OH, I think it's primarily small and niche press that I'm looking at. I'm clicking on dozens of AW writers, some that are with the NY biggies, and I'm just seeing sparse print sales. Maybe I'm not being fair, 'cause I'm comparing rank for different production versions. I'm not saying they're not moving print titles completely, but I've seen a steady decrease in print titles for the past two years. Now, if they're using POD, which most of them are, reviewers are reluctant to give them any ink. But POD negates large print runs, so yes, they can pop a sale off every now and then.
Ah.
This is more complicated than it appears, for all sorts of reasons.
You can't get an accurate idea of sales levels if you're using Amazon sales ranks to formulate your hypotheses. Sales ranks only indicate how various books are performing against one another: they don't tell you how many units are being paid for by eager readers. If you have a month where overall book sales halve, sales ranks won't tell you that: they'll only tell you which of the books which have sold are the most popular.
Further, if you're talking about publishers which only use POD--which is probable, because you say that "most of them are"--then you're not talking about the same sorts of publishers that I am.
Publishers which rely on POD can't afford to use decent distribution channels, and so they're doomed to low sales and those sales are dwindling, too. This isn't because print sales are declining overall: it's because the POD model can't support good levels of sales, and following a book's initial push its sales are bound to fall; and that initial push is going to be lacking in energy, too, as a publisher which can't afford to invest in a decent print run won't be able to afford a decent marketing effort or a proper publicist either. It's impossible for them to maintain sales in the way a better-funded publisher could, and so their books very rarely take off regardless of the quality of those books.
Here's one title that I've been following, just as an example. <snipped> E-book rank 118,000--price 9.39 (Two titles of the series are now up and it did extremely well in the e-book format--hitting and staying in three top 100 spots for a couple months).
Print Version (same release date) rank is 1,335,388, priced at 14.44. (I don't think one Amazon copy has been sold. I could be wrong).
As I've said before, rankings tell you little or nothing. For that book to have an Amazon ranking it must have sold at least one copy: but that's about all you can safely surmise here.
Now, admittedly, I'm not taking into consideration all the other retail outlets--Bookstrand, Kobo, B&N, Fictionwise and others etc. so maybe my opinion is skewed. Amazon can't be used as the only benchmark.
Amazon rankings aren't a benchmark, they're a comparison. And yes, all those other retail outlets have to be considered.
I think you're looking at Amazon rankings and coming up with several very unsafe conclusions; and that you're assuming that because something is true for a tiny area of publishing that it's also true for the majority of trade publishing which relies on completely different ways to print, distribute, market and promote books, so it obviously doesn't apply.
I just had a thriller come out in paperback today, following the e-book version which came out June 15 2012. It's priced at 15.95. I'm going to be brutally honest and say that this title will not sell one print addition, not in the next days, weeks or months, but ever.
*edition*
Even with the most massive promo campaign, and I'm famous for those. I don't have any idea on how to reach a print-coveting audience. And I've done everything humanly possible--massive pushes, announcements, author interviews, book reviews, and so on. But haven't bought any ad space anywhere (and could this be the magic bullet?)
No.
The magic bullet here is to get published by a publisher with proper editing, distribution, marketing and promotion. Buying ad space is something trade publishers do to let retail outlets know that the book they got interested in a few months back will soon be released, and that it's going to be supported by a decent marketing campaign. It's not something that writers do in the hope of selling their own books.
If you want to reach those "print-coveting" readers, you need to get your book in front of them. That means it needs to be positioned on bookshop shelves and reviewed in the publications they read, and so on. You can't do this for yourself apart from on a local level.
OH, are your samples/discussions coming from the larger trade publishers who have some good distribution in place?
I don't know what samples you're talking about: but the discussions I've had involve trade publishers from vast to tiny. Most have a proper distribution contract. Those which don't aren't making sales. That's why I always advise writers interested in trade publishing to only submit to publishers which use offset printing, and which have a real distribution deal: if a publisher doesn't have those two things in place, then it can't sell many copies of your book for you and you might do better self publishing.
I think bookstore placement would make all the difference in the world in regard to moving print titles. I'll bet Behler does ok, as well as some of the better small presses like Snowbooks and Midnight Ink?
Bookshop placement is still very important if you want to sell big numbers. While the majority of print sales are now made online, nearly half of those sales are only made after the books have first been selected in physical bookshops. If your publisher doesn't have full distribution in place, your book won't get bookshop placement, and so will miss out on all those sales.
I'm not going to comment on specific publishers--that's what BR&BC is for--but without full distribution, decent funding, and offset runs, most publishers are going to struggle to sell more than a handful of copies of each title they publish.