It’s been a little over nine years since my first book, Growing Great Employees, was published in December of 2006. At the time, about 75% of book sales still happened in brick and mortar stores. I remember that most of my publisher’s efforts went into getting distribution into Barnes & Noble and Borders, with a bit of effort to make sure it was available on Amazon.
Fast forward to today, when Borders is no more, B&N has shrunk and re-trenched, and online book sales have surpassed in-store sales. Which brings us to Amazon, now the 800-pound gorilla of the publishing world. As online book sales have exploded over the past decade, and because Amazon now has almost two-thirds of that new market share, all of us authors and publishers are dancing to their tune.
One of the many things I love about my new publisher, Bibliomotion, is that they are fully accepting this new reality — and are learning quickly and continuously how to best operate in this new world. I love finding out from them about how to make things work with Amazon.
For instance, because Amazon’s goal is to get people things they want, as quickly, simply and inexpensively as possible (they believe that this total focus on the customer is key to their own success and growth) they’re continually trying to figure out the “things they want” part. That is, how can they let their customers know about things that they might like and want to buy.
Recently, they’ve discovered if a book has a lot of pre-orders and a number of early reviews, it’s more likely to be something a lot of people will want — so Amazon sits up and starts to do things for that book: highlighting and promoting it in various ways.
So we want to take advantage of this, with your help. We’ve created a special pre-order offer for you — one that will benefit you and us. Here’s how it works:
- Go to Amazon and pre-order Be Bad First
- Then come back here, to erikaandersen.com, and type in your email address and pre-order number under the “Be Bad First Pre-Order” heading on the home page.
That’s it. And as a thank you for doing that, we’ll send you two gifts: A one-month all-access membership to proteusleader.com, our online resource that’s chock full of dozens of great, snack-sized nuggets of real leadership and management learning; and an exclusive PDF of the first article I ever wrote about the Be Bad First model (you can see how it’s evolved).
Thank you very much — both for reading my blog, and for helping Be Bad First find its audience in this brave new world of publishing .