I undertook an interesting exercise last night. And the results surprised even me.

Comparing The Spanish Helmet with NZ 2011 Top Ten Fiction

Nielsen produce lists of top selling books in New Zealand. You can find this information on the Booksellers NZ website.
I took the list of the top 10 selling NZ fiction for adults and compared the statistics, rankings, reviews, and likes of these on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Goodreads (a popular social network for book lovers) with the same for The Spanish Helmet.

The Spanish Helmet Rankings

When compared with the top 10 New Zealand books…

Amazon.com

• #4 ranking of sales in paperback
• #2 ranking of sales in Kindle format
• #2 ranking of sales overall
• #3 highest review score

Amazon.co.uk

•  #8 ranking of sales in paperback
• #1 ranking of sales in Kindle format
• #1 ranking of sales overall
• #1 equal highest review score

Goodreads.com

• #1 highest review rating
• #5 highest count of reviews, likes (adds), and ratings

How Did this Happen?

There are few reasons for this crazy success. One is probably responsible for all of the others. I chose to self-publish instead of allowing a traditional publishing house to take on my work and price it out of the market while failing to manage the biggest sales channels on earth.

Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk are by far and away the most important sales outlets for novels. It’s a sad fact that a NZ novel that doesn’t appear on these sites is most-likely only going to sell in New Zealand. And that means a handful of copies. A runaway NZ success sells about 10,000 copies over it’s lifetime. There are exceptions, and one that stands out is the work of Lloyd Jones. It is his novels that top me on nearly every list and I have huge respect for that.

However, one of the top ten novels wasn’t present on either Amazon site. Two of the novels had never sold a copy or been ranked on either site. The pricing of the NZ novels was mostly far too high to compete on Amazon.

Kindle Ignored to Author’s Peril

The saddest part is that many NZ authors are missing out on Kindle sales. Those who are published on Kindle the priced are too high to make an impact.

On the Amazon.com, 6 of the top 10 NZ novels were on Kindle, yet sales of The Spanish Helmet are estimated to be over 10 times higher than the next ranked novel and the rank as second most sold doesn’t look to be broken soon.  The review scores help here too.

It is worse on the Amazon.co.uk site, which is hard to comprehend because the average UK reader has much more comprehension of NZ ways than a US reader. Only 2 of the top 10 NZ novels are on Kindle in the UK. That is a tradgedy.

Thanks to All Readers

I would, therefore, like to offer my heartfelt appreciation to all of the readers who have brought The Spanish Helmet to the place where it is today. I look forward sharing more stories with you in the future.