[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Pierre Lawrence

Disappointing so far, but not unexpected. The video has been up for about two weeks, and with no promotion (e.g., to family and friends) has garnered 17 views, none of which has resulted in a sale. In addition to the paucity of views, the likelihood of a sale is diminished by the lack of links to sites where the ebook can be purchased (Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and Kobo were listed in the video).

To see how much of a hurdle this presents for a prospective buyer I searched for the ebook on each site, Apple excepted, whose closed system requires an Apple device to access, which I do not have.

Amazon is by far the most important platform, and after selecting “Books” in the search bar’s drop-down menu I entered the ebook’s title, expecting ideally an exact match. The search however returns results for all references to the words in the searched-for title among Amazon’s book listings, in this case, about 1,200 (75 pages of 16 listings per page). My title appeared as the thirty-third listing, on page three, meaning a prospective buyer would have to scroll at least that far to find the ebook. Next I searched by author, which produced 442 results (26 pages of 17 listings per page), of which I was listed fifth.

Well...I don't care if it's Amazon or Google. search engines all work the same way. They return a search result based upon how many people searched for something like it, similar to it and what the actual result was for which they sought. The actual, looked-for result is what will be first, (what was clicked the most, IOW) then the next-most-sought second, and so on. The fewer people that searched for your book, the further back in the results will be your book. That's why yours is 1200th or whatever it is. That's just how that works.

On the Barnes & Noble site my ebook was listed fourth of 36 results when searched for by title under “ebooks and NOOK”, and first of five when searched for by author. A search under “ebooks” on the Kobo site listed my ebook first of 33 results when searched for by title and first of 11,620 (?) results when searched for by author (Kobo’s was the most visually pleasing (uncluttered) of the sites, and had the added plus of including the blurb with the ebook listing).

Well, the good/bad news there is, NookPress's results will be higher to the top, simply because they have fewer books (and fewer buyers). Thus, you show up closer to the top, hooray in one way, not-so-hooray in the other.

I encountered another problem in pursuing this project, namely the choice of background music for the video. I hired a seller found through Fivver to create the video (a guy from Bangladesh, who I was highly pleased with), and with respect to the music, instructed him to use the theme from the Twilight Zone if we could (meaning, but not explicitly stating, without infringing the copyright); otherwise similarly sounding music was to be used. Predictably, I guess, the video came back with the theme from the original TV series employed, and although you might get by by limiting the use of copyrighted material to 10 seconds or so and restricting it to personal use, the theme runs for the full 30 seconds of the video and is employed for a commercial purpose (advertising a product for sale). Thus it looks like I will have to replace it with a license-free substitute.

Yeah, well, we don't need no stinkin' copyright permissions, eh?

What sites have you tried, for similar-enough music? I found music that was dead similar to, (enough to be evocative of, but not similar-enough to be infringing) the Mission Impossible Lalo Schifrin theme, for something that I did about...5 years ago, give or take.

Hitch