Paid Content documents Amazon Publishing's haphazard start. Sales have not been stellar, but 3 of the 5 best sellers were from Seth Godin's Domino Project:
After The Hangman’s Daughter, the most successful print titles I tracked were both from Seth Godin’s imprint, The Domino Project: Poke the Box, by Godin himself, which has sold 23,436 copies in print, according to BookScan, and Stephen Pressfield’s Do the Work (publication date: 4/2011), which sold 8,288 copies in print. Another Domino Project book, Anything You Want by Derek Sivers (6/2011) was Amazon’s fifth bestselling print title, with 5,702 copies sold. Sales of 5,000 to 10,000 copies is hardly spectacular in the traditional publishing world, but it’s not bad either.
Why The Domino Project Works…
Seth Godin is clearly doing well with Amazon Publishing—but he was also doing pretty well before he signed up with them. He operates his imprint “99.7 percent independently,” he told me. “Sometimes I ask [Amazon] for their insight, but then I make my own insights about what I want to do with the info I got.” For example, Amazon was able to tell Godin that people often bought his books in bulk, which gave him the idea of selling Domino Project titles in multi-packs.
I asked Godin if Amazon has helped him with the marketing of the Domino Project books. “Most of what people think of as marketing has been done by us, The Domino Project,” he said. “By far the biggest tool we’ve had in selling the books is our blog, which has 50,000 subscribers.” The Domino Project also sends copies of its books to word-of-mouth marketing company BzzAgent .
Godin's approach was to treat Amazon as a fulfillment platform, not a marketing channel. He marketed direct to customers, using Amazon's back end to handle all the fulfillment. The Domino Project's logo says it all:
Once his direct marketing had pushed books onto Amazon's best seller list, he also benefited from Amazon's huge existing user base. But the marketing ooomph came from Domino, not Amazon.
A lesson for publishers and self publishers: the big platforms (Amazon, Apple, Google) can make your life easier, but they don't do the hardest part of your job for you.
My guess is that most Packt and other "how to" tech books are really lean over. Mainly people have them on their desk (or a PDF in a separate window) at the same time as they're doing the work. What's your experience?
