A Long Hard Slog Up the Middle: A Writer's Journey Part 2

As I was saying last time, I finished my first full-length novel in '86, won my first writing award in '91, and signed my first book contract in '94. Since then, I've written over 150 books which have been read by over 10 million people. But I almost gave it all up in the late '90s.

After months of waiting to hear good news, my wife and I were considering our options and wishing we’d sold the family home and moved to Seattle where I was working at the time, having gone back to full-time work other than writing.

Thankfully though after months of waiting, I heard got good news from my agent. The publisher wanted to meet with me. The publisher wanted to discuss my ideas.

During the meeting, it was clear that the publisher liked my ideas but I’d need to provide sample chapters, expand the series details, have more face-to-face meetings, and generally do more to convince them. The hard part that followed required a leap of faith. I couldn’t do all that was required of me, in the time that was required of me, and keep working full-time elsewhere. I had to quit the day job and proceed, or keep the day job and let the dream die.

I chose the dream. I gave notice, worked my last two weeks while I continued developing the materials needed. A few weeks in, I learned the publisher had one idea for the series and I had another. Worse, the concepts were radically different.

I thought for sure disaster was ahead. Thankfully, the publisher did eventually sign me to a two-book contract. A contract to do things their way—and not my way.

However, the sample chapters I’d written over the past weeks were for my series concept and not theirs, so I kept writing the books my way. For this publisher, it was something unheard of for any writer to go outside the standard or to deviate from fixed standards. But my editors loved the final chapters I submitted, and I completed the work in its entirety ahead of schedule—so many weeks ahead of schedule they didn't quite know what to do, and this also was something else that was unheard of.

In fact, I was so far ahead of schedule, that the book’s publication dates were moved back several months. Those several months proved critical, as they allowed the publisher to showcase the books at a major industry event when the publisher otherwise would not have been able to. And the books done my way were smash hits at the event.

The rest as they say is history. Those contracts were followed by two other contracts from other publishers that I’d contacted previously. Suddenly, I was back in the publishing business.

Looking back now after I these years, I know exactly what I would have given up, had I not chased the dream. That little series I started? That series would eventually go on to become one of the biggest blockbuster series for the publisher, with $100M in worldwide retail sales—and counting.

Those first books I wrote in that series? They set the foundation for the entire series and became critically-acclaimed, award-winning bestsellers.

Sometimes in life you must take that leap of faith. Sometimes you must believe in yourself when no one else does. Sometimes you must follow the wrong path to find the right one.

Talk to you next time,

Robert Stanek

Nielsen BookScan Sales Data Can Be Misleading (Or Alternatively Understanding This Brave New World of Publishing a Little Better)

I think most everyone is guilty of preaching. I see lots of opinionated posts that pretty much state, ‘I know everything because I have published a book.” And I know what they mean, because that’s what a lot of people mean when they’re giving their opinion. Sometimes I’m one of those people too. I’d like to think my 20 years of experience as a pro author and 12 years of experience as an indie author get me pretty far in the expert department (but I’m also smart enough to know there are very few actual experts on anything). Publishing has been changing so fast over the past decade that many so-called experts are left scratching their heads as they try to understand what’s going on. One of those experts being left behind is Nielsen BookScan.

For those who don’t know, Nielsen BookScan is a company that collects retail sales information from bookshops. Many companies, including Amazon.com, use Nielsen BookScan sales data to track the sales history of books. Some bestseller lists also use Nielsen BookScan sales data to determine which books are the bestsellers in specific categories at any given time.

Much like bestseller lists, which I’ve written about in Bestseller Lists Can Lie, Nielsen BookScan sales data doesn’t actually show the total sales of any book in any particular category or at any particular time. More accurately, Nielsen BookScan sales data is reflective of a statistical sample of sales of particular books in particular categories or genres at a particular time. More plainly, Nielsen BookScan sales data captures a relatively small portion of book sales in particular markets and locations.

However, Nielsen BookScan sales data is often presented as if it shows a book’s total actual sales or equally as bad some imagined percentage of actual sales. Even Amazon.com which should absolutely know better as a digital online leader misrepresents to authors what Nielsen BookScan sales data actually is. BTW, your Author Central account on Amazon.com shows sales data for Nielsen BookScan US (which is itself one segment of the ten currently tracked markets).

On numerous occasions, I’ve had publishers and others in publishing tell me with a straight face that you can tell the total sales of a book simply by multiplying the Nielsen BookScan sales for a book by some imagined value. Usually, the X factor stated ranges from 1.5 to 2.5 depending on the type of book. Twenty years ago, when books released in the US were primarily sold only in the US in physical, tracked stores that may have been true. Such a thing hasn’t been true for a long, long time in the US or anywhere else.

Here’s what Nielsen BookScan tracks exactly: English Language sales statistics for the consumer book market from about 35,500 tracked retail stores in 10 countries: Australia, Brazil, India, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, UK, and US. Prior to approximately early 2011, the tracked stores included only specific chain bookshops, key independent bookshops, and key supermarket stores. After approximately early 2011, Nielsen BookScan also began monitoring sales from leading internet book sites.

What doesn’t Nielsen BookScan track? Everything else. Nielsen BookScan doesn’t track education (school, college, etc) or library sales. Nielsen BookScan doesn’t track sales from most department stores, even though many carry books. Nielsen BookScan doesn’t track non-English Language sales. Nielsen BookScan doesn’t track any bookshops that don’t participate in the program or that aren’t considered key or leading. Nielsen BookScan doesn’t track non-book sites that also sell books. Nielsen BookScan doesn’t track internet book sites that aren’t considered key or leading. Nielsen BookScan doesn’t track English Language sales in any country other than the 10 where it currently does business.

To understand Nielsen BookScan, you also need to understand that the data is segmented by market (country). Nielsen BookScan US data is reflective of English Language sales statistics for the consumer book market in the US and began operations in January 2001. Nielsen BookScan Australia data is reflective of English Language sales statistics for the consumer book market in Australia and began operations in December 2000.

Nielsen BookScan New Zealand data is reflective of English Language sales statistics for the consumer book market in New Zealand and has been operating since December 2008. Nielsen BookScan South Africa data is reflective of English Language sales statistics for the consumer book market in South Africa and began operations in December 2003. Nielsen BookScan India data is reflective of English Language sales statistics for the consumer book market in India and has been operating since October 2010. Nielsen BookScan International data is reflective of English Language sales statistics for the consumer book market in the UK and Ireland.

Something else you should know: From its inception to approximately early 2012, Nielsen BookScan was specifically for tracking titles that were physical products, meaning tracking of printed books and packaged audio. In approximately early 2012 Nielsen BookScan began working to track sales statistics for the consumer ebook market. Prior to this Nielsen BookScan did not track ebook sales. Nielsen BookScan also does not track digital audio sales in any market.

Nielsen says that BookScan in the US tracks approximately 16,000 locations or roughly 85% of the market but then states that it collects sales data for only 500,000 titles in a typical week. Visit Amazon.com and you’ll find about 12,000,000 titles. My best estimate is that about 35% of these titles are books actively available in the US, including printed books, digital books, packaged audio, digital audio, etc. 35% of 12 million titles is 4.2 million. 4.2 million - .5 million is 3.7 million. Where exactly is the sales data for these 3,700,000 titles? Well, it’s not tracked.

Within a market, such as the US, Nielsen BookScan also provides historical sales data by category, format, author, and publisher with weekly data aggregated into four and twelve week blocks. Titles are tracked by ISBN, the unique identifier for book products. Nielsen BookScan can track sales across formats. At present, this cross-format tracking is for alternate physical editions of books and the tracking is dependent on each related title being properly cross-linked by the publisher in the first place (generally by specifying a related ISBN).

The clear problem here is that modern books are often released in many formats, in many editions, and in many markets. As an example, in the English language there are over 600 William Robert Stanek titles at Amazon and over 900 William Robert Stanek titles in library distribution. You can check these numbers yourself by counting all William Stanek, William R. Stanek, William Robert Stanek, and Robert Stanek titles.

There are an additional 400 or so of my titles in the English language that don’t even have my name on them. They are sold under a brand name. For example, Bugville Learning and Ruin Mist Publications are two of my brands and titles released in these brands may or may not have my name on them even though I have of course written them.

I have hundreds of inactive and/or otherwise out-of-print titles as well. Additionally, over the past 20 years, my books have been translated into 34 languages. All of these translations were released in many formats and editions as well. In total, there are thousands of my titles published in the past 20 years.

How many of these titles has Nielsen BookScan US ever tracked? Well, Nielsen BookScan US didn’t track any sales prior to January 2001. Nielsen BookScan US didn’t track Internet sales until approximately early 2011. Nielsen BookScan US just started tracking ebooks sales and doesn’t track digital audio sales. Nielsen BookScan US doesn’t track education sales. Nielsen BookScan US doesn’t track library sales. Nielsen BookScan US doesn’t track any sales outside the US. I could go on, but I won’t. I think you get the point.

Finally, don’t confuse Nielsen ratings with Nielsen BookScan US. With Nielsen ratings, the television viewing habits of a relatively small cross-section of households are statistically extrapolated to be representative of millions of viewers across the US. With Nielsen BookScan US, the book buying habits of a subset of leading US retail locations are statistically extrapolated to be representative of the millions of books sold across the US. If you’re an author whose books are sold primarily in these retail locations, you’ll look like a superstar. If you’re an author whose books are sold primarily in other locations, you won’t look like a superstar.

Thanks for reading,

Robert Stanek

Are You Using Twitter Effectively?

I’m a tech journalist and writer in my day job. I’ve been a twitter user for many years. I tweet all sorts of things of interest to my readers and others from information about my books to career milestones, causes I support, and more. For my day-to-day twitter needs, I use Tweet Deck, a powerful, handy app that Twitter bought for a cool $47 million in cash and stock some time ago.

One of the things I notice from people and tweet streams I follow is how often people who position themselves as social media elite decry others for using twitter incorrectly while they themselves do things that I consider just as bad. But does it really matter anyway? Does anyone really think that a tweet sent once is read by all their followers? Because that's not how twitter works. By its very nature, twitter isn't something most people log into and watch 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. At any given time, on any given day, odds are only a tiny percentage of anyone’s twitter followers are even following their twitter timelines.

In reality, anything anyone in the public spotlight (author, actor, singer) does on social media is self-promotion. Your tweets don't have to be the me-me-me kind, but whether you are talking about what you ate for breakfast, sharing details about your latest release, or having a conversation with your friends, you are promoting you. You are self-promoting. You are on social media to be noticed, to be followed. If you didn’t want to be noticed or followed, you’d have private conversations beyond the social media spotlight.

If you can’t admit to yourself that you’re a self-promoter, if being thought of as a self-promoter bothers you, maybe social media isn’t the place for you. Otherwise, if you’re going to be honest and admit that it’s all self-promotion, a question you need to ask yourself is whether you are using twitter effectively.

Twitter can be an exceptionally effective tool for helping people get to know you, for spreading the word about your work, for showing support for causes and ideas you believe in, and more. One of the things I’ve done to help understand Twitter better is to use Twitter Web Analytics.

Twitter Web Analytics is a platform for gauging the amount of traffic twitter sends to your website or specific locations (URLs). Using the platform, you can graph and analyze many important statistics, including the number of tweets for a specific website, such as www.robert-stanek.com, and the number of clicks on those tweets. For me, the platform was most useful to analyze specific tweets that included links, such as a link to my Facebook page or my blog, and views of pictures added to tweets. I could then graph the number of tweets, views, and clicks over time. These tweets, views, and clicks were one way of understanding how effectively I was engaging with readers.

Twitter Advertising is another service you can use. Twitter Advertising allows you to promote your account and tweets. As Twitter Advertising provides web analytics, it can be an easy alternative to setting up the official Twitter Web Analytics and determining the effectiveness of your tweets. I learned much from analyzing the effectiveness of various tweets. One of the most important things I learned was that a retweet (RT) was only one aspect of engagement. Knowing this, I started focusing on total engagement.

Total engagement is reflected in:

• The number of follows
• The number of clicks (on links, pictures)
  
• The number of replies
  
• The number of RTs
• The number of favorites

If you want to build total engagement on Twitter, you need to think about each of these factors and decide which of these factors are most important to you. For me, I became more interested in having people engage with my tweets by clicking on them to follow links or view pictures than in having replies or retweets. Using the web analytics provided by Twitter, I’ve been able to increasingly build traction in this area. While my most typical tweets get only a relative few retweets and replies, most of my tweets get dozens of engagement clicks and views. My more successful tweets have garnered hundreds--and a rare few, thousands. For me, that is Twitter success.

How you measure your Twitter success may be different, but you can use the engagement factors I listed previously to help you determine your level of success. Regardless of how you use twitter, I hope this post has given you something to think about.

Thanks for reading,

Robert Stanek

Authors, We’re All Mountain Climbers and Marathoners

Whether you’re a newbie dreaming of success, a workaday writer dreaming of paying the bills, somewhere in between or somewhere beyond, you’re a mountain climber or marathoner even if no one has ever told you as much. Mountain climbers are the lucky few. They’re off to Nepal in preparation for the trek that will take them up Everest almost as soon as their big book is published. Weather permitting, they’ll fly over the Himalayas to meet their Sherpa guides. They’ll hike the trail to Namche Bazaar and catch a first glimpse of Everest as their big book lands on a bestseller list. Then they’ll set out on the trail along the Bhote Kosi and the Nangpa La and their big book will keep climbing up the bestsellers lists as they make their way to Everest Base Camp.

It’s a two-week journey from Kathmandu to Everest Base Camp. After the ascent, the climbers must retrace their steps and hike down a steep trail. Then it’ll be a long, if leisurely, trek back to Lukla and Phakding. If the weather holds, they’ll be able to fly back to Kathmandu without delay, where they can explore the city until they depart the following day for home. A week will pass on the return journey. When they get home, they can rest well knowing they made the climb. But for continued success they’ll eventually need to prepare to climb Everest all over again.

Marathoners aren’t as fortunate as climbers. Their trip to the Boston Marathon begins on quiet country back roads, busy city streets, and quaint city parks. These would-be marathoners may practice sprinting, publishing many works in a short time. They may walk to build endurance, publishing a few works over a long time. Or they may jog at a steady pace, publishing works steadily as they go. Although the books of these sprinters, walkers and joggers may never land atop bestseller lists, these sprinters, walkers and joggers are all working toward the same goal. They all want to enter the marathon and cross the finish line in Boston, having walked, run or crawled for 26 miles and 385 yards to do it.

It’s a grueling 4 hours and 39 minutes on average to complete a marathon at a steady pace of about 10:34 per mile. For those who walk, it’s about 8 hours on average to complete a marathon. Whether you run or walk, crossing the finish line is exhilarating. But crossing the finish line isn’t the end of the ordeal. The second you cross the finish line you must resist the temptation to plop down on the ground. You must walk around. You must hydrate and eat. You must begin recovery. How you take care of yourself will determine how quickly you’ll recover. How quickly you can marathon again.

What no one tells the mountain climber is this: Your next attempt to climb Everest may not be a successful one. If so, there’s nothing wrong with attempting to climb Everest and failing. Lots of climbers have attempted Everest and failed. Perhaps you simply have to shake off the failure and prepare your ascent again. Or perhaps your next mountain isn’t Everest at all. Perhaps it’s Mount Fuji. Or perhaps you may find that success requires a marathon after all.

What no one tells the marathoner is this: You may not be able to complete the marathon. If so, perhaps you are a half marathoner instead of a marathoner or perhaps you were running in the wrong race after all. There’s nothing wrong with being a half marathoner instead of a marathoner. There’s nothing wrong with learning you’ve been running in the wrong race. At the end of all your marathons, you may even find that you were a mountain climber after all.

Bestseller Lists Can Lie (Or Alternatively Finding Your Happy Place While Perusing the Bestseller Lists)

I'm Robert Stanek and I founded Go Indie and Read Indies to help and support independent authors. Today, I want to break down a mistruth in this industry: the one that says bestseller lists show the actual bestsellers in the industry. The simple truth is that bestseller lists don't necessarily show the books that actually are bestselling in any category or any genre at any particular time. More accurately, bestseller lists are reflective of the bestselling books at any particular time in any particular category or genre.
  

Bestseller lists, like those in the New York Times, can lie. Every year books appear on the New York Times lists that have relatively few sales, especially when you get into the extended portions of particular lists. Every year books appear on the New York Times lists that have fewer sales relative to other titles in a particular genre that aren’t on the list. Every year books appear higher on the New York Times lists that actually have fewer sales than titles ranked lower on the list. And none of this is specific to the New York Times lists, rather this is specific to all lists of this nature.

Bestseller lists capture a portion of sales in particular markets and locations. Some bestseller lists incorporate numbers reported to them by publishers as well, which is sort of like inviting the fox into the hen house.

Publishers can become craftsman at working the bestseller lists to ensure important titles land on them. Ways some publishers do this: one-day laydowns, strict street dates and distribution focused on locations tracked by the lists. So if you’re Publisher XYZ and you have a book that you want on a particular New York Times list, you ensure the boxes of books arrive at specific stores on a specific date, can’t go on sale until a specific “street” date and you ensure those stores tracked by the list are your priority focus—you may even ship at different times to markets not tracked by the list to ensure buyers have to go to locations tracked by the list to make purchases.

Publishers organize marketing, drive pre-orders, give tracked stores incentives—whatever it takes—to ensure buyers go out and buy the book on a specific date or dates and especially at tracked stores—and those targeted sales at the right locations put the book on that important list. For some of the most important lists, depending on time of year and category, that tactic can be used to put a book on that all important list with only a few thousand actual sales in a particular week. For other lists, depending on the time of year and category, that tactic can be used to put a book on a list with less than several thousand actual sales in a particular week. Go into the extended lists and that tactic can be used to put a book on an extended list with even fewer sales. Yet when publishers proclaim a book a New York Times bestseller, they rarely state the list the book was on and I don't think I've ever seen one make the distinction between a primary list and an extended list.

Being on a bestseller list is, of course,  very cool for authors and publishers alike. I just would prefer specificity and you may as well. When possible and practical, a USA Today Bestseller should be listed as such and by category, as should a Publisher's Weekly or other print media bestseller. Likewise for online bestsellers, which should list the website and category. Preferably the category will be a top level or competitive second-level category, as this will have more relevance than lower level categories.

With my books, when possible and practical, I always try to state exactly where my book was a bestseller and in what category and in the relative position within a category. I believe that's the only honest approach. As examples:

'The Pieces of the Puzzle' was #1 Fiction for 4 weeks, Top 10 Mystery for 11 weeks and Top 20 Mystery for 16 weeks at Audible.com. 

'The Kingdoms and the Elves of the Reaches' was #1 in Fiction at Audible and soon #1 on the entire site and not long after one of the Top 100 grossing titles in Audible’s history.

When you are specific, whether on a media list or online list, you let readers determine relevance for themselves. As online categories at specific sites are straight forward and based on actual sales numbers, rather than being weighted or based in part on a publisher's reported numbers, I believe online lists when specified precisely can be more honest than media bestseller lists.

The New York Times in particular has many bestseller lists. These lists change over time and currently, at the time of this writing, are as follows:

Combined Print & E-book Fiction (Top 15, extended to Top 35)

Combined Print & E-book Nonfiction (Top 15, extended to Top 35)

Hardcover Fiction (Top 15, extended to Top 35)

Hardcover Nonfiction (Top 15, extended to Top 35)

Paperback Trade Fiction  (Top 20, extended to Top 35)

Paperback Mass-Market Fiction (Top 20, extended to Top 35)

Paperback Nonfiction (Top 20, extended to Top 35)

E-book Fiction  (Top 25, extended to Top 35)

E-book Nonfiction  (Top 25, extended to Top 35)

Hardcover Advice & Misc.  (Top 10, extended to Top 15)

Paperback Advice & Misc.  (Top 10, extended to Top 15)

Children’s Picture Books   (Top 10, extended to Top 25)

Children’s Middle Grade    (Top 10, extended to Top 15)

Young Adult    (Top 10, not-printed extended)

Children’s Series   (Top 10, not-printed extended)

Hardcover Graphic Books   (Top 10, not-printed extended)

Paperback Graphic Books   (Top 10, not-printed extended)

Manga  (Top 10, not-printed extended)

Combined Hardcover & Paperback Fiction (Top 35, not-printed extended)

Combined Hardcover & Paperback Nonfiction (Top 35, not-printed extended)

Each list has a primary and an extended portion. Some of these lists are harder to get on and more competitive than others. Generally, the number of titles on each list is reflective of how competitive the list is. Generally, unit sales, or the number of books sold, is what lists look at vs. the cost of a book and its total earnings. However, the lists depend on tracked store reporting, on publisher reporting and relative weighting. These things virtually guarantee certain types of books will never appear on certain media bestseller lists--at least until the rules are changed to be more reflective of the entire marketplace (and I won't hold my breath waiting for that to happen anytime soon).

If you're an indie author, while you likely won't get on such a list with printed books, you may get on such a list with ebooks. Inclusion of ebooks is something that's happened only in the last few years. Ebooks were included when the list creators started realizing that many e-only books had unit sales above those of what they were calling bestsellers at a particular time. For the authors whose books peaked before such reporting, they simply missed the opportunity to have those books appear on the media lists--and there were many authors who lost such opportunities. 

View any of these lists online and you’ll be able to read a full explanation of their methodology for creating each list. When you read the fine print, you find that the lists are weighted like I've mentioned: “The universe of print book dealers is well established, and sales of print titles are statistically weighted to represent all outlets nationwide.” 

In other words, the lists for printed books are representative of sales at tracked stores and then multiplied by and/or padded with a modifier value to represent sales across the US. (And there's other fine print as well, such as with regard to publisher reported numbers, etc, etc.)

Reading this you may wonder if a list like this is sort of like Nielsen ratings for books. With Nielsen ratings, the television viewing habits of a relatively small cross-section of households are statistically extrapolated to be representative of millions of viewers across the US. Nielsen ratings are carefully controlled. The bestseller lists are not. With the bestseller lists, publishers know what stores and markets are tracked and what stores and markets aren’t tracked. Using statistical weighting, a few thousand sales at tracked stores can be interpreted as many, many thousands of sales across the US.

It's important to point out that if a list includes publisher reported numbers, as many lists did and some continue to do, the honor system was/is relied upon. The publisher reported numbers were/are simply relied upon as fact--something that some publishers took advantage of by shipping out huge numbers of books at steep discounts and than calling the books "sold."

As with print books, ebook-related lists are representative of the industry while not necessarily all inclusive.  At the time of this writing, the New York Times states they don't weight ebook sales yet--but may in the future--while also stating they track only certain ebook markets. It could be list creators simply want to find ways of being relevant when everyone else is looking to the primary online marketplaces themselves to determine what book is a bestseller at any given time. It's also important to point out that e-audio isn't included in such numbers, nor are ebook sales from websites not considered primary markets.

Finally, keep in mind, it’s not just traditional publishers who work bestseller lists. Over the past year or so, I’ve seen indies working online lists and I don’t like the trend.

Additionally, as cool as it can be for an author to see their free giveaway soar up the Amazon free list and maybe get to #1 Free in a category or even #1 Free on the entire site, a book given away isn't a bestseller. During my giveaways at Amazon every one of the books I had in KDP Select landed at #1 in a top-level category at some point in time. I gave away over 250,000 books and I don't count any of it as anything. Why? I gave the books away for free. Readers weren't purchasing them. Reaching #1 Free multiple times was fun but ultimately meaningless (and I do of course, as always, reserve the right to change my opinion about this).

If you're an author and you disagree with my thoughts on free, and that's your choice to do so, I hope you'll always qualify in any reference that your book was being given away at the time. You can use the same qualifiers I discussed earlier with regard to website, category and position within category. For example:

A #1 Free Mystery at Amazon

Further, true bestsellers stay on print bestseller lists not for a single week but for multiple weeks. True bestsellers stay on online bestseller lists not for a few hours on a particular day or for a particular day but for many days. Here's an example:

'The Kingdoms and the Elves of the Reaches was #1 on Audible for FOURTEEN consecutive weeks and then a Kids & YA Top 10 bestseller for the next THREE YEARS.

Now that's bestselling power and it was reflected in the massive sales and millions in retail earnings for my books at Audible.

Thanks for reading,

Robert Stanek