MSI Press Blog

It is Tuesday. Time to tall turkey. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side. Today's topic  is the anatomy of a successful book. We are talking here about books by small presses, micro presses, and self-published authors. Large presses have a different sales volume and a different approach to marketing and sales not typically available to those without their big pockets. The image of a successful book is a high volume of sales from the get-go (and maybe even from pre-orders) that either steadily builds or starts big and stays there on a flat trajectory. Conversely, if a book starts slowly, stumbles, and has a long spell of poor sales, one often assumes that the book is and always will be a poor s

  It is Tuesday. Time to tall turkey. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is--for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side. Today's topic  is a real conversation that I had this morning with one of our authors, but I have changed the numbers and other information to keep identities private. It is not unusual; I have this discussion often with new authors, concerned with low volume of sales who are certain that the distributor's numbers are not right. The discussion in this case is about paperback book sales. E-book sales would take a separate column. Author: I asked you for my sales stats for the year, and you told me that I had sold no books last week, but my friend bought a book and sent me a copy of the Amazon packaging.  A book pur

(photo by  Frank Perez) It is Tuesday. Time to tall turkey. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is--for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side. Today's topic is about figuring out your book sales. Many authors try to figure out their sales based on some inaccurate thinking or assumptions.  Amazon posts a sales ranking. If you look at your ranking, it can appear that your book is selling more (the number is lower than it was a few minutes ago) or selling less (the number is higher than it was a few minutes ago). Actually, that number does not tell you anything about the number of books sold. A higher number could mean more books were sold, fewer books were sold, or no books were sold. The number is a relative one based on recency of purch