The Matt Cutts Effect And Amazon Bestsellers

Last week Matt Cutts praised a Digital Photography book on his blog. The sales rank of the book, which had been averaging around 100, appeared to bounce up around 50 for a couple days as a result. In response to a question posted on that blog, I tossed out the guesstimate that Matt's recommendation might have sold a couple hundred books for the author. It really was off the top of my head as I stopped looking at the ranks of top sellers on Amazon some years ago as being both undecipherable and unimportant to the vast majority of working authors.

I've been writing about Amazon Sales Ranks since the late 90's, during which period both the sales rank algorithm and my approach for reverse engineering the ranks has changed several times. In the early years, I relied heavily on Amazon's public statements about their dollar sales volume and how it was divided up, computed an average price, used a limited number of data points to fix a curve and plotted it on log-log paper. In later years I shifted to numbers for my self published books and ebooks, and data sent to me by friendly publishers. It all got very confused a couple years ago when Amazon started including marketplace sales in the ranks, and I was forced to rely more heavily ebook data. I also stopped trying to estimate sales for the top three decades of the curve, the top 1000 titles.

But thinking about how many extra sales would result from a book moving from an average rank of 100 to 50 for a few days got me curious about those top sellers. I decided to do something I'd been procrastinating for some time and try to see if I could get a feel for what's going on at the top of the curve with Aaron Shepard's Rank Checker, which also displays a stock number. Some of the limitations of this method are that it doesn't include marketplace sales, the stock number often moves up as new stock is received into the Amazon system (at least that's what I hope it is:-), and perhaps most importantly, the ranks themselves are changing every hour. While the top two or three books may be more or less nailed in place for long periods of time, most books move every hour, which is why an average rank must be estimated. Another important factor is that the proportion of marketplace sales versus Amazon stock sales is not proportional for all titles. A top seller that's been in print for years may see half of it's sales coming through the marketplace, while a brand new title may see virtually 100% of it's sales coming from Amazon inventory.

All that said, here are some observations about the meaning of the top Amazon sales ranks for a quiet week in the middle of July, or the first few days of the week. It's just after 2:00 PM EST as I'm writing this entry, and the stock of the #2 seller on Amazon has dropped 38 copies in the last half hour, with me checking every couple minutes. The top seller is the new Harry Potter book which hasn't been released yet. The same #2 title moved 173 copies during a three hour period yesterday evening, and 261 copies during the two and a quarter hours I was out for lunch. Assuming I didn't miss a restocking during any of these periods (and they're normally pretty obvious), the #2 rank on Amazon today is selling about 2,000 copies a day. Sure, there's a huge fudge factor in there (though I didn't list all of my data points), but I'll bet it's a lot more accurate than any other number you may have in mind.

One of the best ways to convince people that guesstimates are in fact data is to plot a graph.



The little marks that aren't buried under the thick blue line are my data points, all of which required some averaging before plotting. There is no data point suggesting that the the #1 book (Harry Potter in this case) is selling 10,000 books a day. It could just as easily be 4,000 or 40,000. If you compare the graph with my permanent sales rank article, you'll see that this graph puts the 1000th rank book at 18 copies a day, while the old graph puts the 1000th rank seller at 100 copies a week. That's pretty darn close considering I wasn't trying! And yes, it really is time I cleaned that old graph up.

So, take it with a shaker of salt, or go nuts watching Amazon stock numbers, try adjusting for Marketplace, time of day, week and year, check continually so you can catch stock adjustments, and plot your own graph. I'm either too lazy to set up an automated script to do it, or too skeptical of the results to bother. And back to the Cutts effect. According to this graph, a move from a rank of 100 to 50 for a few days would sell between 100 and 200 books, so not a horrible guess. Wish I could blog like Matt, like Matt. Be like Matt. C'mon, am I the only one who remembers the "Be like Mike" commercial?

Returning Books Beats Burning Them

Today's Wall Street Journal carried an in-depth interview of Borders CEO George Jones. Jones was quoted at the very end as saying, "Also, some things don't make sense, such as physically returning books all the time...There has to be a more efficient way."

Book returns are even more painful for publishers than for retailers, which is why stripping off covers and sending them back in lieu of the books for credit was once seen as an acceptable alternative to returning the physical books. I don't know if it's still commonly practiced, I only know about it because I used to buy stripped books at a neighborhood paperback shop when I was a kid. Obviously, then, it wasn't working exactly the way the publishers had envisioned. I didn't understand the ethical questions involved in reselling stripped books when I was twelve or thirteen, I just though that tearing off book covers was a mean thing for anybody to do.

Many publishers using short discount POD for printing and distribution have found a solution to book returns, they don't accept them. When I first changed over from offset printing to using Lightning Source for POD, I didn't accept returns either. I figured there was no point accepting returns when I was selling at a short discount because no store would order for stock anyway. At some point, perhaps because I was worried about the Amazon availability of my titles back around 2005, I started accepting returns. To my great surprise, one of my titles now occasionally gets ordered in quantity by the Barnes&Noble chain, and starts popping up on the shelves of some of their superstores. Retailers may regret having to deal with returns, but they have little motivation to order books for stock unless the publisher accepts returns or offers them a heck of a non-returnable discount on a book with proven demand, like 65% or more off the cover price.

While publishers and retailers alike bemoan the effort and expense of dealing with book returns, the alternatives are worse. An easy solution for bookstores would be to only stock books that are selling like hotcakes or classic fiction that they know will sell eventually. While that wouldn't hurt publishers whose books aren't getting any shelve exposure, it would mean the end of the standard trade publishing model that's driven the business since the Depression. It would also result in bookstores that stocked a thousand or so "bestsellers" and a few thousand classics, and not much else.

The superstores that the Borders and Barnes&Nobles chains are built around stock 100,000 or more titles, and most of them aren't going to be big hits. Returning the books that don't sell (chain-wide average) after a couple months is the best way to ensure that the maximum shelf space is being used for books customers may actually purchase. If the chains wanted to declare that all but the top 10,000 sellers in each store were there for wallpaper, they could treat the others as a capital expense and not worry about whether the wallpaper titles ever sold. Of course, after a few years, the affect on the book industry would be the same as if they'd simply filled 90% of their wall space with photographs of bookshelves and kept the real books close to the cash registers.

I don't really understand the complaint on the part of Border's CEO. It's the willingness of the publishing industry to provide his superstores with returnable books that allows them to fill their shelves with a variety of fresh titles and keep the people coming in. It makes a little more sense to me when publishers complain about "reckless" ordering for stock, though school bookstores may be bigger culprits than retail chains. Barnes&Noble has been working on their own solution to limiting book returns by publishing more and more of the books they sell, especially evergreen titles, classics and certain nonfiction. Barnes&Noble stock is up about 60% over the last ten years, Borders is down about 20%.

In any case, tearing the covers off books or burning them for fuel isn't a solution I want any part of. If Mr. Jones was referring to putting POD machines in stores or pushing ebooks, it wouldn't have any effect on the crux of the problem, namely, what to do with all that shelf space if not trying new titles?

A Website Lesson For Publishers

Jim Millot reported for Publishers Weekly today that MediaBay was shutting down after spending millions of dollars working on an Internet based distribution system for audio books. They made what I believe is a classic mistake for any Internet business, diluting their original domain (mediabay.com) with multiple spin-offs: soundsgood.com, radioclassics.com, audiobookclub.com, radiospirits.com and whenradiowas.com. I doubt this dilution had a major effect on the outcome, because none of the sites showed any real legs on Alexa is concerned, but it couldn't have helped.

I've been fortunate enough to talk with some top people from all manner of publishing companies, and if one thing comes through, it's that their Internet efforts are managed by non-Internet savvy people. In some cases, the entire focus is on aesthetics, and the designers who do this work for top dollar would be shocked to hear there even exists such a thing as search engine visibility. They think web traffic is only supposed to come from people typing the name of the publisher into their browser. And the funny thing is, if that's what you design for, that's what you'll get. I recently saw a beautiful literary press site designed 100% with graphics, there weren't even alternative text tags. If the domain name hadn't been the publisher name, it would have been entirely invisible to Google.

Other publishers have a decent sense of text content, what to put on a website, but figure the more websites they put up, the better off they'll be. Creating a new website for every title is a losing proposition, both in terms of maintenance costs, and in terms of drawing visitors. If a domain name for every title is desirable for branding purposes, fine, but redirect them all to the publisher's main site with 301 permanent redirects.

What really drives me nuts, though, are the blank expressions (or those long telephone pauses followed by "come again") in response to basic questions about the website usage statistics. Every web server maintains logs that are stuffed with far more information about visitors and how they arrived than even I have the patience to digest. But for a publisher to say that their website is a part of their overall business strategy, much less a major part, and not to know anything beyond the number of page views a month, is almost criminal. It would be like a publisher with many books in print only paying attention to the cumulative sales total each month, and instructing the printer to print more copies of random titles in hopes they might be the ones that are selling. If you're going to spend money on a website, not setting aside a couple minutes a day to check what's working is no different than handing out book contracts to random authors and hoping it somehow all works out.

The topline number that most publishers are at least familiar with is page views, the gross number of web pages the server coughs up in a given period of time. This number is almost entirely worthless on its own, the vast majority of the traffic may be false impressions or misdirected. All of your traffic may come from your publishing company being voted the worst site on the web five years running. If you get excited about page views, the ones to watch are your order pages. How many views are they getting, and how many of those views translate into book purchases? Simple tweaks to order pages can have more effect on sell-through than all of the aesthetic improvements you can dream of on an infinite budget.

But my two favorite web statistics to watch are referrers and key phrases. Keeping an eye on referrers, the places your visitors are coming from, tells you how much of your traffic is legitimate. I generally check out every new referring site I see show up in the statistics, just to keep current with what it is that people are finding interesting and useful on my site, useful enough to tell somebody else about it. The key phrases tell me how people are finding my site through search engines. I rarely look at key words (single word totals) but they can also be valuable in tracking how site development is affecting traffic over time.

For example, I just checked the year-over-year change in my top five publishing related keywords from the second Monday in July. The main keyword, "book" was up modestly, from 225 search appearances last year to 300 this year. The next most popular, "publishing", was up to 125 appearances this Monday from 85 a year ago Monday. The plural "books" was doubled, from 35 last year to 73 this year, but "published" was down from 42 queries a year ago Monday to 26 three days ago. For the keyword "publish" however, there were 52 visitors this Monday versus 38 a year ago.

This is the first time I've checked the top keywords this year, and it puts me in a good mood because it means this blog hasn't flatlined for search engine traffic yet. I'll check later using a whole month worth of totals, but I figured the small numbers would be easier to grok in a blog post. One of the problems with writing so much about the same subject is that my old blog posts compete with new blog posts for visitors from the search engines. However, as long as the number of visitors using those basic publishing keywords in search terms is growing, I know that the number of appropriate visitors is still growing overall. If I'd checked phrases, on the other hand, and saw that all of my traffic was coming from "know-it-all-jerk", I'd have to rethink my approach.

And if you're a publisher who said "come again" on reading this post, drop me a line and maybe I can walk you through it over the phone:-)