Our book, “Restaurant Owners Uncorked” (“ROU”), is currently ranked #16,981 out of over 8,000,000 paperback books available on Amazon.com. The stats update hourly, and I don’t fully understand how they are measured, but it’s the second highest rank we’ve achieved (it was #10,294 on April 2). Anyway, it seems pretty cool that we’re in the top .1%!

We published the book a little over a year ago – the first copy was sold on Feb. 28, 2011. We wrote it to try to help people in the industry we serve buy telling the stories of successful restaurant owners. We figured if we could tap into the knowledge of some of our successful customers and share it, then perhaps it would help other people increase their chances of succeeding as well. And when the only people you serve are restaurants, you clearly want the restaurant industry to do well! Plus, we also figured it was a much cooler (and fun) way to build our brand than using conventional marketing and advertising.

We’ve sold nearly 2,000 copies of the paperback and Kindle versions combined, and we are still consistently selling >100 combined copies per month. We have received tons of great feedback from people who’ve read the book. ROU has 10 rankings on Amazon, and 9 of those are 5 stars (out of 5) – one person gave it a 4. So this project has been a success, both for us and for the owners involved with the book and for the people who’ve read the book.

We learned invaluable lessons and advice and wisdom from the owners we interviewed, and we want to enable as many people as possible to reap the same benefit. We’ve placed snippets of the content in this series on our blog, but we realize that most people enjoy holding an actual book or a Kindle when they read.

With that in mind, we recently decided to lower the price on both versions of the book. The Kindle version is now $5 (it was $9.99) and the paperback version is $12 (it was $14.99, and we actually tried to lower it to $10 but our publisher won’t let us drop it lower than $11.78, and that’s a weird price, so we’re keeping it simple and clean at $12).

If you’ve read the book and enjoyed it, please share it with somebody. Let somebody borrow it, or give them your copy. If you know somebody that might like a copy, tell them about it. Or buy one for them. I can assure you that the wisdom we’ve collected is far more valuable than almost any price we could put on the book.

Wil