I rarely use SFScope as a personal soapbox, but I’m interrupting the regular flow of sf/f/h news and opinions to ask for a little help on a non-fiction book. Specifically, my The Presidential Book of Lists. As I said on my Presidential blog:
I just got my first royalty statement for The Presidential Book of Lists. And to forestall the questions: no, I’m not rich. No, the book didn’t earn out the advance. Yes, the trade paperback sales were about what I was expecting.
So why am I posting this? Well, I have some question as to the electronic book sales numbers. To wit, the statement shows electronic book sales of 29. Yes, twenty-nine electronic copies of the book sold.
E-books are still a new thing, and there are no real hard numbers on the size of the market, so it is quite possible that my book (which was at one point the #1 seller among Amazon’s Kindle trivia books, and #6 in the political humor category) really did sell only 29 copies, but I doubt it (Random House’s catalog shows it available at nearly 20 different e-book retailers). So I’m running a little non-scientific experiment, a survey. I’m looking for people who actually bought the electronic version of the book during this royalty period (that is, between October 2008 and the last day of March 2009). If you did, could you please e-mail—at tpbol [at] hotmail [dot] com—with the date you bought/downloaded it, the format, and the site you bought it from? You don’t have to worry about giving out your address: the only thing I’m going to do with these e-mails is add them up and give the totals to my agent (if, indeed, they show more than 29 sales). I’ll also report back on the aggregate data, if it shows anything else, to help with the discovery of real sales numbers for electronic books.
Thanks very much for helping me with this. And feel free, please to repost this request or tell your friends about it.
This article reflects the delimma that most authors find themselves in, and more so for those of us who don’t receive advances. The only help I can give you is to blog, tweet, and blog some more. I wish you well and hope your sales increase dramatically.
I won’t be surprised if the sales data turns out to be accurate (indeed, it’s way easier to account ebook sales accurately than brick-and-mortar sales, which are returnable or strippable, and involve a much, much larger numbers of vendors for a well-distributed book).
One reality is that ebook sales are still a tiny, tiny part of the industry (you’ll note how rarely the evangelists — and I’m one myself — talk hard numbers: this is why).
Another is that Amazon now subdivides its bestsellers’ lists so many ways (including Kindle vs. non-Kindle) and updates them so frequently (hourly, near as I can tell) that it’s easy to top one (my own WWW:WAKE hit #1 on Amazon’s Technothriller bestsellers list back for a few hours back in April, which is fun, but nuts; I simply don’t routinely outsell Michael Crichton, Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, Lincoln Child, or Brad Thor, who were ranked below me for that brief moment in time).
That said, I loved your book (as you know, I bought a copy from Larry Smith at Readercon) — it’s compulsively readable, and you should be very proud, Ian!