Authors shun BookSense affiliate links in favor of Amazon

Here's an honest look at why so many authors and booksellers feature Amazon Associate links on their book's Web page, rather than promoting independent bookstores via BookSense. (And this holds true for authors who detest Amazon and would prefer to champion local stores, given a good option.)

It all boils down to economics, writes Kate Whouley in a Shelf Awareness item, Online Alliances: Deal With the Devil or Pact for Profits?

The operator of one book Web site reported "making more in a month from Amazon than they made in three years from a previous BookSense link."

Further, Amazon makes it dead easy, and that's why many diehard indie customers often buy from Amazon. When Whouley looked into the BookSense.com option for her own site, she discovered it required a series of extra steps for her visitors. They had to search for a local bookseller, who might not even stock her book. If BookSense were hard-wired to fulfillment system like Amazon, customers could buy books with ease, and the independents could be giving Amazon a run for its money.

Book tagging lags at Amazon; soars at LibraryThing

They've crunched some numbers at LibraryThing, and with much smaller user base, the social-networking site has accumulated ten times as many book tags as Amazon.

The score:

LibraryThing, 13 million
Amazon, 1.3 million

What's the problem with tagging at Amazon? It's simple, says LibraryThing found Tim Spalding: E-commerce and tagging don't mix.

"You can't get your customers to organize your products unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton."

Amazon's tags are often smart alecky. At LibraryThing, users tend to take things more seriously.

Here's more analysis on LibraryThing's blog.

eBay takes a page from Amazon -- Recommendations

The No. 1 driver of book sales on Amazon is keyword searches -- buyers looking for a title or author name.

But Amazon's crown jewel is recommendations. It's the No. 2 driver of book sales, and it can literally create demand for a book where none existed.

Right behind Amazon's recommendations is its customer review feature, where amateurs compete for "positive" votes from the community.

eBay, in a bid to spur more growth, is now trying to outdo Amazon on all these features. eBay is even paying people to write product reviews.

There's no doubt that good recommendations prompt sales. Look at Netflix. But will recommendations work on eBay? The software engineer who developed a recommendation system for Amazon's auction platform in the early 1990s, Greg Linden, has his doubts. As he recalls, Amazon quickly pulled the plug on auction recommendations because:

[I]t generated complaints from sellers who did not like competitors' items shown next to theirs.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. eBay's biggest vulnerability is it knows a lot about its sellers, but very little about the buyers.

Seth Godin wants publisher to stop selling his Creative Commons-licensed book

There's an interesting dust-up between marketing guru Seth Godin and an entrepreneur who is selling paperback copies of an e-book Godin published on the Web two years ago using a Creative Commons license.

On his blog, Godin is asking people not to buy the book. Apparently, sales of the book are so strong that Amazon is recommending it in e-mails to customers who've bought similar books in the past.

"I didn't authorize this book to be published, I have no idea who the publisher is and I certainly didn't ask Amazon to email anyone," Godin says on his blog.

Godin admits, however, that the Creative Commons license he selected for his book didn't preclude commercial republication.

When I published my own book this month using a Creative Commons license, I selected the most restrictive license. It allows printing and sharing of the material, but no commercial use and no derivative works.

If you want to avoid the type of trouble Godin is having, but still want to use a Creative Commons license, consider the using the Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives license.

UPDATE: It looks like Amazon has taken down the listing for the book, but it remains here in Google's cache. It had a pretty darned good Amazon Sales Rank of around 3,000.

New Web site charts your Amazon Sales Rank

Here's another neat site for tracking the Amazon Sales Rank of any book: Charteo.us.

It has some features you won't find elsewhere, such as the ability to:

• Compare multiple titles on the same chart
• Embedding a chart in any page
• Navigate based on average sales rank. (Take the tour here.)
  

Use it without registration. The site's editor assures me that it will always be free.

Here's a snippet from the site's blog:

I hope curious authors and publishers wanting to track minute-by-minute performance of their books find these charts amusing or useful or amusing and useful. A little more time poking around different corners at the site may also help them pick the right idea for their next project by giving a sense of what is currently hot, what endures and what is in its way out.

A shameless plug for my new book

If you're a book author or aspiring author, you might want to check out my new book, Plug Your Book! It explains how authors can find and build an audience using grassroots marketing on the Internet instead of paid advertising.

You can read the book, comment on it, and suggest revisions here. It's published on the Web under a Creative Commons license (unlimited printing and sharing for noncommercial purposes), and paperback copies of the same book are available from retailers.

Free tools for tracking Amazon Sales Rank

It's all too tempting to be hypnotized by the ups and downs of your book's Amazon Sales Rank. Fortunately, indulging in this pastime no longer requires you to reload your Web browser each time you want to check your rank—several free services allow you to monitor sales ranks of your books and other titles.

Just a few days ago I mentioned TitleZ, a nifty Web site that allows you to chart the Amazon Sales Rank of any book over time. And it seems not a month goes by without some new innovation employing Amazon rankings.

Author Aaron Shepard has his Sales Rank Express tool, which allows you to quickly check all your ranks on Amazon.com and the company's international sites.

RankForest.com is another service that allows you to chart your Amazon Sales Rank by drawing a line graph similar to a stock chart. You can add books to a "collection" for quick reference, and leave comments on books. Many of the site's features are free.

TicTap.com also allows you to track Amazon sales ranks over time on a bar graph and compare purchase prices from different retailers.

And here's another neat site for tracking the Amazon Sales Rank of any book: Charteo.us. This one has some unique features, like the ability to compare the ranks of two or more books within the same chart.

Amazon ranks each book based on how often it sells relative to every other book in its catalog of some 3.5 million titles. The rank of the topselling book is 1, and the rank of the slowest seller is higher than 3,500,000. Books for which Amazon hasn’t recorded a sale have a sales rank of "None."

A book's Amazon Sales Rank appears in the "Product Details" section of its detail page on Amazon, which you can locate by searching for the book's ISBN. Sales ranks are recalculated hourly, and can rise or fall by many thousands of places per day.
Books ranked in the top 10,000 are generally considered commercially successful books.

Since Amazon has an estimated 70-percent market share among Internet book retailers, its sales rankings are the best free publicly available information about the relative sales performance of individual titles. The rankings include new and used books sold by third-party sellers on Amazon’s Marketplace platform.

Amazon doesn't publicly discuss its sales figures for individual titles, so it's impossible to exactly correlate the quantity of sales with Amazon's rankings. However, based on anecdotal reports from various publishers, you can assume that an Amazon sales rank of 5,000 translates into about 15 to 20 sales per day, depending on seasonal factors.

Here's more background on Amazon Sales Ranks.

Purchase "Plug Your Book" by Steve Weber

Three ways to purchase the paperback:

1. Amazon.com.

2. Barnes & Noble.

3. Your local independent bookstore. If it's not in stock, tell the manager it's available within 24 hours from any major book wholesaler in the United States or the United Kingdom.

Contents for "Plug Your Book" by Steve Weber

Introduction
Taking control of your book sales
One big caveat
How to use this book
Staying current

Electric word of mouth
Riding the big river
Amazon’s ‘long tail’
Getting recommended
Personalized bookstores
The wisdom of crowds
Bubbling to the top
Recommendation effectiveness

Amazon Bestseller Campaigns
Making the list
How Bestseller Campaigns work
… and this is success?
Haywired recommendations
Is it worth it?

Amateur book reviews
Credibility through peers
Getting more Amazon reviews
Amazon Top Reviewers
Contacting Top Reviewers
Etiquette in approaching reviewers
Finding more Amazon reviewers
More ways to get reviews
Amazon Spotlight Reviews
Negative reviews
Countering malicious reviews
Old-media book reviews
Posting trade reviews on Amazon
Fee-based book reviews

Building your author Web site
Getting involved
Your domain
Building blocks of your site
A survey of author Web sites
Your online press kit
Multimedia for books
Podcasting for publicity
Waiting for results
When to launch your site

Blogging for authors
What is a blog?
Why blogs are better
Breathing the blogosphere
Connecting with readers
Blog comments: pros and cons
Blog style
Your blog’s angle
Raw materials for posts
Your blog’s title
Writing your blog posts
Blogging categories
Over the long haul
Selecting your blog publishing tool
Advertising-supported blogs
Blog-to-e-mail service

Author blog platforms up close
Business
Humor
Politics
Arts and crafts
Diaries
Romance
Memoir
Mystery
Publishing
Blogs into books

Blog tours
Targeting host blogs
Google PageRank
Building your excerpt
Excerpts that sell
Your pitch to bloggers
A sample pitch
Your guest appearance
Blog conversation
Archiving your results
Encore appearances
More resources

Social networking
MySpace: Not just for kids
Making friends on MySpace
Picking your ‘Top 8’
Tips for working MySpace
Your MySpace blog
MySpace groups
Create your own group
Dedicated pages for titles, characters
MySpace books?
Uploading videos
MySpace best practices
Other places on MySpace
More social-networking sites

Tag – You’re it!
Personal book tagging
Amazon tags
Amazon Media Library
LibraryThing
Tag-based marketing
Problems with tags

Advanced Amazon tools
Buy X, Get Y
Weaknesses of BXGY
Free paired placement
Single New Product e-mails
Amazon Connect
Listmania
Publicize your book
So You’d Like to . . . guides
Search Inside The Book
Statistically Improbable Phrases
Writing book reviews
ProductWikis
Customer discussions
BookSurge
Your Amazon profile
Amazon friends
Interesting people
Fine-tuning book recommendations
Pricing and discounting strategies

Social search
del.icio.us
Smart crowds
Vertical search
Amazon Search Suggestions
Digg

Google, Amazon, digital content
Google Book Search
Accidental book discovery
Instant Online Access
Ad-Supported Access
Google Print on Demand
Amazon Upgrade
Amazon’s Mobipocket
Amazon digital audio
Amazon Pages

Book promotion with e-books
Amazon Shorts
Client acquisition
Selling e-books on your site

Syndicating your content
Article banks
How duplicate content backfires
Really Simple Syndication
BlogBurst
Traditional media interviews
Press releases
Protecting your content

Beyond the blogosphere
BookCrossing
Usenet, Google groups
Yahoo, AOL Groups
Getting buzz on eBay

Revenue from your Web site
Amazon Associates program
Barnes & Noble
CommissionJunction
eBay
Google AdSense, other advertising

Pay per click advertising
Google AdWords
Yahoo Search Marketing

Power tools
Amazon Sales Rank
TitleZ
Affiliate partnerships
Analyzing your traffic
Linking strategy
Search engine optimization
Keyword density
Length of your lease
Publishers Portal
Privacy policies
Web site cardinal sins

Selling on Amazon, beyond
Print on demand
Amazon Advantage
Amazon Marketplace
Catalog accuracy
Handling sales on your site
Google Checkout

Other major online retailers
Barnes & Noble
BookSense

Ethics of online marketing
Shill reviews
Spam

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.

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Reader comments for "Plug Your Book" by Steve Weber

Reserved for future use.

Researching the book market with TitleZ

One of the handiest free tools for book publishers is TitleZ.com, which provides charts of the Amazon Sales Rank for any book.

Once you've set up your free account, TitleZ allows you to instantly retrieve historic and current sales rankings from Amazon and create printable reports with 7-day, 30-day, 90-day, and lifetime averages. This allows you to see how book topic areas or individual titles perform over time relative to others.

TitleZ's charts resemble a stock chart -- except that unlike stock prices, lower is better for Amazon Sales Rank. If you get all the way down to No. 1, you're at the top of the heap.

TitleZ is a handy tool for evaluating book topic ideas since it allow you to gauge the potential audience for a given topic or title. You can easily assemble a list of books along with a specific topic with their historical sales rankings and descriptions. This will provide a quick indication of whether other books on the topic have succeeded or failed, or if the market is saturated.

There are other ways of comparing competitive titles, but TitleZ provides a detailed list faster than the research would take using Amazon or other book sales tracking programs alone. TitleZ also provides pricing information on competitive titles, helping you determine the right price for you book.

You can also track your book's performance over time to assess the effect of promotional efforts and marketing programs.

Using Amazon Shorts to promote your book

Electronic books, or e-books, haven’t gotten much traction with consumers. People don’t enjoy reading extended passages of text on a computer screens, and there’s no popular e-book reader devices yet. Prices of e-books haven’t been discounted much from the price of hard-copy books, giving price-conscious consumers little incentive to switch. In the meantime, though, free and low-cost e-books and downloadable excerpts are a valuable as a way of generating more awareness for your book.

Amazon Shorts are a potential vehicle for authors who want to publicize new books or promote previous works. Each Short is available only on Amazon, costs 49 cents, and can be downloaded immediately in plain text or printed or viewed as a PDF document.

For example, historian David McCullough used an Amazon Short to help promote his 2006 hardcover 1776. His Short was the 1,700-word essay “Faces,” an interesting sidebar that never made its way into the book. The Short was launched just before the hardcover became available, calling more attention to it and McCullough’s long list of previous works. You can view the detail page for McCullough’s Amazon Short by searching Amazon for B000GFRBEM, the story’s ASIN.

At the bottom of Amazon Shorts appears a short author biography and photograph, and below that are links to other full-length works available for purchase on Amazon. So Amazon Shorts is inexpensive way for readers to discover new authors. The low price encourages readers experimentation and impulse buying.

Other authors have used Shorts to serialize works, or to update readers on new stories or create an entirely new story about a popular character.

Some nonfiction authors have used Shorts to generate new customers for consulting services or seminars. In one longtime bestselling Short, Why Authors Are Cranky (ASIN B000A0F6FO), author Bruce Holland Rogers promotes his own Web site, where readers can pay $10 for an annual subscription to his new short stories delivered via e-mail. The Web link in Rogers’ Amazon Short is live, so interested readers can jump right to his site, ShortShortShort.com.

Amazon relaunches ProductWikis as Amapedia

In mid-2006, Amazon added a Wikipedia-like feature to many of its product detail pages. Much like the famous online encyclopedia, Amazon's ProductWiki feature allowed anyone to create or edit content related to products being sold on Amazon.

Now Amazon has quietly relaunched the wiki feature, establishing its own domain and a new name, Amapedia. The change was phased in a couple of weeks ago with very little fanfare. There's still less than a dozen "Amapedia" references on Google.

Meanwhile Amazon has beefed up its guidelines for wiki content, and is warning authors not to spam the feature without at least disclosing the conflict of interest:

Disclose if you are affiliated with the product, such as being the author of a book (or the spouse or close friend of the author)

Three things worth noting:

• Amazon may have changed the name after complaints from an existing company using the ProductWiki name.

• With establishment of the new domain, Amazon has offloaded much of the wiki content from product detail pages, helping to reduce the bloat. That's a good thing -- those pages were getting as long as a country mile.
  

• Amazon is increasingly emphasizing its "community" features. Perhaps the plan is to build an active site at Amapedia that will organize and inject fresh traffic onto Amazon. The wiki feature certainly hadn't gotten much attention stuffed at the bottom of the .com product detail pages.

In the meantime, Amazon's help page on ProductWikis remains unchanged. Interestingly, Amapedia seems to have been the brainchild of an Amazon intern who worked on the coding during 2005. (Thanks, TechDirt.)

Here's my take: Amazon already has critical mass with "customer reviews." This feature is Amazon's "killer app" -- people understand it and value it. To me, it means user-generated book reviews, which are usually a heck of a lot more useful than "professional" book reviews. Amazon's amateur book reviews are a better example of the power of user-generated content than Wikipedia, if you ask me.

Perhaps Amazon should consider augmenting the customer-review feature with more community capabilities. Obviously, most users don't understand or see any added value in product wikis. Trust me, most Amazon users don't want to think about "collaborative structured tagging."