Internet Sell-Through For Publishers with Websites

If a publisher built a website that drew everybody in the world on one day, it would crash. Whether or not it would sell some books for the publisher before crashing depends entirely on why the visitors were arriving. The sell-through for most websites is a closely guarded number because publishers don't want their competition knowing what's hot or learning from the efficiency data for the book selling platform. That's because copying is a time honored tradition in the trade industry. New publishers have trouble building websites that attract any visitors at all, but experienced publishers have trouble building websites that sell books. When you're getting visitors to your website and not selling books, or not selling as many books as you'd like, the tendency is to redesign your order flow or shopping cart to see if a little tweak here or there will double sales. But I've found that online book buyers are willing to jump through modest hoops to buy a book, so a minor tweak in the sales pitch or process will rarely make much difference. The key to a publishing website with good sell-through is attracting the right visitors in the first place and not unselling them once they've arrived.

The graph below shows sales for my latest ebook plotted against the number of visitors per day for an online excerpt from that book. The normal organic traffic for that page, primarily from search engines, has been steady at around a hundred visitors a day for the past six months. But a couple weeks ago, somebody tagged it as a page of interest on StumbleUpon, a sort of social networking or collaborative page ranking service. The problem with visitors from sites like this is that they are almost never looking for the particular book or information that is getting attention, it's more of a passing interest, a sort of internet windows shopping. My websites occasionally get these surges in visitors from casual visitors on a guided tour of some Internet segment, and the sell-through averages out to zero percent.



The page that normally draws a hundred visitors a day started drawing thousands of visitors a day from StumbleUpon alone. On some days, these visitors outstripped the total number of visitors from all other sources to all of the topics on my website. But sales of the ebook actually went down during this period, which can hardly be the fault of window shoppers, since there weren't enough of them to get in the way of the real buyers by crashing the site. What happened in fact is an excellent example of polluted data:-) At the same time that this traffic surge was occurring, the paperback version of the book was released, and on 6/16, I began promoting it on the website. I didn't remove the "buy" links for the ebook, I simply channeled most potential buyers through another page that included information about the paperback. Ebook sales crashed, and after a week I gave up and went back to sending everybody who expressed an interest in the ebook directly to the ebook ordering page. Sales jumped right back to the long term average of between two and three ebooks per day.

Selling visitors on the idea of buying an ebook for instant download anywhere in the world and then distracting them with a more expensive paperback that would take days or weeks to arrive is not a minor tweak to the ordering process. I was literally unselling some visitors who had made up their minds to purchase the ebook. The right visitors are a precious commodity for publishers, which is why it's important that somebody in your publishing company keeps an eye on the server statistics as well as the sell-through for order pages. And don't jump to conclusions based on raw data without understanding the context. If I was a manager running the fonerbooks website and didn't know about the paperback being released and promoted, I would have assumed that casual visitors were somehow depressing sales, rather than just the sell-through. Remember, sell-through depends on the total number of potential buyers, and by including a huge number of window shoppers in the total, the sell-through number is artificially brought low.

The only real measure of how well your website is performing its marketing function in selling your books is to keep an eye on the bottom line. This may be frustrating to webmasters or hired SEO guns who can "prove" to management that the website is humming on all cylinders, but if it's not selling books for the publisher, it's just another expense. I talked about this in a video last winter, which I'll embed here again for anybody who missed it.

Publishing Ebooks with E-Junkie and PayPal

Time for another update on my new and revised ebook business. As I reported in an earlier post, my initial problems with customers not seeing the download link on e-junkie and sometimes losing the confirmation e-mail to spam filters was my fault. The fix was letting e-junkie show their "Thank You" page which includes a download link, rather than my own thank you page, which I'd set up years before for selling books direct with PayPal. Since I made the change last month, the sales process has been nearly flawless, I think I've only had to send one follow-up asking why the customer hadn't downloaded the ebook yet.

I just did a quick scan through my e-junkie account reports, and I can already count ebook customers in 18 foreign countries. The list now includes: Japan, Bermuda, Australia (8), Mexico, Sri Lanka, Netherlands (3), Ireland (3), Cyprus, France, United Kingdom (13), Italy, Honduras, New Zealand, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Austria and Saudi Arabia. It seems to me that in my first month selling ebooks, the split between the US and overseas sales was around 50/50. It's now running around 75/25 in favor of the US. I'm not sure what caused the change, perhaps statistical insignificance, perhaps a change in the wording of my sales links.

The business model of publishing ebooks is remarkably similar to publishing print-on-demand books in one obvious way. While publication takes place when the first copy is sold, or made available to potential customers, the publishing process doesn't involve the creation of stock or warehousing. A single electronic copy is all that the publisher need produce, after which the customer copies are generated by electronic reproduction or printed on demand. Since the books I publish are nonfiction how-to books, rather than literary keepsakes, I'm not married to the idea of killing and grinding up trees for the sake of being a book publisher rather than an ebook publisher.

In the case of my latest book, the ebook is priced at $13.95 and the 191 page paperback (8.25" x 11") at $24.95. An attempt to promote the paperback version immediately led to a crash in ebook sales. I only pushed hard for a week, but I easily lost two ebook sales for each paperback sale generated. That doesn't jive well with my previous ebook experience, where the ebook sales and the paperback sales seemed to be tapping two distinct markets. But there are some fundamental differences with this book as compared with my previous ebook releases. First, the ebook and paperback aren't priced the same. Second, the paperback version on Amazon falls just under the free shipping amount, so customers who are initially attracted to Amazon may get halfway through the buying process and then decide to put it off (forever) because of the shipping cost. When I went back to emphasizing the ebook sales over the paperback sales on my website, the ebook sales bounced right back to where they left off. But the relative shortage of paperback sales may also be influenced by the Slow Tail sales cycle, the idea that a good proportion of customers simply take time to make up their minds. Maybe I'll see a handful of paperback sales this week based on last week's promotion.

Another interesting point about ebook sales vs print-on-demand or offset published distribution sales is the additional visibility into the customer base. My print-on-demand books sales are generally more trackable than regular offset printed sales would be, yet I can only estimate where the books are selling by comparing Amazon and BN.com sales ranks with Ingram sales reports. With the ebooks, I know where each and every copy is going and with a little more work, I could determine exactly which page on my website generated each sale. Unless things change, I can heartily recommend e-junkie for publishers looking for a download solution for their ebooks that ties in easily and painlessly with a third party payment system, like PayPal.

Writing as Obsession, Niche, Commercial or Next Big Thing

Passion for a subject is a great reason to write about it and all the reason you should need to launch a website. But if you see writing and publishing as a path to financial independence or a second income, it's important to consider how far you can go before you start the journey. New or planned publishing websites can be categorized by their potential into four loose groups, which I'm labeling: obsession, niche, commercial and the next big thing. Assigning your planned website and book to one of these four categories is tricky, and certainly doesn't guaranty that you'll fail or succeed in your goals, but should help you manage your expectations and investment.



Writing about your obsession serves an end unto itself, but if nobody shares that obsession, it's hard to see how you're going to draw readers. There may be rare, rare cases where your personal attributes or writing are just so superior to the run-of-the-mill that people would sign up in droves to read about your summer watching a snail move down your garden path. Maybe once a month somebody in the world hits it big for a day with the equivalent of snail TV out of the millions who try. If you search the web for the subject that you're writing about, and the most popular sites related to that subject don't show a dozen incoming links, it's the opposite of popular.

Niche subjects are those that draw enough interest to support a couple of titles on Amazon, but which don't draw tens of thousands of visitors a day as websites. A small niche site may draw a hundred or so visitors a day, and if the site is compelling and the subject is commercial, can help a publisher sell a couple books a day. But niche subjects are also tricky, as a topic that can draw serious traffic on a website may fail to convert into significant book sales due to the subject or reader demographics. Niche books work well when the subject is perceived as having depth, as being worthy of purchasing a book. But take a niche subject like airport parking options. It might work great as a website, drawing people from all over the country or the world checking the parking situation at their departure airport, but a very limited audience would be willing to buy a reference book on the subject.

Commercial websites for publishers are those that can draw enough visitors that they create their own business opportunity. If you have a very popular website, you can sell advertising, sell merchandise, even sell subscriptions to walled-off resources. You don't need to bring out a book to monetize your web publishing efforts, and in some cases, that book would have very little chance of selling. Any site that shows up in the top 10,000 on Alexa or Quantcast, or draws 10,000 visitors a day from Google, can usually be considered a commercial website.

If I knew how to create a website that would be the next big thing, I'd be working on that rather than sticking with this self publishing blog, which is more of an obsession than anything else. Creating a website that will draw hundreds of thousands of visitors a day has more to do with knowing people than with knowing the web. My suggestions about using the available tools to estimate the potential for a website just don't apply to the next big thing, which has no related sites until after it arrives and establishes itself. But that makes doing your homework all the more important, because if you dream is to create the next big thing, you aren't going to do it with something that a hundred other websites have already worked out.