Hi there,

Last week, I wrote about the signals that retailers rely on to understand where our books fit in the market, and which readers to recommend them to. 

This, naturally, hangs on the premise that retailers actually want to recommend our books in the first place. As you remember: the #1 goal of any book retailer — big or small, physical or online — is to sell books to readers. And one of the best ways to achieve that is to make relevant recommendations to their customers.

In a small, indie bookstore, that is the job of the owner, or of the employees. A reader walks in, and if they aren’t looking for a specific book, the store’s staff may weigh in with some recommendations.

On giant online retailers (Amazon, Google, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc.), there are sometimes actual human beings sending recommendations to readers (usually via email). But most of the time, such recommendations will be powered by algorithms.

So, how will those algorithms decide which books to pick for recommendations? On the one hand, they’ll use the factors we talked about last week — the also boughts, in particular.

But having relevant metadata and clean also boughts only tells retailers who to recommend our books to. It doesn’t tell them that they should be recommending the books in the first place.

For that to happen, we need the retailers (or rather, their algorithms), to notice us.

And what’s the best way to achieve that? Sell some books.

I know, I know, it sounds like a chicken and egg problem: you need sales to get sales! But, again, put yourself in the shoes of a retailer — like that small indie bookstore owner we talked about. What would make you immediately take notice of a book? If several customers came in and asked for it. 

There’s a reason why most bookstores will reserve their most prominent displays to bestsellers: these books have already proven they’re able to sell. 

If you want a retailer to recommend your book — or display it in its most prominent place, which ultimately amounts to the same — you, too, need to prove your book’s ability to sell.

It’s like Aesop’s fable: “The gods help them that help themselves.” Except, here, the gods are bookstore owners, or algorithms.

That said, not all sales are equal. The way those sales happen is just as important as their number. For example, you may already know that sales at launch (i.e. during the first 30 days after a book has launched) hold extra weight in retailer’s algorithms.

The “new” factor is just as exciting as the “bestselling” one — and so if you mix the two, you hold the key to the algorithm gods’ hearts. Almost all online retailers, similar to the “newly released” shelf in physical bookstores, have “new releases lists” that they display prominently. The more sales you can generate at launch, the higher you can climb on those lists, and the more the retailers will want to recommend your book.

If you want another example of why timing matters, think about one-time spikes in sales, which I always recommend avoiding. Again, put yourself in the shoes of that bookstore owner: if you suddenly got 50 readers in a day asking you about a book you’d never heard about before, and then there are no enquiries for it again in the following week, what would you think? Probably that something weird happened on that day.

The same thing goes for sales spikes on retailers. If you sell 2-5 books a day, and suddenly sell 200 in a day, then back to 2-5, the retailers will see that spike as just weird. At best, they’ll ignore it. At worst, they could consider it an attempt to manipulate them into noticing your book (and trust me, retailers’ algorithms are just as tolerant of human beings’ ill-advised attempts to manipulate them as the ancient gods were). 

So if you’re planning a big marketing push for your book — maybe for its launch, or because you got a BookBub Featured Deal for it — make sure you spread it across several days, and draw a “plateau” or a “bell curve” in your sales graphs, rather than a spike:

Of course, it’s not just about the timing of sales, the provenance also matters.

“What do you mean by the provenance? Does it matter if I sell a book as a result of a newsletter vs an Amazon ad?”

The short answer is yes. For the long one, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until next week.

Happy writing, and happy marketing!

Ricardo

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