War on sales

I mentioned a few weeks back that Everybody Scream! was reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly and we were anxious to see what sales would be generated from that. We’ve had some time to see the results and the first thing we learned is it doesn’t happen all at once as soon as the issue comes out.

In fact it seems to take several weeks before orders start coming in. There have been a bunch of orders through Ingram which appear to be a result of the review and even some direct orders. One nice surprise was a request for a review copy from a school that may want Jeff as a guest speaker. However, there has not been a torrent of demand for the book and the orders seem to come in spurts. They’re still coming so it’s too early to tell what the final outcome will be but it appears that PW is not a magic sales bullet. It’s certainly going to help but this job would be so much easier if there was just one thing you could do that would drive a whole bunch of sales. I knew PW was important but it isn’t ‘the answer.’ As I’ve suspected there is no magic bullet for sales, the best hope is a machine gun spray of as many bullets as you can manage. It can be messy and wasteful, a lot of the bullets won’t hit anything, but you have more chances to hit something…now where’s my Rambo bandanna?