The Excel Essentials 2019 series is out! That consists of three titles, Excel 2019 Beginner, Excel 2019 Intermediate, and Excel 2019 Formulas & Functions.
I’m going to take a moment to talk about them and then I’ll dive in on some thoughts for the writer folks who follow this blog.
So, how do these differ from the Excel Essentials series? If you’ve already read Excel for Beginners, Intermediate Excel, 50 Useful Excel Functions, and 50 More Excel Functions do you need to buy these, too?
The answer is no. These books are written specifically for anyone using Excel 2019 but 97% of what I talk about in the two series remains unchanged so if you already read the first series you’re fine.
In the formulas & functions book I do cover a few new functions, IFS and TEXTJOIN being the two main ones. MINIFS and MAXIFS as well. But in the prior series I covered nested IF functions and CONCATENATE which were the old way to accomplish the same thing as IFS and TEXTJOIN. And the older functions are still better choices if backwards compatibility is an issue.
Which is why I continue to recommend the Excel Essentials books for anyone using an older version of Excel or who needs to worry about structuring things so they work for others using older versions of Excel.
I basically came out with these books because I just upgraded computers which meant upgrading my Office version to 2019 so I had access to it and also because I know there are users out there who want a book focused on their particular version of Excel so why not give it to them now that I could.
Which is the perfect segue (an interesting word because I want spell it very differently based on the way it’s pronounced) to talking about this from the writer perspective.
Whether you write fiction or non-fiction you always have to think about self-cannibalization at some point if you’re going to publish more than one title.
On the fiction side writers do this when they release bundles. If I have a bundle of books 1 through 3 and books 1 through 3 available on a standalone basis I should expect that some readers will buy the bundle instead of books 1 through 3 standalone. Which means that every sale of the bundle is a sale I don’t get of books 1, 2, and 3.
But it can make sense to do so anyway, because there are readers who are bundle readers who won’t buy a book standalone and it’s also often a way to reach readers who won’t pay as much without having to discount the standalone titles. So you broaden your potential audience in two ways.
The drawback is on a site like Amazon that is so rankings-driven it can decrease overall visibility. Maybe. Because sometimes getting a Bookbub promo is easier with a bundle which can then increase visibility. (Of course at that point you’re selling at high volume but low per-unit profit, but that trade off can make a lot of sense depending on when you do it. My general inclination is to price low only when I have somewhere more expensive for readers to go after that because it’s not easy to make a living on 35 cents a sale.)
In non-fiction there are any number of ways to do this as well.
One is an updated edition of a book. Most readers if there’s a 2010 and a 2020 edition of a book will buy the 2020 edition assuming it’s the “better” edition so publishing a new edition often means no longer getting sales of the editions.
If someone takes another pass at the material you assume they will find better ways to say what they were saying the first time around and update the book for any changes over time.
(Although I will say with cookbooks this isn’t always true. I have Better Homes & Gardens cookbooks spanning thirty years and some of the older recipes are the better-tasting ones because they weren’t trying to be heart-healthy. Although, let’s just take a moment to be glad that 1970’s entertaining suggestions stayed in the 70’s. Hanging bananas off of a centerpiece is an idea no one should have ever had, ever.)
Getting back to the point.
With non-fiction other ways I’ve cannibalized my own sales is through bundles. For example, I have the Excel Essentials title which is the four Excel books from the original series combined into one title.
(Even though it’s a discount over the four individual titles, the individual titles still sell much better, probably because the initial price point seems daunting to someone who hasn’t read my books yet.)
I also have the Easy Excel Essentials books which are extracted from the main series titles and focus on specific topics, like Pivot Tables.
They’re less economical for people to buy if they buy them all but people do still buy them either because they only care about one specific topic (Pivot Tables or Conditional Formatting) or because the price point seems more reasonable to them. They’d rather buy six books for $3 each than buy three books for $5-$6 each even if there’s less overall content in the six books.
Of course, another reason to release new titles has nothing to do with sales, but instead has to do with visibility.
For example, the newly-available-to-everyone AMS Sponsored Brand ads work best with three or more titles. So I went ahead and released Access Essentials so that I’d have three books on Access that I could advertise via one of those ads. I didn’t actually expect high sales on that title, but it gave me another advertising option so it was worth it.
And, as fiction authors who focus on Amazon sales know, there is value in being in the new release charts. (Although that’s only self-cannibalization when it’s an omnibus or bundle release, but that can make people realize they missed book three in that series and go buy it.)
Anyway. It’s something to think about if you’re a slower writer and trying to figure out what you can do. Think about new formats, bundles, etc.
But I don’t recommend new editions unless for this purpose. (These three books took me over a hundred hours to create and with novels or short stories I’ve redone it took as long as writing a new one and probably wasn’t such a vast improvement it was worth it.)
Also, I highly recommend having a release of some sort in January because it’s a nice, easy way to hit at least one New Year’s resolution. 🙂
M.L. Humphrey 