More Money Or More Promotion?

A Literal Literary Loser Compares

I’ve updated my website, NYCSchoolSecrets.com.

My oldest son approved, observing, “It no longer looks like it’s from the last century!” and “I know it’s about education because it has that fake Ivy League looking logo!”

So I’m a hit with the youth.

One of the features my web developer added to the new site is the ability for me to sell my books, “Getting Into NYC Kindergarten” and “Getting Into NYC High School” directly to the consumer. Previously, they’d only been available on Amazon and BN.com.

When I sell the books via my website, I get to keep the entire cover price, $9.99. When I sell via Amazon or B&N, I only earn $6.97 per copy.

It seems like a no-brainer. I should definitely be driving potential customers towards my personal website, rather than to Amazon or B&N.

But… it’s actually not so simple.

Because the thing about Amazon is (it outsells B&N 20 copies to 1, so the latter is barely worth discussing), the more books I sell there, the higher my ranking.

The higher my ranking there, the more Amazon promotes it.

The more Amazon promotes it, the more people see it.

The more people see it, the more may buy it.

The more buy it, the more money I make in the long run. Maybe.

So that’s this week’s dilemma which I hope you chime in on: When promoting my education books (which I do endlessly), where should I be directing my customers?

Let me know in the Comments!

And, in the meantime, in case you are wondering to yourself: Who needs to buy a book about applying to Kindergarten and High School? What’s so hard about it?

Ah, you sweet, innocent, non-New Yorkers. Please enjoy an excerpt from “Admit None: An NYC Schools Mystery” which my agent is currently shopping around, to help explain why my non-fiction books are so sorely needed:

Officially, all NYC independent schools set their cut-off as an applicant needing to turn five years old by September 1. Unofficially, those with summer birthdays, especially boys, who tended to mature slower than girls, were advised to “take the gift of a year,” and wait to start Kindergarten after they turned five, rather than six. It was possible for a family to receive not an utter rejection, but what was dubbed as a Too Young letter, with the invitation to reapply for the following autumn. As a result, boys who turned five in the spring now came off as so much younger than their nominal peer group, who were a full year older. Which was why savvy NYC moms timed their pregnancies accordingly. If you were certain you wanted private school exclusively, a birthday in September or October was best. If you were considering taking a shot at Hunter College Elementary School, a tuition-free lab school which only accepted 50 out of 5000 applicants based on IQ tests, or one of the public, citywide Gifted and Talented programs, then you should be aiming for January. Because the city schools set December 31st as their birthday cut-off, your January baby would be the oldest, strongest and, presumably, the smartest in the public school pool, while smack in the middle and still in contention for private schools. They’d all read their Malcolm Gladwell. They knew which months produced the most successful people. It was science!….

Griffin Zhou was reported to have a tested IQ of 147, which Zelda summarized as: Average. In the rest of the world, an IQ above 145 was considered Profoundly Gifted. But that meant thirteen out of 10,000 individuals had achieved a similar score. NYC counted 70,000 students applying to Kindergarten every year  – they were the largest school district in America. That meant at least ninety-one children at every grade level fit the PG category, if you assumed the statistical distribution in NYC was average, and no one who lived in NYC appraised themselves average in anything. Ninety-one was almost twice the number which Aggie could accept per grade, making Griffin Average within their pool, indeed.

Don’t believe what you read? Check out this video, where word of our insanity has made it around the world! (And, once again, I am wearing my favorite blue interview sweater):