Re: Marketing efforts: First feedback

David Friedman wrote:
I expect that the total number of books per day for a score of, say,
20,000, isn't very large--doesn't represent any significant income. But
I can measure its reliability as a signal by simply watching the random
fluctuations--and on that basis, I think it is clear that both the
Forbes.com link and Baycon produced clear effects.

Currently I'm at about the 10k level, although I don't expect to stay
there for long. But my guess is that that means something like ten or
twenty more copies per day than I usually sell--which is not much money,
but is more people than attended my Baycon reading.


What I've found by monitoring Amazon this last year is that one sale will
push your book to a ranking of around 50k. It then starts to drop at a rate
of from a few hundred to about 10k per hour depending on how many other
books are being sold and how many books you sold in the past month or so
(good selling books sink slower than poor sellers)

If you sell another book on the same day then the ranking rises to about
35k. And each supplementary book sold (again in the same day) will cause the
ranking to rise by about a third. So to get 10k you must sell at least 5
copies in one day. As the rankings are adjusted hourly the best rankings are
achieved by having all 5 copies sold in the same hour.

This formula seems to hold up to the 1k mark. Resonance made it to 1300 so
that's as far as my sample went - and yes I did take hourly samples (I love
numbers) for a short time.

Re: marketing feedback. The biggest bump that Resonance received was after a
mention on the Instapundit blog when the book shot up to 1300 and stayed
under 10k for a week or so. And that was just for a paragraph to say he'd
read the book and liked it. I had some amazing reviews elsewhere but none
resulted in a noticeable Amazon spike.

Re cons and book signings: interesting, I've yet to go to a con - or even to
a proper book signing - living in France, 500 miles from the nearest
bookshop that stocks Resonance, it's not easy. But I'm planning to take a
month out and tour next year - US and the UK - to push the paperback. So
I'll see if I can add a couple of cons to my itinerary.

Chris Dolley

http://www.humor.me.uk/mambo/

Author of Resonance (Baen, 2005); Shift (Baen, 2007)




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