Amazon

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Comment by Renate on April 8, 2007 at 7:27pm

Hi Lorne,
Thanks for that. I have a blog and I have connected it to Technorati and did FeedBurn, but I did not as yet put a counter on it to see how much traffic is passing through.
By the way, love have you go and see my blog, you may find it interesting - www.promisedland-renate.blogspot.com and, may be leave a comment?...

At the moment, and it is literally this moment, I am fixing the keywords for my website, which I hope to get up and running as soon as I got that done,
I have AmazonConnect and I have posted a couple of posts there but when one gets no comments back it is very discouraging, as one does not know who and how many people read the material.

Once I have my site up and the connection to the various search engines I want it to go into to, I may find things a little easier.
I did look into all of those things people advise one to do on Amazon, but really, people have to come to one's page before one can have them read your material.
I wrote 3 or 4 reviews as well, and I found that all this is consuming all my life and that it is not time or cost effective.
I also started to look into email promotion, but one needs to be a millionaire to be able to afford it and again, it is not cost effective for a writer a far as I can see.

All in all, I rather produce by continuing putting together my book of paintings and poems, write more poetry, and paint more beautiful paintings.

It is a pity that productive people need to spend their time on promotions etc. But that is how life is.
Sorry to be so negative, maybe tomorrow I'll feel better
thanks again,
Renate

Renate

Comment by Lorne Epstein on April 8, 2007 at 5:07pm

Renate,

Alow me to share my experience, maybe it will be of some help. I have been selling my book on Amazon as a consignment seller, meaning they order books from me directly based on their prediction of sales. That may have some impact vs. having a pubisher. Like yourself, my book is paired with a book on my site. However on that books site, my book is not paired with it.

I sell about 40 per month now (moving up yeah), maybe that will help as a marker. Sounds like you sell more if you are in the 12k range of rankings.

The two things that helped me sell my book was writing a blog and using all of the tools offered by Amazon. I can see why it would be daunting. I get intimidated and I have been using computers for a while. I don't have a clear understanding of the metric they use to pair books along the same subject. That is the sixty four thousand dollar question. Maybe someone else knows?

Comment by Renate on April 5, 2007 at 3:03pm

Hi Fallen Sky,
I see from this posting what you are doing. This is very interesting. What publisher are you working for, or with, or are? Love to know. Will look for John's posting.

When this rating came about, there was delay in fulfilling the orders, as per a buyer who got this information from Amazon.

Comment by Fallen Sky on April 5, 2007 at 11:36am

Hmm,
you should be able to enter here: www.amazon.com/connect and sign in with your amazon account email address and password. If you don't remember your password, you can click on "forot your password?" and enter your email address and they'll send it to you or let you reset it.

Honestly I'm not sure if Amazon offers sales reports to individual authors because I would always get them as a spreadsheet for all of our books from our amazon buyer. I think the process must be different for authors than for publishers.

Probably someone else here could help answer that question!
I do know that a rise in the rankings from the bottom to about 12,400 could actually only be the equivalent of one book sold that particular day!

I believe John wrote an excellent blog post a while ago about the correllations between sales rank and actual sales..perhaps he could post the link here.

Comment by Renate on April 4, 2007 at 2:11pm

Hi Fallen Sky,
Thanks for that. I don't really know how many books I have sold, as I don't know how to enter my account at Amazon. I have sent an email with this question but got no reply as yet. I only know that my rating went up a few time to 18,500 and once to 12,400 and that my pairing was extended.
If you know how I can enter my account, I would appreciate the input. Also I have just 2 days ago got my verification for my AmazonConnect, but have no idea how to enter it without going through clicking on the link that says - improve you sales
Being new to all of this i find it very daunting

Comment by John Kremer on April 4, 2007 at 2:10pm

Yes, you need to sell more actual copies before the program can kick in for you. If you haven't already, you can sign up for an Amazon.com blog. I don't remember the details of how to do that, but check out the author or publisher page for info.

Then in your blog, you can recommend some of the other titles for people to buy. Once they start buying those titles when they buy yours, the program will really start to kick in for you. Of course, this still will take some time.

Comment by Fallen Sky on April 4, 2007 at 6:42am

How many books have you sold via Amazon overall? I ask because what I was told by our Amazon rep was that a certain # of books need to be sold for that system to kick in.. i.e. it needs a certain amount of sales history to draw from.

Those recommendations are truly automatic, they are actually the books that other people bought with your book. The ones that are NOT automatic are the buy x get y parings, those are bought via co-op advertising.