Q&A: Do online book reviews really help publicize my book?

QUESTION: I read your guide to getting reviews by the top Amazon reviewers. I immediately contacted the top 30 reviewers who I thought might have an interest in my book. A Top 10 and a Top 20 reviewer each requested a copy, which I find very encouraging.

My question: How do reviews from top Amazon Top Reviewers translate into book sales if book readers are unaware of the existence of the book?

ANSWER: I think of this as an art, not a science. The primary benefit of having good online book reviews is it builds credibility for your book. Reviews from Top Reviewers tend to be well-written and influential and they're often chosen by Amazon for the Spotlight position.

Amazon shoppers aren't going to discover your book from perusing book reviews written by Top Reviewers or anyone else. Online reviews don't generate awareness of a book. But once the buyer is looking, reviews help the buyer make his or her decision.

Credible reviews will give some of those browsers a compelling reason to buy your book. If those reviews convert just a small portion of browsers into buyers, you'll rack up healthy sales over time.

But you're absolutely right, people have to become aware of the book, otherwise there's nobody visiting the page and nobody to convert. So in that sense, this is a technique that's most effective if you already have a successful marketing campaign that's resulting in exposure for your book.

Amazon reviews are just one part of a multi-pronged approach. One or two book-marketing techniques probably won't do much for you. Work on a dozen techniques simulataneously, and you'll start getting somewhere.

Q&A: What's the difference between Amazon Advantage and regular seller accounts?

QUESTION: I'm an independent publisher. What's the difference between Amazon's Advantage program and selling books on Marketplace using a Pro-Merchant account? I know that with the Advantage program, Amazon lists publishers' books for free and charges 55 percent commission. Pro-Merchant sellers pay only 15 percent commission plus a $39.99 monthly fee. Why, then, would anyone choose the Advantage program?

ANSWER: If you're a third-party seller on Amazon, then you're responsible for fulfilling the orders, of course. With Amazon Advantage, Amazon handles fulfillment and all customer service.

The major advantage of Amazon's Pro-Merchant subscription ($39.99 monthly) is that Amazon waives a 99-cent "closing fee" on each transaction. So if you sell more than 40 books per month, the subscription pays for itself.

As a Marketplace seller, it's tough to compete against Amazon on sales of new books. Most customers prefer buying directly from Amazon because those orders are eligible for Super Saver Shipping and Prime Shipping. So you need to undercut Amazon by a few dollars to get significant sales. Still, Marketplace is a good venue for selling returns and hurts.

Publishers with certain types of books like to have access to buyer information, to be able to cross-sell and upsell additional products. If you sell the book yourself on Marketplace, you'll have access to buyer names, addresses and e-mails. If Amazon is handling the fulfillment, you won't know who is buying your book.

Google Book Seach doesn't cannibalize sales, Cader says

Many book publishers see Google as a content pirate, but those who want to survive can no longer avoid partnerships with the search giant, according to publishing guru Michael Cader.

To remain competitive, publishers must allow readers to sample pages of their book for free via Google's Book Search and similar services, said Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Marketplace and publisher of its daily newsletter "Publishers Lunch."

"Some publishers are nervous, but all the evidence -- anecdotal and hard -- is that nobody has lost sales due to people reading some samples of a book for free online," Cader said. "I strongly believe that anybody who's not at least experimenting is missing out on an opportunity and risks making themselves irrelevant."

Google Book Search has been highly controversial among publishers. The Authors Guild of America and Association of American Publishers have each sued Google claiming "massive copyright infringement." Google, however, maintains that its service is "fair use," since users can only view 20 percent of a book's content.

Not only should publishers be participating with Google Book Search, but should also be participating with Microsoft's new book search initiative, Live Books Search," Cader said.

Nowadays Google and the Web is "the place where people turn for information, whether the people in publishing like it or not," said Cader, who was speaking on a conference call Thursday afternoon conducted by the Copyright Clearance Center.

In the unlikely event that display of sample book pages cannibalize sales, publishers could simply take the material down from the Google or Microsoft services, Cader said.

Q&A: Which book blogs are most popular?

QUESTION: I'd like to get exposure for my book on some of the popular book blogs. There are so many of them nowadays I don't know where to start.

ANSWER: Exposure on a quality book blog can provide tremendous exposure for your book. However, 99.9 percent of book blogs are in the "long tail" and don't have many readers. I'd suggest spending your time pitching this to five or 10 top-tier general-interest book blogs. If one of them picks it up, you'll get mentions on many of the secondary blogs.

Here are some good general ones I know about off the top of my head:

GalleyCat

Big Bad Book Blog

Radar O'Reilly

Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog

http://Bookslut.com

But don't leave off here. Research the top blogs in your niche, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. Research blogs on Technorati and take a look at their traffic trends on Alexa. Then write a personal note to each blogger and offer them a review copy of your book. Explain why your book is of interest to that blogger's audience.

Check the Amazon Sales Rank of your book and competing books

Here's a nifty tool you should bookmark:

Aaron Shepard has upgraded his Amazon sales rank checker, Sales Rank Express (formerly called Sales Rank Multichecker). The strength of this tool -- compared to others like TitleZ, Charteous, RankForest, RankTracer, Books & Writers or the now-defunct JungleScan -- is its ability to poll Amazon's Canadian, U.K., French, German, and Japanese sites. Also, it looks up books "paired" with yours, the same list Amazon shows under the heading "Customers who bought this item also bought ..."

Here's Aaron's description of the new Sales Rank Express:

"It's now several times as powerful, with a lot more information presented, and a lot more convenience in looking for it. Here's a list of some of the info available for each book (with up to 10 books displayed per page).

• Sales rank
• Customer rating
• Number of reviews
• Date of last review
• Basic metadata, as it appears on Amazon
• List and sale prices
• Amazon discount
• Copies in stock
• Availability
• Summary of offers
• Top pairing
• Other formats

You can search by author, publisher, title words, ISBN (10-digit or 13-digit), or any combination of the four. Within the results, you can then automatically look up the same info for all formats of a title (paperback, hardcover, etc.), or for the book's top ten pairings (the competing and complementary titles used for Also Bought lists, exit offers, etc.). Searches for pairings can be chained, so you can check each book on your Also Bought list to see if you're on that book's list too!

Sales Rank Express has separate forms for each of Amazon's countries -- U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, and Japan -- so it's easy to check your books on sites even where you don't know the language. There's even a "Fix Data" button for each book in each country, to bring you right to Amazon's correction form.

The site includes full documentation that not only describes how to use Sales Rank Express but also describes much of the significance of the data and how it relates to the inner workings of Amazon. For instance, you'll learn that the figure Amazon reports for copies in stock can often be used to view sales almost in real time. You'll also learn that this figure does not always equal the number of copies in Amazon's own warehouses! (This figure, by the way, is not currently available on Amazon itself or anywhere else but Sales Rank Express.)

And it's all still free.

Try it and let me know what you think!"

Q&A: Are book reviews by Amazon Top Reviewers more important?

QUESTION: What sort of book reviews are the most influential to Amazon customers? It seems to me that reviews from so-called Amazon Top Reviewers might be taken more seriously. Otherwise I'm not sure the reviews mean very much, when readers and reviewers with no particular qualifications weigh in on your book.

ANSWER: How much impact an Amazon review has depends mostly on the credibility and helpfulness of the reviewer. It all boils down to this: Does the review help Amazon shoppers decide whether they're likely to be satisfied with the book?

None of this depends on whether the reviewer is designated as a "Top Reviewer." However, I'd add this: Amazon gives added weight to reviews by Top Reviewers when its system calculates which review(s) are assigned to Spotlight positions (Spotlight Reviews are the one or two reviews that appear above all other reviews, sometimes permanently.) So reviews by Amazon Top Reviewers tend to have more impact simply because they're much more visible.

If an author gets a helpful review from a Top Reviewer -- and Amazon gives that review a Spotlight position -- that review can do more for your sales than a rave review in Publishers Weekly or a writeup by any other "professional" critic. After all, that Spotlight Review can
be read by hundreds of book buyers daily -- for the next decade or more -- while those "professional" reviews will be lining bird cages tomorrow.

I'm not saying that Amazon's system for assigning Spotlight Reviews is infallible, or that the best reviews will definitely be spotlighted. I'm saying that reviews by Top Reviewers are given the most weight in the selection process.

This is a double-edged sword, of course. Sometimes a Top Reviewer will pan a book, give it one or two stars out of five, and that review gets the Spotlight. Obviously, this doesn't help sales -- word of mouth doesn't help your book if it's *bad* word of mouth.

For more detail on this, see the section of my book on "amateur" online book reviews.

Q&A: How effective is Amazon's ClickRiver for marketing books?

QUESTION: What's your take on ClickRiver, Amazon's new pay-per-click advertising network? Will this be a viable method for advertising books?

ANSWER: I opened a ClickRiver beta account a couple of weeks ago and have been diddling with it. First, the good news:

• It's much easier to use than Google Adwords. The interface is clean and it reponds fast. If you ask for a keyword, you'll start getting impressions within a few minutes. It's also relatively cheap -- you can buy impressions on practically any keyword(s) for 10 cents per click. But that's probably because not many people are competing for the keywords, at least not yet.

• ClickRiver does a great job of suggesting additional keywords. For example, let's imagine you're advertising a book on "orchids." Once ClickRiver knows you're targeting orchids, it will suggest every book title and author name in the orchid space -- at least those that have good sales. It sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many good keywords will be suggested that you didn't think of. One thing I found odd, though: ClickRiver didn't suggest any titles newer than two years. I guess this is a glitch.

The bad news:

• Clickthroughs are very, very sparse. I have thousands of impressions so far, and not one single click. If this was an Adword ad, Google would have shut it off already for low clickthrough. So on the one hand, ClickRiver hasn't cost me a cent, but on the other hand it's been a complete waste of time.
  

I'm sure the reason for the low clickthrough is that ClickRiver ads just aren't that visible on Amazon's detail pages. For example, here are some ClickRiver ads that appear on the detail page for a Garfield book, they appear far down the page and are uncompelling by design:


Visibility will probably always be a tension for this program -- For Amazon to make serious money with this, they're going to have to raise the profile of the ads. But the more they do this, the more likely buyers will be distracted from buying the Amazon product they're looking at.

I've always suspected that pay-per-click is an ineffective way to market consumer books. There's simply not enough profit margin in the typical book to pay $10, $15 or more in advertising for each sale. PPC is supposedly a revolutionary way of targeting people, but I believe it gets the same crummy response as most direct mail 2 percent to 5 percent.

It's a different story if you have a high-margin book or a club or service where acquiring a customer is worth hundreds of dollars over the lifetime of the customer. But I think the main user of ClickRiver ads will turn out to be people who are selling high-priced, high-margin products and services outside Amazon.

Here's a novel way to plug your book: 'Give away' the film rights

Usually, novelists get paid something when they sell their film rights, then the project can end up in limbo for years. But Author Jonathan Lethem has a better idea.

Lehman is offering to "give away" the option for his new novel "You Don't Love Me Yet" -- but only if the filmmaker coughs up 2 percent of the movie's budget as a fee, and releases "ancillary" rights such as distributing the project online or adapting the story for the stage.

The book was published today by Doubleday.

Lethem, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author, is certainly correct that artists should have a say about how content is commodified, instead of just leaving it up to media conglomerates. Why shouldn't authors get a piece of the box office and be able to set some conditions?

This was also a brilliant bit of publicity by Lethem and Doubleday -- offering to "give away" the film rights in exchange for a percentage. That virtually guarantees a film will be released within five years.

Q&A: How can a bookseller undercut my price on Amazon?

QUESTION: I just noticed that a third-party Amazon seller has my book listed for sale as "new" on Marketplace for $1.05 less than my list price! My book is sold only on Amazon. I can't understand this, since I'm the only one with copies of the book!

ANSWER: Anyone with a copy of your book (or anyone knows of a way to order your book at a discount) can sell it on Amazon at any price they wish. Is it possible that this seller has a review copy of your book or a used copy and has decided to describe its condition as "New"?

Some Marketplace sellers don't actually carry any books in stock, instead they have "virtual" inventories. They upload databases of ISBNs to Marketplace and, when they make a sale, order the books from a wholesaler. Amazon's Marketplace participation agreement prohibits drop-shipping, but there are at least a dozen high-volume vendors who do it.

The seller who has your book, however, appears to be a low-volume seller (not a drop-shipper) who probably has a copy of your book. If not, they may have typed in your ISBN by mistake and not noticed the discrepancy with the title.

If you're really curious, ask the seller. Click on their starred feedback rating, and at the bottom right of the next page, there's a link to "contact this seller."

Finding freelance editorial help for your book project

For book authors, one of the great advantages of the Internet is how easily you can find and contact freelancers to help with your book project.

A great resource I recently discovered is the Editorial Freelancers Association. On the site you can search members by skill set and geographic area. Most of the people listed have a tremendous amount of experience. Rates vary.

There are some better-known freelancing sites, such as eLance and GetaFreelancer, where members who want work bid on your job. These sites provide an escrow system to protect the participants, and prices are decided by a reverse auction. It's a great concept, but I don't know if it's something that works all that well for editorial jobs.

I was very disappointed the one time I listed a proofreading job with one of the popular sites. I gave the job to the best of 50 applicants, and it turned out that person didn't have the necessary English skills and knowledge of style rules for books -- despite having exemplary ratings from previous jobs.

My suspicion is that many of the bidders on the popular freelancing sites are overseas techies who are between Web-site development gigs. Nothing wrong with that, but when you're paying good money for an editorial job, top-notch language skills and style are critical.

Q&A: How many bookstore sales can I expect for each Amazon sale?

QUESTION: I have a book for sale on Amazon, and now I'm getting it distributed to bookstores. How many more sales can I expect when my book is available in stores? I've heard that if you get your books into the stores, you'll sell more books -- but how can I forecast the number of books?

ANSWER: This is more difficult than forecasting the weather. And I'm not a meteorologist or a retailer. However, in his book "Print-on-Demand Book Publishing," Morris Rosenthal estimates:

• If the title is modeled at one or two copies by the major bookstore chains, multiply Amazon sales by five.
• If the title is also carried by indies, specialty stores and book clubs, multiply by 10.
  

Depending on whose numbers you believe, Amazon accounts for between 8 percent and 15 percent of book sales in the United States. But it's safe to assume that certain types of books are overrepresented in Amazon sales -- computer books, specialized books, books that appeal to a younger audience.

By contrast, brick-and-mortar stores do a better job moving bestsellers by big-name authors, especially when they're on display in the front of the store.

Certain types of books do poorly on Amazon because buyers prefer to examine the physical book before purchasing. A good example is children's picture books, as Aaron Shepard points out. Many of these are bought as gifts from grandparents.

Your mileage will vary.

Why you should boycott AbeBooks

Nothing irks an author more than seeing review copies of his or her book for sale on the Internet. It's tough enough to make a living as a writer, without having to compete for sales against free copies of your own book.

I found a galley of mine for sale on AbeBooks.com, and it was listed for sale before my book's publication date!

In case you're not familiar with them, ABE is the big bookselling network that recently bought LibraryThing. I've complained repeatedly since finding my galley there a couple of weeks ago. ABE has acknowledged my complaint but hasn't done anything about it -- it's still for sale.

Apparently ABE thinks I'll just go away, but they've got another thing coming. I blew a chunk of my retirement savings to print those ARCs, and I'm not going to sit here politely like a chump.

If you think I'm mad about this, you're goddamned right. This is one thing authors and publishers get pissed about. And that's why every reputable online retailer prohibits the sale of review copies, uncorrected proofs, galleys, or whatever else you want to call them.

Some people even argue that selling ARCs is illegal, citing copyright infringement. Personally, I think that's silly -- there's no law against selling review copies. And I don't have a problem with collectors selling ARCs of out-of-print books. But selling promotional copies of a newly launched book? C'mon, that's just sleazy, and that's why reputable sites have these policies:

Amazon.com:
[Prohibited]: Promotional media. Movies, CDs, software, books (including advance reading copies and uncorrected proofs), etc., that are produced and distributed for promotional use only.

Barnes & Noble BookQuest:
[Prohibited]: Promotional items, including Advanced Reading Copies.

Here's the deal, folks: Authors and publishers can't make money if parasites are allowed to siphon off marketing resources. If publishers can't make money, guess what's going to happen to ABE and every other bookselling network? They're toast. They'll need to find something else to sell instead of books.

How does AbeBooks justify sales of review copies? Actually, they don't, take a look at their participation agreement, they prohibit it too:

b. Unacceptable Listings
Promotional Items
Promotional items are goods that are distributed, free of charge, for the purpose of advertising an event or good, such as a movie or book. Promotional items can include advanced reading copies, un-proofed copies and posters.

But it seems ABE is giving a wink and a nod to anyone who wants to ignore this policy, even when a violation is reported. It makes you wonder what else is going on.

How many other authors do you think ABE is screwing by looking the other way while ARCs are trafficked on its site? A lot. There are more than 135,000 books on ABE described as "uncorrected."

What do you think about this? Feel free to post a comment here, and to post a comment to ABE too.

Instant books and online sales

A specialty book publisher and Barnes & Noble are hoping to cash in on the white-hot popularity of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

The publisher, Black Dog & Leventhal, printed 100,000 copies of the so-called "instant book" and Barnes & Noble is producing a hardcover edition and giving it prime real estate at the front of its stores. The book was published Feb. 15.

According to the Wall Street Journal, author Steve Dougherty turned in the 128-page manuscript in two weeks for a flat fee of $15,000.

Obama certainly is popular, but political tomes are not usually bestsellers. Indeed a quick checks of the sales rankings on Amazon.com and BN.com from one week ago shows mediocre results:

Amazon.com Sales Rank: 4,864
BarnesAndNoble.com Sales Rank: 73,665

And most of the current success on Amazon seems pegged to publicity from the Wall Street Journal story. A week ago, the book's rank on Amazon was 40,247.

But perhaps this book is an impulse item that will do well in the front of brick-and-mortar stores.

I have a feeling publishers have just scratched the surface of what's possible with niche audiences and print-on-demand technology. But to stick with the Obama example, here's a few other books about the candidate from nimble publishers that seem to be having some success, at least on Amazon:
Should Barack Obama Be President?
Barack Obama: Working to Make a Difference
Barack Obama (People in the News)

I couldn't find a Web site for Black Dog & Leventhal, but I was able to find this list of their books.