Odd for me to be posting a blog on a Friday, and things have been really pretty manic and busy all week, but right now things are quiet and I thought I’d post an update.
It was a heck of a first few days for “How Far?” and we haven’t even ramped up the PR effort yet. It’s just been a barrage of social media and I’ve even spent an hour or so each day just emailing specific relatives, friends, and former teammates to make sure they know about the book and will consider buying it. You can’t be shy.
It’s hard to gauge exactly what the sales are because Outskirts Press only releases sales numbers quarterly. QUARTERLY! Geez, that’s going to be a long wait.
Amazon does not release sales numbers at all but they do provide “Sales Rankings” and that’s about all you can go on. So here’s what we know…
There are more than 700,000 books in the Amazon catalogue. That’s a lot of books. For the first four days after “How Far?” launched, we were in the top 5% of all the books on Amazon! That is stunning. I don’t know what it means, but it’s stunning. Things have slowed down a little today, but once Elon Werner and I get the publicity machine running, I’m sure we’ll see a new uptick.
I can look back on how that all worked with “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” and that’s how it went. A big blast of sales on Day 1 then a small drop-off for a week or so, followed by an even bigger burst in the third week. Why? Because Elon had lined up a bunch of interviews, podcasts, and even FaceTime conversations and that effort reached out to a whole new audience, beyond my racing friends and blog readers who were waiting for the book and hit “Buy” the day it came out. So, I think there’s that to look forward to.
An interesting side issue is the fact “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” is selling a little bit now. I’d see the odd increase in our sales rank with that every now and then, but I think it’s risen substantially “in the category” this week. The old dog just keeps on truckin’
And that’s another thing. There are many categories of books on Amazon. I don’t know how many, but maybe 100? “Sports Biographies” was the category for the first book, and it’s not an enormous playing field (pun intended.) There are lots of books, but it’s not crazy big. You sell a few books in one week and you’ll rocket right back up to the top 900 or so in the category.
Moving to the “Historical Fiction” category was like getting called up to the big leagues. For one thing, the category is enormous. Many thousands of books. Secondly, a lot of those books are written by some of the best authors in the world. I’m literally playing on a completely new level when measuring my success against those who are also selling and promoting a new “historical fiction” book. It’s the big leagues. The clubhouse isn’t as nice and there’s no catered food, but it’s the big leagues.
That’s why I’m so shocked and stoked (that’s a reference to my SoCal baseball character Brooks Bennett) to be having so much success with this. And like I said, we haven’t ramped up the actual “sales pitch” yet, with the PR effort. It’s pretty amazing.
As I mentioned in the last blog, we are on BarnesandNoble.com now, as well. I still steer people to Amazon because that’s where the money is, the customers are, and the sales ranks are easy to judge.
Plus, once the book is actually in people’s hands and they read it, they can review it on Amazon. That’s precious PR, as long as the reviews are good. If you buy it on a different platform, Amazon will rarely allow you to review the book.
And speaking of Amazon, those mysterious sales rankings, and PR… We kind of got hosed on this book. For the first book, we could see our ranking by the end of the first day. That allowed Elon to heavily push the fact we were well up into the Top 50 in the category on the first day. That was big news.
This time, Amazon was really slow to add the sales rankings to the “How Far?” page. Like nearly 48 hours slow. So, we have no idea where we stood on that first day when so many people were anxious to buy it. And we’ll likely never know. I can only guess. And my guess is “We were pretty good.”
The book is shipping now, but as far as I know nobody has received it yet. So, we have no reviews at this point and probably won’t for a week or two, depending on when the books actually begin to arrive in mailboxes and how fast people read. I’m looking forward to that day, with the typical “excited dread” any author feels. You may love what you’ve written, but others may not. It’s all personal preference.
UPDATE: The first guy to post that he had ordered the book, just a minute after I announced it was available, was the first to receive it from Amazon. He just sent me a photo a few minutes ago. Way to go Bob Cole!
Am I a stalker of the sales rankings? Yes, I’ll admit I am. They don’t change in real time. I think they update every hour or so, but I can’t help but click on the page to see what’s going on.
This is not new for me. When I ran those indoor soccer teams I got no end of grief from my staff because of my continual habit of looking up advance ticket sales on the computer in the ticket office. I’d walk in the room and my director of ticket sales would just stand up and let me have his chair, while rolling his eyes.
Did I watch the crowd coming in the arena? Yes. Couldn’t help it. At league meetings, other GMs would say “You can’t do anything by then. Your crowd is going to be your crowd. Just relax and wait for the game to start.” Really? No way… I’d look at the traffic coming in, the people walking up to the gates, I’d see if there were lines at the ticket windows for walk-up sales, I’d check out how crowded the concourse was, things like that. Just by looking at the cars coming into the parking lot, I could judge within 10% how big our crowd was going to be.
Even throughout my NHRA years, I still was a crowd watcher. I couldn’t help it, even though I had nothing to do with selling tickets. I’d cruise around on the scooter and see how long the lines were at the ticket windows, and at the gates. Like I said, I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.
And here’s the next big piece of news. I’ve owned the web domain bobwilber.net since the first book, but never did anything with it. Barbara and I decided it was time to fix that, so we asked around for some advice from other people who use GoDaddy to build and host their sites. The consensus was that the process wasn’t hard, and the GoDaddy staff is great.
We set up a call with them and went over the options. Yes, we could build our own site for free but the options are pretty rudimentary and neither one of us have ever tried that before. Or, we could pay them a fee and they’d build it for us with actual professional web designers. We decided “professional” was better than “amateur” and agreed to that option.
Yesterday, I had one-hour call with one of their design guys and we went through everything from “What’s your goal here?” to specifics of page layouts. He asked me “How soon can you have all the text and photos to me?” and my answer was “Right now.” I had it all ready to go.
As I type this, bobwilber.net is being built. In a few weeks, we’ll have it up and running. Anyone will be able to learn all about me and peruse both books. Yep, there will be a “BUY THE BOOK” button under each cover image. That button will take people directly to Amazon.
People often ask me if I can sell them a book. The answer is no. I need a middleman. Our tax accountant made that abundantly clear with the first book. There are tax issues galore, including sales tax, when you sell anything yourself. I wanted nothing to do with that. I’ll happily let someone else sell the books, pay the taxes, and then send me my royalty.
Oh, and the addition of barnesandnoble.com a few days ago was huge news for my Canadian fans, friends, and readers. Amazon made a corporate decision to stop shipping books to Canada. The customs stuff, the Covid security, and just all the legwork that has to be done to get a book across the border and into a mailbox wasn’t worth it to them. Kim the Lawyer and Crazy Jane, who both live near Vancouver, were crushed.
And then barnesandnoble.com took my book and they will ship to Canada. Now I have happy friends in Vancouver.
I’m assuming the weekend will be pretty quiet. That would actually be nice. It’s been pretty crazy here.
Remember, you can buy the book right here:
And whattaya mean you haven’t bought it yet but plan to? Help a brother out here. It’s $29.95 and it’s my baby.
That’s my update. If you’re on Twitter or Facebook with me, I’ve put out the challenge to see who will get their hands on a copy first. Post a pic if you get it. I assume, like with the first book, I’ll be one of the last to get mine. Not sure why the author has to wait, but I suspect that will be the case again.
As always, please click on the “LIKE” button below if you didn’t hate this blog installment.
More updates next week. Wish me luck!
Bob