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Marketing Loft [Public] / Re: What the heck happened?
« Last post by TimothyEllis on Today at 12:16:28 PM »
So backlists are basically useless for income unless you write frequent bestsellers to spark readers to search your correctly spelled author name for another read but if you can write frequent bestsellers why care about your backlist?

Because at the end of the day, only the total really matters.

I'm currently selling across 75-90 books each day. That's a variance from .01c to $30 just after a launch, or $10 normally.

Most of those sales and KU reads are back list.

My second biggest sellers/reads at the moment are my first series. I'm not sure why, but the last series started sending people back to the beginning again.

I have a dozen non-fiction out there as well. While some of my novels reference one of them, they sell/get read periodically just on people scrolling through my back list. They all have ranks in the million range, but they get found because they're listed in my AC.

It doesn't really matter how someone finds you, but if they like what they found, they will look at your back list.
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Marketing Loft [Public] / Re: What the heck happened?
« Last post by LilyBLily on Today at 10:22:00 AM »
I agree with Timothy (and Bill) about the abyss. Most of us have a book or a few books that we simply can't sell. They're listed in the online stores and on our websites, but we do nothing active to try to sell them because we know they don't sell and likely never will unless to a diehard superfan who will read anything we've written. Those superfans are very rare birds. As a reader, I won't follow an author I love to a subgenre I don't like; I can't expect other readers to cross over for my oddball books, either. 

So, effectively, I've got some books in the abyss. My first published book is at 1.5 million in the Amazon store--and that's the good news. A fellow writer I've known for years keeps publishing books that go straight to the abyss. Just checked on one and its rank is 3.5 million.

But wait! There's more! My least popular books don't show a rank at all, probably because they haven't sold a single copy in years.

Ouch. The abyss is deeper than 1.5 million and deeper than 3.5 million, too.

Oh, well. I keep writing and publishing books anyway.





 
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Marketing Loft [Public] / Re: What the heck happened?
« Last post by Hopscotch on Today at 10:16:39 AM »
Bill/Tim's comments that books that sell little are not noticeable on Amazon bc they are shunted so far down the "products related to" carousel a reader never will spot them.  So backlists are basically useless for income unless you write frequent bestsellers to spark readers to search your correctly spelled author name for another read but if you can write frequent bestsellers why care about your backlist?  :HB
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Marketing Loft [Public] / Re: What the heck happened?
« Last post by Bill Hiatt on Today at 04:32:55 AM »
Quote
Now, it doesn't matter if your competition is selling thirty books an hour or three books a decade.  The books are available to be found either way and your book gets lost in the vast sea of books, regardless of how well they sell.
There is a big difference between available to found and likely to be found.

I think Timothy's point is that books that have sold little or nothing in recent months are really only findable in a practical sense if you search by specific author and title. In other words, to find them, you need to already know they exist. If you search a genre or even a subgenre, such books, if they get listed at all, will be so many pages in that you will never see them.

Example: Look at the Kootenai Trees. I know about this book only because it was published by another Bill Hiatt in 1976. It does show up in search results for my name if you search in books. It shows up if you search by title using the exact title. But if I just type in a word like Kootenai, which can't be that common, I get 22 pages of results, none of which is the target book. This search does produce things as obscure as leatherbound environmental impact statements related to the Kootenai National Forest in Idaho, even though they aren't currently available. But it doesn't take me to Look at the Kootenai Trees, and at the end, it says "No results for kootenai in Books.
Try checking your spelling or use more general terms." This is odd, since it found me some results. But it didn't consider that particular one worth reporting.

You can bet the book isn't going to show up spontaneously anywhere else, either. The only way it shows is by author search or be relatively accurate title search.

Another example is an author I knew well when I first started. (I won't mention the name.) She was prominent in romance. Searching for her by name shows a lot of irrelevant stuff and two advice to writers books she published. Clicking on her name takes me to an author page where some of the romances appear. (They are generally in the 2 million or so bracket because she hasn't been active recently.) The fact that they didn't show up in an author search is telling, though.

Third example: One of my old shorts, "Angel Feather," appears erratically in searches. I think it sold one and now is back, but until recently, it didn't always appear in author searches. And unlike the author in the second example, I'm still active. But that particular title was in the process of disappearing.

In other words, there are a lot of books on Amazon that will show up only if you know exactly what you're looking for. Even an author search may not always do the trick. An exact title search will do. Looking at the author page will do it, though it will be hidden at first.

Are such books in real competition with us? No. They're in the abyss. Unless you know they're there, you're likely never find them.

So yeah, technically saturated, but only a small part of the product is really accessible.

 
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Marketing Loft [Public] / Re: What the heck happened?
« Last post by Crystal on Today at 03:06:11 AM »
Books aren't a product people sell with smart economic principles, generally. Most people who write a book do so out of love or passion, not business acumen.

You can't assume people are writing more books because it is a logical business move.

Most people who write books do so because they love books.

I mean, who here, in this very thread, only writers a book if they good mathematical proof of an expectation the book will make a certain amount of money? If so, what's that amount? What salary does that fetch you?

I know, even when I've decided to write less because it makes less financial sense, I still *want* to write. I'm still a writer in my soul. I want to write in a different way, yes, at a different rate, and sometimes different products. But my drive to write is there whether I have good reason to believe a book will make me 50k or $5.
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Marketing Loft [Public] / Re: What the heck happened?
« Last post by TimothyEllis on March 27, 2024, 10:11:03 PM »
How do we reach those latter readers?  Well, that is the multi-million dollar question.

Um...I've been posting exactly how to do this for the last three months.

Not exactly. You've been posting high level ideas without any low level 'how to do it'.

'Use social media' is not actually useful.

How do you effectively use social media for conditions today? That's what people need to know.

I do a lot on social media, and I reach my existing fans, and that's about it.
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Marketing Loft [Public] / Re: What the heck happened?
« Last post by PJ Post on March 27, 2024, 09:56:05 PM »
How do we reach those latter readers?  Well, that is the multi-million dollar question.

Um...I've been posting exactly how to do this for the last three months.

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Marketing Loft [Public] / Re: What the heck happened?
« Last post by Lorri Moulton on March 27, 2024, 02:04:35 PM »
30 million? I'm feeling SO much better about my rankings now.  :ws
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Marketing Loft [Public] / Re: What the heck happened?
« Last post by TimothyEllis on March 27, 2024, 12:06:31 PM »
Tim, I'm not really following your logic. If "the market" is the top 500k and there are over 1.5 million books, then by definition, there are 3x the books the market needs, so the market is quite oversaturated.

There are something well over 50 MILLION books on Amazon, and that was math from several years ago before low content began. The paid ranks go up to around 15 million, and so do the free ranks, so we know there are minimum 30 million, but that doesn't include all the never ranked books and those which stopped selling.

Total U.S. book sales hit 788.7 million units in 2022 across all print sales — a 4.5% decrease from 2021.

"all print sales." That's not total sales. Just the Trad portion of the market, and the eBook portion where the books have an ISBN, which is only a fraction of them.

You're buying into the Trad doom and gloom figures, because the Trads are declining.

They overprice, they don't understand categories and keywords on Amazon, and they DON'T represent actual sales numbers.

Amazon does not release sales numbers. So any figures out there are WRONG.

There's been nothing accurate since Dataguy disappeared. And his figures were extrapolations, not hard data. But still better than anyone else's.

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Marketing Loft [Public] / Re: What the heck happened?
« Last post by Post-Crisis D on March 27, 2024, 08:11:01 AM »
Regardless of whether you want to view the market as saturated or not, the bottom line is that there are more books available than even the above average reader is ever going to be able to read in their lifetime.  Granted, that would seem to suggest the market is saturated, and has been, but the saturation issue doesn't really matter.

The issue is visibility.

There are two potential markets for books, depending on your target audience.

One is the mass market or semi-mass market.  There are voracious readers that will read every specific genre book they can find that sounds moderately interesting to them.  This could be horror, romance, fantasy, scifi, whatever.  And, those can be broken down into more specific categories, like adventure scifi or space opera or post apocalyptic urban fantasy or whatever.

In that market, there are plenty of readers but also plenty of books available.  It is going to be tough being seen.  Now, it doesn't matter if your competition is selling thirty books an hour or three books a decade.  The books are available to be found either way and your book gets lost in the vast sea of books, regardless of how well they sell.  The ones that sell get better visibility but the ones that don't sell are still out there.  And, many of the authors of those books that don't sell are trying to get boosted into the ranks of books that do sell.  So, a lot of competition out there and gaining visibility is likely to be costly.

The second market are readers specifically interested in your work.  In that market, you don't have much competition.  Your potential competitors are ones that have books that fit into "if you like books by so-and-so [that's you], then you'll like these books."  But, that is only going to be effective for that subset of readers that like your stuff but also like other books in your category and sort of fall into the first market but still like your stuff best.  Either way, your readers are going to keep buying your stuff so long as you fulfill their reading desires.

The second market is harder to find but more loyal once you do find them.  In the first market, your book is just a hamburger.  In the second market, your book is filet mignon.  Or, if you're reading this in 2030, your book is ground up crickets and mealworms in the first market and a black market hamburger in the second market.

How do we reach those latter readers?  Well, that is the multi-million dollar question.  I guess maybe hire a good PR team and then date a popular pop star or something.
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