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<![CDATA[Welcome to the website of Selfishgenie Publishing - Blog]]>Sat, 21 Dec 2024 01:05:26 +0000Weebly<![CDATA[And The Winner Is ... The Website Owners.]]>Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMThttp://selfishgenie.com/blog/and-the-winner-is-the-website-owners

Is it worth Indie authors entering book award contests?

If I tell you that none of the book marketing gurus suggest it as a way of marketing books, then you can probably guess the answer.

If book awards/contests sold books, then the marketing gurus would be all over them.

The biggest awards, eg The Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize, sell a lot of books but we’re talking about Indie authors here and none of us are going to get close to a nomination for those levels of awards! But even those levels of awards don’t sell more books for many of their nominees. We can probably all name a Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize winner, but how many people can name the runners up? Even fewer people can name any nominees?

At the most basic level, book contests appeal to the vanity of authors. They say “you know your book is good, so why not come and claim your prize, because winning is a foregone conclusion.”

Well, get over yourself. It is readers who decide if a book is any good, not authors.

But I guess all Indies feel tempted to enter book contests from time to time, on the basis that being able to claim that your book is a prize winner will sell you more books.

However, sales data doesn’t back that up.

Data suggests that being able to put “Winner of the (whatever) Book Award” in your book blurb has very little impact on sales. Being able to put a good quote from a reader’s review in the blurb is far more effective.,

OK. Maybe winning an award might sell you a few more copies, but what are your chances of winning?

The websites that run these awards are businesses and they make money from them, so they want as many entrants as possible. Entry fees can range from as low as $20 (£18 approx) up to several hundred dollars. So, it can be a big money earner for the websites.

Let’s say that they manage to attract 1,000 entries. The only books that the readers may be interested in are the winners – or at least the top three. So, you have something like a 999 to one chance of your book winning.

I wouldn’t back a horse at those odds – would you?

All the other entrants remain unknown to readers, even if they get a place on the website. They just get lost amongst the other 1,000 entrants that the website attracted to enter the contest.

OK, some contests award prizes for the best books in a range of genres. This makes it more likely that an author can win a prize, especially in a niche genre.

There are generally recognised to be around 50 genres* (publishers disagree on how many exactly). If you rule out non-fiction, the number of genres shrinks considerably to around 30.

But let’s stick with 50. So, 50 winners, and another 100 in second and third places. Add in the overall winners and runners up and that gives you 153 prize winners.

But that still leaves 847 entrants without anything to say on their blurb despite having paid their entry fee.

And a lot of book contests are considerably bigger than 1,000 entrants, so the probability of winning a prize gets even more remote.

There are book “contests” which, if you pay a large enough entry fee, you are guaranteed to win a prize. You are buying the prize, not winning it.

But readers generally aren’t fooled by those. If they haven’t heard of the prize, they won’t be suckered in by a fake like that.

OK, at the end of the day it’s your money. If you want to spend it on entry fees for a book awards, real or phoney, that’s your business.

But in terms of increasing sales, you would be better off putting that money towards an advertising campaign. The probability of increasing sales is considerably higher.

* Genres are different from book categories. Amazon has thousands of book categories which are created by slicing and dicing the main genres until they are so niche that some have hardly any books in them.. Genres can often be subdivided, eg Fantasy alone subdivides into a dozen different sub-genres, but the overall genre is still fantasy and that is the level at which book contests award prizes. After all, they want to hang onto the entry fees, not pay them out by awarding lots of prizes.

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]]><![CDATA[The Swiss Army Knife Of Websites]]>Sat, 14 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMThttp://selfishgenie.com/blog/the-swiss-army-knife-of-websites

I have always believed that everything we use in our lives can be used for more than one purpose. A screwdriver is great for driving screws, of course, but it can also be used as a lever to get the lids off of paint tins.

And the same applies to the Bookfunnel website - not the paint tin thing, but other book marketing purposes.

Many Indie authors will be familiar with Bookfunnel’s original purpose, which is to deliver free content to readers in exchange for their email addresses. It is a vital tool for people trying to build email lists.

It can also be used for delivering free content to existing email subscribers and ARC* readers. So, it is already a multipurpose tool.

But did you know you can also use Bookfunnel to sell your books, using the power of “group promos”?

And, importantly, if you are already a subscriber it won’t cost you a penny. In terms of advertising, it works out as a really cheap option. A Bookfunnel subscription costs about $10 a month, which you can easily spend in a day advertising on Amazon or Facebook.

First I need to explain about “group promos”, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Bookfunnel (if you are, then please feel free to skim over this bit).

Basically, you sign up to a group promo by uploading some free content (novella, short story, or a complete book) to Bookfunnel. You create a landing page for the book and then you join a group, usually one that is relevant to your genre so that the free content goes to the right sort of readers – the sort that read your genre and that you want on your email list.

Once you have joined the group, you promote the offer on your social media and using your email list, while the other group members do the same. Your content then gets downloaded in exchange for a reader’s email address and that way you can build your list much quicker than you would by relying on organic growth.

A good group promo could get you as many as 50 new email addresses, though the average is a little lower.

Now, substitute “sales” for email addresses.

Is making 50 additional sales something in which you would be interested?

Stupid question – of course you would.

Well, Bookfunnel is there ahead of you. As well as what they call “newsletter swaps”, which build your email list, you can also join “sales swaps”.

The basics are the same, upload your book, create a landing page and join a group promo, but one that is focused on sales instead of newsletters.

The main differences is that you create a sales landing page and add a universal book link so that the “call to action” button takes the reader to the sales page for your book: Amazon and/or wherever else you sell it. The other difference is that the wording of the promo header makes it clear to readers that the books have to be paid for rather than being downloaded for free (though you can also offer free books).

Just as with the newsletter swaps, you promote the group on your social media and to your email list and the other authors in your group do the same.

What are the numbers like?

Well, typically a group promo of that sort will be made up of between 10 and 20 authors. We’ll stick with the lower figure so that our estimate is at the conservative end of the scale.

If each author has 100 people on their email list, that’s a potential reach of 10,000 readers of your genre. And that’s before you factor in the group's combined social media reach on top.

In reality the email lists are likely to be much larger (possibly 1000s of email addresses per author), so the actual reach of the promo is probably going to be considerably higher.

All that exposure costs you nothing.

Joining the group costs you nothing.

Joining Bookfunnel does require you to pay a subscription fee, but if you already subscribe then that is a “sunk cost”. In other words, you have already paid your money, so you lose nothing, but you stand to gain a lot.

Other than their cheapness (you can’t get cheaper than free) there are several other advantages to using these swaps that you don’t get using other advertising methods.

1. You are targeting people who read books in general, but who also read your genre specifically.
2. You don’t have to spend time researching keywords or comp authors, which you do for a lot of ad platforms.
3. Readers are used to getting emails from the authors, so they open them (well, most do anyway).

As all Indie authors know, January is a slow month for sales unless you write self-improvement books (people who believe in “New year – New me” buy a lot of self-improvement books in January). Everyone is strapped for cash because of Christmas, so they don’t spend much money on books.

But that doesn’t mean there is no book market. You just have to go looking for it.

Many people get new Kindles or other ereaders for Christmas, so they are looking for books with which to load them up. And people who like reading will still buy books – if they are cheap enough.

So, it’s a great time to run a Kindle Countdown Deal, especially if you write series. Set your series starter to 99p (99c) (or even free) and use a Bookfunnel sales promo to advertise it. You can pick up a whole lot of new readers without having to spend money on advertising, so your financial risk is zero. Just for a change you aren't paying to give soemthing away for almost no return.

You can promote full prices books, but this does work best if you are offering free or heavily discounted books.

And even if you don’t get sales, you are likely to pick up new readers through KindleUnlimited if your books are subscribed to Kindle Select.

Pro tip.

Email lists cover a lot of territories where you can’t run Kindle Countdown Deals, and you are limited to running them in 2 territories at a time anyway.

That means that the readers in many territories get starved of bargain books. Canadian and Australian readers will be jumping up and down shouting “That’s us. We don’t get them” right now and those two countries have big book markets.

This is your opportunity to get readers in those countries on board because email list are often international, but you will have to adjust the price of the book manually in the KDP price settings. Remember to do that a couple of days before the start of the promo, because it can take a couple of days for price changes to filter through the system to reach all available territories.

And don’t forget to adjust the prices back to normal after the end of the promo.

You don’t have to be on Kindle to make this work for you. So long as you can use a universal book link to take the reader to the right place to buy your book, you can use these swaps.

So, if you are already a Bookfunnel subscriber, what are you waiting for? And if you aren’t a subscriber, this is another reason for joining.

* ARC = Advance Review Copy – a book provided for free in advance of publication, in exchange for a review being posted on Amazon/Goodreads after publication..

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]]><![CDATA[Work SMARTer, Not Harder!]]>Sat, 07 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMThttp://selfishgenie.com/blog/work-smarter-not-harder

Are you familiar with SMART objectives?

They were a big thing back in the 80s and 90s and emerged from the bad habits of bosses, who set their staff objectives without making sure that the objectives were actually achievable.

For example, if you were my employee and I were to set you an objective of painting a wall, you would expect me to provide you with paint, brushes, maybe a ladder and possibly even training in how to paint walls.

Sad to say, back then not all bosses saw things that way. They would just say “paint that wall” and expect the employee to do it without further input from them. Consequently, objective setting had a very bad name, and a lot of objectives were never achieved. This had a very poor outcome for businesses that were relying on the achievement of those objectives to make them profitable.

The reason you don’t hear about SMART objectives anymore isn’t because they are no longer set, it’s because the setting of them is so routine that no one bothers to call them by that name anymore. Now it is just called objective setting (or goal setting).

Why should you, as an Indie author, be interested in SMART objectives?

Well, if you are one of those people who think in terms of the process of either writing a book or marketing it, then setting SMART objectives is very much a part of that process.

Because if you don’t set them for yourself, you could end up in the same position as the person who has been told to paint a wall but hasn’t been given the paint and brushes.

So, what does the acronym mean?

S = Specific.
M = Measurable
A = Achievable (or attainable)
R = Relevant
T = Time based (or bound).

So, let’s unpack those in terms of what you need to do as an author. I’ll be addressing this from a book marketing perspective, but exactly the same principles apply to setting yourself objectives as an author who is about to start writing a book.

SPECIFIC

This means that the objective describes exactly what you are expected to achieve. So, you wouldn’t say “sell some books” because that is too vague. Instead, you would say “Sell 100 books”.

But we can probably make the objective even more specific when we start to include the other elements from the acronym.

MEASURABLE

In essence I’ve already included a measurement in there by saying “100 books” – but that is the end goal.

To make sure that you are on the right track and making progress, you might want to break that measurement down into smaller chunks. Perhaps measuring once a week to see how sales are progressing.

There may also be other measurements to be carried out, such as the amount of budget that is spent each day, week or month to achieve the objective. That is very important if you happen to be short of cash.

Failing to set measurements of success mean that the objective becomes vague and open to interpretation. You can actually let yourself off the hook.

As you are doing this for yourself that may not seem important, but it can mean you don’t achieve what you set out to do because you weren’t sure what you expected the outcome to be.

Your measurements also need to have targets that are comparable to what others are achieving. So, as a first time author, how many books can a first time author expect to sell? There is no point setting a target of 1,000 books, if first time authors almost never achieve that level of sales. You will just end up feeling frustrated because you failed to hit the target.

ACHIEVABLE

This is where we get into the allocation of resources to achieve the goal.

If you have been trying to sell books for a long time and made no progress, then you will have to do something different and that means learning what to do. So, you may need training in order to make your objective achievable.

That may mean that you need a budget, because training can cost money (yes, I know there is free training available, but we’ll assume that isn’t going to be sufficient). But you may also need a budget to pay for things such as new book covers.

You may also need to advertise, which also requires a budget.

So, this “achievable” word is probably the one that is most important in setting goals and objectives, because without the right resources to back the objective up, it isn’t going to be achievable..

RELEVANT

This also harks back to the bad old days when some bosses would set an objective that the person carrying out the work didn’t think was relevant to their job.

Now, if you are a painter and decorator, then telling you to paint a wall is obviously relevant. But if you are an accountant then it has nothing to do with your job.

Studies found that people who were given objectives that they didn’t consider to be relevant to them, didn’t put much effort into achieving them. If they did consider they were relevant, however, they would put in a lot of effort.

As an author you might have to consider what is relevant to you. Maybe you don’t think that marketing your book is relevant. But if you aren’t going to market it – who is?

So, if you don’t think that marketing is relevant to your job as an author, how are you going to achieve that objective of selling 100 books? It can be done, but you would have to pay someone else to do it for you – which takes us back to “achievable” and the allocation of resources to pay someone else to do the work.

TIMEBASED

Again, harking back to the bad old days, some bosses would set an objective and not set any date by which it had to be achieved. Was it high priority and had to be completed by the end of the day/week/month? Or was it low priority and didn’t need to be completed until the end of the year?

So it is with your objective to sell 100 books. Do you want to reach that figure by the end of the month, in 3 months’ time, 6 months, a year?

This ties in very much with measurability, because the longer the timescale you set for yourself the more measurement you will have to put in to make sure you are making progress. It also ties in with resources, because if you have set the target for your objective to be completed in a year, then the budget has to be capable of lasting a year too.

There is also the question of achievability. Just because you set your objective to sell 100 books by the end of the month, it doesn’t mean it will be achievable by then – especially if you don’t have other essential resources such as knowledge and budget.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

I think I have demonstrated that all the elements of a SMART objective have to be integrated, so that they all work in harmony with each other.

It doesn’t matter how relevant the objective is, if it doesn’t have the resources that are necessary it won’t be achievable, for example. If it doesn’t have the right measurements taken at the right time, you won’t know if you are succeeding or failing and if you are failing, you may not know why you are failing.

Going back to that original objective of “sell 100 books” we would now re-write it as:

“Complete an on-line book marketing training course then sell 100 books within a period of 30 days, commencing immediately on completion of the course but before 31st December 2024, while remaining within a budget of £100.”

OK, it doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, but it does contain all the elements of a SMART objective.

It doesn’t make the relevancy of the objective clear, but as you are an Indie author responsible for marketing your own books, I think we can agree that relevance is implied.

Now, you may wonder why I have gone to the trouble of explaining all this in a blog dedicated to writing and book marketing.

The answer is simple. Many of the questions I see on social media about people floundering around with their writing or their marketing, come down to the fact that the person hasn’t followed the SMART principles.

Because SMART objectives feed into SMART planning. All that means is that once you have set your objective, you can create a plan for how to achieve it. And a SMART Plan takes into account all the elements of the SMART objective.

If you don’t have a plan, you don’t know what you should be doing, or when you should be doing it.

The number of people I see posting questions on Facebook writers’ groups that start by asking “When should I start doing … (whatever)?”

Sadly, the answer is often “3 months ago mate!”

By starting with your SMART objective and creating a plan to achieve it, you can then measure progress towards completion. As has been said many times before “Fail to plan – plan to fail”.

Just creating a plan is an objective in itself, because some people have never planned a single thing in their entire lives. Someone else has always created the plan for them and they have just done what they were told, when they were told.

I’m not ashamed to admit that the first time I was asked to plan something, I had absolutely no idea how to go about it. It was a hard learnt lesson and one I have never forgotten.

I’m not going to pretend that all my plans worked seamlessly, but in general they have a high success rate because I have had to consider all the things that make the plan achievable. And if I am unsure about achievability, I can ask myself what I need in order to make it more achievable so that I include those in the plan too.

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]]><![CDATA[Don't Fall For Author Scams!]]>Sat, 30 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMThttp://selfishgenie.com/blog/dont-fall-for-author-scams

I don’t know if authors are targeted by scammers more than any other profession, but sometimes it feels that way.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, many writers are “Newbies” who are ignorant of how the publishing industry works, That means that they don’t have the knowledge to identify a scam when they see it, which makes them easier targets.

The second reason is that the publishing industry has always used a lot of freelancers to provide services: editors, proofreaders, graphic designers et al. The arrival of easy to access self-publishing, back when Lulu was founded in 1998, gave those freelancers a whole new market for their skills. It also provided employees with those skills the opportunity to establish “side hustles” to earn more money outside of their normal workplace.

That made it very easy for scammers to use those sorts of services to disguise their scams.

I must emphasise at this point that there are a lot of hard working people out there offering their professional skills, who do a good job at reasonable rates. Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to differentiate between them and the scammers.

The scams tend to fall into two types. There are the ones that rely on vanity to draw in the victim and there are those that offer a service which they either don’t provide, or which is such poor quality that it is as good as a scam.

Let’s start with the vanity scams.

Let’s face it, as authors, we often think that our work doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. This is especially true for self-published authors who are struggling to sell even a few copies of their book, let alone rise to the dizzy heights of “best seller” status.

And that is the feeling that the scammers play on to draw you in.

It will often start as a DM or an email, saying how the sender works for a publishing company, or is a representative (perhaps “talent spotter”) for an agent, producer or someone else who can turn the author into the next “big thing”..

The DM or email will tell you that whoever sent it really liked your book and thinks it has a real chance of success and they will help you to get it into the hands of whoever they say they represent. There will be no mention of money – yet. They will often want to speak to you on the phone, because it is much harder to resist a scammer on the phone because they can be so charming and persuasive.

OK, let’s unpack that a little bit.

Firstly, it is a direct appeal to the author’s vanity (we all suffer from it, even if the amount of vanity varies). It has the author punching the air and saying “Yes, I always knew my book was good.” Essentially, most of the scammer’s work has been done just because of that reaction.

Agents, trad publishers, TV and film companies don’t need to “reach out” to authors to find work to publish., They are inundated with authors and script writers sending them work. Most of it is good work, too. The publishers and producers are spoiled for choice.

Simply knowing that can save you from the scammer.

There is a variation on that theme, which is the offer to get your book into one of the well-known mainstream bookstores. Barnes & Noble tends to be the bookstore of choice, probably because it is the largest chain in the USA.

Again, it’s not how those businesses work. The trad publishing houses are sending them a constant stream of new books, with the added advantage that the publisher is doing the marketing, so the bookstore doesn’t have to.

So why would the bookstores need to go through a “middleman” to put a book on their shelves that won’t have that marketing effort behind it? It would just be taking up shelf space that could be used for books that will sell because they are being marketed properly

One of the most common things that is seen in writing groups on social media is the appeal “does anyone know anything about (insert name of business)? They have approached me offering to (insert scam)”.

Simply asking the question means the author is suspicious

But they aren’t making the post in order to confirm their suspicions. They are making the post in the hope that someone will say “It’s OK, they’re legit. Go with them” Sadly, the responses almost never say that.

Remember the main way of identifying a scam is that if it sounds too good to be true – then it’s too good to be true.

The next type of scam is the vanity or “hybrid” publishers.

Now, I’m not having a go at hybrid publishing as a legitimate industry sector. If you are happy to pay for someone to print a whole load of copies of your book for them to end up in your shed while you try to find some way of selling them, that’s your business not mine.

But there are a lot of scammers describing themselves as hybrid publishers with the sole intention of getting their hands on your money.

The best you can hope for is a whole load of badly printed copies of your book, the worst is an empty wallet and no books at all.

Do some research. Find out what others have to say about the company. Not on Facebook, but by doing real research.

If they are scammers, there will be “red flag” posts on the internet warning about them. If they are genuine, there will also be articles about them describing their business – and I don’t mean on their own website. Someone somewhere will have posted a review saying how well they serve their customers.

Two new scams that have appeared recently are the “foreign rights” scam, and the “translation” scam.

The foreign rights scam offers to find publishers overseas who will buy the rights to publish your book in another country. You pay a fee to an “agent” and they will do the work for you.

Needless to say, once they have got your money that will be the last you will see of it. They might send you an email from time to time to report “progress” but it will always say “nothing to report yet” or, perhaps, “I have a publisher interested but nothing definite at the moment.”

They may even come back to you and ask for more money because they just need to make “one last push” to close the deal.

The translation scam is different because there may be a product at the end of it. The problem is that the author of the book won’t own the copyright on the product – the scammer will.

Under EU law, and in some other countries, if a translator makes a translation of someone’s work then they own the copyright on the translated version. The author has to give permission, but that just means saying yes in an email. In practical terms the “translator” (the actual work could be done by AI) can sell their version on Amazon and the author can’t do a thing about it and will certainly never see a penny of the royalties..

There is one exception and that is in Germany. There the author retains their copyright even on the translation.

So, the first thing to do if someone emails to ask if they can translate your book isn’t to say yes, It’s to say “How much will you pay me for the right to translate my book?”

Scammers try to get around this by posing as a student who wants to use your book as a course work assignment, but don’t fall for that!

Finally, we get to the “service” scams, These are often the hardest to spot because there are so many freelancers plying their trade these days.

The first question any author should ask is “can I do this for myself, for free?” In many cases you can. Websites such as KDP and Draft2Digital offer a lot of helpful articles on their sites to assist with the self-publishing process. For audiobooks there are similar helpful services on ACX.

For those things where the author would benefit from professional assistance, such as editing, proofreading and cover design, then the warning is “buyer beware”.

Use trusted sites such as Fiverr to find the services you need. The reason that you can trust them is that they hold onto the money you pay until you sign off to say you are happy with the product that is provided. That means it is much harder for scammers to operate.

If you don’t want to use Fiverr or similar sites, then seek out recommendations from people on social media. DO NOT respond to the sorts of message that say “DM me” or “Give me your phone number”. You have no idea who you are dealing with. If someone says “I used so-and-so and they were good.” then that is different.

Perhaps the biggest area for scams, however, is in marketing services. You just have no idea if the person you are dealing with is actually doing anything. They may promise to send out a gazillion emails to their lists or put out a post on X that will be seen by a gazillion followers, but you have no idea if it is true.

Even if you find their pages on X (or wherever) you have no idea if their followers are genuine or not. It is very easy to buy “followers” (fake accounts) and, of course, we all know about the bots that make up so much of social media these days.

And, having paid your money and your sales haven’t improved, you have no recourse simply because they won’t guarantee their services. Which means they can keep committing the same scams because they are fireproof.

As we have said many times on this blog before, when it comes to marketing, learning how to do it yourself is always going to be the cheapest (and safest) option.

It will also be the best one because no one will market your book with the same passion for it as you have.

If you really want to know if what you are seeing, or being offered, is a scam, then check it out on “Writer Beware” which is a website that exposes scams targeting writers.

Scams Aimed At Advertisers

For those authors who advertise using Meta/Facebook look out for comments on your ads, DMs and emails that tell you that you have infringed Facebook’s advertising rules in some way. They are quite common, especially for new advertisers.

They will usually say that your account is about to be closed or blocked or that your ad will be suspended or deleted if you don’t take action.

There will be a link, and it can be confused with genuine Meta URLs. Some of the communications are accompanied by the Meta logo, so it is easy to be fooled.

But, as you can see here, anyone can get hold of the Meta logo.

Meta does communicate with advertisers using DMs, but if the message relates to payments don’t click on links, Log in to your FB account and check your account settings. Any issues with payments will be flagged there. For ads, it is easy to check if they are active or suspended in your ads dashboard and then query the issue directly with Meta.

If in doubt, contact Meta direct, DON’T CLICK ON ANY LINKS. And please do your fellow authors a favour by reporting the scammer’s account and then blocking it.

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]]><![CDATA[Murderous Marlow]]>Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMThttp://selfishgenie.com/blog/murderous-marlowDisclaimer. The views expressed in this review are those of the reviewer and not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing. No payment or inducement was requested, offered or received in respect of this review and the reviewer purchased a copy of the book.

If you like your murder mysteries cozy, then “Death Comes To Marlow” by Robert Thorogood is probably just the book for you.

For those of you who aren’t native Brits, Marlow is a small (and rather expensive) town about 35 miles west of London, sitting on the banks of the River Thames. I have been there several times and I can say that it is not the sort of place where you might expect a murder to happen – which is why it is such a great location for a cozy mystery.

This is actually the second book in the series, the first being “The Marlow Murder Club”. I haven’t reviewed that because it has already been on TV as a drama in March of this year, so you can go and watch it for yourself on the U streaming service.

But the real reason I’m reviewing the second book and not the first is that I think that this book is better in many ways.

If you haven’t read the first book, or seen the TV series, it follows Judith (a senior citizen), Becks (the vicar’s wife) and Suzie (a dog walker) as they investigate a seemingly impenetrable murder, all the time getting under the feet of Detective Sergeant Tanika Malik of the Thames Valley Police.

“Death Comes to Marlow” catches up with this trio the following winter when Sir Peter Blake is murdered on the eve of his wedding to a much younger bride. But wait, is it a coincidence that Judith, Becks and Suzie have all been invited to a cocktail party to celebrate the forthcoming nuptials and are present when the murder takes place?

Of course it isn’t (but I can’t tell you why).

Two out of the three amateur sleuths believe that the death, in bizarre circumstances and inside a locked room, is no accident. DS Tanika Malik takes some convincing, but eventually she decides the death is at least suspicious. Unfortunately, Tanika’s boss returns from sick leave at that point and he is dismissive of the idea of murder, Which leaves the three amateurs no option but to keep on investigating (with a little bit of inside help from Tanika).

There are several suspects, and they all have seemingly cast iron alibis, so who could have committed the crime? And, perhaps more importantly, how could they have committed the murder inside a locked room and then made their escape?

I can’t say any more about the plot without giving away spoilers, but lovers of Miss Marple, Murder She Wrote and other amateur sleuths in the cozy genre, will find this book entirely to their taste. It is well written, the characters are well developed and, importantly, the clues are all there so that you can try to solve the mystery for yourself.

So, why only 4 stars?

Well, it is all down to me really. I worked out the “who” of the whodunnit very early on and also the “why” for the murder. I even worked out a tiny bit of the “how” because the author used a plot device that I had seen used in other cosy mysteries. This made me feel that the author hadn’t quite fulfilled the promise of the “mystery”. After all, if I can solve the murder that quickly, so can anyone.

All that remained was the rest of the “how” and that was far more challenging, and I had to wait until the end of the book to find out how the murder had been committed. So, the author really had created a mystery and my temptation to give the book 3 stars was dismissed and I upgraded it. But, as I said, the clues were there for me to interpret had I been a bit cleverer.

Did I enjoy the book? Let me put it this way. I’m already reading book 3 of the series, “Queen Of Poisons” and I have book 4, “Murder On The Marlow Belle” on pre-order (at the time of writing. By the time you read this I may had finished reading them all).

So, I recommend “Murder Comes To Marlow” to all lovers of the cosy mystery genre. To find out more about the book and the series, click the button.

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]]><![CDATA[New Scam Targeting Authors]]>Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMThttp://selfishgenie.com/blog/new-scam-targeting-authors

There is a new scam going the rounds, tempting authors into giving away the rights to their books for free – and it is entirely legal.

This affects EU copyright law, but globally the laws are very similar so you may want to keep reading and then check the law where you live. Particularly the law as it applies in the country where the scammer lives, not where you live, because that is where you will have to pursue your claim for copyright infringement.

The scam relates to the copyright laws for the translations of books.

It was meant to protect translators and give them some ownership of what they had worked hard to produce. But with recent advances in AI the law has not been able to keep up and this has opened up a loophole for scammers to wriggle through.

I want to reassure you that not all translators are scammers. The vast majority are honest people and will deal with you honestly. But, as usual, a small minority give the rest a bad name.

So, how does this scam work?

You get an email or a DM asking if a “student” can translate your book as part of their university work. Or it may be that someone is offering to do a translation of your book for free for you for “practice”.

Being a kind person, you agree that the student can do the translation.

However, it is the translator who owns the copyright of the translation, not the author and this is the loophole that the scammers exploit.*

They can upload the translated version of the book onto Amazon and sell it legally and there is nothing the author can do about it, because the author gave permission for the person to translate their book – and the scammer will have the email or DM to prove it.

It may not even be a decent translation, but the book’s buyer won’t find that out until they have bought the book and it is you, the author, whose reputation will be damaged by the poor translation as it is your name on the cover.

The reason that the translator holds the copyright for the translation is because of the work they have put into it. Of course, with AI available these days the “work” may be minimal, but copyright law has yet to catch up with this innovation.

This would also apply if you hire a translator to translate your book into another language for you, unless you have a contract prohibiting them from publishing the translated version.

But the scam doesn’t end there.

Because the translator holds the copyright for their translation, they can sell the rights to further translations to third parties. So, you have said OK to your book being translated into French, for example, but the translator can then sell the rights to their French translation to be translated into Italian, Spanish, Russian or any other language they can find a buyer for.

Or they can use AI to produce those translations for them.

And you won’t receive a penny.

As the author you can protect your interests by refusing permission for a translation unless there is a contract in place to protect your rights as the originator.

This could be an upfront payment to you for the translation rights or it could be a royalty share deal.

But don’t just say “Yes” without that agreement in place. Don’t even suggest that you will consider them doing the translation. Say only that you are willing to negotiate a contract.

So, beware. If someone approaches you and offers to translate your book into another language, especially if they are offering to do it for free, because they may not be acting in your interests but in their own.

If you are willing to consider allowing someone to translate your book, we recommend that you take this approach:

1. Ask them if they are willing to enter into a contract with you in order to protect your interests. The likelihood is that if they are scammers you will hear no more from them.

2. Agree terms for the transfer of the rights to translate the book.*. This may be a one off up-front payment to you for the rights, or it may be a royalty share agreement for publication of the translated work. It could be a mixture of both with an upfront payment being traded off for lower royalties.

3. Agree which languages they will hold the translation rights for. Usually this will just be one language, but it could be more than one, which makes the rights more valuable as it increases the potential sales volume.

4. Once your book has been translated into one language, the translator will have the right to sell the rights for translation into a third language, so your contract must prohibit that.

5. Agree who will do the publishing of the translated work, you or the translator. If it is the translator, agree the monitoring arrangements for sales on which the royalties will be calculated. This can take the form of KDP sales reports.

6. Agree who will do the marketing and how the marketing costs will be deducted from royalties in order to maintain an equitable balance between author and translator.

7. Find a solicitor/lawyer who will draft the contract on the terms you have agreed. It will cost you money, but it could earn you more in the long term.

This may appear complicated but remember that your book is your property, and no one will protect your rights to your book except you. The law is on your side, but in this case it is also on the side of the translator.

* There is one exception. In Germany, national laws state that the originator of the work holds the sole copyright, and that copyright cannot be transferred.. So, any scammer is unlikely to be offering to translate your work into German. But get a contract anyway, just to be safe.

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]]><![CDATA[Blurbs ... Again!]]>Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMThttp://selfishgenie.com/blog/blurbs-again

We have to talk about blurbs again, don’t we?

In writers’ groups on social media, I am still seeing such awful blurbs being posted, inviting feedback, and I have to wonder why authors don’t realise how badly they are showcasing their books.

There are so many blogs and books about blurb writing, they all say similar things (including this one) and they are all quite clearly not being read by authors. If they were the blurbs wouldn’t be nearly so bad. I’ll be recommending one of these books later.

I suspect that it is because authors view writing a blurb from the author’s end of the telescope. They have lavished weeks, months or even years of effort on their story and they want to tell the reader as much as possible about it in their blurb. But instead of making the book sound exciting, they try to tell the story in 300 – 500 words and that just does not work.

When you view the same thing from the readers’ end of the telescope, the blurb looks very different.

In the blurb all the reader wants to know is “Will I like this book?”.

Creating a blurb is not a writing exercise, it is an exercise in psychology.

Everything about a blurb has to say “this is the best book you will read this year” while actually saying something completely different. Every word has to have meaning for the reader in a way that they don’t even recognise.

Which is why trad published authors don’t do their own blurb writing. Trad publishers hire specialists to write blurbs. People who know how the psychology of blurbs works.

So, as well as writing, editing, proofreading, cover design and marketing, self-published authors have to add a new skill set to their arsenal, and it’s called copywriting. It is a major skill used in advertising of all types and a blurb is just another form of advertising.

The buying of a book is a lengthy process. It may only take a few minutes, but in psychological terms it is a lifetime of decision making.

We call these decisions the “sales funnel”.

It’s the basic process that takes place between the reader first seeing your book ("awareness" in the graphic) and the point at which they click (or tap) on the “buy now” button.

The thing is that in terms of the “sales funnel” the blurb is only about halfway along the path. (The "interest" section of the graphic). But if the reader isn’t attracted by the blurb, they won’t take the next step along the path (desire), so the sale is lost.

Think of a blurb like a bridge across a river. On one side you have the book’s cover, title, subtitle and price, and on the other side you have the free sample (which stimulates desire), next to which is the “Buy Now” button. The Bridge of Blurbs allows the reader to cross from one side of the river to the other.

I’ll return to the latter stages of the sales funnel at the end of this blog, just to remind you of what they are.

But first I want to talk about the barrier of the “read more” button.

When you look at a blurb on Amazon you are only shown a few lines of text. The more “white space” the author has included, the less text there is to read.

Then comes the “read more” button which will reveal the rest of the blurb.

Now, ask yourself this question. If you haven’t got the reader’s attention after those few lines of text, will they click on that “read more” button?

I think you already know the answer, but just to make it clear – No, they won’t. They will go and look at a different book.

Getting the reader to click on the “read more” button is the first challenge to be met by the blurb. It is a barrier to sales that can be as big as the Great Wall of China.

Let’s start with the “tag line” because that is usually the first bit of the blurb the reader sees.

So, what makes a good tag line?

It is one that forces the reader to ask questions. If they start to ask questions, they will want to know the answers and that means reading the rest of the blurb.

I came across this example of a great tagline. It’s from self-published bestselling author Mark Dawson.

“MI5 created him. Now they want to destroy him.”*

The first thing to notice is that there is clear signal as to the genre of the book. “MI5” can only mean spies and secret agents. If the reader likes those sorts of books, they are likely to read on.

But those two sentences also invite the reader to ask questions.

With your “reader” hat on, start asking some questions about those 2 sentences.

I got “Who is the ‘him’ that is referred to? Why did MI5 create him? What did they create? An assassin? A Spy? Why do they want to destroy him? What did he do wrong? Will they succeed?

And, the 2 sentences together add up to one thing – betrayal. So, the reader is almost bound to feel some sympathy for the character and sympathy is a powerful emotion to invoke.

Importantly, they will start to read the rest of the blurb in an effort to find some of the answers to their questions.

That isn’t the only type of tag line you can use. Some authors use a quote from their reviews, and they can work well. Research has shown that click rates for review quotes are quite high. Quotes work because readers identify with other readers. It’s a bit like being part of a club.

But reading the tag line is like seeing an attractive person across a crowded room. They look nice, but are they interesting?

So, you go across the room to talk to them to find out. After initial introductions, they start to talk.

“I was born in London, but my family moved to Nottingham when I was 5. I went to primary school at … then secondary school at … before starting at university where I studied …. After that I went to work at … My brother went to … and he lived with my Auntie Vi. She’s a …”

Are you bored yet? Are you looking over their shoulder to see if there is anyone more interesting you can go and talk to?

So, imagine your reader’s boredom when you start to tell them all about your character’s backstory, or the world you built for them, or their extensive family tree and all the other things authors stuff into their blurbs.

Yet the author still expects the reader to click on the “read more” button despite the fact that they have already sent the reader to sleep.

The second para has to tell the reader what the story is about. Not the whole thing of course.

You introduce the protagonist, drop in tropes that indicate the genre and the type of story within the genre. But above all you introduce the conflict because the conflict starts to raise emotions in the reader. They start to like the protagonist, they start to sympathise with them. In short, they start to engage with them.

To do that you have to use words that trigger emotional responses. “Vulnerable” is one such trigger word, often used in romance. “Courageous” is one seen in action adventure, sci-fi, fantasy and more.

Below is a list of words that trigger an emotional response. There are many more, of course, but these are seen frequently in blurbs. The reason they are seen so frequently is because they work. You only need to use a couple to get the reader responding at an emotional level.

Sympathy is a particularly powerful emotion.

If the reader sympathises with the character’s plight, they are going to want to know what happens to the character. Which means that the character can’t be a victim. People don’t actually sympathise with victims that much because victimhood is passive. What they do sympathise with is a victim that is fighting back, because that is active.

If you can start to raise those emotions the reader will click on that “read more” button and you are a long way through the funnel to getting them to buy the book (but still not the whole way).

So, the author has to hit the reader between they eyes with the sorts of words that are going to excite their imagination.

These are called hooks, because they hook the reader into reading more. A hook at the end of a paragraph encourages the reader to move on to the next paragraph, so you can’t have too many of them.

Hooks are often multi-layered.

The top layer invites questions, the next layer invites an emotional response, the third layer will raise the level of the drama.

But the most important part of the hook is the bit that will appear above the “read more” button. If it is hidden from view it might as well not be there because it may not be seen at all.

Most blogs you will read on blurb writing agree that the “sweet spot” for the length of a blurb is between 250 and 350 words, around 100 (40% or less) of which will be above the “read more” button..

Anything more than that and you will lose the reader, and they’ll move onto the next book in the search results.

YOU CANNOT ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN

Many authors put a call to action (CTA) at the end of the blurb. This is not a good idea because the reader is not yet ready to buy. They will see the CTA as being “pushy”.

If that was the right place to put the CTA, Amazon would put one in - and they don’t. Amazon puts the CTA at the end of the free sample, because that is when the final decision to buy will be made (I’ll return to that in a moment).

But that doesn’t mean there is no CTA in the blurb at all. Any good blurb will have a CTA, it’s just that it is disguised.

The form of disguise is the “cliffhanger”. This can be a statement eg “Her survival is at stake …” or it can be a question eg “Will she survive …”

Note the use of an ellipsis rather than a question mark. It leaves things open ended and that is good for keeping the reader engaged.

If the blurb has done its job, the reader will now go to one of two places on the sales page as they take the next step along the sales funnel.

They may scroll down to the reviews because, as I
said, readers like to know what other readers thought of the book.

Notice I didn’t mention the product information, which they will have to scroll past to get to the reviews. That’s where the sales rankings are displayed. Interestingly , readers don’t seem to bother with them too much. Sales ranks seem to bother authors far more.

I’m sure readers do look at the product descriptions, but they don’t seem to influence sales.

If the book is so new it hasn’t had any reviews, it doesn’t mean the sale has been lost. Readers aren’t stupid. They know that a brand new book won’t have reviews. So, they will take the final step along the sales funnel to the “free sample” (previously called the “look inside” segment).

Your book has excited interest and kept the reader on the page, but the free sample stimulates the desire for the book.

If the free sample doesn’t keep the reader interested until they reach the “buy now” button, there is no desire and the sale won’t be made.

This isn’t universal, of course.

A percentage of readers will buy without even reading the blurb, because the book has been recommended to them by someone whose opinion they trust, or they are familiar with the author and like their books. It may even be the long awaited next book in a series.

A percentage of readers will buy on the strength of the blurb alone.

A percentage will buy because they trust the reviews.

But by far the largest percentage of sales come from the free sample.

So, why so many words dedicated to how to write a blurb?

Because the blurb is part of the sales funnel and if the reader isn’t captured by it, they won’t get to the reviews or the free sample. They can’t get to the other side of the river without crossing the Bridge of Blurbs.

At the top of the blog I mentioned a book on blurb writing that I would recommend. It gets deep into the psychology of blurb writing but it isn’t heavy. It is Robert J Ryan’s book “Book Blurbs Unleased.” If you only ever read one book on blurb writing, make sure it is this one. It’s free to download on Kindle Unlimited.

* The use of bold text for the tag line was deliberate. Tag lines should always stand out from the rest of the words.

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]]><![CDATA[Unleash The Power Of Email Book Marketing.]]>Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMThttp://selfishgenie.com/blog/unleash-the-power-of-email-book-marketing

Selling a book to someone who has just enjoyed reading one of your books is the easiest book you will ever sell. In business terms it’s called “picking the low hanging fruit”.

If you have another book out, then it’s easy to do. You just put a link to the next book in the backmatter and the reader clicks on it and the sale is as good as made.

But what if your next book isn’t out for a while? How will the reader know when it is out?

You can’t expect the reader to go onto Amazon once a week to check and they may not follow you on social media, so how do you communicate with that satisfied reader 3 months, 6 months or even a year from now?

No matter which book marketing guru you read, they all agree that email lists are one of the top 4 ways to sell books (the other 3 being ads on Amazon, Facebook and Bookbub).

So, why do so few Indie authors use this method to communicate with readers and boost their sales?

Every Indie author selling in the 6 figure income bracket (and higher) has an email list as long as the Norwegian coastline and they use it every time they launch a new book (and at other times in between, of course, but more of that later).

It’s why they are 6 figure plus income earners.

That should tell every Indie author everything they need to know about email lists. Yet still there is an incredible amount of resistance from Indie authors to building and using them.

Here are some of the reasons that a lot of Indie authors give for not using email marketing (in no particular order), with our response beneath.

"I don’t sign up for email lists, so no one would sign up for mine."

You are not your readers. Lots of readers sign up for as many lists as they can because they are always looking for new book recommendations.

"They are a lot of hard work to build and maintain."

True, but without hard work, nothing happens – especially sales.

"It is expensive to build an email list."

Not true. While it isn’t free, as a marketing tool it is far cheaper than advertising (I’ll cover costs later).

"I don’t have time for building and maintaining email lists."

Nor did those 6 figure income authors when they started out, but they found the time and that’s why they are now 6 figure plus income authors.

If you have your own pet objection which we’ve missed out, put it in the comments and we’ll be happy to respond to it.,

If, at this stage, you are still saying “email lists are not for me” then fair enough. Thanks for reading this far and we’ll get on with writing this blog for the benefit of the authors who want to make some decent money from their books.

OK, now they’ve gone, we’ll admit that not everyone who uses email marketing is going to reach the dizzy heights of 6 figure plus incomes. But they can get to the mid to upper 5 digit levels. We know this is possible because we are already achieving that for our authors.

So, what do you need to start?

Well, you need something to attract readers to your email list. Some people call these “freebies”, some call them “reader magnets” and I know of one person (who I will name later) who calls them “cookies”, because she hands them out like cookies.

I’m going to call it “content” because that covers a whole raft of possibilities. Some of these are:

Full length books (often a series starter).
Novellas (in the same genre as your write your novels)
Short stories (ditto).
Prequels/Epilogues/Side stories (adventures that other characters had)
All of the above 3 for the villain(s) of the book.
Extracts from books.
Maps (depending on genre)
Family trees (depending on genre)

There will be some work in creating that sort of content just for it to be given away for free but, to use an old British term, they are a sprat to catch a mackerel.

If your email list grows at any sort of speed you will want to automate as much of the work as possible, or you really will find yourself drowning in emails, so the next few paragraphs talk about the businesses that can do that for you.

You need an email list management service. There are many of these around, some of which have free packages with limited functionality, but even if you need to subscribe they have packages starting from around $9 a month (£7 – price correct at time of writing).

Mailchimp and Mailerlite are the market leaders but there are smaller providers.

A word of warning. Having used one of those companies I can’t say they are not the most user friendly when it comes to setting up automated responses and emails. You will have to spend some time watching their tutorials and even then you may have difficulties and have to email for support..

Then you need a delivery system to get your content to people so you can harvest their email address (ethically and legally, of course) for transfer to your email service. If you want to follow best practice you will also want to deliver new content to existing subscribers.

There is no doubt about the market leader in the delivery field. It is Bookfunnel and we have no hesitation about mentioning them. All their packages cost money and you will have to go in at above the most basic subscription level if you want to capture email addresses.

What Bookfunnel calls “Mid-List Author” has a subscription price of $8.33 a month or $100 annually (£6.50 and £78.33 - prices correct at time of writing) and that is the minimum package you need.

When you compare those prices with what you might have to pay for advertising, you can see that email marketing is far more economical. You can easily spend $100 a week to run a Facebook or Amazon advertising campaign.

The rest of this blog is devoted to how you use Bookfunnel to build your email list from scratch and you have to get a little bit creative to make that work. We’re not going to go into too much detail. You’ll find lots of videos on the Bookfunnel website to help you.

The first way to capture emails is “Group Promos”, which offer a range of books by different authors for free, capitalising on the fact that they give readers a choice of content. In these terms a book doesn’t have to be a full length novel, but it usually excludes extracts and sample chapters.

The second is more advanced and is “Author Swaps” where you promote a single book by another author in order to generate sales, and they do the same for you.

Bookfunnel has a built in system for preventing cheating and not keeping your end of the promotional bargain.

If you don’t promote other authors the way they are promoting you, you’ll find it hard to join a group promo the next time. Bookfunnel calls it “reputation”, but that is all we are going to say on the subject. Feel free to email us if you want to know more.

Every month there are a number of Group Promos in the most popular genres that allow a newbie to join without an established “reputation”. Of course, the group will mainly be made up of other newbies, but that doesn’t matter. You are all in the same boat and are all there for the same reason – to get email addresses.

To join a Group Promo you need at least one bit of content to give away and most promos are capped to a set number of books per author (typically 2 - 4) so that no one author dominates the promo.

Now, if you don’t have an email list, how do you actually send out the link to the promo?

Some promo organisers (anyone can be one of those) even insist that you have a minimum number of email addresses in your list in order to join the group.

This is where you have to get creative.

For a start, the promo organiser has no idea how many email addresses you have in your list. I’ll just leave that hanging there and let you decide what to do with it.

Secondly, all anyone is really interested in is those clicks, so it doesn’t matter where the reader saw the link that takes them to the promo. It could have been in an email or it could have been written in crayon on the back of the door of a public toilet (public bathroom if you’re American).

So long as the click is made, nobody is any the wiser. Nor do they really care.

So, instead of using your non-existent email list, you post the link on your social media instead.

Don’t worry if you have only a small number of followers (I’d suggest a minimum of 1,000 on Twitter/X). You only need a handful of clicks in order to start to establish your reputation and you will also get an email address every time someone chooses your content as the one they want to download.

Now, you do need to be a little bit creative about how you post the promo link. Just saying “free books” and inserting the link isn’t going to attract many link clicks.

There is a video available on Bookfunnel on what sort of content to use in your promo emails or posts, so I’m not going to repeat the lesson here.

Group Promos typically run for between a fortnight to a month and I suggest you join 2 groups a fortnight but no more. Joining too many promos at once could lead to things becoming unmanageable.

There is a reason for joining two groups, though.

I’ll call the two different groups Promo A and Promo B.

When you start to get email addresses for downloads of your content as part of Promo A, you can send the link for Promo B to those addresses, providing the promo is still running. And vice versa for Promo B, of course.

The advantage of doing that is that you are sending the promo link to people you know are likely to click on it – because that’s how you got their email address in the first place.

If you get 10 email addresses from each promo, 20 in total, and you do that twice a month, that may give you 40 email addresses. If your content was a series starter, there is a good chance that 50% of those people will then read through the rest of your series.

If your book is a trilogy, that’s 20 sales of Book 2 and 20 of Book 3. And every month you are likely to get the same results again, so you are selling books you wouldn’t have otherwise sold, at the same time as you build your email list for future marketing campaigns. That will more than cover the cost of your Bookfunnel subscription.

But don’t forget to put links in all the right places in your series starter. And if you put some different content onto Bookfunnel, you can put links in all the books in the series to get more sign-ups in exchange for that free content. That is called “organic” growth.

But, more importantly, you now have 40 email addresses to which you can send the next promo to. You can still use social media for your promos too, as that increases your “reach”. In fact, I would continue to do that even when you have 10,000 addresses in your email list.

Now you have to learn how to use those email addresses in order to build engagement with those readers.

You will notice that I didn’t say “sell your books to those readers” and that is because selling is the last thing you should be doing. What you should be doing is using your email list to send out newsletters which build engagement. The sort of engagement that makes the reader feel they are part of an exclusive club. And that means providing them with exclusive content.

This turns a reader into a “superfan”. Not only will they buy everything you care to write, but they will tell everyone they know about your books at every opportunity. These people really exist, and newsletters are the way they are found or created.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expert in the craft of newsletter writing – but I know someone who is.

You will recall that I mentioned someone earlier in the blog who refers to her free content as “cookies”. That lady’s name is Tammi Lebrecque and she is one of the acknowledged gurus of email book marketing.

She has written two books on the subject and they are called “Newsletter Ninja” and “Newsletter Ninja 2”.

I highly recommend reading both books BEFORE you start trying to build your email lists, as they will save you a lot of time and heartache. The first book gets into the nuts and bolts of list building and engagement and the second book takes a closer look at what makes a good “cookie”.

So, that concludes our brief (or maybe not so brief, looking at the word count for this blog) tour around emails and list building. It really is one of the foundation stones of a marketing strategy and if you don’t have an email list it is unlikely that you will ever reach the dizzy heights of a 6 figure income.

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]]><![CDATA[Is Your Metadata Sabotaging Your Book?]]>Fri, 25 Oct 2024 23:00:00 GMThttp://selfishgenie.com/blog/is-your-metadata-sabotaging-your-book

Did you know, your book’s meta data on KDP could inadvertently be sabotaging your book?

We all know that meta data is key to your book showing up in Amazon searches. I’m not contradicting that in any way.

What is also key, however, is not including anything in that metadata that might confuse Amazon’s algorithms.

As we all know (despite the growth of AI) computers are stupid. They do what they are told to do.

So, if they are told to search for keywords in your meta data in order to place your book in front of the right readers, that is what they will do.

The problem arises when we, the authors, use words that aren’t meant to be keywords. They are meant to be something else.

Let me illustrate. Let’s say you are a writer of romance novels. You have spent hours, days or even weeks crafting the perfect blurb for your book. Great!

Your opening line of the blurb is “Melissa woke up feeling like a zombie.”

Now, you and I know that this is a simile. Melissa isn’t really a zombie, she just went to bed very drunk and is now feeling the effects of her excess. I think that the majority of us can relate to that.

The trouble is that Amazon’s algorithms don’t know a simile from a hole in the ground. For them the use of the word “zombie” suggests that this may be a horror story, subcategory “zombie apocalypse”.

So, if Amazon now shows the book to lots of horror story readers who then don’t buy it, the algorithm now doesn’t know what to do with the book – or who to show it to.

The use of the word “zombie” just once is unlikely to have that affect. But if the author was to say also “her hangover was of apocalyptic proportions” then the confusion would be compounded by that word “apocalyptic” which, coupled with “zombie”, now tells Amazon’s algorithms that this is a book about the zombie apocalypse..

That romance book will be forever shown to readers of zombie apocalypse books and not to the readers of romance who might actually buy it.

And it could be costing the author money. If they are running ads for the book, every time a reader of zombie apocalypse stories clicks on the ad, the author will be charged but the reader won’t buy because they will soon discover that the book is a romance, not a novel about the zombie apocalypse.

The example I have used is extreme and the categorisation of the book as romance is likely to override the use of the words. But it serves to illustrate my point.

Because when the book is in the right category (let’s say fantasy) but uses keywords that can be used in a number of different subcategories, there could be a real problem.

If the words you use in your blurb produce results for searches in the wrong subcategories, readers won’t click on the book and then the algorithm will assume there is something wrong with the categorisation and will stop showing it completely.

Your keywords will be seen as irrelevant, making your book effectively invisible.

I use fantasy as an example here because it has so many subcategories, but the same can apply in a number of genres: sci-fi, romance, historical fiction et al.

So, our takeaways for this section of the blog are simple:

Check all your book’s meta data to makes sure there is nothing in it that could mislead the Amazon Algorithm (may its name be praised most high).
Check to make sure your book is in the right subcategories to start with, and not just in the top level category.

But there is a second way that some authors sabotage their own books with their meta data.

One of the things we often read on social media is questions about how to choose a category for a book that is, according to its author, uncategorisable.

The authors seem to think that just because they have included tropes from different genres or sub genres, they have created some sort of new genre.

This is both wrong and/or arrogant.

It is also very dangerous for the author.

Every book has a central story and that is the one that dictates its genre (or category to use Amazon’s terminology). If you try to outthink the categorisation system for books on Amazon all that will happen is that your books won’t be shown to the right readers and therefore won’t sell.

OK, there are some readers that won’t read a book in genre X if it contains trope Y, but they are the minority. Most readers are sufficiently liberal to accept a few intrusions from other genres providing the main tropes of the book remain faithful to the genre they love.

So, listing a grimdark novel under romantacy just because it contains a love interest is not a good idea, because romantacy readers won’t read it. If romantacy readers won’t read it, then Amazon’s algorithms will decide it is irrelevant and won’t show it to readers in any fantasy category..

For some reason there are some authors who think that they have created something that doesn’t fit into a category. Just because they have included a noblebright hero in a grimdark novel, they seem to think that their book is no longer grimdark. Likewise, if they then give their noblebright hero a romantic interest, they have strayed even further away from the grimdark category.

This is NOT the case. If the main theme of the book is grimdark, then it doesn’t matter what else you throw into the mix. It is still grimdark and in that subcategory of fantasy it should be listed.

The same applies to all the other myriad categories on Amazon or other book retailing platforms.

Every author who claims that their book can’t be classified in that way is either arrogant, suffering from an overdose of vanity or they just don’t know how the categorisation system works..

There is no such things a new category or subcategory. If there was, Amazon and the other retailers would be all over it, because they employ professional market researchers to stay on top of those sorts of things..

Ask yourself a few simple questions:

- What genre of book did I set out to write?
- Does the main plotline include tropes appropriate to that genre?
- Do the additional tropes that I have included amount to a major change in genre?

This will help you to decide if your book is whatever you set out to write. You have not created a new genre just because you included a romance, or a quest, or … well, you get the idea.

So, for the second part of this blog, our takeaways are:

You have not created a new category or subcategory of book.
Make sure you list your book in the correct subcategory for its main theme – whatever that main theme is.
Don’t list a book in an inappropriate subcategory just because you threw in a few tropes from that subcategory.

With a bit of luck, you won’t then sabotage your own book.

If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.

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]]><![CDATA[What Is "Product Targeting"?]]>Fri, 18 Oct 2024 23:00:00 GMThttp://selfishgenie.com/blog/what-is-product-targeting

One of the most time consuming parts of advertising with Amazon is having to do all the research to find those hundreds of keywords that the Amazon Ads gurus tell you that you need in order for your ad to show up in searches.

I’m not decrying the advice, because you really do need all those keywords to run keyword targeted ads. I’m only bemoaning the fact that it takes so long to find the right keywords.

Tools such as Publisher Rocket can help save time on this research, but if you haven’t got that and don’t want to subscribe to it, you are stuck with doing trial and error research to find what sort of search terms produce the best results for books like yours.

But just suppose, for a moment, that there was an easier way to advertise your book than using keywords.

And, just suppose some more, that you get better sales using this approach.

Is that something in which you might be interested?

If it is, then read on.

Now, for a moment, I want to take you away from the world of book marketing and into advertising products in what is called “pay per click” or PPC marketing, which is used both on Amazon and places like Google Ads to advertise a wide range of products.

This is a huge area of marketing, generating $ billions per year in sales and the people who market in this area know how it works. They don’t want to do hundreds of trial and error searches to find out what keywords to put into their ads. They haven’t got time for that. They have money to make and, in their world, time is money.

This is where we get our inspiration.

If one of these PPC marketers wants to sell an electric drill, for example, they don’t go looking for synonyms for electric drills that could act as keywords. They also don’t put in random search terms for electric drill type products that may result in an electric drill coming out top of the search results.

No. What they do is tell Amazon Ads “When someone searches for an electric drill made by Acme, show them my electric drill as well.”

And it works.

It has probably happened to you. It has certainly happened to me.

When I searched for Ping golf bags recently, I was also shown a lot of golf bags that weren’t made by Ping but which might also suit my purpose. Some of those were cheaper than the Ping bags and it was one of those that I bought.

And very nice it is too.

So, substitute a book title or an author name for “Ping golf bag” and that is how this system works for authors.

It is called “product targeting” and it needs far fewer searches to find suitable targets than hunting down 2 or 3 hundred keywords.

And you can be very specific about which products you want to target. because you use the product’s ASIN to identify it, rather than phrases that can be either too broad or can be misinterpreted.

If you do happen to subscribe to Publisher Rocket, their competitor analysis tool will also speed up this process, but for the purposes of this blog I’ll assume you aren’t a subscriber.

Where “Science Fiction” can produce thousands of potential books in the search results, some of which are like yours but many of which aren’t, ASIN 123456ABCD can produce only one result – and that result is a book that would sit comfortably right next to yours on a bookshelf.

That’s providing you have selected the ASIN with care, of course.

If you just pick a hundred books from the best-seller list and include them in your ad, your ad won’t work because the results won’t be relevant to the readers - and Amazon hates irrelevancy in ads. It hates it to such a point that you will have to pay more just for your ad to be seen. You will also pay for a lot of clicks that could never result in sales because the wrong readers are seeing your books.

So, what do you have to do to create a product targeted ad?

First of all, you have to select your “targets” and those are the books like yours that people are searching for. Let their authors go through all the pain of finding the right keywords. All you have to do is say “When this book appears in search results, show them my book too.”

So, you do your searches by category (genre) and sub category to find books that are similar to yours.

If you write “space opera” you are looking for space opera books specifically, but you might also look for neighbouring categories such as space marines, space military, deep space exploration etc whose readers might also buy your books.

But just a health warning here – if you stray too far from your own book’s category your readers may see your book as less relevant to them, with all the consequences that will bring regarding how Amazon will treat your ads.

When we do this we look for books that are doing well in the sales rankings for the subcategories in which they are listed, so in our example we would be looking at “science fiction – space opera” books that are doing well in the charts.

We don’t want the big names though. Targeting Isaac Azimov probably isn’t a good idea, because readers of his books may be prejudiced against Indie authors.

Just an aside here, the reading world seems to be dividing into three camps these days.

There are those who will never read books by an Indie author, no matter how good the reviews for the books are. There are those who are only reading Indie authors these days because they know they can get good books at better prices from Indies. And there are those who will read both but will tend towards selecting the Indies that are higher up the sales ranks or whose books are getting better reviews.

As an Indie author you are better off looking for the Indie authors who are doing well, because their readers aren’t so prejudiced against books by Indie authors.

Our starting point is the best seller lists, but you can also use the sales rankings that are shown on the product pages if you are using titles/authors provided by Publisher Rocket.

And don’t forget to include your own books as targets, especially if you are advertising a new book or you have a new series out.

Readers may be searching your book titles and your author name, so you want to be sure your new book shows up in the results, not just your old books.

Then you copy and paste all the ASINs into a document for later use.

How many ASINs do you need?

Well, you are looking for the books that are selling well and which will be appearing in readers’ searches, so perhaps 20 to 30 books. If you can find 30 books by different authors then that is great. Many readers search for their favourite authors because they know they’ll get lots of other suggestions to pick from in those “also bought” and “recommended for you” lists.

Once you have your list of ASINs, it’s time to go across to Amazon Ads and set up your ad.

There is a second way of selecting targets and it is very much quicker.

Just as with keyword targeting, Amazon Ads will suggest products (books) that it considers are similar to yours and you can select your targets from that list. However, a word of caution if you would like to go that route.

Amazon doesn’t understand your book as well as you understand it. The targets it selects for your book are not necessarily going to be the best targets.

They are going to be the books that Amazon thinks are the best targets and that may be very different. Don’t just accept them willy-nilly. Check them out first to make sure they are a good match for your book. If you don’t you may be doing more harm than good by accepting them as targets.

When you set up a “Sponsored Product” ad you will be familiar with selecting manual targeting and keyword targeting. This time you will be using different options.

You will still be selecting manual targeting, but now you will need to select “product targeting”.

The options you are now presented with are similar to those used for keyword targeting. You need to select “Individual products”, “Enter list” and click on “expanded” for matching.

If you want to take Amazon’s suggested products as your targets, then you don’t have to use the “Enter list” option.

Using “expanded” matching allows other books by the same author to be selected by Amazon, increasing your range of suitable targets

Now all you have to do is paste your list of ASINs into the target box (or select your targets from Amazon’s list of suggestions) and enter them.

Which brings us to bidding strategy.

Many gurus that advise on keyword targeting tell you to bid low. This is because you are using hundreds of keywords and if you set high bids you’ll burn through your budget very quickly. So, they advise you to use custom bids and default bids which conserve your budget but will still result in your ad being seen.

When you are product targeting the bidding strategy is the opposite.

In PPC marketing of this sort, you are in a dog fight for visibility. You have a much smaller number of targets, so you have to make sure your books are seen alongside them. It is a real auction and the only way you can win is to outbid the competition.

So, not only do you select the suggested bids, you actually need to increase them. We usually add 5 pence (5 cents) to each bid. Even that may not be enough, so there is some trial and error here.

We have seen suggested bids that are so high we would struggle to make any profit from the ad. We tend to delete those targets for ‘standalone’ books, but if our book is part of a series we may decide we can make enough profit on read throughs to the rest of the series, so we aren’t too bothered by a high bid for Book 1.

So, does it work?

Yes it does. Sales are better than we get for keyword targeting, which is what this is all about. Our return on advertising spend (ROAS) is higher when we take KU reads and read throughs for the series into account, which is the only true picture of advertising profit and loss.

Which brings us to analysing results.

It is the nature of PPC marketing of this sort that your ad will get a lot of clicks, but not all clicks will result in sales.

Some ASINs will get you lots of sales and some will get you none, depending on how well matched your book is to your target. This is why you have to select your targets with care and not use the “throw lots of targets in and hope for the best” philosophy that you can get away with in keyword ads.

It is important to cull ASINs that aren’t bringing you sales because, unlike keyword ads, these could be costing you a lot of money every time they are clicked. That means checking your advertising results data at regular intervals to see which targets are performing and which aren’t and switching off the poor performers.

As you are targeting specific books, your ads will become dated after a while. Books that are riding high in the best seller charts today may be bumping along in the gravel in 3 months’ time and won’t be showing up very high in the search results, even when the searches are done on the author’s name.

This means shutting down your ad when sales start to drop and setting up a new ad with new targets. The longevity of targets will vary, but unless you are targeting a best-selling author (not advisable anyway because the bid costs are too high) you should be shutting down your ad when it gets close to the “break even” point in terms of its ROAS.

You don’t necessarily have to create a brand new ad every time. By analysing your results data, you can identify targets that are no longer performing and switch them off, replacing them with some new targets. But eventually this piecemeal approach may make it more difficult to analyse your results, so starting afresh from time to time is advisable.

As with all things, you don’t have to take our word for the effectiveness of this tactic.

Run your own trial.

Take a book that you advertised using keyword targeting and which has had reasonable sales and use its data as your baseline, then try running an ad for a month using product targeting and see what happens. If it doesn’t result in better sales, email us and let us know.

So, our main takeaways from this blog:

When it comes to Amazon Ads, product targeting is a time saving and profitable alternative to keyword targeting.
ASINs must be selected with care to match your book(s) as closely as possible.
You are in an auction, so your bids have to be better than those of the competition.
Use your data to get rid of targets that may be costing you money by not making sales.

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