A few weeks back, Simon over at LitHaven mentioned he was considering adding advertising to the blog, and was looking for guinea pig books for a test run. Essentially, participants would get a month's free advertising in exchange for sharing sales figures with Simon, so LitHaven might set accurate ad rates (and/or see if ads were productive enough to even be vaible). Me, being the promotional whore that I am, immediately offered up Voices of Vision.
When Amazon.com initially listed VoV for pre-order some months ago, it started off with a sales ranking of 445,510. In the months since then, I've watched as the sales ranking steadily spiraled downward, hitting the depressing low point somewhere around 1,600,000 late last week. I didn't write that number down for obvious reasons, but I should have. I checked Amazon today, with LitHaven having run a small ad for VoV since Tuesday, and the sales ranking has zoomed up to 191,444. Holey moley! That's the highest ranking it's ever held.
Now keep in mind that Amazon numbers are meaningless in anything other than relative terms. All that number means is that there are 191,443 books that are selling better than mine. A jump that large could theoretically result from as few as five books being bought over a one day span, for instance, if they were bought at the right time during Amazon's byzantine sales rank calculation process. But the sudden change does tell me a few concrete things: 1) A number of people have responded to the LitHaven ads and pre-ordered the book; 2) Online ads can have immediate impact (if they're placed wisely); 3) VoV is selling more copies at this point in time than 1,200,000 other titles available on Amazon (sorry, but I'm as suceptible to gratuitous ego boo as anyone).
Those sales rankings are useless for anything other than judging comparative popularity on Amazon. But the smaller numbers do give a heightened veneer of credibility to the book, more exposure and better placement in Amazon's internal searches. Breaking into the five-figure range would be even nicer. I've still got almost a full month left for the ad to run on LitHaven, so I'll keep an eye on the numbers and keep track of whether this is just a front-end spike that will quickly tail off, or if the sales momentum builds throughout the month.
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Glad the advertising has helped some. I might want some kind of testimonial from you later on, would that be ok?
ReplyDelete--Simon