I created an automated sales rank notification system several years ago, to help us keep up to speed on our book sales, both for us personally and for other authors published here by Books To Believe In. We wanted to know immediately if there was a sales event, so we could get the feedback needed to help amplify any sales campaigns, publicity, or other current events we, or our authors were doing. We still use this system daily, and it's proven to be a great tool for book marketing.
Here's how it works. My automated system checks Amazon and sends notification emails to us, or to our authors, hourly whenever one or more books were sold during that hour. It is exciting to see which books are selling and theorize on the why’s. We've learned quite a bit about trending topics and other great lessons in marketing and sales, just by observing this activity.
This feedback allows us to directly correlate the publicity work we are doing with our books to their sales. We can tell immediately if a social media campaign is working or if it has failed. We don’t have to wait days, weeks, or months for sales results, we get information in near real time, ready for quick analysis. As it turns out, Twitter campaigns are the most surprising, most effective, and the most fun to watch using this tool.
When we create a virtual launch party for a book, we watch its sales rank go down with each passing hour until it hits a low point, capturing screen grabs of the book’s sales page with every passing hour so we have proof of its low ranking to use in future publicity campaigns. It is a great claim that your book is an ‘Amazon best-seller’, but if you can provide the proof with a screen grab of your low sales rank, your web visitors will know you’re not just blowing hot air.
Our authors go to http://forauthorsonly.com/bookmetrics.php to set up their books with our service, and the process is very easy. (We recently opened up this service to any other book authors who might want it.) Once a sales notification email or text-mail is received, a quick visit to the book's Amazon.com page can show what categories the book might be in the top 100 in. Right below sales rank, Amazon.com lists the top categories the book is in. Again, that is something to publicize through Twitter or Facebook or other publicity programs. It might be hard to be in the top 100 overall on Amazon.com, but frequently a book receiving even a small amount of sales gets in the top 100 of their book’s niche category. That's valuable marketing leverage!
We are supremely glad we implemented this campaign, because in June of 2010, the sales rank for Secrets to Creating Passive Income suddenly starting dropping towards Number 1 like a rock! We hadn’t done anything substantial with that book for a few weeks, so this surprised us. For almost two weeks, we saw a steady stream of sales of the book and didn’t know what was causing it. We were baffled. Internet searches didn’t yield any answers... Finally, we got an e-mail that explained our new found fame. Our book had been recommended by a national magazine with 1.1 million circulation. We were famous and didn’t know it! If we hadn’t been on alert from these e-mails, we might have completely missed out on being able to play up that magazine’s coverage WHILE it was still on the newsstands. If we had only been aware of a sale’s spike on the monthly check we received from Amazon.com, some 60 days later, we would have completely missed our moment in the sun.
If you are an author, having an automated system act as a watch dog to let you know about sales activity is a tool you should consider taking advantage of. It’s very fun to receive the e-mails, but more importantly, it is powerful to be able to tell in real-time how effective a sales campaign is. It is a tool that will not only notify you of sales, but help you generate more sales too.
