Aaron Shepard on Aiming at Amazon

Aaron Shepard has been quite successful by focusing his publishing efforts on doing well on Amazon. His book, The Business of Writing for Children, is always highly ranked (currently in the low 2000s). Aaron has graciously agreed to be interviewed by the SmallPress Blog.

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1. Your latest book, Aiming at Amazon, is very much geared toward being successful utilizing Amazon. Can you give us a brief synopsis?

AS: Basically, I'm saying that it's a whole lot easier and more efficient for a self publisher to make money from nonfiction books by building sales on Amazon than to go the traditional route of trying to break into bookstores. But to do it, you have to orient your book from the ground up for online sales. Most publishers fail on Amazon because they treat it as an afterthought. A book aimed at bookstores is automatically handicapped on Amazon.

2. Can you give us one of the secrets from the book? (We promise to still buy it!)

AS: I focus a great deal on using print on demand through Lightning Source -- not because it's a "favorite" company of mine, but because it's the only avenue into Amazon, BN.com, and even Ingram that lets you control the discount you offer and maintain a high profit margin while minimizing your labor.

3. You have been successful in selling on Amazon. In particular, your book, The Business of Writing for Children, does quite well in terms of rankings. What do you do that we can emulate?

The success of that book has been built up through many different efforts, but two of the most important are optimizing both the title and the cover image for online sales. I discuss those matters in depth in Aiming at Amazon.

One of the main thrusts of my book is that marketing on Amazon is not something you "add on" when the book is done. Marketing starts with the concept, the research of market potential, and the writing and design of the book. Most books on Amazon publicity just provide a laundry list of special features that Amazon provides for promotion. My book does discuss some of those, but I try to make it clear that those are just the extras. If your book is not already set up for success, those features probably won't help.

I also try to discourage use of spamming practices that are often recommended by people who should know better, as well as get-rich-quick schemes aimed at newbies, like "instant Amazon bestsellers" and Amazon's own paid placements. These schemes are both unnecessary and in most cases useless -- essentially just ways to separate self-publishers from their money.

In fact, I have a plan for a competing service, and maybe some of your readers can tell me what they think. I call it SPB -- Small Press Bloodletting. (No relation to your own SPB, Tom.) The idea is that the publisher sends me $1000 and I send back $500. That's better than you'd do with most of those other programs.

4. Elsewhere you have shared the discount that you give Amazon and your reason for doing so. Can you do that here for SPB as well as give your reasoning?

I don't sell directly to Amazon at all. All my sales go through Lightning Source, which sells to Amazon, Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and Barnes & Noble. Amazon orders from Ingram as well as ordering directly from Lightning.

The discount to wholesalers that I set at Lightning Source is a "short discount" of 25%. That's what Ingram and B&T get. Ingram gives Amazon NO discount, while Lightning Source gives it SOME discount -- but it's not saying how much. I do know that it's less than Ingram gets.

The idea of setting a short discount at Lightning was to maximize my profit by keeping hold of the money that Amazon would otherwise pass through to customers through its own discounting. Of course, this means you don't get stocked in bookstores -- but bookstores weren't stocking my books anyway, just as with most self-publishers. that's one way that "aiming at Amazon" can free you to make money where it is really available.

The whole question of discounts, though, is currently a sticky one because Amazon seems to have started discriminating against books not just with short discounts, but also with standard ones. Amazon wants the same discounts a wholesaler gets, and it's weighting some features against books that don't provide it. So, it's more of an uphill battle for publishers like me who refuse to bow to the monster -- but I'm still thriving despite it.

Comments

[Mike Perry]

Your "sticky one" comment brings up the downside of your otherwise useful market strategy. It has the small publisher putting virtually all his sales "eggs" into Amazon's basket. As I am sure you realize, that's risky.

About 2001 I had a frustrating telephone conversation with Amazon's legal department about how it was displaying our edition of Arthur Balfour's classic Theism and Humanism. The book had gone into a second edition and someone who knew how to "game" their system was offering a supposedly used copy of our first edition for about $50. Keep in mind that both editions are $14.95 paperback reprints of a 1915 original that sells today to collectors for perhaps $20. Neither is worth $50.

Because that used copy seemed to offer Amazon far more profit than the small markup on our second edition, the results for some searches for the title on Amazon ONLY displayed the overpriced used version. Nothing else. Our far-cheaper paperback was completely invisible. Other types of searches, which apparently did not use that "maximize Amazon profit" algorithm, would display our inexpensive edition.

Amazon legal did not deny that this was happening or that it wasn't deliberate. They admitted that what a potential customer sees when they search is at least sometimes only what makes Amazon the most money. Since then, I've noticed that sometimes less profitable editions seem to be there but less easy to notice.

More recently, G. K. Chesterton's "The Ballad of the White Horse" was listed among five best books on a particular theme (tales of war) by the Wall Street Journal. For a few days, sales of our version, part of a collection called G. K. Chesterton's Early Poetry, were quite brisk, although perhaps not as brisk as they should have been. Again, it seemed to be how Amazon was gaming search results.

If I remember right, we had the least expensive paperback edition and our edition included other Chesterton poetry, making it the best deal by far. But when users searched for the title, they didn't get a list of all titles. They were sent directly to our hardback, which even I would admit was rather pricey. (It was intended for libraries and I had to pass along the high cost of Lightning hardbacks.) That's when what Amazon did got rather bizarre. The page for our hardback appeared to list a paperback edition, but people who clicked on it were sent to someone else's more expensive paperback. Only by playing around with various searches and looking down lists could you find one that took you to our paperback edition. Weird, but certainly consistent with a policy of showing website visitors search results that maximize Amazon profits.

That's why I've stuck with full discounts for our books. It gets them in some bookstores and, by giving Amazon more flexibility in their pricing, keeps a book from falling into the "black hole" Amazon reserves for books with low profit margins.

One moral of this rather sad tale is that publishers should encourage those who want to buy their book through Amazon to search using the ISBN. That does seem to always get to the title.

A SUGGESTION: Someone with the proper technical skills should offer small print-on-demand publishers an online alternative to Amazon, one that would give us the no-hassle, no inventory advantages of doing print on demand through Lightning without making us so dependent on Amazon for sales.

It'd work something like this. If you set up an account and send them properly formatted data, Ingram will already direct-ship Lightning titles to customers for a publisher . For a small publisher with a few titles, all the hassles of creating an online store to do that make doing it alone a poor idea.

But suppose anyone publishing via Lightning/Ingram could set up an account with a third party, either a business or a co-operative, who'd handle all the billing and data processing. A small publisher could have what appeared to be his own direct-order online store without the hassle of maintaining it himself. He'd get the publisher slice of the profit and the sort of markup Amazon gets without running an online store or being dependent on Amazon's whims.

Even better would be an online store that pools all Lightning publishers who want to join in one large, virtual online store with enough titles that many users would check out prices there. Since small publishers could quit at any time, they would be its primary clients, so it would be run for them without Amazon's games. It could even, with a few exceptions, offer prices that were guaranteed to match or better Amazon's. And this alternative would give publishers control over how their books come up in searches, how they are priced, and how they are displayed.

Most important of all, it'd offer something that authors and publishers desperately need--a competitor to Amazon that will pressure it to be more accountable. Amazon is very close to being a monopoly, and that's bad news for almost everyone.

--Mike Perry, editor of Chesterton on War (out in January)