If we lived in the Prairie Home Companion’s village of Lake Wobegon, all of our book titles would have above average sales.  Want to know whether your book’s sales are above average?  The staff at the Southern Review of Books (SRB) have come up with a rough benchmark based on some recent industry sales data.  They have computed that the average book sold 7,608 copies in 2007.  How did they determine this? 

First, they started with data from W.W. Bowker showing the number of books published in the U.S. in 2007.  On May 28, 2008, Bowker released its latest statistics on book production in the U.S. and estimated that 411,422 new titles were published in 2007.  Of those, 276,649 were traditionally manufactured titles (ink on paper), and 134,773 were digitally manufactured titles (toner on paper), also referred to as print on demand (POD) titles.  Bowker derives its book production figures from year-to-date data from over 72,000 U.S. publishers and include traditional print as well as on-demand titles.  Audiobooks and E-books are excluded.  

Next, the Southern Review of Books staff considered unit sales from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), which shows that U.S. publishers produced 3.13 billion copies of their books in 2007. Dividing the BISG unit sales by the Bowker figure of 411,422 new titles, one gets a mean average of 7,608 copies per title.  Thus, any title selling more than 7,608 copies would be defined as “above average,” and any book with fewer copies sold would be “below average.”

Here are some caveats from SRB about the average they computed:

• The mean is an average of low-run POD titles combined with high-run traditional titles.  POD runs typically don’t exceed 1,000 copies, since this is not economically feasible.  This means POD titles are generally below average from the start . 
• Similarly, offset runs for ink-on-paper titles typically become economical above 1,000 copies, so traditionally published books are more likely to be found in the above-average category.
• The average above applies only to titles published in 2007. 
• The numbers from BISG and Bowker are based on reporting systems that use samples and don’t necessarily produce absolutely accurate information.
• It’s unlikely that unit book sales published in 2007 would follow an unskewed normal bell-shaped curve distribution. That’s because roughly two thirds of new titles were conventional ink-on-paper titles with large press runs, while one out of three, or a third of the total, were toner on paper print on demand books that likely had small press runs well below 1,000 copies on average. That would produce a distribution skewed to the right, or positive/traditionally published side of the distribution.

With regard to the last point, here is what we would expect from an unskewed normal distribution.

# of std. dev. from avg.	# of titles	% of titles
1	279,776	68 %
2	111,084	27 %
3	19,336	4.7 %
4 or more	1,236	0.3 %

Unfortunately, we live in a world where such distributions are skewed.  But the 7,608 average is at least a starting point.  So if you want a title to be above average, figure out what it will take to sell 7,608 copies (plus one).  Averages are useful, but here are some suggestions for the future:

• A more interesting average in today’s multimedia, multi-format world might be average IP revneue units sold, which would include copies sold in any format - print, electronic, audio, etc. 
• Compute averages based on a more comprehensive and detailed sales tracking database like BookScan.
• Compute averages for categories.

Perhaps uUsing mulitple averages, will allow all of our titles be above average.

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New Society Publishers is committed to facilitating social change and its mandate embraces a broad social transformation toward sustainability.  But New Society Publishers goes beyond simply publishing books on topics such as globalization, green building, renewable energy, conscientious commerce and sustinable living.  As a business, it walks the talk.  In 2005, New Society became the first North American publishing company to become carbon neutral.  The company has also received the Ethics in Action award in 1997 for ongoing social responsibility, and again in 2002 for environmental excellence.

All of this is not surprising, given the activist roots of its principals, Christopher and Judith Plant.  Chris Plant started his publishing career in the South Pacific as an organizer with the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement and as an editor with the Institute of Pacific Studies in Fiji.  Judith Plant is a former adult educator who became an author with the release in 1990 of her highly successful book, Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism published by New Society.  We recently interviewed Chris and Judith Plant about the focus and direction of New Society Publishers.

FPP: How did you come to choose publishing as a way to express your activism?

Chris & Judith:  Getting the word out is a large part of activism of any kind; you need informed people to make a difference. We originally started publishing a magazine to enable communities scattered over a large geography to know what their issues were and how they were dealing with them. Oftentimes, they were facing similar struggles - forestry, watershed issues, toxic wastes, etc - and having to reinvent the wheel over and over again instead of being able to learn from each other. Sharing issues and solutions became the meat-and-potatoes of what we published.

FPP:  You have described yourselves as bioregionalists. Can you explain what that means and how that has affected your day-to-day operations and publishing decisions?

Chris & Judith:  The bioregional view sees the local as the focal point, the locus, of all action. We all live in a place, and caring for that place is the most immediate thing one can do. Understanding your place used to be the key to obtaining your water, your food, and your security. But in a globalized world, that all changed. However, as the global system crumbles through the pressures of Peak Oil and other long emergencies, the ‘local’ promises once again to become the most important aspect of most peoples’ lives. The Relocalization movement is all about this trend.

FPP:  New Society Publishers is on Gabriola Island in the province of British Columbia. Does that present challenges for you?

Chris & Judith:  Only if you miss the city! No, it’s an ideal life here. We’re on a beautiful Gulf Island in a quiet piece of forest, a short walk away from the seashore, connected to some of the best and most interesting people in the world through our work. My husband and I have a 30 foot commute, our staff often bicycle to work, and we give ourselves lots of time off. How challenging is that?! Seriously, though, publishing is the ultimate ‘electronic village’ occupation: it can be done from anywhere. And, to keep a balance, we do in fact venture out into the ‘real world’ every now and then, to rub shoulders with activists and authors and make sure we aren’t too cut off from most peoples’ day to day realities.

FPP:  Your company has a focus on publishing books that help to build an ecologically sustainable and just society. How has this focus developed over the life of New Society Publishers?

Chris & Judith:  In the beginning, in Philadelphia, the publishing operation was the propaganda arm of the Movement for a New Society whose aim was nonviolent revolution and opposition to the war in Vietnam, to nuclear weapons, etc. As times changed, the publishing element became autonomous, and we evolved the mandate of the publishing company around what we considered to be the key overarching issues of the day. Ecological sustainability and social justice remain the deep fabric of human habitation on this planet.

FPP:  What is the typical profile of a New Society Publishers author - or is there such a thing?

Chris & Judith:  Active, committed, eloquent, upbeat, capable, compassionate - and among the best human beings in the world!

FPP:  New Society Publishers has gone carbon neutral. This is a pretty major step for a book publisher. What were the hurdles you had to overcome as a print publisher to get there?

Chris & Judith:  When we took the step to committing to print all of our books on 100% Post Consumer Waste paper in 2001, it was a major commitment. No-one had done such a thing before. Every other publisher thought we were crazy because it added a significant cost to the production of a book - and who cared anyway? We had three tremendous allies in taking this step. First, New Leaf Paper from San Francisco who could provide the 100% PCW paper stock and who pulled out all the stops to help us do it. Second, our printer in Manitoba who had faith enough in us to order two truckloads of paper, not knowing if we would be able to actually pull off our commitment and use it all up. And third, the Markets Initiative group who were so totally convinced that change in paper use had to happen that they inspired us to take the risk of helping to change the publishing industry. After our paper commitment, going carbon neutral was a breeze!

FPP:  Do you see more publishers opting for this direction in the future?

Chris & Judith:  Yes. The Green Press Initiative - publishers who have taken similar vows - is growing all the time.

FPP:  Given the concerns about global climate change and all of its effects, are you seeing more demand for your titles than in previous years and changes in the readership for your titles?

Chris & Judith:  Absolutely! Our topics of concern have all of a sudden become mainstream. That’s what we were struggling to achieve all along and now that it’s a reality, it’s very exciting to be at the forefront of the trend. A part of our list was always designed to ‘mainstream’ the movement; now we’re seeing way more so-called ordinary people take on the key issues of our time.

FPP:  What role, if any, do you see technology playing in the way you will produce and market books in the future?

Chris & Judith:  As Peak Oil works its way through the system, shipping a heavy commodity like books around the universe is going to have to become a thing of the past. Physical books will occupy a special and sentimental slot in our lives. Electronic books’ time will come!

FPP:  What do you see as the biggest challenges for book publishers in the next few years?

Chris & Judith:  Coming to terms with Peak Oil and the restructuring of an entire industry. Publishing has to move from: books to e-books, from bricks and mortar bookstores to cyberstores, from shelves and warehouses filled with books to point of sale machines that print books on demand - if you really need to have a physical copy at all.

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Book Vid Lit

by Sheila Clover-English

Sheila Clover English, the CEO of Circle of Seven Productions, has been a pioneer in book video production, marketing and distribution for authors and publishers.

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Nielsen ratings systems did away with using view counts to measure website success and instead switched over to time spent as a way to rate. This way of measuring success is far more indicative of real life engagement by a viewer. You can have 100,000 hits, but if the viewer isn’t there long enough to at least absorb the message of the video those hits are meaningless.

Matt Cutler, Vice President of Visible Measures, a company that tracks online behavior, estimates that more than 30 per cent of consumers abandon an online video within the first 10 per cent of its stream. He goes on to give an example saying that for every 100 viewers you will have 30 that will click away within the first 10% of the video. This is called “Initial Attention Abandonment.”

Some of the reasons for Initial Attention Abandonment have to do with trust, transparency, engagement and entertainment.

Trust - This has more to do with branding. Is this a brand viewers know they will have a good experience with? Will they get the kind of content they’re promised by tags and titles?

Transparency - Is the video in a place where the person can tell what they’re going to get? Do they realize they’re getting an ad or are you trying to trick them into thinking it’s something else? Not only can you lose a viewer once they realize they’ve been tricked, but this is a quick way to damage your brand.

Engagement - Does the video give them something to do? Be it physical or mental or even emotional, does the first 10% of your video offer them a way to engage the video? Some videos can be a talking head that just delivers a message, but with every viewer sitting there with their finger on the mouse just waiting to go on to the next thing, there aren’t going to be a lot of videos that can be just an ad message delivery system that will be successful.

Entertainment - Give your most gripping, most powerful, most complete message about your story or product that conveys to viewers that they are being, or about to be, entertained within that first 10% of your video. People have so much to choose from to keep them entertained. Why should they watch YOUR video as a source of entertainment? You need to have something that conveys how entertaining your video is going to be for them right away or you will lose them. You can’t “build” your story or message to a climactic end unless that initial “building” is a sensational opening.

What should I include in the first 10% of my video?

You should have visuals or text that immediately convey all of the above elements. Not an easy task. Let’s take a look at a successful book video that includes all of these elements, Dark Possession by author Christine Feehan. You can watch the video yourself at Dark Possession - Christine Feehan - TV Version.  I chose the MySpace site specifically because MySpace requires a viewer to watch just over half the video before the view is counted. If you watch less than half, the view won’t count. This video has been viewed nearly 20,000 times.

Trust- The title and description let people know what the video is. It is a book video. It is about the novel by Christine Feehan.

Transparency- From the start we let people know it is a book video by stating it is from Bestselling Author Christine Feehan.

Engagement- The engagement here is emotional. You see the couple running for their lives. You’re told two worlds are colliding, the living and the dead. Now your viewer wants to know what’s happening to the couple. What are they running from? Who are they? What are they? You have engaged them by making them want to know more and by putting an attractive couple in a dangerous environment.

Entertainment- The viewer is given a sense of romance, danger and adventure within a short period of time. They get special effects and at the end, “the tease” that leaves them wondering what happened.

People are more likely to share a video like this. There are several elements that are worth having a conversation about. The video, through text and visuals, poses questions while bringing the viewer into the action.

How can you keep people from clicking away? Well, if I knew that I’d be making the big bucks! But, I can speculate just as well as any major media goliath can. Part of what keeps them from clicking away is the video itself. Part of it is where the video is located. Is it where people who like paranormal romance reside? Part of it is timing. Your video may end up having something in common with a current news topic. There may not be a whole lot of new content out at that time. Part of it is the topic of the storyline. There are so many factors that go into what will make people stay and watch the video that you really have to concentrate on the things you CAN control.

Make a great book video. Make sure the first 10% of your video offers enough to keep them watching. Give it a good title, tags and descriptions. Distribute it to the right online destinations. Instruct your client/author/publisher to utilize it. And then, just like CBS, HBO, NBC or any other media giant…hope it goes viral.

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Blooks - books based on a blog - are becoming more and more popular.  Authors, especially unpublished authors, can benefit from blogging their material first as a way to build an audience for their work.  There are enough blog to book success stories now to make this an attractive option.  Many of the early blook successes were more the result of serendippidity than plan.  In this post, I outline one approach for authors who are intentional about creating a book from a blog.

Title.  Use the same title and subtitle for your blog that you would like to use your book.  This has the advantage of allowing your blog to double as a book website after publication.  Also, it makes it easy for your blog readers to find your new book.

Table of Contents.  Layout out your blog categories to roughly corresond to the table of contents for your book.  Using exactly the same titles for categories and chapters may not always work.  Also, some standard table of content names won’t make any sense for a blog - e.g. Introduction or Epilogue.  The idea is to have a kind of one to one correspondence in mind so that when you go produce your manuscript, you’ll be able to map your blog content to the right places in your book.

Chapter content.  Your blog posts become the content for your chapters; content tagged for a particular category can go in the corresponding chapter.  If you have a post tagged for multiple categories, the flow of your content will probably dictate which chapter it lands in. 

Bibliography.  The links in your posts become your pointers to reference material that appears in a bibliography or set of end notes.

Visuals.  Pictures, illustrations and graphs may present a bit more of a challenge.  If the pictures you want to use in your book involve licensing or permissions, you may have to use substitues on your blog (or go without) while you are negotiating. 

Author bio.  Most blogs make it easy to share your bio, either as a blurb on your main blog page or as a separate page.  Include your picture, and both a short and long form bio for yourself which can be incorporated later into your book.

As you start to post, you’ll want to use blog statistis to rank content and track your word count to know when you have a book equivalent.  A good rule of thumb for a book equivalent is 50,000 - 75,000 words.  You should also track the word count by category.  Remember that your categories are acting as surrogates for chapters.  You will probably to be sure your content is relatively balanced as you go so you don’t wind up with too much or too little content in each chapter.

There are several ways to rank content.  Here are a few examples.

• Page views - the level of overall interest in a particular post.
• Comments - feedback from your readership.  A post with a high number of comments is a good indicator of blook-worthy content. 
• Longevity - the number of days since the original post.  This is useful to find topics that might be evergreen
• Concentration - the number of days since the original post for which there were page views.  Some posts may see all their activity concentrated in a few days (e.g. posts related to news stories) and thus may not be as “durable” as a post that continues to receive page views day after day. 
• Density - the number o page views for the post divided by the overall page views for the blog.  This shows the contribution of the post to overall blog activity. 

In subsequent posts, I plan to share more specifics on the blog to book process, including:

• Ideas for editing posts into a cohesive, engaging manuscript.
• Tools that make it easy ways to track and collect your references.
• Using tags as a surrogate indexing schema.
• Creating a compelling pitch card for publishers using your blog statistics.
• Blook techniques for fiction writers.
• Preparing a blog tour while crafting your blook.

I would welcome any thoughts or ideas that others like to share on this subject.

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Book Vid Lit

by Sheila Clover-English

Sheila Clover English, the CEO of Circle of Seven Productions, has been a pioneer
in book video production, marketing and distribution for authors and publishers.

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According to the Pew/Internet Project findings, 3 of 4 young adults (73%) on the internet watch or download video.  Half of young internet users say they watch YouTube.  Many post videos to blogs and even more will forward on a link in email. They’re online socializing, researching (school and education), playing games or getting news.Publishers know that teens are online and most have outstanding website offerings that are fun, interesting and interactive.  A great outreach to young people was a Blogfest that Simon & Schuster did and of course other publishers have similar offerings for young people of varied ages.

Lately, schools and libraries have looked to engage younger readers as well by using book trailers. Sara Kajder wrote in the Educational Leadership magazine for ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) an article entitled “The Book Trailer: Engaging Teens Through Technology.”  This article is amazing and outlines how using book trailers help students who are struggling readers and helps them to be more engaged in the stories they are reading.  The points the author brings up, viewed strictly from an educator’s perspective, was very enlightening.

Libraries are getting into it too!  The Tucson-Pima Library is just one of many that we discovered using book trailers.  You can see how involved they are and the wonderful outreach they extend to young people on their book trailer site.

Book trailers are more than just promotional tools for a book.  They have a greater outreach and greater potential to show young people that books are exciting.  The publishing industry as a whole have this incredible opportunity to build tomorrow’s readership.  Publishers should reach out to high schools and libraries and sponsor book trailer contests.  This can build the confidence level of students who are struggling.  It can create an atmosphere of acceptance where books are not just for book worms anymore.  Cool kids read and make book trailers!  Cool kids read.  Pass it on.

Reaching out to young people through a digital medium in order to encourage reading isn’t a new idea.  But, it is an ever-expanding idea with more and more opportunities to engage young people and create new readers using new media.

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Video games can now cost $20 million and up to produce.  Such high production costs raise the risk for bringing new games to market and have spawned a search for ways to extend a game’s IP via cross marketing in other media - notably books, merchandise and film.  Though long familiar to Hollywood moguls, this approach is now being pioneered by Electronic Arts in the gamer world. 

One example where this is being used in a new game due out in Fall 2008 called Dead Space.  A series of 6 graphic novels (or comic books) will be used as a prequel to the game to provide users with background information.   They will be offered for sale at $2.99 each, though a premium edition of the first issue with special cover art will be sold at a higher price point.  As reported on Kotaku, the series will be created by Image Comics with Ben Templesmith and Antony Johnston.  There’s even a book trailer that’s been created for the series.

This is somewhat the reverse of the journey made by Marvel Comics a few years ago, as chronicled in the New York Times.  Marvel’s comic books sales had slowed and the company almost went out of business.  But, like one of the super heroes it markets, the struggling publisher morphed into a Hollywood entertainment power with its own studio and licensing business.  Marvel has combined making its own super hero movies (where it can reap more of the rewards) with innovative financing (using its comic book IP as collateral) to emerge as a successful, profitable moviemaker.

Book to movie deals are continuing at a brisk pace, as evidenced by the regular reports in Publishers Weekly and industry sites such as Freelance Writing.  Major book publishers are also getting into the movie game.  This past fall, HarperCollins, a division of News Corp., announced a partnership with Sharp Independent to develop movies based on HarperCollins books.  These new collaborations, according to an article by Rachael Donadio, give publishers greater participation in movie profits (if there are any) and allow authors to have more say in the selection of screenwriters, directors and actors.   The closer ties with Hollywood may eventually change the nature of literary fiction as writers realize they may need to structure their stories for multiple mediums. 

Entertainment IP in the hgh stakes world of big media wants to be everywhere.  Look for lots more cross media collaborations (some might say contamination); and look for tomorrow’s most successful artists among those who are able to cross media divides and become multiple media “multi-talents.”

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The bookstore chains are still a dominant force in book retail.  According to Para Publishing, in 2007, big chain retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Borders accounted for 33% of unit book purchases.  However, their dominance is steadily eroding.  The primary challengers are online booksellers, notably Amazon.com.  Purchases made through online retailers represent approximately 20% of book purchases.  In fact, books are the most popular product sold on the internet according to Nielsen Online which surveyed 26,312 people in 48 countries.  It found that 41% of internet users had bought books online.  In some countries the percentage was much higher - for example in Korea 58% of internet users had purchased books online.  And in the U.S., 57.5-million had purchased books online.  In all, the direct-to-consumer (Internet, book clubs, book fairs, catalog and other) channel accounted for 35% of book purchases.

More book publishers are also exploring non-traditional retail channels.  In some cases these channels can have a greater impact on book sales than the traditional bookstore channel.  Why?

The primary problem with the bookstore channel is returns.  These can cost a publisher and generally the cash flow timing with wholesalers, distributors and bookstores is not favorable.  Returns were implemented by publishers during the Great Depression as a way to help out the bookstores.  They have remained entrenched ever since and are a drag on publishers’ profits.  Sales are generally final in non-bookstore retail channels making them more attractive.  The downside is that access can be much more difficult or require a specialized salesforce.  The other problem is payment.  Publishers often don’t get paid for 60, 90 or (more usually) 120 days.  This can wreak havoc with cash flow.  In the non-traditional retail channel, publishers can avoid both of these problems.

Non-bookstore retail venues use different selling models.  For example, Starbucks sells only one book at a time in its stores, featuring a title for several months. Costco, Walmart and other big box retailers carry bestsellers as well as a selection of lesser known titles.   A recent New York Times article on non-reported that sales of consumer books sold through such nontraditional outlets grew by more than $260 million. 

These can be broken down into:

• warehouse clubs - e.g. Costco, Sam’s Club
• mass market retail -  e.g. Walmart
• non-traditional accounts - big box retailers (e.g. Home Depot), drugstores and grocery stores, gift and specialty stores
• mass market wholesale

Non-traditional book channels can often offer a book greater exposure to its primary audience.  An interesting example was highlighted on the bNet Business Network.  A book titled “A Gentleman Gets Dressed Up” was picked up by Borders, and was placed in the Health and Diet section.  According to Nielsen BookScan, since 2003, the book has sold 4,000 copies in the retail bookstore channel.  By contrast, Jos. A. Bank Clothiers and Brooks Brothers have purchased 8,000 and 15,000 copies for their stores, respectively. 

Another instructive example comes from the world of children’s books.  In an article, Better Than Bookstores: Prime Channels for Selling Children’s Books, written for the PMA Independent, Florrie Binford Kichler examines innovative approaches to using non-bookstore venues for selling children’s books, including:

• Associations
• Children’s book clubs
• Museums/historic sites
• Schools

Potentially, the biggest threat to bookstore retailers could come from the new print at the point of purchase technologies which I have often discussed on this blog.   As the technology matures, it will allow virtually any organization to print and sell books without the need for wholesalers, distributors or inventory.  Publishers have many bookselling options today and may continue to migrate away from bookstore retailers as long as their outdated and onerous returns and payment policies remain in effect. 

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First consider the size and structure of the blogosphere.  The popularity of blogs has soared in the last few years.  There are now over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati, which doesn’t even include the more than 70 million Chinese blogs.  According to recent demographic surveys by the Pew Internet Study and the New York Times / CBS News, blogs have become mainstream and represent virtually every audience and topic area. 

Blogs focused on a given topic tend to link to similar blogs.  What this means is you can use blogs to:

• Develop an audience for your work while you write
• Promote your book effectively and at low cost once it is written

A blog bears many resemblances to a book. Both have a title and subtitle that reflect the content of a book. Blog posts can be organized into categories which serve as a kind of table of contents to classify and group related material. Blog posts, typically 300-500 words in length, represent the raw content of a book. Links within posts or on the blog roll serve as a bibliography, showing references to source material.

How do you attract people to your blog? Initially, through searches individuals make on popular search engine sites like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. By using popular keywords in your blog title, subtitle, categories and posts, your blog will begin to turn up in these searches. You can discover these keywords using keyword discovery tools or simply checking out popular blogs in your topic area. The more you blog, the more others discover and link to your blog content, the higher will be the ranking of your blog site in search results, and the greater the traffic you will receive.

Blog software usually provides a basic set of statistics that allow you to track important information such as number of visitors, page views, referring sites and average time spent by each visitor. Page views and comments left by visitors for specific blog posts provide an indicator of popular content. This makes blogs an excellent way for you to field test and select material to be included in your book.

Once you have cultivated an audience, you can transform your blog into a great marketing platform. For example, you can:

• Feature your book on a special blog page, with your bio, a book description, excerpts, press releases and testimonials; thus your blog can double as a book website.
• Promote your book to a wider audience by arranging a blog tour.  A blog tour is a series of scheduled guest appearances on related blogs, where you have the opportunity to talk about your book. This is a low cost, high impact method to discover new readers for your work. 

The blogosphere is not the only place to market your work, but it can one of the best. 

Whether you are publishing independently or trying to sign on with a traditional publisher, blogging can be key to your success. More publishers are now starting to view the blogosphere as a fertile ground to find promising writers. Why? As an author who blogs, you can quantify your audience and this is attractive to risk averse publishers.  This is, in essence, the new author book pitch.

Blogging is a low risk, low cost way to build your audience while you are developing your work, and then promote your finished book to that same audience. Give it a try!

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Everyone loves a mystery - especially when it involves a secret code or an algorithm that only a select few fully comprehend.  Google’s PageRank algorithm is one example.  It has been the subject of hundreds of articles, blog posts and even a book.  Amazon’s sales rank algorithm is another example.  Like PageRank, it takes into account many factors, weights them and then produces a single number that indicates how well a title is selling.  There is mystery attached to all three areas - the choice of factors, the weights and the calculation. 

Amazon says very little about its sales rank number, providing only this modest overview of its basic function:

As an added service for customers, authors, publishers, artists, labels, and studios, we show how items in our catalog are selling. The lower the number, the higher the sales for that particular item. The calculation is based on Amazon.com sales and is updated each hour to reflect recent and historical sales of every item sold on Amazon.com. 

The sales rank is designed so that a lower value represents greater sales.  Typically your sales rank will decay (grow larger) when your title is not selling, and jump downward when  sales materialize. 

There have been many attempts to analyze the sales rank algorithm.  Morris Rosenthal of Fonner Books provides a more detailed explanation with accompanying video.   His analysis shows  how the sales rank correlates to books sold weekly, for books with a rank of 1,000 or greater, and daily for books with a rank of less than 1,000.  Both plots show a gently curving line on a log-log scale.  In studying the algorithm over several years, he has found that the newer version (released in October, 2006) is less influenced by historical sales, and also that it is more predictable and correlates better with sales events such as promotions or reviews. 

Another analysis of the sales rank provided by Dog Ear Publishing, pinpoints some of the characteristics of Amazon’s calculation of sales rank.  These include:

• Sales rank is based on a comparison of your success relative to about 5.2 million other titles that have sold at least one copy
• Ranking are updated hourly
• The top 5,000 books seem to follow a different ranking methodology than their higher valued cousins.  This seems to include considering the time between sales and averaging sales to keep rankings in this group more consistent over time.
• Volatility is sales rank is greatest for books with a sales rank between 50,000 and 250,000.  Titles on either side of the sales rank spectrum tend to change more slowly over time.

Brent Sampson of the Web Pro News new analyzed the frequency of update for sales rank and provided an interpretation of what rankings in certain ranges indicate.  One interesting finding - the ranking is predictive in nature.  That is, trending calculation is applied to arrive at a computerized sales trajectory.  This can mean that even if a book’s sales pick up, it’s sales rank may temporarily fall. 

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has published the results of experiments he and others have conducted to study the effects of purchases on sales rank.  He has also used this data to determine the percentage of Amazon sales accounted for by titles in the long tail (i.e. - average sales rank over 100,000).  He concluded that they made up between a quarter to a third of Amazon’s overall book sales. 

As Google does with PageRank, Amazon periodically tweaks the algorithm and this is often the subject of controversy.  Freakonomics’ author Steven Dubner wrote in the New York Times recently about what he perceived as a change in the weighting of top ranked books which favored hardcover paperbacks over older, but still best selling paperback titles. 

There are a number of handy tools available for monitoring your Amazon sales rank.  If you want to quickly check your title’s sales rank without navigating through Amazon, you can use the applet at Sales Rank Express.   You can also install a handy Amazon sales rank  widget on Steve Weber’s blog.   Finally, Charteous has produced a nice tool for tracking Amazon sales rank over time.   The site allows you to track your Amazon sales rank over time as a line chart.  The charting begins when you sign up.  You can also compare your sales rank with other titles.   This is good intelligence to have when determining how you are doing relative to your category.  Two things you will need to do to use this functionality:

• You’ll need to create an account (there is no charge) 
• You’ll need the Adobe SVG browser plug-in to see the charts

Perhaps someday the arcane calculations within the sales rank algorithm will be exposed.  Until then, authors, publishers and curious onlookers will have to examine the nuanced correlations between book sales and sales rank and speculate about the algorithm’s internal machinations.  And of course Amazon will continue to adjust the parameters, weightings and equations, resetting the analysis and frustrating the cognoscenti.   A corporate powerhouse, using secret code administered by a techno priesthood to strike fear (and sometimes exhilaration) into an anxious population of authors / publishers - the whole thing has the makings of a good techno conspiracy thriller.

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We hear a lot these days that the media are becoming more fragmented.   There are more media outlets competing for the attention of smaller and ever more specialized audiences.  In some sense, media fragmentation is really audience fragmentation enabled by new technologies.  For example, cable TV has enabled hundreds of channels vs. a handful of networks, and these cater to very diverse audience interests. 

For a medium like television such fragementation is a relatively recent occurrence.  But book publishers have been dealing with audience fragmentation far longer.  In fact, books represent the original fragmented medium.  The number of books published in the US and UK in 2006 was 190,000 and 130,000 repsectively.  A gauge of the fragmentation is the number of books in the bibliosphere which can be derived from the size of R. R. Bowker’s Books in Print database, which contains over 7.5 million records.  There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of genres and sub genres with more being created every year.

This has challenged publishers to find new ways to aggregate small audiences into a market with enough size to make a title profitable.  In this sense, the Internet is an ideal marketing medium.  Here are a few ways the web can be used by publishers to aggregate small adiences.

• The first place to begin aggregating your audience is during the development of the title.   Using a blog to showcase your work acts as an audience magnet.  You can design your site and your posts to make it more likely to turn up in certain keyword searches.  You can measure the popularity of content (your posts) and determine what might be most effective in a title.  You can also see which sites and searches are referring traffic.  This can form the basis for understanding your audience long before the printed book is released.
• Do some tag research to see whether your audience perceives your title the same you do.  Make a list of tags that you think best characterizes your book.  Then see what turns up when search for those tags on Amazon, LibraryThing or general bookmarking sites like del.icio.us.  Every set of tags has the potential to identify a new audience. 
• Use your tag smarts to advertise more effectively online with tools like Google AdWords.
• Take a blog tour (see Blog Touring 101) to sites whose audience and / or topic might be a good match for your book.  You can start with sites that already link to your blog and also use blog search engines to find those high authority, high traffic sites that can give your book broad exposure.  Blog tours are often overlooked.  But once you consider that blogs now represent some of the largest media properties in terms of audience size, you can see the benefits of using this lost cost tactic.
• Use a book video to draw attention to your title and track who’s downloading it.  Adjust tags on the book video to test which tags attract the most downloads.  More clues to who your audience is and what they are interested in.

It’s nice to dream of publishing a book that sells millions of copies.  But the reality is that over 95 percent of books sells fewer than 100 copies.  This makes it imperative for every publisher to have a strategy for aggregating small markets into larger ones. 

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