Sales of a book can be amazingly unpredictable. Writers, editors and agents work their butts off to produce a high quality project. We are all working together to insure when that book hits the book shelves, either in those brick and mortar stores, online or digitally, the readers are climbing over each other to buy the darn thing. And yet, more often than not, books just tank in sales. So what happened?
I know Jessica Faust was blogging sort of about this a couple of days ago when she talked about agents getting overly excited about a project. Remember, that was why we signed you in the first place. We fell head over heels in love with your story, those characters and that fantastic plot line. The editors do the exact same thing. But something happened along the way.
The problem here is that there is likely no one real good reason for the book not selling. It can be any number of variables, or even a combination of variables.
I know I mentioned this author before, but I worked with one person here at Greyhaus who had her book come out right in the middle of the collapse of Borders. Well crap! There went 50% of the sales and there was nothing more that could be done.
In other cases, it might be something as simple as the book cover design. That guy on the front cover of the romance novel just wasn't enough eye candy for the readers.
It might simply be the timing of the book. In this case, think about movie releases. You have this great movie ready to come out at Christmas time and then, darn it, the other company moves their release time earlier and now you are going head to head against The Hobbit.
I can go on and on here, but I want to get to the real point here. We cannot predict the future. We cannot insure sales will be there. What we can promise is that everyone is indeed working hard to get those sales to work for you. But like everything else in this business, we won't know until it happens.
Always a good perspective to have. Thanks for the wise tip.
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