Manipulating Amazon Bestsellers For Fun or Profit?

A new round of debate has sparked up in publishing circles over an article written by John Kremer, a respected expert on book marketing and author of the popular "1001 Ways to Market Your Book." It started with a post John made to his blog about campaigns to push a book to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. This was followed by a response from Richard and Angela Hoy of WritersWeekly.com, who also run Booklocker, questioning the ethics of Kremer's approach. John responded with a 25 point defense of his position.

My own take on creating temporary Amazon Bestsellers, called "Amazon Bombing" by some, is that there's little point in doing so. While I accept Kremer's examples of the technique helping this or that title on Amazon or BN.com in the past, my gut feeling is that this promotion style falls into category of "funny once." The first couple publishers or authors who went to the trouble may have seen some benefit due to gullible buyers being impressed by the sales spike, but now that the news has been out for some time, it's hard to believe anybody puts credence in a transient high ranking.

If my memory serves me right, a similar debate over the ethics of manipulating Amazon ranks led to a schism of the Pub-Forum list, when Shel Horowitz, another respected marketing Guru, used a mass-emailing technique to temporarily propel his "Principled Profit" up the rankings. I remember keeping an eye on the book's ranking after the campaign, and it fell right back down the charts after the effects of campaign ran out of steam. I don't know if it helped Shel's sales through other channels, but I suspect it would be hard to separate the publicity generated by the debate over the technique from the effects of the momentary bestseller status.

I'll leave the debate over the ethics of temporarily manipulating the online sales ranking of a book to others, but my own suspicion is that whatever value there may once have been doing so is rapidly losing currency.

Selling Books Online by Mail Order

Direct sales are often the plum of the self publishing business. I've been selling books online since 1995, my first book didn't even have an ISBN number. If you can get serious visitors to your website, you can sell books. You don't need a super sophisticated website to sell online, my first order form wasn't even a form - just a page with the price and my mailing address for checks or money orders. While it turned out to be a little too crude (I got some overseas checks I never cashed because of the bank fees and took a beating on shipping and handling), the lesson I took away was that selling books online was possible, even in the early days of the commercial Internet.

During our offset press days, we shipped thousands of books to U.S. and Canadian customers, using Media Mail in the U.S. and airmail for Canada. At first we only took checks (though some people ignored us and sent cash), later we added credit card processing, but it didn't really have much impact on sales for those titles. The customers who found our books online tended to be pretty sold on them by the time they ordered, and were willing to jump through (minor) hoops to get them.

When I started selling self published books online through this site, I gave a 20% discount and charged $2.25 for Media Mail shipping and handling. The $2.25 covered the postage ($1.42 at our weight) a padded mailer (around $0.20 each when bought by the 100 count), with a few cents left over for the "handling" portion. Mail order sales accounted for approximately 20% of our gross the first year, with the other 80% going through Amazon or special order through bookstores fulfilled by Ingram distribution.

It that rapidly became apparent that many mail order customers were spoiled by relatively fast delivery times from online retailers, and shipping books from Massachusetts to the West Coast or the South West by Media Mail brought regular complaints. Some customers started complaining if the book didn't show up within a week, others waited two weeks, and by three weeks most got a little worried. We always stated "usually 4 to 14 business days for delivery" which is basically 1 to 3 weeks, but people just expect better and you get tired of e-mails accusing you of being a crook. In the end, I think I issued two refunds that year (our policy is never to reship to the same address), which was much cheaper than paying for delivery confirmation for all books, but the overhead of dealing with the angry e-mails got to me.

When we shifted to using PayPal to print all of our labels, I started putting delivery confirmation on all of the books be sold online, which brought the total shipping cost right up to the amount we charged for S&H. The problem was that most customers thought that the delivery confirmation number was the same as a tracking number, and expected to be able to track their book in transit. Since the post office frequently doesn't bother scanning the labels until the package is delivered (thus, "delivery confirmation") this led to even more correspondence. I was actually tempted to stop selling books online and channel all of our orders through Amazon and Ingram, which has the built in advantage of improving stocking at those warehouses, and raising the profile of the books on Amazon as they sell more, but I went for the intermediate route.

Last year, I released all of our titles as e-books, which is a natural fit for online selling, and some percentage of customers who would have bought through mail order now buy e-books, especially those outside the U.S. who face longer shipping times and higher postal costs. At the same time, I did away with the 20% discount for mail order sales, which means customers can actually buy our books cheaper by ordering them through the local store (and not paying for shipping and handling) or by ordering enough books from Amazon to get free shipping. At the same time, I started shipping all of our books by first class mail with delivery confirmation, which means the $2.25 we charge for shipping and handling doesn't actually cover our cost, but with no discount on the books, we can afford it. The result is we are selling far fewer books online this year, mail order revenue is down around 80%, but we are selling more books overall, as customers click through to Amazon or order through their local bookstore. More importantly, I haven't had a single complaint about shipping time this year, as opposed to last year when sometimes I was in multiple correspondences about mail order delivery time at the same time!

Amazon IS the world's biggest bookstore

Amazon reported their earnings for the second quarter of calendar 2005 yesterday, beating expectations and bringing about a 10% jump in their stock price. Their North American media sales (they don't break out books from music and video) were up 14% for the first six months of the year, making the fourth straight year with double digit growth. This means that Amazon is growing their media sales at twice the rate of Barnes&Noble, which in turn, has been growing at twice the rate of Borders. Amazon will nearly catch Borders for North American sales this year, and will be at approximately 75% of Barnes&Noble sales.

Amazon's overseas growth is even more startling, and stands out in contrast to the torpid growth of the two other American retailers overseas. Amazon's international media sales, primarily in the UK, Germany, France and Japan, reached 97% of Amazon North American sales in the first half of the year. At their current growth rate, Amazon will sell more books overseas than in North America next year. While none of the big three retailers break out their book sales vs other media, such as music, movies, and audio books, it's probable that the Amazon mix contains more of these non-book products.

What this means to the self publisher is that putting all of your eggs in Amazon's basket isn't necessarily the worst thing to do. If you have the option to get your books into Barnes&Noble, Borders and the independents, by all means do so, but weigh the costs and risks. Getting books stocked on shelves doesn't mean they'll sell, and it’s quite an upfront investment to meet their stocking requirements. With Amazon, a single copy on their shelf means it's "in stock" and they'll ramp up their ordering to meet actual demand, rather than insisting on a huge print run for initial stocking. Sure, sales will be slower when the book is on "2 - 3 weeks shipping", but as it builds momentum, stocking will catch up. All of this goes against the traditional "push" model of publishing, where the economics dictate printing the greatest possible number of books to lower the unit cost and increase the shelf impact, but it's ideal for print on demand.

I've seen increasing sales through Amazon.UK thanks to my books there being printed by Lightning Source U.K., the overseas branch the primary print on demand provider for all U.S. publishers. Amazon recently acquired their own print on demand operation, Booksurge, but it's unclear as yet how they will integrate Booksurge printed titles into their international operations. Replica also maintains a direct relationship with Amazon via Baker&Taylor, but I don't know if they have any international connections, and the stocking mechanism is a little clunky.