The Guinea Pig Project: Books Sales and Amazon Rankings

Image representing Amazon as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Author Bob Kaay over the past few weeks concocted a most interesting experiment regarding book sales and Amazon rankings.  He alerted his fan base about his forthcoming book Silverbirch: A Tear in the Fabric of the Night Sky and asked them to all buy it on the same day.  He’s written a very detailed description of his “guinea pig project,” as he calls it — and it is very illuminating for other writers.  He actually made an obvious, if fleeting dent in the Amazon rankings.  And he provides his conclusions about how writers might be promote sales of their books.

This post brought back to mind recommendations I’ve come across from Steve Harrison, the guru of achieving best-seller ranking for one’s book.  Harrison recommends a similar approach, but done much, much more aggressively, including all kinds of gimmicks and giveaways to encourage someone to buy a book on a given day.

The cornerstone of the strategy proposed by both Kaay and Harrison is to build a contact list well in advance of book publication, using blogs, social media and whatever other tool will do the trick.  The list needs to be tended to, in order to build some loyalty.

So once again the message:  writers who wish to promote their work need to build a network of friends and fans — and the social media have become one of the most important tools.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Related Posts

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Sorry, comments are closed.

Web Analytics