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.
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Links of Interest (April 30th 2007 through May 1st 2007) · All the Billion Other Moments
Posted on May 1st, 2007 at 5:31 pm.
[...] How A Small Press Author Stormed Amazon?s Charts (and beat Black Lab)Video interview with Scott Sigler about Ancestor’s performance on Amazon, and the reaction. [...]