First with the News

Well, my memoir has been selling for 59 days and I think it's doing pretty well. I've learned a lot about the publishing business since First with the News went on the market on November 30. Amazon is undoubtedly the king of the book world. People turn to Amazon, and can make choices about ordering a book because they learn everything they need to know about a book: the front cover image, author profile, details of the content, a free look inside the book to get a taster, reviews, and the daily changing rankings. A mass of information. Other retailers on their websites are nowhere near as informative. So Amazon scoops it up. Well done Amazon. For the author it's quite exciting to watch the rankings, specially when they go up dramatically, like mine did this week. One major book-business company I hadn't heard of before is Nielsen BookData UK , They supply retailers with bibliographic and biographical details of every book. They seem to be very proficient and professional but it's up to retailers how much info they put on their websites. It seems to me that if they want to make money out of a book, the more info they put on their websites the better, both for them and for the author. Doesn't that make sense? Yet I have found I have had to spend long hours contacting retailers and asking them to at least put the image of my book on their website. No one is going to order a book if  all they have is a title and an author's name, unless they personally know the writer. As every author before me has presumably learned, writing a book is far easier than marketing  and selling it!!