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Old 05-27-2012, 04:21 PM   #39
J. Strnad
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Where does the figues about "lots sales" comes from ? And how many sales lost because of people just not hearing about the books, because they don't browse amazon ? I wonder what would have actually happen by selling the book everywhere.
Fair questions.

Unfortunately, we don't have two separate universes in which a book is exclusive to Amazon in one universe and sold everywhere in the other, so we don't have hard data. We have to do what we can with anecdotal evidence, of which there is plenty.

The way it seems to work is this:

An author makes his book exclusive to Amazon for 90 days (i.e. joins the Select program). Now two things happen:

1. The book enters the Kindle Owners' Lending Library where Prime members can borrow one book per month for free. Amazon pays the author $2.00 or so for each "borrow." This gets the book out to two groups of readers:
1a: People who want to read it but don't want to pay directly for it. (They've already paid for their Prime membership, probably to get free 2-day shipping on the other Amazon purchases).
1b: People who would have bought it anyway, but now can get it for free.
How much does lending through KOLL cannibalize paid sales? No one knows. How many are new sales? No one knows. It's a subscription service where the reader gets a deal and the author gives a discount.

2. The author can give away his book for free at Amazon for five days, which do not need to be consecutive. Why do this? Because:
2a. It bumps the book up on the popularity lists, which gets it more exposure for a time after it goes off free, which results in more paid sales.
2b. It helps to promote the author's other, non-free books.
2c. It increases the number of "also boughts" at Amazon, meaning that more people will see the book when they buy other books--it'll come up more often on other books' "also bought" recommendations.

Now, the author has to play the numbers game.

Going with Select, getting borrows through Prime and taking advantage of free days, authors have reported increased sales ranging from little-or-nothing to hundreds and even thousands of copies.

How many B&N, et al., sales have they lost during this time? It varies. No one who is selling substantially through the other outlets goes for Select. But if their non-Amazon sales are small, say 5% of the total or less (mine are around .5 - 1%), they have little to lose.

The sales bumps are temporary, unless (like Howey) you hit some kind of magical tipping point. But then, so is membership in the Select program. You can drop out after 90 days.

So, how do you play the game, as an author?

First, you look at how much you can lose. It's finite. If you're selling, say, 5 books a month on all the other outlets, you lose 5 sales a month.

Next, you look at how much you stand to gain. It's infinite or pretty much so (not literally). You'll get some borrows, you'll see a sales bump at Amazon. No one knows how much. You don't have to get much of a bump to make up for those 5 sales at other outlets.

If you're a romance author who makes half her sales at B&N, it would be a stupid move. Generally speaking, for most other genres, you'll do better to improve your sales at Amazon and let your B&N, et al., sales go.

You're quite right that Amazon could offer these promotions without requiring exclusivity. But they don't. The author has to play the game as written.

Notice that nowhere in this scenario does the author say, "I don't want these readers!" But yes, he'll sacrifice the few to reach the many, if that's how he thinks it'll work out.
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