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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this review are those of the reviewer and not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing. Neither Selfishgenie Publishing nor the reviewer received any remuneration or financial inducement to provide this review.   “Scars Of The Heart” by Bob Van Laerhoven is an unusual collection of short stories.
Why do I consider them so unusual? Because they are so dark, with so few redeeming features, that the stories make for uncomfortable reading. I’m not saying the stories are bad. In fact, overall, they are very good. It’s just that if you are looking for something uplifting and cheerful to read, you won’t find it here. But if you like dark stories with heavy psychological undertones, then this may be just the book for you. First, though, a few words about the author. He is Flemish-Belgian and has a lot of books under his belt published in his native tongue, He is a new author to me, but as I don’t speak Flemish or Dutch, that comes as no surprise. Some of his other books have been translated into English, so if you are a reader of psychological literary fiction you may have come across him elsewhere. As a freelance travel writer and, later, a charity worker Bob Van Laerhoven found himself in some of the worst trouble spots of the late 20th century. He witnessed horrific sights, and I believe these have influenced his stories more than a little. Because this is a translation I was unsure about some of the usage of vocabulary. In a number of cases I wondered whether the author used a word deliberately and I was unable to work out its context, or whether it was just a mistranslation. If you read the book, you’ll have to try to work that out for yourself. The author’s nationality gives some of the stories in this collection a connection to Belgium, but just as many have no connection. Some of the stories deal with characters who are either journalists or novelists but, again, some of them don’t. But all of the stories have darkness at their heart. Death and sexual assault are never far away, though the main thrust of the stories is the psychological impact of violence on the characters. Did I enjoy the book? Well, enjoyment may not be the right word, but I read it from cover to cover and never considered putting it to one side. This is why I have given it 4 stars. So why not 5 stars? I think it is the lack of any redeeming features amongst the characters and the lack of redemption for them. I feel that they don’t learn anything from their brushes with violence and death. It risks leaving the reader feeling as depressed as I think the author may be. I would have liked to have felt that there was more hope in the world and this collection does the opposite. It suggests that death is never far away from anyone, and we are wasting our time trying to avoid it. But, bleak as it may sound, this collection does absorb the reader into the author’s dark view of the world. I would hesitate to use the word “entertaining” about such dark subject matter, but it was certainly engaging at a very emotional level. If you would like to find out more about “Scars Of The Heart” by Bob Van Laerhoven, click here. If you have enjoyed this book review, be sure not to miss out on future blogs by signing up for our newsletter. We’ll even give you a free ebook for doing so.
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 Do you know your book marketing strategy from your book marketing tactics? The difference is quite important. Think about it in terms of what you intend to achieve (strategy) and how you are going to achieve it (tactics). Tactics are shorter term and you may need to change them if they aren’t working. But strategy is a longer term thing. If you keep changing strategy every five minutes, you are unlikely to achieve anything. But you can’t decide on your strategy until you have first defined your goals. The connectivity between goals, strategy and tactics is often described in business speak as “getting your ducks in a row”.  What follows is used for illustration purposes only. We are not advocating any particular marketing strategy. That is for you to decide, based on your own goals. As an Indie author you probably know your major goal. It will be to sell as many books as possible (that may not actually be the goal for some authors. They may just want to write books and aren’t concerned with sales. But because you are reading a nook marketing blog, we’ll assume you want to sell books). That probably won’t be your only goal. We’ll stick a pin in the “Sell as many books as possible” goal, because we know that’s always going to be there. So, what other goals might you have?  Well, you may not want to spend a lot of money on marketing in order to sell your books, so there may be a goal related to achieving the major goal as cheaply as possible. You may also have a goal to build a loyal fanbase in order to make sure that you are able to make sales of future books, without having to start from scratch every time you launch one. You may have other ideas about your publishing goals. By all means add those to your personal list of goals.  “Selling lots of books” and “Not spending any money on marketing “ may be conflicting goals and your strategy may be unable to deliver both, so you may have to re-think which goal you want to achieve and remove the competitor so as not to get into any strategic conflicts. Having decided on your goals, you can now consider what strategy you must use to achieve those goals. Note the use of the singular version of the word. You may have several goals, but you only ever have one strategy. And if that strategy can’t deliver all your goals, you’ll have to reconsider your goals and perhaps prioritise them. Why only one strategy?  Because if you have more than one you will have difficulty focusing your efforts and resources on achieving your goals. If you divide your resources between strategies then it is likely that you won’t have enough resources to achieve all your goals. The two strategies may even be pulling in different directions, You create competition for yourself about what you consider to be most important. That is why I said that you have to consider your goals carefully, so that you focus on what is most important, rather than trying to achieve everything and ending up achieving nothing. Goals and strategy have to be aligned. For example, if your goal is to spend as little as possible on marketing your book, having a strategy based on paid advertising is contrary to your goal. Instead of achieving your goal, you will fail to achieve it – spectacularly.  So, let’s pick out one of the goals I suggested above: to spend as little as possible on the marketing of your books. One possible strategy for that is to use social media for your marketing, as that is free. So, your strategy is now aligned to your goal. Now you can think about your tactics. You might have several of these all directed by the same strategy. Tactic 1 might be to build up a following of readers on X (formerly Twitter) who will see your marketing messages and buy your books.  Tactic 2 might be to create great videos which you can use to market your books for free using TikTok and Instagram. Maybe even Facebook and X too. Tactic 3 might be to create “reader magnets” so you can build an email list, so you have a fanbase who have bought your current book and who are ready and waiting for news about your next book. Are those tactics aligned to your strategy? Yes, because 1. They all use social media (except the email list). 2. They are all free (except the email list). 3. They are proven ways of selling books.  What about that email list? To do this effectively you will normally have to subscribe to a suitable email management app, such as Mail Chimp or Mailerlite. Those subscriptions aren’t too expensive (certainly not as expensive as advertising) so they do align to spending as little money as possible. They only fail to align if the goal was “spend no money at all”. All you have to do now is implement those tactics and see if they are going to achieve your other goal of selling books.  What happens if they don’t achieve that over-arching goal of book sales? Well, in the first instance, you don’t change your strategy (at least, not yet). You have to identify why those tactics aren’t achieving your goals, and that means analysing your results. All your results. For tactic 1, for example you would have to dive into your X engagement data to find out how many people are reacting to your posts. Not just in terms of clicks to your book’s sales page, but in terms of likes and shares.  But you also have to identify how many of your followers are engaging in conversations with you, because it is engaged followers who are most likely to respond to your promotional posts, not those who just scroll past while looking for something more interesting. (Follower count is vanity. Engaged followers are sanity) I’m only using that as an example, of course. Once you have identified the problems with your tactics, you can then modify them or even scrap them and introduce new tactics. But the strategy of using social media remains unchanged.  Remember your goal was to spend as little money as possible on promoting your books. So perhaps you need to drill down into that a little bit and decide what “as little as possible” actually means. Maybe you need to set a budget that you are prepared to spend. With that budget you can then modify your tactics to spend a bit of money on creating better “content”, such as more exciting images or videos. That still sits within your strategy, while still meeting your goal. All you have done is to define your goal more tightly to identify what “as little as possible” actually means and then modifying your tactics accordingly. It is only when you have run out of suitable tactics that you consider changing your strategy. So, if you have been using social media for a year and you’ve changed your tactics to the point where you can no longer look at your goal of “as cheaply as possible” and not start crying, then you have to consider whether using social media for marketing is the right strategy. Or at least if using it as cheaply as possible is the right goal.  But by that time you will have built up a mass of evidence in the form of data that will be able to advise you on that. You won’t just be guessing. This is where the problem of “shiny objects” comes in. If you follow writing groups on social media you will often see someone raving about the latest shiny object they have used to sell their books. The temptation is to chase that same shiny object and try it out, which is where things start to go wrong. Because you have no idea what strategy that person was using. That is if they have a strategy at all and aren’t just jumping from one shiny object to the next - which isn't a strategy, it is just chaos. Remember your goal was “as cheaply as possible”, whereas their goal might be “make sales at any cost”. The shiny object could therefore fit in with their strategy – but it would undermine yours. Shiny objects are often short term in nature, a tactic at best, and, as we suggested above, strategy is a long term thing. So, our takeaways from this blog are illustrated in the graphic below.  Put simply they are:
1. Strategy has to be aligned with goals 2. Strategy dictates which tactics are selected. 3. Measurement of the effectiveness of tactics drives review. 4. Review results in tactical changes. 5. Review can also result in the modification of goals. 6. It is only the modification of goals that changes strategy. If you try to miss out any of those steps, or to do them in the wrong order, it is likely that you will fail to achieve your goals. It may even cost you money in the form of lost sales, increased expenditure, or both. So it is really important to get your book marketing ducks in a row. 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.   Some readers of this blog may already have heard of David Gaughran. On YouTube he has a lot of “How To” videos on self-publishing and the marketing of self-published books. I’ll provide a link to one of them at the end of this review, because what he has to say is based on solid research and first hand experience. Which is why I have given “Amazon Decoded: A Marketing Guide To Kindle Store” 5 stars (hereafter referred to just as Amazon Decoded). Many of us feel that our books just aren’t getting a fair shake on Amazon. When we do incognito searches for them they appear so far down the search results that we know that no reader is ever going to scroll that far and discover our book. Which is the problem this book aims to rectify "turn an ad that yields 10 sales a day into an ad that yields 100 sales a day" Now, neither I nor David Gaughran would claim that this book will propel your book into the global best-seller category overnight. But what it will do is make your book more visible to readers and if it is more visible, there is a greater chance of the book being bought. When you couple that increased visibility with advertising, there is the potential to turn an ad that yields 10 sales a day into an ad that yields 100 sales a day (but please note the use of the word “potential” - nothing is guaranteed). But what is great about this book is that all the things David talks about doing are FREE. "the way Amazon can make your book visible to readers is as good as advertising it." That’s right. You can make your book more visible without having to pay a penny. In fact, you can get Amazon to do your advertising for you for FREE. Amazon doesn’t call it advertising, of course, but the way Amazon can make your book visible to readers is as good as advertising it. David refers to this as “Visibility Marketing”, because it is all about making your book more visible amongst the 8 million ebooks (and counting) that are on Amazon. First, a little bit about the author in order to establish his credentials for writing this book.  Author David Gaughran David Gaughran. has been in the business of self-publishing for several years and he writes fiction as well as this sort of non-fiction. But, importantly, he is a very successful self-published author because he understands the marketing side of the self-publishing equation. But David also used to work for Google, which means he has a lot of insider knowledge on how Google’s search engine works. This is crucial, because Amazon’s search engine works pretty much the same way because Jeff Bezos went to Google to ask them to show him how their search engine works – and Google showed him. You may think that the Amazon search engine just scans the search words that are typed in, looks for matching words in books' metadata and then lists what it finds. Of course it does that, but it then selects the order in which the results are displayed based on a whole lot of other factors. And equality rules on Amazon. Your book, if it meets the right criteria, can appear in the search results right below – or even above – those of the big name trad published authors. Yes, really.  Your book will also appear in “also bought” and “recommended for you” lists, which are a great way to sell books. That is what “Visibility Marketing” is all about. And making that happen is what this book is all about. Some of the things David talks about you may be familiar with already. For example, one section covers keywords and if you don’t know how important having the right keywords for your book is by now, then you must have been living on Mars. "Some of the things he suggests are so simple" Some of the things he suggests are so simple that it left me with my mouth hanging open thinking “Why haven’t I heard of this before?” (Answer: because I hadn’t read this book before) I don’t want to spoil David’s sales, but I’ll give you just one example, as a teaser. It relates to books that are set up as a series. When you link your book to Amazon from a non-Amazon ad (eg a Facebook ad), don’t use the link that takes the reader to the Amazon page for Book 1. Use the link that takes the reader to the Amazon page for the series. Why? Three reasons (but there may be more): 1. There is less competition on that page – it is reserved for the books in your series and if there are any “also bought” or “recommended for you” lists they will appear below all of your books. Which is probably well below the bottom of the screen where readers won’t see them unless they scroll down. 2. If someone is on the series page, they may buy not only book 1, but possibly book 2 as well. So, you get two sales for one ad click. You may get lucky and they buy book 3 as well. 3. Holy of holies, they may buy all the books in the series in one go (series readers love to binge), because that is an option on the page. "I’ll email you back a photo of me eating my hat." So, when I was saying that an ad that sells 10 books a day could sell 100 books a day, this is one of the ways that it might happen (if there are 10 books in the series). You see how simple that idea is, and how simple it is to implement. And it appears very early in the book, so you know there is a lot more to come. This book is full of stuff like that and if you don’t find something that you can implement straight away then email me and tell me and I’ll email you back a photo of me eating my hat. But that is the simple stuff. The real secrets are a lot more complicated. If I were to ask you what the difference is between best-seller lists and the popularity of your book, what would you answer? "it is the popularity of your book that decides how visible it is on Amazon" Obviously I can’t hear you, but I’m guessing you said “there is no difference”. You could not be more wrong. And it is the popularity of your book that decides how visible it is on Amazon, not the best seller rankings (or the book's sales rank). OK, the two things can be the same, but a lot of the time they aren’t. Popularity, rather than best-seller rankings, drives what Amazon puts into “also bought” and “recommended for you” lists which are crucial for selling without having to advertise. They also drive recommendations for Kindle Unlimited subscribers, which is something I covered in a last week’s blog (you see, all these things join up). I won’t try to explain the differences, because that is David Gaughran’s job. All I can say is that once you have read the book you’ll be wondering, as I was, how you didn’t know that before. (Answer: see above re not having read this book before). It is this insider knowledge and the intensive research into the subject that makes this book (a) worth the £3.99 you paid for it (UK price) and (b) a good investment because the purchase price will be repaid very quickly. And this concept comes before we’re even halfway through the book! David provides links to free resources on his website so that you don’t have to remember everything he says in the book. These resources will help you to implement some of the ideas within the book. Towards the end of the book, David also provides marketing plans that you can tailor to match your own needs and then implement. He is well aware that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to book marketing and therefore he understands the need for flexibility. There is some use of jargon within the book – the word “algorithm” is used a lot, for example. But if you aren’t technologically minded, you don’t have to understand how the guts of the Amazon search engine work. You only have to understand what you have to do to make it work for you, which is what this book is all about. As you can guess, I highly recommend “Amazon Decoded” by David Gaughran and if you want to find out more about the book, click here. If you want to take a look at David Gaughran’s videos on YouTube, I recommend you start with “How To Sell Books” but there are many others. 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.  The pros and cons of enrolling books in Kindle Select, the Amazon programme behind KindleUnlimited (KU), are many. It is a constant subject of social media debate amongst Indie authors as to whether it is worth doing or not. But most Indie authors don’t know about the hidden secret behind KU which makes it a much more attractive proposition than you might think. But we’ll circle back to that later in the blog. We know that the amount paid by Amazon for Kindle Enrolled Normalised Pages (KENP) read is quite low. Depending on what price you sell your ebooks for, it could be as low as 10% of the royalties you receive for the sale of an ebook. Conversely it could be as high as 90%. It’s a difficult comparison to make because Indie authors sell their books for a far wider range of prices than trad publishers – anything from 99p to £9.99 or more (99c - $9.99).  Our standard price point means that for a complete read of a book enrolled in Kindle Select we get about 50% of the amount we would if the book was purchased as an ebook. Compared to our paperbacks, KU downloads provide a slightly better return, as we have to keep our paperback prices low so we can be more competitive compared to trad publishers and therefore we receive lower royalties for paperbacks. One of the arguments against enrolment is that, under Amazon’s T&Cs for Kindle Select, you can’t “go wide”.  That is to say, you can’t distribute your books through other on-line retailers, such as Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords et al. Here we have a bit of a paradox, because Amazon’s market share for ebooks is around 67% (USA market). So, if you distribute through other channels you only get access to an additional 33% of the total US market. In the UK Amazon’s market share of the ebook market is 79%, which means “going wide” has the potential to reach only an additional 21%. So, what do you gain by “going wide?” Well, obviously you gain access to that wider ebook market. But access is not the same as sales.  To get those sales, you have to market to people who won’t see Amazon ads. Even if you market using universal book links which can direct readers to both Amazon and those wider markets, there is no guarantee that the reader will choose the wider market in preference to Amazon. Given that marketing on platforms other than Amazon is usually more expensive, you could be paying more for sales you would have got with Amazon Ads anyway. And of course we have to take paperback prices into account as well. Amazon’s economies of scale make them the most economic Print on Demand (POD) seller of paperbacks through the internet. None of the other on-line POD providers can get anywhere close to Amazon’s price structures. Whereas the printing costs from most other POD providers means setting a price much closer to that for physical bookshops, which loses you the competitive edge of selling online at a lower price. So, for readers who want to buy paperbacks on-line, Amazon is the first choice seller. At least, it is if they want buy their paperbacks for the lowest prices.  There are other business models of course. If you buy your own ISBN you can use distributors such as Ingram Spark to print and distribute your books, which means it is possible to get books into physical bookshops, which is an ambition for many authors. We have lost the chance to sign up some new authors because our business model doesn’t include distribution through physical book shops. You can even sell your books direct to the public yourself through sites such as Etsy, but they still require marketing if you want to direct readers to your Etsy store.. By going wide you can put your book out for free all the time through platforms such as Smashwords (permafree as it is known) which can sell you the other books in a series. Amazon doesn’t allow you to do that. But a permafree book doesn’t, itself, make you any money. So, there are solid arguments for not enrolling a book in Kindle Select – providing you can convert potential sales into actual sales.  We take a different view. We know that if a book is selling well as an ebook it will also be downloaded through KU. For the current month (July 2024) KU downloads are accounting for 46% of our total income. Based on an average number of KENP per book, the equivalent number of downloads for our books on KU exceeds the number of actual sales we make of those same books. OK, we don’t make so much money from those downloads, but we do make money. And our authors’ names are better known because their books are being read more widely. At the time of writing, we get the equivalent of 1.7 complete KU book downloads for every book we sell in ebook and paperback format combined. To put that in simple numbers, for every 100 ebooks/paperbacks we sell, we get 170 KU complete reads. Now, we have to ask ourselves – and you – how much more marketing would we have to do to sell 170 more books if we wanted to go wide and therefore didn’t enrol those books in Kindle Select? And, of course, marketing costs time and/or money.  Every click we get for an Amazon ad gives readers three buying options: ebook, paperback or KU. If we don’t enrol the books in Kindle Select and go wide instead, readers would only have two buying options: ebook or paperback. Even if our marketing is successful, with the market shares we have quoted above, for every hundred books we sell through Amazon it is unlikely that we would sell enough books through those other retailers, at a high enough price, to make up for the loss of the 170 equivalent book downloads we get through KU. OK, some of those wider channels also offer subscription library services similar to KU, but they are nowhere near as well subscribed as KU and they don’t pay any better.  And now to that secret we mentioned at the top of the blog. If your books are popular as ebooks, Amazon will actually recommend them to their KU subscribers. And the more ebooks you sell or are downloaded on KU, the more Amazon recommends your books, creating a virtuous circle. Basically, you are getting FREE advertising from Amazon – and let’s face it, they don’t give much away for free. KU subscribers get regular email recommendations and, of course, the books appear in the “recommended for you” listings specifically targeted at them. Yes, KU subscribers get their own recommendations listings because not all ebooks are enrolled in Kindle Select, so the standard "recommended for you" listings aren't suitable for KU readers because not all the recommendations will be available to them - and yours will be one of them if it isn't enrolled in Kindle Select. There are reasons why Amazon pushes KU subscribers towards the more popular books, which we won’t go into here. But one thing is for sure – if you aren’t enrolled in Kindle Select, you can’t benefit.  “But”, I hear you say, “To use KU the reader has to have a Kindle.”
“To start with,” we reply. “Kindle is the most popular ereader in the world by a wide margin. But Amazon has thought of that, and the Kindle app allows readers to download books on any phone or tablet, turning them into Kindles as well. It’s been available for years!” Now, we aren’t being paid by Amazon to promote Kindle Select. We are just telling you what we have found and what we have calculated to be the better choice of sales channels for us based on real life data. We do “go wide” with some titles, but they are the ones we have found aren’t downloaded very often through KU, so there is no reason to keep those titles exclusive to Amazon. We don’t know why those books don’t appeal to KU subscribers. We do know that some genres do better on KU than others and that may be one of the reasons. Perhaps we need to do some research into that. But, until then, we lose nothing by going wide with those books. But for all the rest, we enrol our books in Kindle Select so that we can maximise the exposure we get for our authors, which also maximises the income that both we and our authors earn. For us, being enrolled in Kindle Select is a “no brainer”. 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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