published by You” option on Lulu allows you to pick your own name for your publisher, and people can also just publish their book on Lulu and never have to invest in an ISBN to get circulation outside of Lulu.  This is important only because I decided to do some investigating using Amazon.com’s Advanced Search engine.  Doing a search for all paperback books, in all subjects, with Lulu.com listed as the publisher returns a number of 3,383.  Hardcover titles are only 47.  And note this may not include some foreign published titles, and would only include Lulu titles that purchased an ISBN for global distribution.   For what it’s worth, the average cost of the paperback (averaging the top 10) titles is $29.17 and the average list price of the hardcover (top 10) titles is $34.83.

For fun, I decided to find the “bestselling” Lulu.com paperback book on Amazon and compare its sales rank on Amazon to its rank on Lulu.  As of April 28th at 6:47pm CST when I’m writing this article, the #1 book on this Amazon search is Permanent Passenger by Micha Berman.  This book has a sales rank of 203, 489 on Amazon.  On Lulu.com, it’s #214.  Not bad.  I decided to email Micha Berman, the author, and ask him a few questions about the number of books he’s sold to date and how he did it.

At this point in time I am nearing 1550 or so in sales, and that includes books I have sold on my own.
In my first year I sold close to 1300 books, the breakdown was something like this:

786 sold on US Amazon
62 sold on British Amazon
178 print Lulu
132 download Lulu

I should point out more and more of my books have been bought on Amazon Kindle in the past 6 months, in the first year probably 50 or so sold on Kindle.

I sold the rest myself at book talks around the country. I try to direct many folks to Lulu but many people are used to buying books on Amazon so that seems to be where most people buy my book.

So how did he do it, you ask?

Don’t follow the rules, I get the word out everywhere and am constantly telling folks about my book from people on the elevator to the grocery clerk. Second, get the word out to radio stations, tv stations, alumni magazine, special interest magazines, in my case cruise magazines and websites.

One funny story, that gives you a feel for what I am doing, I wrote emails to every radio station in San Francisco/Bay Area, it took time, guts and lo and behold in resulted in me getting on the biggest talk radio station several times. Also the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed my book, unheard of for self published books, but I wrote to reviewers for 8 months talking about their reviews and finally got a response.

So there you have it!  Throw out the fact that the 30 people who voted in our poll might not have an ISBN and that their book might not be available on Amazon, and I still think we have a pretty fair snapshot of how well self-published books do their first year.  We all know that getting your book on Amazon is not enough.  It takes determination and hard work to market your book and to do it well.  And marketing is a must if you want to beat the odds!