Tindal Street Press's summer ebook success
Tuesday, 20th September 2011
Tindal Street Press is delighted to report a double ebook success this summer, topping the Amazon digital book charts throughout the summer months.
Bone and Cane by David Belbin, a regional crime story set in Nottingham with a 1997 General Election background, attracted ebook readers attention during May and June when it was a number 1 bestseller for three weeks. To date, this format has sold over 30,000 ebooks. At one point it was the bestselling novel on Amazon in all formats, outselling the number one paperback.
David Belbin is a well-known bestselling young adult author, and this is his debut as a crime writer for adults. He has already written the next in the Bone and Cane series, The Drugs Don’t Work, to be published in 2012 and launched in a special Boxing Day Kindle promotion.
But our biggest success came with That Summer in Ischia: marketed as the perfect summer read. It outperformed all other titles on the Amazon Summer Reads promotion, selling more than 74,000 during the two months of July and August and remaining number one for most of that period.
That Summer in Ischia is the debut novel of Liverpool-based Penny Feeny, a mystery in which the events of a kidnapping in 1979 cast a long shadow into the present day as a young girl travels back to the Italian island of Ischia to find out what happened to her mother in that eventful summer.
In both cases heavily discounted ebook sales have lead to high chart positions and word-of-mouth, and have improved the sales of their physical books. The ebook success paves the way for successful mass market editions of their books early in 2012.
Publishing Director, Alan Mahar comments: ‘We have had most of our books available in ebook format as a matter of course, but sales have usually been small. This summer the clear genre appeal of a regional crime novel and a summer beach romance have reached more readers than we could have expected. Our experiment with high discount has made a significant difference to the visibility of the books and therefore to sales. It’s a bonus for us at a time when bookshop sales have been doubly hit by the recession and the digital revolution. We are proceeding with care, but we believe these ebook sales may enhance rather than damage future book sales’
