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He who is creative,
must create himself.
~John Keats
Display quote Chapter 2,
Daedalus Rising,
the true story of Icarus
by Robert William Case
© Copyright 2009,
EJ Thornton
This book is presented in a free format here by the author and publisher. All rights reserved .
Case Study
The Children
Last Stand of the Fallen
First Time Author
"Fiction for Fun"
Adam Craig wrote "The Children, Last Stand of the Fallen." He got it published many years after he initially wrote it because he attempted to go the traditional publishing route, soliciting agents, going to writer's conferences and sending out queries to see if anyone liked his book well enough to publish it.
I claim that the first time author's curse is "Inexperience" and that going through the experience of "Publishing 101," which any first time author has to go through getting their first book published, is an expensive "course," both in time and in money. Most publishers aren't willing to hand-hold first time authors through this exercise.
Luckily, for Adam, at one of those writer's conferences, he was introduced to the concept of Partner Publishing. Several years later, after being frustrated with the agents and the queries, he decided to try it.
It was a surprisingly quick process to go from submission to print compared to the many years he'd labored over the manuscript, tweaking and improving it with every step.
But the problem again was no one knew him and no one knew the concept of his book, so how were we going to get it in front of potential readers.
The first thing we did was list the objective facts about the book, such as:
- it has 282 pages
- it is fantasy, fiction, sci-fi
- it is set in the mountains of post-apocalyptic Colorado
- its protagonist's name is Aiden Kane
- the supporting cast of good guys were children with special powers
- the antagonists were mutated beasts called Drae Nocht
- there were battle scenes
- there is a love story
- the main theme is a story of sacrifice and survival.
- the story was inspired by a dream the author had many years before
After listing these facts about the book, we asked who would want books about that subject. Since Adam grew up on video games and this book could translate into a feature film or a video game, we decided to concentrate on the "gamer" community, that is those kids who love video games.
So, we created pages featuring his book called "Gifts for Gamers" and "Gamer Gifts." There is actually a lot of competition for this search term. We put it under "Post Apocalyptic Novels," "Teen Fiction" and "Sci-Fi Novels" as well. The beauty of the internet is that we can classify the same book in multiple ways at no extra expense to the company - except set up, which is something a paper catalog just can not do. The paper catalogs are forced to pigeon-hole a book and make it fit its categories, but the internet is much more free form.
Instantly, we could put this book in dozens of places people who would enjoy it would see.
Adam then went to his gaming forums and told them of this book and it created a stir from inside the gaming community. So, even though he hadn't created a huge list of his potential customers, like Jonathan Manske had, he still had access to a large group of people to launch his book to. This actually became a virtual launch for his book.
What Your
Amazon.com Rank
Says About Your Book
I have been tracking amazon.com rankings for several years for all of my books and I've created tools to monitor it and alert me when things change. This is a good idea, because when your amazon.com rank goes down below 1000 or 100, it is newsworthy in certain circles. So, I monitor all my books all the time.
If you sell one book a day, at the time you sell the book, your rank changes from wherever it is to roughly 70,000. Give or take - these are all ball park figures and based solely on my experience, not anything amazon.com publishes.
This is the trek one of these books took through two days where the book's amazon sale's rank dropped five times each day.
9/30 - noon
Beginning Rank Rank after Sale
404934 74370 (three hours later)
80036 31641 (three hours later)
33735 19823 (two hours later)
22372 14901 (three hours later)
14975 11208 (10/1 - noon
53810 26353 (six hours later)
42952 28397 (one hour later)
28397 19435 (one hour later)
19435 16180 (one hour later)
16180 9107
So, if a book's rank is over 100,000 - they're probably not selling more than one a day.
If the book's rank is in the 4 digits, they're rougly selling at least 5 a day. Of course, the drops in the rank show less of a change the lower the rank gets. To maintain a rank less than 5,000, the book should be seeing consistent sales every hour.
When the rank gets into the hundreds, the book is likely selling multiple copies every hour consistently through the day.
When the book isn't on the first or second page of an amazon.com search, it isn't being found. The placement in the search results are based on popularity (or sales rank), so how does a book get found in the first place? This seems like a case of the 'rich getting richer' or the more popular books selling just because they're the more popular books.
This is exactly the case.
The way to overcome it in amazon and on the internet is to stack the deck in your favor. One way to do that is to "create an event." Another way to do it is to use the advanced tools we discuss in the last chapter of this book.
Last updated on: Sunday, March 14, 2010
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