Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
How A Small Press Author Stormed Amazon’s Charts (and beat Black Lab)
Scott Sigler works in downtown San Francisco, and hasn’t taken a day off from his day job in the last month to promote his new science fiction book Ancestor. So, how he got to #7 on Amazon was a wake-up call to many in the publishing industry. Turns out that podcasting your novels - and giving them away for free as PDFs - builds a large and loyal following.
Ancestor, is Sigler’s second novel, both of which have been podcast. I’ve been running into Sigler at San Francisco podcast Meetup events for the last year, and although I wasn’t amazed by his efforts at podcasting his sci-fi/mashup genre novels (so-so audio), I was impressed by the rabid and rapidly growing following that he was cultivating, as well as the fact that he was mounting an effort to coordinate his follow-up to “Kill Amazon” - yes, that’s seriously what it was called: Ancestor Kills Amazon.
In March, alt rock band Black Lab tried to do the same thing, and managed to sell 14,000 copies of their 2006 song “Mine Again” on iTunes, sending the song to #11 on the iTunes U.S. rock charts, according to Mike Musgrove at the Washington Post. While Sigler may not have sold as many copies as Black Lab, his gross is far higher; by the end of the first week, Sigler had sold 3,800 copies at Amazon’s price of $13.53. Which means his gross (about $51,000) is about four times higher than that of Black Lab’s (about $13,000).
And that’s what rocketed Ancestor to the #7 spot on Amazon for a day (and the #1 spot in Amazon’s Horror category and #4 in Amazon’s sci-fi category), and got Sigler’s other novel Infection (now retitled Infested) signed to Random House’s Crown imprint, where it will be reissued in hardcover next summer. Sigler’s next book, The Rookie, comes out in November.
Adam Comes Aboard, Podcast Hotel & Web 2.0
Howdy. I’m Adam Metz.
I’m the newest addition to the LaunchSquad staff, and what a perfect week to join the team. I’ll be handling a number of new initiatives at LaunchSquad and consulting with clients on social media, including projects that involve blogging, vodcasting, podcasting and viral campaigns. With apologies to famed rockumentarian Marty DiBergi: enough of my yappin’! This a crazy week in San Francisco.
The O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo began Sunday night at The Moscone Center, right down the street from LaunchSquad, and today is arguably the coolest day of the conference. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is being interviewed by John Battelle, Web 2.0 conference Program Chair, at 11:30 a.m.
I should be over there this afternoon and tomorrow, along with Jeremy Frank from Launchsquad. You can catch me on Twitter at the conference (LaunchSquadAdam) or on IM (ajmetz [at] mac.com).
This weekend (April 20 and 21), an amazing event comes to San Francisco’s Swedish American Hall – Podcast Hotel. I’m really looking forward to this conference/unconference, because it contains some of the coolest talks of the season, like the Friday afternoon roundtable, “How do Podcasting and DIY Media Mix With Music Marketing Today?”, which features Corey Denis from IODA and Kevin Seal from Pandora - two of the most innovative companies in new media today. (Full disclosure: IODA is the digital distributor for my tiny record label, Baum Records) The Saturday-morning keynotes from Jonathan Cobb (Kiptronic) and Robert Scoble (PodTech, ex-Microsoft) should also be awesome.
Dance dance revolution: the opening night party Thursday night (7 p.m.) at Madrone Lounge should be pretty insane, and it features Lucaso from The Sound Culture Podcast on the decks. I hear he goes to eleven.
See you on Twitter, at the conferences, or on the dance floor.
