This is a developing story of a LinkedIn member, Olga Kellen, research professional, translator, marketer, writer, Citizen of the World. There are postings about LinkedIn, its features and also about Olga Kellen's personal development, research and reports on a variety of topics including self-publishing and Internet marketing, her writing and marketing experience.
As we could see from Amazon book sales numbers for print-on-demand self-publishing companies titles, they actually do not sell (see the previous post).
The new authors usually think that if they self-published with a self-publishing POD (print-on-demand) company for several hundred dollars or better yet for free, they are going to sell their books and make money. No way! The business model of POD companies is selling TO AUTHORS (or their families and friends), but NOT TO PUBLIC.
It means that if the authors' intention is to sell to public, the authors must do their book promotion themselves to make public aware of their books and to create the demand. It takes time, effort and money.
"A Few Sales Tricks Can Launch a Book to Top of Online Lists"
The article reports on a service available to authors who want their book titles at the top of online bookranking lists at websites such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. The service is offered by a public relations firm. For $10,000 to $15,000 they will propel an author's book to the top of the list with a mass email it calls the Best-Seller Blast.
Source: Bookseller; 1/13/2006 Issue 5212, p14
"Huge campaign for self-published novel"
The article reports that electronics entrepreneur Larry Tracey is to launch his self-published novel with an advertising campaign that outstrips most of those from large publishing houses. The chairman of power supply solutions provider XP Power is backing "Seagulls Dance" with £50,000 of television advertising and a full-scale musical, financed from his own pocket. The romantic novel, set in early 19th century Ireland, will include a CD of the lead song from the musical.
Source:Forbes; 1/30/2006, Vol. 177 Issue 2, p72 "Promote It Yourself"
The article reports that with book sales flat, authors are promoting themselves. J.A. Konrath got a the book deal with Hyperion in 2003, but quickly realized the publisher was only promoting its most promising titles. Konrath now spends 90% of his time and about $40,000per year hawking his books. So far it's working. The first two have sold 70,000 copies, prompting Hyperion to give him another six-figure advance for three more. Other authors also find creative ways of selling their work.
So, get creative with your promotion... to pay less... but there is no way to sell books without promotion...
Self-publishing has become very popular. As they say, there is a book inside of everyone and with all the self-publishing companies around it's very easy to publish one's book. "Become a published author!" is all over the Internet. All these print-on-demand self-publishing companies offer very easy entry terms most of the time. The author just uploads the book content on their website, they take care of everything else and it costs the author nothing or not much.
Now, in a blink the author is published with a link to his/her book on a self-publishing company's website. As soon as the self-publishing print-on-demand company gets a paid order for the book, the book is printed and mailed directly to the person who placed the order. A snap!
The question is - who is going to find the newly published author to order his/her books? Unfortunately, nobody, even if the book is a killer... If people search for books online, they go to... yes, that's right, Amazon. So, since all the author's relatives and friends have received an email with a link to order the newly published book and ordered it (or not), the next step is to show the book up on Amazon if the author is going to sell to public.
This step involves some money spent by the author to buy an ISBN and bar-code for the book as the Amazon inventory process requires them, but it's affordable. Also the print-on-demand self-publishing company will charge the author for putting the book on Amazon, the price varies from one company to another.
Now, the book is on Amazon and ready to be sold to any person in the world. How will it sell? Let's see...
I have made an honest attempt to analyze Amazon book sales of self-publishing print-on-demand companies. It's not easy to find numbers when it comes to money made ;-) but some evaluation can be done anyway.
First, the choice of print-on-demand self-publishing companies to analyze their Amazon book sales. There is a list of 48 such companies compared by their services and fees, available on the Internet. So, without inventing anything new, we'll go with this list.
Some of the print-on-demand self-publishing companies from the list are not on Amazon with their books at all, but most of them are represented by just a handful of titles which makes it impossible to get any stats on their sales. Out of 48 analyzed, we are left with only 7 (!) self-publishing print-on-demand companies that make some book sales on Amazon to general public. Their names are as follows: Authorhouse, Booksurge Publishing, iUniverse, Lulu, Publish America, Trafford Publishing and Xlibris. (It appears that there is no sense to compare the other 41 self-publishing companies' services and fees as their authors' book sales to general public are so minimal that they are almost invisible.)
Second, the book sales numbers evaluation process. I assumed that 6 months is quite a good period of time to let sales get some momentum for a self-published print-on-demand book and looked up for Amazon sales for representative samples of randomly chosen titles of the above mentioned companies published approximately 6 months ago. I have to mention here that only Amazon knows the exact number of books sold, but some information can be extracted from Amazon sales ranking system anyway.
Book sales for 1,265 titles of the above mentioned print-on-demand self-publishing companies were analyzed for this research. With the 95% confidence level I can say that from 0% to 1% of print-on-demand self-publishing companies' "best selling" titles sell approximately one book a day on Amazon, while from 100% to 99% of the titles sell less than that or none at all. A shocking discovery on print-on-demand self-publishing for aspiring authors, isn't it?
The LinkedIn Questions/Answers section is a valuable resource of all kind of information. You can search the section for keywords if needed.
I visit it almost every day and as it appeared a couple of days ago - for good reason. I was about to start calculating sample sizes that would be representative for several sets of data in my statistical research. This would take some time to go back to my books and/or online to refresh my knowledge on the subject I thought... I opened the Q/A and there is a nice surprise - somebody just asked a very similar question and received answers! As for one I would be shy to ask for help in something that I could definitely do myself even spending some time, but the asker was not shy and it helped me as well ;-) So, this is the story how the LinkedIn Q/A saved me quite a lot of time.
Some other time I had some little disappointment with this section though... I wanted to post a staffing/recruiting question, but it appeared that I could not do it - the system only allows to post such questions to my own network, but not to all LinkedIn members unfortunately... no luck ;-(
I continue posting answers to questions about publishing and self-publishing, book marketing and promotion, marketing services on the Internet, e-commerce, e-books, building small business websites, search engines optimization, websites promotion, translations and teaching languages, immigration and visas, real estate, etc. They are all in the scope of my expertise and often result from my previous research on a broad variety of topics in business and industries.
It's a great feeling to receive a thank-you from an asker or a "good/best answer" rating. Some members don't bother themselves with being polite though ;-) and say nothing after getting help... Well, people are people anywhere even on a professional networking site, right?
Yes, it's official - I have 2,000,000+ third degree LinkedIn connections! It is through only 50 first degree connections and I haven't really started inviting members to connect yet . These connections have been made mostly through Questions/Answers area of LinkedIn.
What else is new?
I have expertise in the following categories now:
Job Search (1)
Economics (1)
Exporting/Importing (1)
Internationalization and Localization (1)
Events Marketing (1)
Incorporation (1)
It means that in these categories my answers were rated as "the best" by askers. These categories are more or less in line with what I am looking for: some interesting new projects in Internet Research, Internet Marketing or English / Russian Translations.
So far so good - I have some expertise requests coming in...
I have joined 3 LinkedIn Groups: Forbes.com Entrepreneurs, MRKF (Market Research Knowledge Forum) and LIBS (LinkedIn Business Strategists). Not lots of activities in each of them though...
Jiglu (Beta) Autotag widget is running on my blog now. A LinkedIn member posted a request for testers and I subscribed. It seems to be a nice addition to any blog. The developers are still working on the tool to improve its functionality.
