The title page, cover, first chapter have all come back from the publisher for my new book about selling on Amazon.com. This should be a lot of fun in the mean time, there is something very weird about having your first book go out.
The book is a simple 140 page book about how I have noticed that Amazon works, and have set up a web site just to discuss the book. The web site is “Sellingbooksonamazon.net” if you want to wander on over there and take a look. There are just a couple of entries up.
Amazon is an interesting place to sell books, indeed just about any item on, there are a number of interesting ways to approach the system. And since I am a security engineer, there are always a number of things I am going to notice that others might not, like double book entries with radically different sales ranks, the ability to use Boolean search constructs when looking for a book, using the + and – signs to remove or add words when you get back a few million hits off of a generic title.
There is also the issues with suppliers, how do you know what to buy so you can have a high inventory turn over rate. Lately this has not been so good, as sellers constantly complain about low sales, but if you look at their inventory they have a majority of titles that are well above the 1 million mark.
The part that cracks me up the most though is pricing, sometimes you get these wild spreads in pricing, like in the picture, and often people are wondering why there are these wild spreads in prices. Or penny books, why penny books, books for 1 cent, that weigh 7 or 8 pounds, that will cost much more to ship than what Amazon pays you in allowance for shipping. There is a lot of cool stuff in here, and just getting back chapter one and the cover art cracks me up.
Can’t wait for it to come out in August.
Tags: amazon, selling, books, selling books, sales rank, pricing, spreads, ecommerce, sales, selling, fun
