How to Search Amazon.com
A lot of the questions I get from authors and publishers have me go search Amazon.com to provide an answer. This is somewhat inefficient for both parties, especially when you can search Amazon yourself. Most people stop with the search box that comes up on every Amazon page, and never even click the Advanced Search tab. The form they present on Advanced Search you with date, titles, subjects and publishers is pretty useful, but it can't match Power Search for flexibility.
Power Search, which is just a big empty box at the bottom of the Advanced Search page, allows you to do Boolean type searches, with AND, OR, NOT, not to mention field operators, like TITLE, PUBLISHER, BEFORE, AFTER, LANGUAGE, even READING AGE. It takes a while to get used to the query syntax, you can use parenthesis () for order, and colons : indicate the field that's being sorted in the expression.
For example, a lot of subsidy published authors would like to know how their titles are performing relative to other subsidy published books. If you power search Amazon with PUBLISHER: (iuniverse AND xlibris AND authorhouse) you'll get a 58,000 title plus sort of the big three subsidy publishers. At the moment, the top book is "With a Little Faith" by Jude Stringfellow, which is selling a half dozen or so copies a day on Amazon, outranking all but the top 5,000 or so titles. The #2 title at the moment is "The 45 Second Presentation That Will Change Your Life" by Don Failla and Joe Hardwick. This book was published in 2000, and is the #3 title in the Amazon Category "Business & Investing > Business Life > Communication > Meetings & Presentations". At number three in our instantaneous subsidy published bestseller list, we have, "Atheist Universe: Why God Didn't Have A Thing To Do With It"
by David Mills". The book tops the 223 title strong "Religion & Spirituality > Spirituality > Atheism" category on Amazon.
These and other subsidy published titles easily located by searching on Amazon.com are outselling most, if not all of the trade published competition, and the authors can be rightly proud of their success. While I think that it's unfortunate they didn't choose the self-publishing route and keep the publisher's share of the money, it doesn't take anything away from the commercial viability of their titles.
On the other hand, I hope that authors who are considering spending significant sums of money on subsidy publishing fees run some of these searches themselves as a reality check on their investment. If the goal is earning a living as an author, subsidy publishing is not the way to get there. Of the 58,000 plus titles the sort brings up, maybe one tenth of one percent have achieved significant Amazon sales. One thing that does become clear paging down the list is that many of these titles are labors of love, so the bottom line isn't the only measure of success. Just be forewarned and don't throw good money after bad if you find out that you, and not your book, is the business for a company you've contracted with:-)
Power Search, which is just a big empty box at the bottom of the Advanced Search page, allows you to do Boolean type searches, with AND, OR, NOT, not to mention field operators, like TITLE, PUBLISHER, BEFORE, AFTER, LANGUAGE, even READING AGE. It takes a while to get used to the query syntax, you can use parenthesis () for order, and colons : indicate the field that's being sorted in the expression.
For example, a lot of subsidy published authors would like to know how their titles are performing relative to other subsidy published books. If you power search Amazon with PUBLISHER: (iuniverse AND xlibris AND authorhouse) you'll get a 58,000 title plus sort of the big three subsidy publishers. At the moment, the top book is "With a Little Faith" by Jude Stringfellow, which is selling a half dozen or so copies a day on Amazon, outranking all but the top 5,000 or so titles. The #2 title at the moment is "The 45 Second Presentation That Will Change Your Life" by Don Failla and Joe Hardwick. This book was published in 2000, and is the #3 title in the Amazon Category "Business & Investing > Business Life > Communication > Meetings & Presentations". At number three in our instantaneous subsidy published bestseller list, we have, "Atheist Universe: Why God Didn't Have A Thing To Do With It"
by David Mills". The book tops the 223 title strong "Religion & Spirituality > Spirituality > Atheism" category on Amazon.
These and other subsidy published titles easily located by searching on Amazon.com are outselling most, if not all of the trade published competition, and the authors can be rightly proud of their success. While I think that it's unfortunate they didn't choose the self-publishing route and keep the publisher's share of the money, it doesn't take anything away from the commercial viability of their titles.
On the other hand, I hope that authors who are considering spending significant sums of money on subsidy publishing fees run some of these searches themselves as a reality check on their investment. If the goal is earning a living as an author, subsidy publishing is not the way to get there. Of the 58,000 plus titles the sort brings up, maybe one tenth of one percent have achieved significant Amazon sales. One thing that does become clear paging down the list is that many of these titles are labors of love, so the bottom line isn't the only measure of success. Just be forewarned and don't throw good money after bad if you find out that you, and not your book, is the business for a company you've contracted with:-)
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