Wired Writer

The Dark Side and Amazon Numbers, Part 2

For all of you just tuning in, this is a continuation of the brouhaha from my August 11 blog entry.

Brouhaha recap: person designs book marketing program that artificially creates a very temporary best-seller rank at Amazon; person sells program at the price of two and a half large bushels of gold; Angela Hoy of the Writer's Weekly newsletter runs an article on the subject and comments on it in her forum, calling a spade just what it is: a spade. [Or ScamAzon, as another reader called it.]

And now for the promised, fresh-from-the-email oven goodies:

Best selling author Tim Bete was quoted in Angela's article on how he achieved his top-10 Amazon rank: Curious to know more, I emailed Tim and asked if he would mind sharing some more detail on his methodology. Tim is a true credit to the writing profession: he not only wrote back almost immediately, but was also happy to share his 'mythodology', as he put it.

"...The key is to have a niche. Mine is Christian parenting humor. I contacted every Web site and blog I could find within that category to let them know about my book. Many mentioned my book -- and it was free. They considered my book "news" since it fit their target audience. One humor e-newsletter asked if it could use one of my columns in return for mentioning my book. The column was actually about my book -- http://www.timbete.com/Column006.html The e-newsletter had 30,000 subscribers and more than 50 bought my book, driving it to #2,600 on Amazon.com and into the top-10 within the parenting humor category. Because I promoted my book using an ongoing program, my sales rank remained pretty high. A one-day spike on Amazon doesn't mean much. Keeping a high rank over weeks and months is important."

Thank you Tim! Great words of wisdom from someone who has actually walked the walk.

Finally, M.J. Rose has an interesting take on Amazon numbers -- they may not mean what they seem to mean. As Mark Twain put it: "There are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are statistics."

That's it for now--with the exception of me ording a certain piece of scuba gear and hoping it will help me with my writing. Seriously! I don't know why I didn't think of this before. I'll let you in on my little scuba adventure later...

Just now realizing the dog snores louder than the husband,
Wired Writer

posted by A.M.Adams @ 8/18/2005 11:01:00 PM