 Once again I’m indebted to the users of Twitter for the inspiration behind this week’s blog. The theme is how perceptions don’t necessarily match up to reality. The Tweet(s) in question relate to an author bemoaning the fact that someone had posted rude 1 star reviews about two of her books on Amazon and she feared this was impacting on her sales. They were also undermining her confidence and making her ask herself if she should continue working on her third book. I Tweeted back (sympathetically I hope) that reviews weren’t everything and, at the end of the day they are an opinion, and no author can please everyone. If they had valid criticisms, then it was a good idea to learn from them, but otherwise forget them. There are also people who delight in posting 1 star reviews, just because they can. (I know, we live in a truly troubling world)  In her reply the author posted a screenshot of her review data, the yellow bars Amazon uses to show the percentages of reviews for each star rating. And it was highly revealing, but not in the way she thought. Out of around 240 reviews, over 60% were 5 star and another 20% were 4 star. I pointed that out, suggesting the (approx) 10% of 1 star reviews weren’t something to worry about. The number of 4 and 5 star reviews would be far more influential than the 1 star ones when it came to decisions about purchasing. She didn’t agree with me, suggesting that her KENP reads had dropped since the 1 star reviews had been posted. I suggested that she would need a bit more evidence than that in order to draw such a conclusion. Perhaps her KENP reads had dropped because her marketing activity needed refreshing. I think I may have persuaded her, because she did say she would think about that. Or maybe she was just trying to shut me up, which is a real possibility.  But it is easy to take an isolated bit of data, such as reviews, and interpret them as something they aren’t. Looking at her numbers, I would be using the percentage of 4 and 5 star reviews to trumpet the success of our books, in order to encourage new readers to try them. That screenshot she posted tells a far different story to the one she was seeing, as far as I was concerned. Because 80% reviews at that 4 and 5 star level are a real sign of success, not failure. It is always dangerous to take two bits of data, put them side by side and assign cause and effect from them. In this case a couple of 1 star reviews put alongside a drop in KENP reads equals a cause and effect.  Cause and effect? A third bit of data is needed in order to see if that is a valid conclusion. In this case the third bit of data would be a measurement of marketing activity: social media posts, advertising spend etc. If there is a lot of marketing activity but a drop in KENP reads, then the author may be right in her original conclusion. But if there is a drop in marketing activity at the same time as a drop in KENP reads, then perhaps it isn’t the 1 star reviews that are the cause, perhaps it is the lack of marketing. It is very easy to let our perceptions and emotions get in the way of interpreting our data. In this case it is possible that the author is (a) underconfident and (b) sensitive to criticism. I can’t prove that because I haven’t got all the data available, but it seems to be a reasonable conclusion to draw on the basis of what she said in her Tweets.  That under confidence, combined with the sensitivity, led the author to draw a conclusion that supported her perceptions and, despite what Lee Atwater may have said, perception is not reality, it is only the perceiver’s reality. Perception may be reality, but it isn’t actuality (Bill Cowher) and you have to be able to tell the difference if you want to market your books effectively. In this case it was the perception that 1 star reviews were affecting KENP reads, when the actuality might be a lack of marketing or perhaps another, undiscovered, reason. As statisticians will tell you, correlation does not imply causation. More evidence is needed. So, if you want to diagnose problems such as drops in sales levels, what can you do?  The best thing is to use several different types of data alongside each other and see what, together, they are telling you. KDP provides you with a lot of information on sales and KENP, but it doesn’t tell you anything about your marketing activity. This means that you need to have some measurement of marketing activity that you can analyse. If you use paid advertising, there is a mountain of data that can be obtained in relation to the performance of your ads. The most important bits are conversion rates. Eg how many impressions (views) did your ads get and how many clicks on the links did that convert to. Then how many of those clicks were converted to sales. The experts suggest you should be expecting at least a 10% conversion rate of link clicks to sales to consider an advertising campaign to be successful. But if you don’t use paid for advertising, you only use social media, you have to look elsewhere for your data. But the same principles apply. How much engagement did you get for the social media posts that pitched your books? How many clicks on the links etc.  The lower the numbers are, the less likely it is that you made sales or KENP reads.
If you got high engagement levels but low sales, it means that readers looked at your book but chose not to buy it and there are many reasons why that may be. Reviews are one of them, of course, but they aren’t the only one. There is your cover, the blurb and the ‘look inside’ portion of the book as well. I would say that all three of those are a more likely reason for a reader not buying than having 10% 1 star reviews when 80% are 4 and 5 star. I’m not saying reviews aren’t important. Readers often send us important information tucked away in a poor review and that information can be used to improve writing. But, as I said before, a review is just an opinion and, in some cases, it isn’t even that. It may just be some poor soul being nasty because it makes them feel good. And that contaminates the data, just as an author getting their Mum to post 5 star review contaminates the data. But importantly, don’t let perception become your reality if you aren’t sure it is also the actuality. Correlation isn’t the same as causation (well, sometimes it is but that is a whole different blog). 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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 I think it is fair to say we get a lot of our ideas for blogs from Twitter and other social media sites, especially those used by authors. Be careful what you post, because you might well get a mention here. Not by name, of course. We would never do that. So it is this week, with a Tweet we saw a few weeks ago from an author (we sometimes write our blogs several weeks in advance of their publication). The Tweet was actually in two parts. The first part related to the way an author’s book sales had fallen off over recent weeks. By ‘sales’ we also mean KENP read using KindleUnlimited etc. A blog we posted a couple of weeks ago covered some of the reasons why sales vary on a seasonal basis, so we won’t cover that ground again (scroll down a bit if you want to find out more). But, of course, it’s not just the season of the year that affects sales.  We like to think of book sales a little bit like the way we think about tending houseplants. If you give a houseplant just the right amount of attention at just the right time, it should flourish. Well, a healthy plant in a disease free environment should live a long and happy life if it is given the right care and attention. But if you don’t give the plant the right care, or enough attention, or you give it at the wrong time, it will die. The same applies to giving it too much attention. The phrase ‘killing with kindness’ may have been invented for houseplants (if it wasn’t, please don’t email to tell us – put it in a blog of your own).  So it is with marketing a book. Given the right attention at the right time, your books should still sell even if seasonal factors are against you. That’s providing they are readable, of course – it’s hard to sell a poor quality book, ie one that has a ‘disease’. If you don’t do enough marketing or you do it at the wrong time or in the wrong way, your books won’t sell. And you can do too much marketing, killing the book with kindness so to speak, because readers get fed up with seeing your marketing efforts. Our response to the Tweet we saw was to suggest the author think about taking a look at her marketing strategy to decide what might be needed to lift her sales. The second part of the Tweet was about the author’s fixation with checking her sales data on KDP. She seemed to be looking very five minutes (I may be exaggerating) but she knew it wasn’t healthy.  For Indie authors I can quite understand the need to constantly check sales data. Sales provide validation for the author that their book is ‘good enough’. An author who has an agent or a mainstream publisher doesn’t need that sort of validation. They have already had their fix by getting the agent and/or the publishing deal. But for Indies there is little other than sales data to tell them that readers like their books. Reviews are the other form of validation, of course, but they are opinion based and therefore subjective, whereas sales data is empirical. Numbers don’t have an opinion. To paraphrase an old business saying: reviews are vanity, sales are sanity.  You don't fatten a pig by weighing it. But you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it, as the saying goes (apologies to vegans, Jews and Muslims). Weighing your pig tells you if it’s gaining weight, but if you aren’t using that information to adjust your pig’s diet, then knowing its weight doesn’t achieve anything. OK, it’s a heavy handed metaphor (it was a heavy pig) but it makes the point. Knowing your sales data doesn’t sell more books. Knowing your sales data tells you whether or not your marketing strategy is working. If you aren’t making sales, or not as many sales as you think you should be making, then that is telling you to look at your marketing strategy so you can change it to make more sales. But if you make changes to your strategy, you have to give them time to work. Checking the figures every five minutes doesn’t help. It may just lead to frustration and, in extreme cases, it may actually be harmful to mental health.  By marketing strategy, we don’t just mean your advertising or social media posts.
Book covers and blurbs can both have an effect on sales and need to be quality checked to make sure they are doing their jobs. The “look inside” feature on Amazon is also part of your marketing. If you don’t capture the reader’s imagination in those few free pages, you may not make the sale. The way you word your social media posts, what sort of images you use and a whole raft of other considerations also play their parts. We blogged about all of that last autumn, so we won’t go into those again today. If you want to know more, check out our archives under the "marketing" heading. So, Indie Author who inspired this blog, we hope we have reassured you that checking your sales data is actually quite normal. But we hope we have also encouraged you to take the information provided by that data and make use of it, so that your sales will look after themselves and you don’t have to check them so often. 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.  Here at Selfishgenie we try not to mention politics or religion in our blogs. It’s not that we don’t have opinions on those subjects – we’re human (honest, we are) so of course we have opinions. No, it’s that if we express our opinions we are pretty sure that we will alienate a considerable number of our readers. It doesn’t matter which side of the discussion we are on, we are going to alienate the people who are on the other side. And that is bad for business. If we alienate people, they may decide that they want to punish us for our views by not buying the books we publish.  Are you opening a can of worms? If they do that, however, they aren’t just punishing us, they punish our authors and that’s wrong, because those others don’t necessarily share our views. In fact, I know of a couple of our authors that have opposing views, but we manage to get along amicably anyway. So, the people that are trying to punish us actually end up punishing people who agree with them. It’s a strange world, isn’t it? But, of course, that brings into question how Indie authors handle politics and religion, and it can be very bad for sales. I include in this views on climate change, race, homosexuality, transexuals, conspiracy theories, vaxxing, and a wide range of other issues which have political or religious implications.  A poisonous mixture! Every time we post something on social media, it tells the world a little bit about us. And some of the things we say have the power to alienate people. It doesn’t matter that they are our sincerely held beliefs. It doesn’t even matter that what we say may be true. All that matters really is that it has the power to affect book sales. I know there are authors who struggle with this. They have strong beliefs and they want to express them either to support or oppose whatever it is their beliefs are about.  But some of the people who take an opposing view read those Tweets and think ‘I don’t agree with them, therefore I won’t enjoy their books if I bought them, so I won’t buy them’. It may be an absurd view, but that doesn’t stop people taking it. I once overheard someone say that if they had known that a certain author held certain political views, they would never have bought their books. The person they were talking to asked them if they had actually enjoyed the books, to which the first person replied that they had. You see how ironic that is? Even though they had enjoyed the books, they wouldn’t have bought them if they’d known the political views of the author. Absurdity in the extreme. But I’m pretty sure that person isn’t an isolated example.  Then there are the political “discussions” people get embroiled in. Some of them get quite heated; insults get thrown around and generally the people involved never come out of it looking good, no matter how valid their arguments. Again, if one of the participants is an author, it won’t help their brand image. No one knows how many people are viewing those social media arguments and taking note of what is being said, so the people involved never know how much harm they are doing to their “brand”. And, of course, it is there forever. Even if it is deleted by one of the parties, it can still be found on a server somewhere.  Some people would rather burn books than read them - even yours. The other side of this coin is the expression of political or religious views in books. There are times when that is appropriate for those to be featured in novels, of course, but there are times when it isn’t. It is possible for some books to use sensitive subjects and become bestsellers, such as “To Kill A Mockingbird” and “Last Exit To Brooklyn”. However, it isn’t possible to know in advance how books featuring these topics will be received and for every Booker/Pulitzer prize winning bestseller there are a thousand books that sink like lead balloons.  If you are writing books aimed at a specific audience who are likely to share your views, then writing about religion or politics (or the rest) is perfectly OK. You aren’t going to alienate people who agree with you and it doesn’t matter if everyone else is alienated because you don’t expect them to buy your books. And you will soon find out how many people support your views from the number of sales you make. But if an author is trying to find a broad audience who have a wide range of views on politics and religion, including sensitive topics in novels has the power to make the reader throw their book at the wall and you can be sure they’ll never buy another one by the same author. So, there are two different bear traps to consider when you are writing your book.  If you are a big name author you can probably ride out the storm created by expressing your views in public. I could list a dozen authors who have created social media storms on a range of issues and their careers haven’t suffered. However, I know of one big name who can't now get a job cleaning sewers because no one will employ him anymore. He’s an actor. He made his political views public and it has ruined his acting career. Can you, as an Indie author, take that risk? Your career could be over before you’ve even sold your first book. Not only that, but everything you say on social media remains there forever, somewhere, lurking and waiting to be exposed by someone with an axe to grind. When you are better known, as we all hope to be, it can also come back to haunt you. Even if you have modified your views over the years and you no longer believe as you did back in the day, no one will believe you. After all, we all know that leopards can’t change their spots, don’t we?  Of course, people can (and do) change, but the people who are out to embarrass you will assert that you haven’t changed, and other people will listen to them because it will be hard for you to prove that you have changed. The only way you will be able to restore your reputation will be to hire a very expensive PR agency to give your public image a make-over and nobody wants to have to spend that sort of money. As I said, it doesn’t matter which side of the argument you are on, the people on the other side of it will either stop buying your books or, worse, will try to take you down for having the temerity to express your opinions. Of course, there are times when you can introduce politics into novels with broad appeal. For example, in novels set during the 1930s and 40s, making your protagonist an anti-fascist is fine. Similarly, for books set during the Cold War it would be OK for them to be anti-communist. But those are areas where there is broad agreement that the relevant regimes were evil. They are the exception, not the rule. And if there are readers who think those regimes weren’t evil, you probably aren’t too bothered about alienating them.  In political thrillers it may seem obvious to align your characters to a political party, but that way lies madness. No matter on which side you place them, someone is going to take offence, especially if it is hinted that everyone who supports a similar political line is tarred with the same brush. Make a politician corrupt or venal and suggest that they belong to party X and not to party Y, and you are bound to upset all the supporters of party X. That could be up to 50% of the reading public in some countries. Making religious figures corrupt or evil is just as bad.  One of our authors wrote a political thriller and left the actual politics ambiguous. After all, personal greed and ambition are not limited to one party or another, because it is the individual that is greedy or ambitious.
A study of scandals relating to the conduct of individual politicians will reveal that no party ever comes out of things squeaky clean. (We’re not going to name names, for the reason with which we started this blog). So, when it comes to politics, religion and other topics where people are divided, if you decide to dabble, either on social media or in your books, take care because you are entering shark infested waters. And if you feel you really must nail your colours to the mast on social media, write under a pen name so no one knows who you really are, or use a fake name on social media. 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.  Big news - we have recently put some of our titles onto Draft2Digital. We decided to do this because, by keeping them exclusive to Amazon, we were actually narrowing our sales channels when we should really be going wider. Not everyone uses Amazon to purchase their books, so we were losing quite a lot of opportunities to offer our titles to those people. There was one advantage to using Amazon. That was their KindleUnlimted (KU) programme. We get a lot of downloads through KU and they account for a significant proportion of our revenue. But if we put our ebook product onto other distribution platforms, we aren’t able to use KU, so we risk that income. And yes, Amazon do check the other retailers to make sure we aren’t cheating.*  So, we analysed our income by title and it didn’t take a lot of time to realise that many of our titles aren’t read using KU, though they are purchased in ebook or paperback format. For some reason those books don’t seem to attract KU readers. Five of the titles are non-fiction and that may have something to do with it. The remainder do get the occasional KU download, but not enough to justify us making them exclusive to Amazon. OK, back to basics; just who are Draft2Digital (hereafter referred to as D2D)? Basically, they are similar to KDP in that they allow Indie authors and small publishers like ourselves to upload their books to them, which they then distribute to retail channels. They also offer formatting services, cover creation (not cover design as such) and a few other whistles and bells. But their big selling point is that they distribute books through a wide range of on-line retailers.  How many? Here’s the complete list (at time of writing): Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Scribd, Smashwords, Tolino, Overdrive, bibliotecha, Baker & Taylor, BorrowBox, Hoopla, Vivlio and Palace Marketplace. They will also distribute via Amazon if your book isn’t already on there, so it really is a “one stop shop”. Several of the companies listed above are aimed at the book borrowing market rather than the retail market, so in that respect they are similar to KU. I’m not suggesting that is 100% of the on-line book market, but it is a lot more than Amazon by itself. If you are considering distributing your book as an audio title, they also offer audiobook services, including helping you to find a narrator. This service may be cheaper than ACX.com, but only marginally (see previous blogs on the subject of audiobooks).  So, what is D2D like to work with? First of all, using the files we had already uploaded to Amazon caused us problems. Any reference to Amazon in the MS caused it to be rejected, as did references to ebooks in paperback MS’s. As we often insert a preview for another book at the end of an MS, with a link to its Amazon sales page, this meant having to go back and remove those references and links. You may also have to remove contents pages if you want D2D to insert a contents page complete with hyperlinks. The same applies to copyright pages, dedications etc. however, you can opt to use the ones that are already embedded in your files.  If you already have a cover for your ebook then it will probably upload OK to D2D, but when we uploaded our paperback covers we had some rejected because the back cover blurb was “blurred”. We had used shadowing behind the text and D2D’s quality bots couldn’t handle that. They also reserve more space for an ISBN than Amazon, so if any text encroaches into that space it will result in the cover being rejected. Paperback covers also have to conform to the D2D standard trim size, which is 5.5 x 8.5 inches (14 cm x 21 cm). If your covers are bespoke, created for you by a designer, you may have to go back and get them to adjust the size. However, if you created your own cover using packages such as BookBrush, you can alter the size yourself (don’t forget to adjust the positions of the text). I guess that sort of thing is all part of the learning curve for a new app, but it was frustrating and continues to be so as we have to change our cover designs and edit our MS’s in order to overcome these issues.  What about royalties? As with Amazon, you can set your own price for your books, which means you have control over the amount of royalties you receive once D2D and its partners have taken their share of the sale price. Unlike Amazon, which has two options for royalty percentages, D2D has only one, which is the sale price minus distribution charges. You also have the capability to run price promotions for ebooks and you can price your book to make it free, but not on Amazon. The price for Amazon will automatically be set to a minimum of 99c (99p). What is worth noting is that the printing costs for paperbacks seem to be much higher on D2D, which makes them less competitive than Amazon. To reduce the price to what you may have set on Amazon, you would have to reduce the amount of royalties you earn. In some cases it may not be possible to price-match to Amazon and still earn any royalties at all. Conversely, you could increase your paperback prices on Amazon, but that may make them less competitive compared to works by other authors. If you aren’t as famous as J K Rowling, you can’t charge J K Rowling level prices.  In terms of marketing tools, D2D has a partner site called Books2Read (hereafter referred to as B2R). It's basically a resource for readers to use to find books they may like. When your book is published its details are automatically copied across to B2R along with a “universal book link” (UBL) that allows the reader to go direct to their preferred retailer in their preferred country to buy the book. One of the tools B2R offers to authors is “new release notifications”. These are automated emails sent to readers who are registered on the site and who are signed up to your profile, so once you have uploaded your book, this tool helps your readers to find it. This is something I think gives D2D a real edge over Amazon, because any marketing you do through them has to be paid for.  OK, it’s a one shot deal, but one shot is better than no shot at all. It’s also fully automated, so you don’t have to do anything except register your book for the notification system and D2D has a pop-up for that which appears when you press the "publish" button.. You’ll know when the email notification has been sent, because you’ll receive a copy. Other than B2R there are no real marketing tools for you to use. They don’t have an equivalent to Amazon Ads, which is a shame. Somehow I think D2D is missing a trick here and is also limiting the ability of authors to market the books they have so painstakingly uploaded onto their site. On the other hand, it does create a “level playing field” for all their authors, because you can’t “buy” success through advertising. Everyone has the same chance of being discovered if readers are looking for their genre of books. Of course, you still have the option to advertise your books using other channels, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. Make sure you include the UBL in your advert so that readers buy it through D2D rather than go looking on Amazon.  So, has this switch resulted in thousands of new sales?
Well, it’s early days yet. What I can tell you is that we had sales within days of uploading our first book to the site. Not many, I’ll admit, but sales are sales and we hadn’t done any marketing work for the book. Readers found them for themselves and that rarely happens on Amazon. We’ll let you know more when we start to get some results worth talking about. In the meantime, check out D2D for yourself and see what you think. It costs nothing to look. * We know Amazon (actually their bots) goes looking, because we got a “cease and desist” email from them for one of our books which was uploaded to Smashwords some years ago and we had forgotten to take it down when we enrolled the same title on KU. Amazon threatened to withdraw our earnings for the book if we didn’t unpublish it from Smashwords. They’d actually found the book on the Barnes & Noble website, who Smashwords were using as one of their distributers. 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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