Sales of eBooks have surpassed paper sales.
I don't think this means the death of paper publishing but it does mean the long tail of books is set to get longer. Approximately 70% of books sell less than 100 copies in their life time. This ultimately means that these niche titles are well suited to electronic publishing. For those minority of books in the best seller category, they will of course remain available in paper.
As people increasingly migrate to eBooks, we have the battle of the eBook readers.
Most people have heard of Kindle, Amazon's reader but there are others out there such as Nook, Kobo and more....
I've currently published books on Kindle and Kobo. I am monitoring the effectiveness of these sales channels and will publish a blog in future contrasting the effectiveness of these channels. The reader is after all a sales channel.
So far I haven't managed to publish on Nook. Nook is Barnes and Noble's attempt at e-readers. My thoughts are at this time they need to up their game. As an author I can't publish on Nook.
Why?
Well I don't have a USA bank account. Currently their PubIt! publishing system does not permit non USA based authors! Seems to me that if they want to compete with Amazon they urgently need to fix this. Or maybe this is a subliminal ploy to demonstrate USA authoring supremacy.
Amazon have adopted a policy with their KDP Select offering which is there to stifle competition. With KDP Select, users are encouraged to opt-in to an exclusivity arrangement where content is only available via Kindle. Given Nook won't accept my content, the exclusivity is really a battle between Kindle and Kobo at the moment however it will eventually starve competition of content.
Given the speed at which change is happening to the publishing industry, it is interesting times. I will keep you updated on progress through the year.
Thursday, 3 January 2013
Wednesday, 2 January 2013
Sales Brainwashing
Over the past 3 years I have become fascinated by the human brain. If you've read any of my books you'll probably have guessed it!
More recently I have being researching the Neuroscience of language. The saying "With knowledge come power" is absolutely correct for this topic. The interesting thing about language is the profound power it has to control people.
Let's do a small experiment
"Chocolate or Painkillers"
The last sentence was very short yet may have stimulated cravings for chocolate. Firstly you may have pictured chocolate. When you pictured chocolate, part of your brain would have reacted as if it was in front of you. Another part of your brain would recall the reward feeling that chocolate gives and this would have reinforced the desire. You will have probably made a decision you would rather have chocolate as opposed to paracetamol - unless of course you have a headache right now.
Generally people are "towards motivated" to chocolate and "away from motivated" from painkillers.
Although I wasn't there to physically sell you some chocolate (or painkillers) I may have stimulated a desire - I sold you on chocolate.
OK this is a very simple example where I exploited the fact you may have been conditioned over time to like chocolate and you are used to making impulse buy decisions for chocolate. This was a simple example - it is possible build more complex examples where the choice of words, structure of sentences and positioning can be used to create "forced" decisions and responses.
Generally people are "towards motivated" to chocolate and "away from motivated" from painkillers.
Although I wasn't there to physically sell you some chocolate (or painkillers) I may have stimulated a desire - I sold you on chocolate.
OK this is a very simple example where I exploited the fact you may have been conditioned over time to like chocolate and you are used to making impulse buy decisions for chocolate. This was a simple example - it is possible build more complex examples where the choice of words, structure of sentences and positioning can be used to create "forced" decisions and responses.
Words have the power to change minds. Words can be a window into the soul.
With all power there is the opportunity for the power to be used for good or for evil. The opportunity for language neuroscience to be abused by sales is a very real threat. The title sales brainwashing was deliberately chosen to attract your attention, arouse curiosity and trigger a possible fear that you may be brainwashed by the next smiling salesman you encounter.
It is not all evil - neuroscience can be used for "good" in sales too.
The reality is the world is saturated with noise. Cutting through noise to deliver the right message to a prospect, to gain their attention and show how a product can solve their problems or create opportunity for them is an example of the use of neuroscience for good. This is a perfectly ethical use - using words to help the prospect make the right decision is fine. It is when words are used to manipulate the prospect so that they buy when there is no benefit or value for the prospect that neuroscience is straying into evil territory.
People like to think they are being rational when making purchase decisions however my research suggests that the vast majority of people are susceptible to being brainwashed to make purchase decisions simply by the clever use of words.
Given that certain segments of the sales profession has a poor reputation for being unethical and manipulative, how can we ensure that neuroscience is used for good and not evil?
I'd welcome your thoughts.
Thursday, 20 December 2012
Trust Based Sales
People don't trust sales. In today's modern society, people have developed highly tuned senses, able to detect a looming sales pitch with very few cues.
I noticed it myself this week in an email from someone I hadn't spoken to in a long time. It wasn't
pushy but a couple of words triggered a response that put me on guard that if I wasn't careful I would open
the sales flood gates.
This has led me to wonder whether we will see a change in how successful sales may happen in the
future. These future sales may be based solely on trust.
I've seen this kind of pattern in the Open Source Software community. Some software vendors
provide free fully functional versions of their software products. The commercial version is more
thoroughly supported and have more sophisticated features. Here the "sales" people are the
company's technical support. They provide support (for free) to the community, fixing issues
and generally fostering trust in the product. Once the trust is established, up-selling is possible.
Many consumer products, particularly web based ones, provide a free watered down version
of their product to gain customers in the hope they can up-sell to more sophisticated fee paying
versions.
Giving all this free stuff away may work in software where there production costs are low but
I can't see Ford, Fedex or other similar organisations adopting these kinds of loss leaders.
This recipe is not guaranteed. The challenge (and I think this is a marketing challenge) is to identify the minimum viable functionality to give away free. Give away too much and customers will fail to
see the value in purchasing a commercial version. Dropbox I think has this problem. I can't
see the value in upgrading - the free version meets my needs.
So what can we learn from this trend?
Well giving stuff away free can't work for every business and it clearly depends on whether there is trust already. Take a new chain of supermarkets. Provided the products are familiar, I am happy show in
a different supermarket.
Relying on customers to consciously decide to up-sell themselves is not a good way to achieve revenue targets. There needs to be a balance between trust and familiarity and pushing the up-sell.
People don't consciously do things. Reputation based selling requires people spread the positive word and that doesn't happen by itself in the same way that bad news is spread.
Take 100 sales. You might get 1 or 2 people spreading the word if you do a good job and they may only pass the good news onto 1 or 2 of their friends. Whereas if you do a bad job, then 30-40 of your disgruntled sales will spread negative opinions to 10 or more people. Negativity is more powerful than positivity. This explains the phrase "loyalty takes years to acquire but can be lost in a second".
The temptation may be to be unethical and employ paid ravers - some unscrupulous companies do this. Not a great tactic as your reputation can be destroyed in seconds if this is ever discovered.
The future holds challenges for companies to operate with trust, without being pushy and rely on word of mouth with integrity.
I noticed it myself this week in an email from someone I hadn't spoken to in a long time. It wasn't
pushy but a couple of words triggered a response that put me on guard that if I wasn't careful I would open
the sales flood gates.
This has led me to wonder whether we will see a change in how successful sales may happen in the
future. These future sales may be based solely on trust.
I've seen this kind of pattern in the Open Source Software community. Some software vendors
provide free fully functional versions of their software products. The commercial version is more
thoroughly supported and have more sophisticated features. Here the "sales" people are the
company's technical support. They provide support (for free) to the community, fixing issues
and generally fostering trust in the product. Once the trust is established, up-selling is possible.
Many consumer products, particularly web based ones, provide a free watered down version
of their product to gain customers in the hope they can up-sell to more sophisticated fee paying
versions.
Giving all this free stuff away may work in software where there production costs are low but
I can't see Ford, Fedex or other similar organisations adopting these kinds of loss leaders.
This recipe is not guaranteed. The challenge (and I think this is a marketing challenge) is to identify the minimum viable functionality to give away free. Give away too much and customers will fail to
see the value in purchasing a commercial version. Dropbox I think has this problem. I can't
see the value in upgrading - the free version meets my needs.
So what can we learn from this trend?
Well giving stuff away free can't work for every business and it clearly depends on whether there is trust already. Take a new chain of supermarkets. Provided the products are familiar, I am happy show in
a different supermarket.
Relying on customers to consciously decide to up-sell themselves is not a good way to achieve revenue targets. There needs to be a balance between trust and familiarity and pushing the up-sell.
People don't consciously do things. Reputation based selling requires people spread the positive word and that doesn't happen by itself in the same way that bad news is spread.
Take 100 sales. You might get 1 or 2 people spreading the word if you do a good job and they may only pass the good news onto 1 or 2 of their friends. Whereas if you do a bad job, then 30-40 of your disgruntled sales will spread negative opinions to 10 or more people. Negativity is more powerful than positivity. This explains the phrase "loyalty takes years to acquire but can be lost in a second".
The temptation may be to be unethical and employ paid ravers - some unscrupulous companies do this. Not a great tactic as your reputation can be destroyed in seconds if this is ever discovered.
The future holds challenges for companies to operate with trust, without being pushy and rely on word of mouth with integrity.
Friday, 30 November 2012
Using LinkedIn to promote ebooks
Yesterday I started a promotion of my Kindle book, Romancing The Sale by offering free downloads for 3 days.
It was moderately successful with 98 downloads from the USA, 40 from the UK and 1 from Germany. I did a free download promotion on the day I launched the book which was significantly more successful however interestingly although this was a much smaller number of downloads, it was enough to get me to a ranking of 1,050 in all books and #1 in the sales and marketing category. Previously I was around 7,000 so maybe people buy less books this time of year!
So how effective was using the social media aspect of LinkedIn?
The approach I used was to post a status update and encourage people I know to like the status update. I had 46 likes for my status post. The status post lead to this blog and in the blog was a link to the book on Amazon. I used an Amazon affiliate account to track the Amazon views.
I had 98 visitors to the blog page outlining the offer and there was a link to the book there. The Amazon affiliate account showed I had 31 visitors resulting in 3 purchases - sadly none of them my book.
So 31 out of 98 people viewing the blog went to Amazon (32%) and zero downloads.
Free should eliminate risk but it shows even when risk is eliminated there is not 100% take-up.
Clearly I was getting downloads from somewhere. I had set up announcements on about 20 of the ebook review sites such as Pixel of Ink so it looks likely they were driving the traffic and not LinkedIn.
Interestingly I did discover LIKE and SHARE have different behaviours on LinkedIn. I'm still not entirely sure what SHARE does as it is inconsistent. Some people shared and it effectively spawns a new status post from them but not always....maybe someone can explain it to me.
So now to experiment number 2. My day one experiment was a little convoluted with the blog in the way so today I have linked direct to the product on the LinkedIn status post. Let's see what results that brings...
It was moderately successful with 98 downloads from the USA, 40 from the UK and 1 from Germany. I did a free download promotion on the day I launched the book which was significantly more successful however interestingly although this was a much smaller number of downloads, it was enough to get me to a ranking of 1,050 in all books and #1 in the sales and marketing category. Previously I was around 7,000 so maybe people buy less books this time of year!
So how effective was using the social media aspect of LinkedIn?
The approach I used was to post a status update and encourage people I know to like the status update. I had 46 likes for my status post. The status post lead to this blog and in the blog was a link to the book on Amazon. I used an Amazon affiliate account to track the Amazon views.
I had 98 visitors to the blog page outlining the offer and there was a link to the book there. The Amazon affiliate account showed I had 31 visitors resulting in 3 purchases - sadly none of them my book.
So 31 out of 98 people viewing the blog went to Amazon (32%) and zero downloads.
Free should eliminate risk but it shows even when risk is eliminated there is not 100% take-up.
Clearly I was getting downloads from somewhere. I had set up announcements on about 20 of the ebook review sites such as Pixel of Ink so it looks likely they were driving the traffic and not LinkedIn.
Interestingly I did discover LIKE and SHARE have different behaviours on LinkedIn. I'm still not entirely sure what SHARE does as it is inconsistent. Some people shared and it effectively spawns a new status post from them but not always....maybe someone can explain it to me.
So now to experiment number 2. My day one experiment was a little convoluted with the blog in the way so today I have linked direct to the product on the LinkedIn status post. Let's see what results that brings...
Wednesday, 28 November 2012
FREE: Download Romancing The Sale for free
I am giving away my book, Romancing The Sale for free - well for 3 days anyway.
From Thursday 29th November 12 to Saturday 1st Dec you can download it for free on the Amazon Kindle store.
All I ask in return is that you place a review on Amazon when you have finished.
I've had quite a few people say they don't have a Kindle. You can still download and read it even if you don't have a kindle. There are Kindle readers available on iPhone/iPad, Android and even PC.
Download Romancing The Sale
It has seven 5* reviews and one 4* review so I'm sure you won't be disappointed. Here's a sample review of the most recent review:
Enjoy the book. I'm busy working in my limited spare time on the sequel Romancing The Sale: Word Chemistry and a short free book on the mindset you need for start-ups.
On a different note I have been sharing my experiences of how successful the different strategies for book promotion are, on my blog. I will share at a later date, the results of how effective free promotion and social media campaigns are.
From Thursday 29th November 12 to Saturday 1st Dec you can download it for free on the Amazon Kindle store.
All I ask in return is that you place a review on Amazon when you have finished.
I've had quite a few people say they don't have a Kindle. You can still download and read it even if you don't have a kindle. There are Kindle readers available on iPhone/iPad, Android and even PC.
Download Romancing The Sale
It has seven 5* reviews and one 4* review so I'm sure you won't be disappointed. Here's a sample review of the most recent review:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A unique mix of tongue in cheek stuff with very serious no nonsence sales advice!, 24 Nov 2012
This review is from: Romancing the sale (Kindle Edition)
I must agree with many of the other reviewers - this is an original book
which has some excellent advice within its (electronic) pages. The
authors analogy to dating sounds a little cringey perhaps but stick with
it - its well worth the read. Many people will resonate with this
approach as they read through this book but there is also a very serious
side to this work. It thus gives a unique insight into the world of
sales and there's lots of facts and stories from the real world too.
Highly recommended. Enjoy the book. I'm busy working in my limited spare time on the sequel Romancing The Sale: Word Chemistry and a short free book on the mindset you need for start-ups.
On a different note I have been sharing my experiences of how successful the different strategies for book promotion are, on my blog. I will share at a later date, the results of how effective free promotion and social media campaigns are.
Sunday, 25 November 2012
Magic Words
This week I was lucky enough to see Phil Jones presenting about Magic Words. Phil is an excellent presenter with a real flair for conveying simple yet powerful concepts.
His presentation pretty much covered the contents of his book Magic Words which I found very useful. The book covers simple psychology techniques to make your words have more impact.
I particularly liked the techniques for heading excuses off at the pass. Phil used to lead the sales team for DFS furniture stores and they wanted to sell the coating to protect the material on the furniture as it was high margin. The number one excuse why customers didn't want to buy it was that "We never eat or drink on the furniture". To solve this problem he used the "I bet you're a bit like me" technique. He would frame the conversation using "I bet you're a bit like me. When you work hard you come home and you want to crash in front of the TV with a beer or glass of red wine. Maybe even some crisps and snacks". The customers agreed they do this sort of thing.
Now when it came to selling the protective material coating they can't now say we never eat or drink on the furniture!
A few of the ideas and concepts are covered in my book but there is enough novel content here. I will be experimenting with the techniques over the coming weeks and will report on success.
Wednesday, 14 November 2012
Effectiveness of advertising to sell books
Following on from my earlier post on selling my book, Romancing The Sale, here are my experiences of using on-line advertising to promote awareness and ultimately sell copies of my book.
This was an experiment and I enjoy measuring the results of experiments so here are my findings.
Well it look like advertising is a waste of money and completely ineffective - at least when it comes to selling books. If you you are an author, I wouldn't recommend advertising as a vehicle to promote your book!
I set up a Google AdWords advertising campaign to display adverts to potential prospects for my book based on carefully selected keywords.
I had a selection of different adverts to measure which adverts achieved the best response rate.
My adverts were displayed a grand total of 58,000 times and I had 97 people click on the adverts. Just a 0.16% click through rate at a cost of £28 (approx £0.29 per click). My best advert has a 1.25% click through rate which is very high.
As my book is on Kindle I wanted to measure the conversion rate. The sales process by using advertising is:
Advert is display -> Attracted to the advert -> Clicks on the link -> Views Amazon page -> Decides to buy -> Add to cart -> Pays for shopping cart -> Purchase complete
Amazon doesn’t provide statistics on how many people have viewed your product page. The only stats are for purchase complete. I had heard that Amazon have an 80% shopping cart abandon rate and they are one of the better performers in the industry. Well my experience seems to back that up.
In order to measure the stage from my advert being clicked and eventually being purchased, I set-up and Amazon Affiliate account. This enables me to see a little more detail once my prospect clicks on the advertising link.
So my 97 click throughs translated into zero sales on my book but interestingly it did sell other stuff which I will cover shortly. I'm currently selling an average of 1 copy of the book per day so these sales are clearly not coming from advertising but other activities such as social media and word of mouth. I have a big campaign sheduled for the end of November so I will be able to compare other marketing vehicles and their effect on sales.
I had originally assumed a 1 in 4 conversion rate to purchase. Let's assume my 97 clicks through is actually 100 click throughs. I assumed of this 100 that 25 would decide to buy the book. Deciding to buy and actually buying are two very different things. Amazon's 80% shopping cart abandon rate means only 20% of people that decide to buy actually buy (good old Pareto yet again).
Based on my numbers, it would mean that I should have had 5 sales but I had zero. Interestingly with an Affiliate account you can see what people did buy and I had 4 consequential sales - someone bought a nice sofa and the other 3 bought books (not mine). One person bought a how to book on murder which is a little different to my Romancing customers.
Although it is interesting that I created consequential sales it doesn't achieve my primary goal of selling my book.
So what would it take to sell one book through advertising?
I think my original 1 in 4 conversion rate should be 1 in 5 (20% again) since this would match the 4 resulting sales. However the additional sales step is important. There is a decision to buy something and there is a decision to buy my book. I think Pareto kicks in again and only 20% of those that decide to buy decide to buy my book - the rest decide to buy something else like a new sofa.
So to sell one copy
1 @20% = 5 people who actually buy something
5 @20% = 25 people who decide to buy something
25 @20% = 125 people who are looking to buy something
125@0.16% = 78,000 adverts need to be displayed
So I need 125 people to click on links in order to achieve 1 sale. Assume 30p per click, this means spending £37.50 to achieve one sale! I need to increase the price of my book to make this viable!
I'm now abandoning my AdWords campaign since it is clearly not effective.
I am now experimenting with the LinkedIn advertising to see if that it more effective. It wasn’t very effective in the past on other campaigns I've run. I'll share the results in the near future. So why LinkedIn. Google doesn't have user profiling - the adverts are displayed based on keyword triggers. LinkedIn has excellent user profiling so my adverts can be displayed to my target audience. In this case I am restricting it to show to people in the UK and North America that have the word sales in their job title and have specified a skill of either complex sales, professional sales or relationship based selling.
This was an experiment and I enjoy measuring the results of experiments so here are my findings.
Well it look like advertising is a waste of money and completely ineffective - at least when it comes to selling books. If you you are an author, I wouldn't recommend advertising as a vehicle to promote your book!
I set up a Google AdWords advertising campaign to display adverts to potential prospects for my book based on carefully selected keywords.
I had a selection of different adverts to measure which adverts achieved the best response rate.
My adverts were displayed a grand total of 58,000 times and I had 97 people click on the adverts. Just a 0.16% click through rate at a cost of £28 (approx £0.29 per click). My best advert has a 1.25% click through rate which is very high.
As my book is on Kindle I wanted to measure the conversion rate. The sales process by using advertising is:
Advert is display -> Attracted to the advert -> Clicks on the link -> Views Amazon page -> Decides to buy -> Add to cart -> Pays for shopping cart -> Purchase complete
Amazon doesn’t provide statistics on how many people have viewed your product page. The only stats are for purchase complete. I had heard that Amazon have an 80% shopping cart abandon rate and they are one of the better performers in the industry. Well my experience seems to back that up.
In order to measure the stage from my advert being clicked and eventually being purchased, I set-up and Amazon Affiliate account. This enables me to see a little more detail once my prospect clicks on the advertising link.
So my 97 click throughs translated into zero sales on my book but interestingly it did sell other stuff which I will cover shortly. I'm currently selling an average of 1 copy of the book per day so these sales are clearly not coming from advertising but other activities such as social media and word of mouth. I have a big campaign sheduled for the end of November so I will be able to compare other marketing vehicles and their effect on sales.
I had originally assumed a 1 in 4 conversion rate to purchase. Let's assume my 97 clicks through is actually 100 click throughs. I assumed of this 100 that 25 would decide to buy the book. Deciding to buy and actually buying are two very different things. Amazon's 80% shopping cart abandon rate means only 20% of people that decide to buy actually buy (good old Pareto yet again).
Based on my numbers, it would mean that I should have had 5 sales but I had zero. Interestingly with an Affiliate account you can see what people did buy and I had 4 consequential sales - someone bought a nice sofa and the other 3 bought books (not mine). One person bought a how to book on murder which is a little different to my Romancing customers.
Although it is interesting that I created consequential sales it doesn't achieve my primary goal of selling my book.
So what would it take to sell one book through advertising?
I think my original 1 in 4 conversion rate should be 1 in 5 (20% again) since this would match the 4 resulting sales. However the additional sales step is important. There is a decision to buy something and there is a decision to buy my book. I think Pareto kicks in again and only 20% of those that decide to buy decide to buy my book - the rest decide to buy something else like a new sofa.
So to sell one copy
1 @20% = 5 people who actually buy something
5 @20% = 25 people who decide to buy something
25 @20% = 125 people who are looking to buy something
125@0.16% = 78,000 adverts need to be displayed
So I need 125 people to click on links in order to achieve 1 sale. Assume 30p per click, this means spending £37.50 to achieve one sale! I need to increase the price of my book to make this viable!
I'm now abandoning my AdWords campaign since it is clearly not effective.
I am now experimenting with the LinkedIn advertising to see if that it more effective. It wasn’t very effective in the past on other campaigns I've run. I'll share the results in the near future. So why LinkedIn. Google doesn't have user profiling - the adverts are displayed based on keyword triggers. LinkedIn has excellent user profiling so my adverts can be displayed to my target audience. In this case I am restricting it to show to people in the UK and North America that have the word sales in their job title and have specified a skill of either complex sales, professional sales or relationship based selling.
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