Have you seen Hazlitt? It’s Random House Canada’s new online pop culture/literary magazine. It’s slick as hell. I read it as RH’s attempt to do what they should have started doing in 1995, when Amazon first launched—create an inviting, online presence so readers know they exist and what books they “curate.” I haven’t researched this so I don’t know if or when there will be a similar RH USA offering. It may be that they’re keeping everything under wraps until 2029, when they’ll unveil their mind-blowing, cutting-edge device: the ereader.
Using Mean, Mode and Median to Evaluate Also-Boughts
Self-pubbed authors are always debating ebook pricing strategies. Former math editor that I am, it occurred to me that you could look at data gleaned from your book’s also-boughts to see what they tell you about the customers who have bought your books.
The also-boughts (or “alsobots”) are typically located under your book’s product description on Amazon. They look like this. (Click to enlarge.)
In this case the author (not me) has about 17 pages of books that were bought along with his. If you go through each of the titles and write down the book prices, you get a nice collection of data on purchasing patterns.
A refresher is probably necessary here.
The price (or prices) that appears most frequently is/are known as the mode.
The average of all the prices—add them all up and divide by the number of individual prices—is the mean.
The number that appears in the middle of all these prices when you rank them from lowest to highest is the median.
One of my books—a nonfiction collection of my science articles—has only 5 pages of also-boughts. When I worked my way through the calculations, here’s what I found:
* I had 20 data points in all.
* The mean (average) price was $5.0035, or $5.00.
* The median (right-in-the-middle) price was $2.99.
* The mode (most frequent) price was $.99.
(You don’t have do these calculations by hand, by the way. You can use calculators like this one, this one or this one.)
This gives us some food for thought. You can use the results to ask yourself some questions:
* Am I pricing too low? (If both the mean and median are higher than your book’s price, you might consider adjusting.)
* Am I pricing too high? (Both mean and median are lower than your book’s price.)
* Am I living in cheapskate city? (Your mean and median are consistently lower than those of ebooks by comparable authors. The mode and even the median for all your titles is always $.99.)
Traditionally published books by name authors tend to display also-boughts that are solidly in the mainstream price range: $9.99 to $12.99.
Are the customers who’ve bought these books ignorant of the ocean of better-priced self-published books out there? Are they consciously avoiding them? Is there too much competition to be listed as an also-bought for a book by a Patterson, a Lee Child or even a Malcolm Gladwell that the algorithm favors higher-priced books over lower-priced ones? Does the evidence support the suggestion that there’s a self-pubbed pricing ghetto?
Or are there other reasons?
Uncertainties
This kind of data is interesting but problematic, for the following reasons.
* Book prices are dynamic. The price you’re seeing in also-boughts when you do your calculations may not be what customers originally paid.
* Inclusion as an also-bought is highly selective. You’ve sold a thousand of a certain title. Great. But you don’t see 1,000 also-boughts or even 500. You’re getting skewed data to begin with.
* Those who’ve designed software similar to the kind used by Amazon say systems can be inaccurate when reflecting customer buys or making recommendations. Think how often Netflix, Twitter, or Tumblr recommend films or follows you’d never spring for in a million years.)
Conclusion
Math is fun, but maddening when you don’t have all the facts. Mean, mode and median can be an interesting guide, but not the only one. My gut tells me to price my books somewhere in the range between $2.99 and $4.99, and this analysis seems to support my gut. (My median was $2.99 and my mean is $5.00.)
But this is what drives me nuts. Part of me can’t help wondering if I’m not caught in a self-fulfilling loop. Six of my also-bought data points are for ebooks priced $8.99 or higher. If customers were willing to spring for those books, why wouldn’t they spring for mine at that price? Sane me answers, “Because your name isn’t Oliver Sacks, Malcolm Gladwell, or Mary Roach, dumbass.”
So: If you’re picking prices with your gut, you might welcome the chance to put some calculations behind your decision. Just understand that the analysis may not be any more accurate than your gut. And if you’re like me, your brain will still give you doubts.
Outlining a book
I always outline when I’m writing nonfiction. It just seems to make sense. The editor tells you what the publication is looking for. They spell it out in your “letter of agreement.” You do the reporting, then sit down and organize the facts exactly the way everyone has told you they want it. In this respect, writing nonfiction is a little like elementary school. They hit you with facts, you spit them right back.
Journalist Jon Franklin wrote an amazing book called "Writing For Story" that describes a powerful method for outlining short articles and nonfiction stories for maximum dramatic effect. He says that writers who try to write a complex story without outlining will inevitably reach a point where they begin "spaghettiing" — churning out copy that doesn’t have a strong focus.
I agree. Nailing down an outline before you write a nonfiction article usually results in writing only one or two drafts.
But all this goes out the window when I’m writing fiction. When I do fiction, I just start writing scenes I feel compelled to write now. And I keep numerous files with scraps, ideas, etc., of other scenes I know I’ll need in the future.
I once saw P.D. James talk about a similar method in a BBC interview. If she felt like writing a “bit of action” today, she bloody well would. That was a revelation to me. I had never known that you could do a book that way. I had assumed I should start at the beginning, write all of the way through in sequence, and start over with revisions. That’s what I’d done with everything I’d ever written.
Lawrence Block says outlining is nice, but don’t ever fool yourself that you have your entire book figured out. That’s an illusion. Better ideas will come along as you write and you need to be open to incorporating them. (By the way, I suspect that those who honed their craft prior to the age of computers learned to compose much more finished drafts than we do today.)
Today, I write as quickly and as far as I can in my piecemeal mode until I start to get irritated. That’s my spaghetti point. That’s when I know it’s time to see if everything I’ve written can be plotted on an outline, and if I can discern a coherent structure in it all. By then, I know a lot about the characters, their world, the story, and where I want to go. I start moving the scenes around in Scrivener, and it actually becomes fun, thinking of all the different ways I could build tension if I move this here or there.
Write first, then outline seems to be my current modus operandi. Wash the clothes, then hang them out to dry. An analogue to this might well be David Lynch’s index-card approach to making a film, only not nearly as crazy or as brilliant.
What do you do?
My story "Even" appears today on Shotgun Honey
My story “Even” is running today at Shotgun Honey. Thanks to Sabrina Ogden, Ron Earl Phillips and their team for choosing it and putting it all together. I picture the story taking place in a kitchen somewhere in New Jersey, but admittedly it could be anywhere. Those of you who know me through my children’s writing ought to be prepared before you read this. It’s definitely not for kids. And please, whatever you do, don’t tell my mom you caught me writing dirty words.
Ghosting while ghosting
I’m waiting on edits on two books I’m ghosting for other people, so I’m using the lull to get a good first draft together of my new novel, “The Marshal of the Borgo.”
The book’s set in an unnamed nation that’s suspiciously very much like Italy. “Borgo” is Italian for burg, as in Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Clevesburg. The anglicized version of the word is borough. Americans also use that term. I grew up in a town in New Jersey that used the abbreviation boro on their official stationery and town seal.
Until this week, I was having trouble describing the book’s genre. Then I ran across this post by mystery writer Elizabeth Zelvin, who talks about the stigma of introducing elements of magic into otherwise straight mysteries. She describes a recent short she did of this type as a “paranormal whodunit.” I’ve never heard the term before, but Google tells me that it certainly is out there.
I don’t know if I’m writing one these books yet. I’ll see how it turns out. I do know that I’m playing straight with the murder investigation in the book. It’s just that the detective has some unresolved issues in his past that can only be dealt with via the paranormal route. You might well ask, “Why can’t you just drop that magic crap and give us a straight mystery?”
Two answers to that: One is, the book doesn’t want to be a straight mystery. The second is, straight mysteries just don’t interest me much anymore.
More later as I sort this out.
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News:
* My short short story, “Even,” should be running Monday on Shotgun Honey, barring last-minute schedule changes. I’ll post a link when I have it. I hope you’ll check it out.
* The domain of this website is now officially daggyland.com. Your RSS feeds will continue to work, no problem, because it’s still a Tumblr blog under the skin. If you’re a stickler, you might want to save the new address to your reader: feed://daggyland.com/rss
Cover Reveal: The Girls of Atomic City!
This just in!
My wife and sometimes co-author Denise Kiernan just got the cover of her next book, The Girls of Atomic City, about the women who unknowingly worked to create the fuel for the first bomb.
It’s a true story—a narrative nonfiction title that will be published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster in March 2013.
I’m proud of her. It’s a project she’s been working on, in various ways, for the last seven years or so.
To find out more, you can check out Denise’s website…
Sign up for the newsletter at the book site…
Check out her old-timey WWII-era images on her Tumblr blog.
You can pre-order via Amazon.
Or pre-order a signed copy via our indie bookstore, Malaprops.
I’ll post again about this when she gets a trailer together.
Jonathan Mayberry is a wise man
“Everyone should have at least one Hollywood experience as a way of learning some crucial life lessons, namely: Don’t get your hopes up; don’t hold your breath; don’t expect the quick fix; and also don’t give up.”
— author Jonathan Maberry, as quoted in "On The Convergence of Indie and Traditional Publishing"