Book Buyers vs Browsers On Your Website
I've gotten some complaints about my lack of publishing posts recently, just going through a midlife crisis, nothing to be concerned about. In looking back on my ten plus years of publishing online and selling books, I've become convinced that fine-tuning your sales pitch, while good for your soul, has a minimal impact on book sales. I started out selling copyshop printed books over ten years ago, with the tagline "it's cheaper than a new cartridge for your inkjet" to print-on-demand books today, with thousands of NY trade publisher sales in-between. It's hard to go wrong with an Amazon Associates link or two to your titles, sometimes I link books directly, sometimes I use an intermediate order page with other ordering options. I've experimented with links at the top of the page, at the bottom, in every corner and intra-paragraph position. I've even told other publishers at various times that one placement is better than another. Yet all of the experiments you run with the look and functionality of your publishing website pale next to the big question:
Are the people visiting your website buyers or browsers?
What I've learned, very slowly and without careful collection of statistics because the trends are too long-term and broad, is that you can't sell a book to a browser. That's by definition. Browsers browse, buyers buy. The interesting corollary to this rule is that buyers will figure out how to buy the book as long as you give them a half a chance. The color scheme, the payment method, the heat zones on your pages, they have some impact down in the margins, but the real challenge remains getting the right people to visit your website. The odds of converting somebody who doesn't want to buy a book into somebody who does are long and tedious. You might get a few more sales by making your site content so difficult to navigate and noisy with advertising that some visitors will buy out of frustration, but do you think they are likely to link to your site or tell a friend about it?
I remember being real excited when the order page for the second book I self published generated five times as many visitors as the order page for my first title. I was sure it would translate into five times the sales. Well, over time, it translated into the same number of sales, the audience for that book were just five times less likely to be buyers than the audience for the first title, no matter how I made the pitch. Somewhere in all the spasmodic page redesigns, I finally groked that the sales levels were remarkably stable with the overall visitor count. The people who were predisposed to buying a book when they arrived were figuring out how to do so and buying it. The browsers were either finding what they wanted or not and leaving. N'er the twain shall meet.
It's a lesson that's taken me a decade to learn, so take it for what it's worth. I've sold a half-dozen titles online at levels high enough to make these comparisons (say, over 1,000 copies) and the only constant is the average number of sales per title per visitor. All titles require hundreds or more visitors to sell a copy, the real measure is how many order page visits are required to sell a book. My best title converted around 1 in 20 order page visitors into a buyer, the worst is closer to 1 in 200, an order of magnitude difference. Note that I'm talking about trackable sales only, visitors who bought a book through my Amazon Associates account or direct from us. Visitors who returned to Amazon at a later date or ordered through a bookstore aren't included.
Another support for this argument is that visitors are just as likely to buy a book that I promote through an offhand mention on a page as a book that is excerpted in tens of thousands of words over a dozen pages. The offhand suggestion won't get as many sales as my own books because it won't get as many click-throughs to the order page, but the sales rates fall within the spectrum, usually near the higher end. Sometimes, I make some clever change and it has immediate results, record sales the next days, followed by a week of below average sales as the fates even out. I've even read some marketing books late in life, and some of the ideas sound brilliant, but they just haven't translated into sales. In the end, you can lead a browser to a sales page, but you can't make him buy.
Are the people visiting your website buyers or browsers?
What I've learned, very slowly and without careful collection of statistics because the trends are too long-term and broad, is that you can't sell a book to a browser. That's by definition. Browsers browse, buyers buy. The interesting corollary to this rule is that buyers will figure out how to buy the book as long as you give them a half a chance. The color scheme, the payment method, the heat zones on your pages, they have some impact down in the margins, but the real challenge remains getting the right people to visit your website. The odds of converting somebody who doesn't want to buy a book into somebody who does are long and tedious. You might get a few more sales by making your site content so difficult to navigate and noisy with advertising that some visitors will buy out of frustration, but do you think they are likely to link to your site or tell a friend about it?
I remember being real excited when the order page for the second book I self published generated five times as many visitors as the order page for my first title. I was sure it would translate into five times the sales. Well, over time, it translated into the same number of sales, the audience for that book were just five times less likely to be buyers than the audience for the first title, no matter how I made the pitch. Somewhere in all the spasmodic page redesigns, I finally groked that the sales levels were remarkably stable with the overall visitor count. The people who were predisposed to buying a book when they arrived were figuring out how to do so and buying it. The browsers were either finding what they wanted or not and leaving. N'er the twain shall meet.
It's a lesson that's taken me a decade to learn, so take it for what it's worth. I've sold a half-dozen titles online at levels high enough to make these comparisons (say, over 1,000 copies) and the only constant is the average number of sales per title per visitor. All titles require hundreds or more visitors to sell a copy, the real measure is how many order page visits are required to sell a book. My best title converted around 1 in 20 order page visitors into a buyer, the worst is closer to 1 in 200, an order of magnitude difference. Note that I'm talking about trackable sales only, visitors who bought a book through my Amazon Associates account or direct from us. Visitors who returned to Amazon at a later date or ordered through a bookstore aren't included.
Another support for this argument is that visitors are just as likely to buy a book that I promote through an offhand mention on a page as a book that is excerpted in tens of thousands of words over a dozen pages. The offhand suggestion won't get as many sales as my own books because it won't get as many click-throughs to the order page, but the sales rates fall within the spectrum, usually near the higher end. Sometimes, I make some clever change and it has immediate results, record sales the next days, followed by a week of below average sales as the fates even out. I've even read some marketing books late in life, and some of the ideas sound brilliant, but they just haven't translated into sales. In the end, you can lead a browser to a sales page, but you can't make him buy.
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