 In one of our recent blogs we talked about using this medium as a marketing tool. In response we got a few emails from people saying they wanted to blog, but didn’t know what they should blog about. So here are a few “prompts” for you to think about. We claim no originality for this list. It has been collated from numerous sources. Some of these ideas are better than others and all will need to be adapted to suit your personal style.  1. List post List posts are great. List posts also give you high click-through rates. You can use list posts for tools, resources, to do things, checklists and so on. You see these quite a lot in search results, eg “Twenty great ways to improve your sales”. 2. How to post How-to-post is an excellent way to describe any topic in your niche together with screen shots, images, and videos. Many of our blogs are basically “how to” posts.  3. Case study post Case studies are my favourite and you must include them in your content marketing strategy. The words “Case studies” weigh more than your usual articles. A case study is simply a story – usual about success – that demonstrates the application of certain techniques. For example, you might link to a blog post and then demonstrate the techniques the originator used to make it more effective. 4. Ultimate guide post Guide post is a very detailed and comprehensive post. When you post this kind of article you need to make sure that you don’t leave any stone unturned. Make it a thorough and precise guide for higher conversions. This is really just a more in-depth “how to” blog – but it covers all known aspects of the topic.  5. Interview post Ask any influencer or blogger who ranks a little higher than you in your niche for an interview. You will be surprised how many influencers or blog owners will agree. So, if you know an author that is making a few more sales than you (you can identify that from the sales rankings of their books) you could ask them. They will post about the interview on social media when it goes out, attracting more readers to your blog. 6. Link roundup post Link roundup is one of the best ways to get connected with influencers or experts in your niche. You can do weekly or monthly roundups. You can take the expert views from their own blog content and put them with the link and description and you are ready to go, but make sure you notify them once you post it – they might share :) 7. Quote post Quotes are great. They are motivational, inspirational and people love quotes from influential people. The easiest and most effective way to create that kind of post is to put together the quotes from influencers together with a link. It works great. The quotes blog is really just a niche form of the list post. You can also turn this into a “case study” blog by showing how you applied the quote’s message. 8. Review post Review a book, product, service, location or anything else. You need to be totally honest in your reviews, so we tend to only post ones that we can honestly award 4 or 5 stars. You could post lower rated reviews, but there is always the chance that the author/seller may decide to take revenge – it has happened to us. We post a lot of book reviews because the authors Tweet the links and then we get extra traffic to our blog page. 9. Survey post Whether you want to launch a new product, new blogging site or theme – survey your audience. You can do a survey through survey blog posts. We’re not too sure about this one. The easiest way to do a survey is to use the tools that exist on several social media sites. But there' no reason why you shouldn't use a blog to conduct a survey too.  10. Infographic post Infographic is sexy and entertaining. It is also easy to consume. Infographics are a quick and funny way to learn about the topic without a ton of heavy reading. Basically, this is just a slideshow turned into a short video. 11. Trend post Trend posts are great at the beginning of the year or before any holiday season or on the latest trends in your niche. It looks forward to what may be to come. You can link it to your target audience’s special interests. 12. Holiday post Create a post before a holiday or during a holiday. This can be advice, entertainment or your holiday routine. This could be something like a Christmas story or a feature on some aspect of the holiday, such as food.  13. Behind the scenes post Show behind the scenes of how your blogging system works or your blogging life or blog analytics or behind the scenes of your product. This one is ideal for writers. There’s so much that can be said about the process of writing a book. 14. Comparison post People love comparing things and it is a great idea to post the comparison blog of two different products or someone else’s product; compare the features and benefits of your product. I’m not sure how this would work with comparing books, but it might work with comparing different marketing strategies or techniques. 15. Income reports post Show your audience the income you are making. You can show either yours or your organization’s income report. It is like a financial report. This will also help you build trust with your audience. Basically, this is just showing off and not something we intend doing, but some people might like to do that. But it can help readers to know which markets produce the best incomes for certain types of books.  16. Special interest posts If you have done as we suggested and found out what sort of interests your readers might have, write blogs that appeal to those interests. Be careful with the content, however. If you don’t know a lot about a subject – steer well clear. Or do more research! 17. Best of posts Pull out the best post of yours and sum up together to make one single blog post and present it to your audience. Basically putting old wine in new bottles, but it’s a quick way to get a blog ready if you are short of time. 18. Product update post Update your audience on your books/products or new features. It can be your existing products or products you have been working on. It is always a good strategy to create excitement and anticipation among your audience. Really just a variation on number 16, but focusing on the product rather than the wider world of writing.  19. Challenge post Take any challenge such as losing weight, getting a certain amount of traffic, subscribers and then write about the progress, tactics or any tools you have used or are using. People love to see challenges and are eagerly waiting to see your monthly progress blog post. OR you can post a challenge for your audience. There is a lot of scope here for blogs on a variety of subjects, from writing to climbing mountains. 20. Contest post One of the evergreen ways to engage people is putting together a nice and impactful contest post. It works in all niches regardless. The downside is that if you run a contest, you probably need to offer a prize. 21. Journey post Travelling or having travelled somewhere or attended any conference or event, posting about your journey together with do's and don’ts. People like to consume ideas and suggestions. More of a travelogue than a blog, but I know plenty of people who do this. 22. Upcoming events post Post weekly/monthly/yearly city events. Post about the events with past year event pictures, short description and why you should attend these events. (Don’t forget to notify event organiser about your blog post, they might share :) You have to keep your ear close to the ground with this one, to know what is upcoming. But there are plenty of literary festivals and book fairs, and lots of people want to go them now that we are out of Covid restrictions.  23. Quiz post People love quizzes including myself. Buzzfeed is a great example of using quizzes in their content marketing strategy, they always do quizzes. You can use Quizzer to create quizzes or Playbuzz WordPress plugin if you have a WordPress website. 24. Crowdsourced post The crowdsourced blog post is another great way to get connected with influencers. Bring on multiple influencers to answer the single question. When you have 10 experts answering the same question each in 140 words, you have a 1,400 word blog post. 25. Problem/solution post You audience have a problem, give them a solution. You can give them a solution in many forms such as suggesting books, techniques, hacks, tools, events to overcome their problem etc. Very best way to start such kind of blog post is by defining a problem and then by presenting a solution. For example, in the past we have blogged about how to deal with both writer's block and imposter syndrome (separate blogs, of course - we don't want to use up a good blog idea all in one go) This is basically what we have been doing with our blogs on social media marketing. But if you are an expert in any field you can generate blogs from what you know best. 26. Share recent travel experience Share your travel experience. This work like a charm for travel bloggers. Put it together (your travel experience) and then post it as a blog post. Not really any different from number 21, but you could spread it over a number of posts by focusing on different aspects in each blog: food, culture, sights, activities etc. 27. Blog anniversary post So you are blogging for a year now, post it as a blog post. Share your blogging career experience on your blog anniversary.  28. Stats post Create a post with sexy stats, it is like a research post. You can show any type of stats such as your traffic stats, any blog or business achievements (if you have a solid one), market trend stats in your niche – it can be holiday stats, industry stats, product stats. Stats are an easy way to tell a story, but you have to be sure the stats actually support your message. 29. FAQ post Are you getting asked the same question again and again from your readers? Create a blog post on most frequently asked questions. Most authors get asked the same questions over and over, so this suggestion might fill several blogs. 30. Q/A post It is like an interview blog post but you can position it in slightly different way. Answer the unique questions from any of your readers. Usually, a video blog work very well but don’t worry about the medium yet, let you audience/readers decide what medium they want. This takes number 29 and goes into more depth with a specific question. It is also similar to number 25.  HOW OFTEN SHOULD YOU POST A BLOG
The short answer is “As often as you can”. You need people (a) to come back to your website on a regular basis and (b) to Tweet about their visits or just RT the link. That means giving them a reason to come back and that means providing fresh content for them to read. We post once a week. It is hard work coming up with fresh ideas, but the above list gives you plenty of scope to get creative. If you have enjoyed this blog and want to make sure you don’t miss future editions, you can sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. .
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 There is one P in the 6Ps of marketing that we have yet to touch on, and that is “process”. In some way all of the previous blogs touched on this as a process has to have content and they were about content. But the really important part of process is another P – planning. A marketing plan is essential to success because, if you don’t have a plan, you won’t know what you are supposed to be doing or when it should be done. So, what does the plan look like?  Rudyard Kipling The content of your plan lies in the old Rudyard Kipling quote “I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.” Putting those words into questions helps you to decide the content of your plan:
There are many similar questions that can be asked and our previous blogs tell you what to ask and how to answer some of them.  You may have noticed that we have omitted “why”. That’s because the why question is “why should I write a plan? There is an old saying about planning: If you fail to plan then you plan to fail. That’s the why. That is all good, but some people have never constructed any sort of plan at all, so this blog is aimed at them. How do you get from that quote above to selling more books?  The first thing you need when creating a plan is an objective, goal or desired outcome. Call it what you like, but it is a description of where you want to be by the time your plan has been delivered. For Indie authors this is usually quite simple to define – your goal is probably to sell more books. You even have a readymade measurement to tell you if the plan is working – the number of books that you are selling after you have delivered the plan compared to the number you are selling now. But that is a big goal to achieve and you will need to do a lot of work to achieve it. What you also need to know is if your plan is taking you in the right direction. It might take you 3 months or more to achieve your goal and that is a long time to wait to find out that your plan isn’t working and needs to be re-thought. "if each step is successful, then the final outcome should never be in doubt." So, you have to create sub-objectives, which you can tick off along the way to make sure you are staying on track for success. Believe me, if each step is successful, then the final outcome will never be in doubt. And if some of the sub-objectives still seem quite daunting, you can break them down even further. Remember the old maxim: “How do you eat an elephant? One bit at a time.” (apologies to vegans).  Not this sort of trial. For each major objective you need to ask those who, what, where etc questions to identify the sub objectives and if you want to break the sub-objective down into smaller bits, you may need to ask them again. But whatever you plan to do, keep it simple. Simple plans have fewer things that can go wrong and the less that can go wrong, the more chance there is of success. You can always go back to the plan later, after you have learnt from trying things out, and get a bit more ambitious in your use of marketing techniques (I talk about reviewing plans later). You may even want to run a few “pilot schemes” or “trials” to see if what you plan to do is actually going to work on a larger scale when you set the whole plan in motion.  One of the things of which you have to be careful, is that you lay out your sub-objectives in the right order. For example, if you were building a house, “Put the roof on” wouldn’t appear in the plan until after “dig foundations” and “build walls”. You may need to spend a bit of time making sure your marketing plan is constructed (groan at bad pun) in the right order, just like you would build a house. Test the logic and feasibility of doing things in the order you have described, to see if you have got it right. In previous blogs we talked about getting some training in social media marketing, so that might be an early sub-objective in your plan. We also talked about writing your marketing messages, so trying those out on people might be another sub-objective. But basically, all you are doing is breaking down one very big and daunting objective into several smaller, less daunting tasks, then laying them out in a logical order. "there is no point in knowing “you are here” if you have no idea what “here” looks like." In project management we call the completion of sub-objectives or tasks “achieving a milestone” and it feels very rewarding to reach each milestone and tick it off your plan. But, just like real milestones, you have to know where they are, which means having some sort of measurement of achievement for each task. After all, there is no point in knowing “you are here” if you have no idea what “here” looks like. In the same way, you can’t know you have reached a milestone if you don’t know what the milestone looks like.  A written description of what it will look like is the best way of recognising a milestone. For example, a description of the messages you want to send out about your book might read: “Write 7 sentences/paragraphs of up to 140 characters* each that provide a clear indication of the book’s content., grammatically correct, correctly spelt and tested on sample readers.” You can see from the description that “quality” checks are built in. That is the sort of task description you could write for each sub-objective, so you will recognise your milestone when you get to it. But all plans are meaningless if they don’t have resources assigned to them. A plan without the resources to deliver it is just a wish, a hope or even a dream.  Is it a plan - or just a wish? These resources can include money, to pay for things such as advertising. But a far more important resource is information. You have to know the answers to those who, what, why etc questions you asked, so that you can apply your other resources in the right place at the right time. So one of your sub-objectives is almost certain to be information gathering, or research as it is more commonly known. This will result in you not wasting your other resources (such as money) on the wrong activities. Time is another major resource. None of this stuff will do itself. Yes, I know, you’re a writer. You don’t want to have to spend all your time doing marketing.  Which makes it all the more important that you don’t waste what time you are willing to expend on marketing by doing the wrong things. There is an old saying in quality management “Isn’t it amazing how people who don’t have time to get things right the first time they do them, always have time to do things a second time when the first time goes wrong.” And if you are spending money, you can’t afford to spend even more money correcting mistakes by getting things wrong first time. So, all that research is critical if you want to get things "right first time". You will make mistakes (because you are human), but you can minimise the number of mistakes you make.  The final resource I’m going to talk about is knowledge, which I have already touched on in previous blogs. If you don’t really know what you are doing, you are going to waste your other resources on getting things wrong. "Trial and error” may teach you a lot, but it is an expensive way to learn. Invest in yourself, even if the investment is just time spent doing a free on-line course. We’re not talking about studying for a 3 year marketing management degree here, just a few hours learning the basics of social media marketing and trying out a few ideas to get a feel for what is right for you and your books. Once you have your marketing plan – you can use it again and again, refining it each time as you learn what works best and what isn’t working so well. because you will have to keep  repeating your marketing activity, because marketing messages soon fade from people’s consciences and you will always be looking for new readers who will buy your books, because nobody buys the same book a second time. Consequently, you have to keep reviewing your plan to make sure it is delivering for you. There is a thing called the planning cycle which is made up of four stages:
Just because your marketing plan delivered some sales, it doesn't mean it couldn't have delivered more sales, so you need to look at your results to see where improvements can be made and then make those improvements. "But I'll finish with one word of caution"  That brings us to the end of this series of blogs on marketing. We hope you have found them helpful and, more importantly, we hope you are selling more books as a result of reading them. But if you still have questions, please feel free to ask them. You can find our email address on our “contacts” page. I’ll finish with one word of caution. You can’t make a silk purse out if a sow’s ear. A brilliant marketing plan won’t sell a book that readers don’t want to read. So, if you are doing all the things we have talked about in this series of blogs and your books still aren’t selling, then you have to ask yourself why. The answer is no longer going to be “because of a lack of marketing”. If you would like to express your thanks for the guidance we have offered over the past 13 weeks, it would be welcomed. We are publishers, so the best way of thanking us is to buy one of the books we publish. Take a look at our catalogue on our "Books" page. * We know that Twitter now accepts posts of up to 280 characters, but you need to make an allowance for the inclusion of a link to the book’s sales page and for hashtags. And, of course, character count isn’t an issue for Facebook posts, though people rarely read beyond the first few lines. For Facebook, think “elevator pitch” or “blurb”. If you have enjoyed this blog and want to make sure you don’t miss future editions, you can sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below.  This week’s blog is split into two parts, but they are closely related. The first is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the second is measuring the success of your marketing. Now, we would be the first to admit that we are not experts in SEO. If you want one of those, all you have to do is search SEO on Twitter and you’ll find about a gazillion people on there who either are, or claim to be, gurus on this subject and they’ll help you – for a price. But in terms of the completeness of this series of blogs, we would be very remiss if we didn’t mention this subject, so here goes. "helping people to find you, or your books, on the internet" What is SEO? It’s all about helping people to find you, or your books, on the internet and social media.  Most blogs about SEO concentrate on promoting a website. Firstly, you may not have a website and secondly, we’re mainly talking about promoting your work through social media. However, people do search for book ideas using search engines such as Google and they also do searches on Amazon and other book selling sites and the same SEO principals apply. People do searches by entering search words and the critical words they use in the query are known as “keywords”. If you are using the same keywords as the person doing the search, there is a high probability they will find you (or your book). But if you aren’t, they won’t. We looked for more information on using keywords on Amazon and this blog was quite useful. According to that article, people looking for books on a particular subject are likely to enter a short description of what they are looking for, rather than single words. This is called a “string” of keywords.  So, in the “keywords” section of your book’s description, you need to connect together several attributes about the book that someone may look for. For example, if someone is looking for a romantic novel that also involves pirates, they may type in the string “books about romance involving pirates”. I actually typed that into Amazon’s search bar and, guess what, I got several returns of books that involved both pirates and romance.  Not a very romantic pirate. That approach won’t guarantee that your book is on page one of the results, but it will certainly be found and it will be in the list somewhere. We found some of the books we published on page one of the results thanks to the keyword strings we have used in their descriptions. Finding the right keyword strings may involve some trial and error. Unlike Google, Amazon’s search bar isn’t so good at predicting commonly used search terms based on what you are typing. We got as far as “Romance in…” when the predictive text gave up and didn’t suggest “including” or “involving”. When we tried “Romance and …” It didn’t carry on predicting past the P in “pirates”. This means that you have no way of knowing if a search terms has been used before. But it is worth spending some time trying out keyword strings that might work with your book and seeing what sort of returns you get on both Google and Amazon. Whatever you get is bound to feature your book somewhere in the results if you use the same strings in your book’s description. The ones that come up with the best matches are the ones to use.  Many readers like following a series, so if your book is part of a series, even if it is only the first, make sure you include “…. book series” as one of your keyword strings eg Sci-fi book series. And if you aren’t getting the results you expected after a few weeks (you have to give things time to produce results), you can try some different strings and see how they work. Importantly, though, if your books use those keywords strings on Amazon (and other retail sites), they will also be picked up by Google if someone searches there for your books. So, you can try doing your searches there first and make use of Google’s better predictive search term capabilities. "The use of the right keywords is also a factor when you use SEO for social media." The use of the right keywords is also a factor when you use SEO for social media. As we said at the start of this blog, we aren’t experts in SEO, so we went looking for people who are and we came across this blog, which contains the key messages.  People do search social media using keywords and hashtags, so having the right keywords and hashtags in your posts will help them find you. Every day Twitter tells you what keywords and hashtags are “trending”, so you can join in the conversations if you are interested in those topics. It’s unlikely that your keywords or hashtags will ever trend, but some of those trending topics may be of interest to your target audience so RT’ing the best of the posts will help with your engagement. But for you, it is using the right keywords or hashtags in your posts so when people do searches on social media using those words, they will find your posts amongst the results. There will still be a crowd of course. If you write romance, then #romance is a hashtag that produces a lot of search results. So, you have to use something a bit more targeted, such as #periodromance or #modernromance. There’s still going to be a crowd, but it will be a smaller crowd.  You can also create and use hashtags of your own. If your Tweets are RT’d, those hashtags will become better known over time. Your audience will start to recognise them and they will, perhaps, think of using them for searches. All hashtags started with someone creating them. Some never catch on, some are still in use years later. Finding hashtags that are already in use is easy enough. When you use the # symbol, predictive text starts to offer you choices of previously used tags. But you won’t know which ones are most popular amongst users. Just because hashtag has been used, it doesn’t mean it is useful. However, if a hashtag has been used a lot that day, Twitter will tell you how many uses it has had, eg “500 in Tweets in the last hour”  There are websites that will help you to choose the right hashtag. We use Ritetag, which is free. As well as showing you which hashtags are already being used and how visible they are, if you create your own hashtags you can look on Ritetag a few weeks later and see what sort of response you are getting. Just one final word on hashtags. Social media users comment on how distracting they are, so the experts advise never using more than three in any post and placing them at the end of the message, rather than within the main body. I was reminded of this just a few moments ago when I was on Twitter, came across a Tweet that was mainly made up of hashtags and immediately scrolled past it. "Knowing how your hashtags are working is useful information" Knowing how your hashtags are working is useful information. If they aren’t working, you need to find a way of promoting them or you need to change them. Which brings us to the generic subject of measurement.  Measurement is usually regarded as the boring part of marketing. Besides, there’s only one measurement that you are interested in – book sales. But measurement is pretty important when it comes to creating a successful social media marketing campaign. If you are going to do this well, you are going to start your campaign weeks or even months in advance of your book’s publication. That is a long time to wait to find out that your social media campaign isn’t working. So, you need to measure other things along the way to tell you if you are on the right track.  Think about a long car journey. One way to measure your journey’s progress is to read the road signs and see how far you are from your destination and, if your destination isn’t shown on the sign, how far you are from the next town along your route (known by navigators as a “waypoint”). If you have a satnav this information is constantly on display, along with an estimated remaining journey time – so you are quite used to doing this sort of measurement. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent of a satnav for your social media marketing so you will have to set up your own measurement system and your own “waypoints”. By system, we don't mean anything elaborate; just a few measurements you can track over time. You can put them into spreadsheet and create graphs if you want, but you don't have to, so long as you can read them and understand what they are telling you. If you are on the right track – great. But if you aren’t, it isn’t too late to re-think your campaign and try a different approach. In your car journey you might change your route to avoid traffic congestion at some road works and this is no different. Sometimes it only needs a slight tweak to the wording of a message to produce better results.  I’ll give you a real-life example. As part of our generic marketing (rather than targeting a specific title), we Tweet a different “Book of the Day” each day. For a long time, this wasn’t producing much in the way of interest – hardly any re-tweets (RTs) or “likes” and even fewer click throughs to Amazon. These are three of our measurements, used to assess if we are catching Twitter users’ interest. The posts we were using were images showing the book’s cover alongside its blurb. That allowed us to get past Twitter’s 280 character limit. Above the image we just said “Book of the Day” with the book’s title, the author’s name, a link to Amazon and a few hashtags, because the image told the user what the book was about – no need to repeat it (or so we thought). Then one of our colleagues mentioned how hard it was to read some Twitter posts on her phone. The text was so tiny that it was unreadable. She showed me the Tweet and I had to agree with her. I suggested she expand the image, but she said she didn’t have time to mess about like that. "The text was so tiny that it was unreadable" The penny dropped with a very loud clang. That was what was wrong with our images. People use social media a lot when they’re on the move: trains, buses etc so a lot of our Tweets will be viewed on phones and the images we were using weren’t readable on a small screen.. So, we changed the format of the Tweets. We made the wording bolder and more eye catching and, instead of using our own image, we let the link connect to Amazon, which then showed the cover image within the Tweet but made it more prominent.  The results were almost instantaneous, with more likes and RTs being recorded. But, thanks to Twitter’s analytics we could see we were also getting more click-throughs to the Amazon sales page. And then we saw that sales were going up. But if we hadn’t been measuring likes and RTs in the first place, we wouldn’t even have known we had a problem. We use different measurements to establish what levels of engagement we get on this website and we see how different messages on social media result in traffic arriving here. If you clicked on a link on Twitter to read this blog, you will appear in our measurements. Not by name of course, that would breach data protection laws, but you are there in “number of clicks” on Twitter analytics. If you publish your books through KDP, the reports they produce, which are measurements under another name, can give you some interesting insights. Firstly they indicate which formats are most popular for your books. If you aren't selling any copies in paperback, why bother publishing a paperback? They also tell you which territories your books are selling in, so you can use that information to guide your advertising strategy. If you've just spent £100 on advertising on amazon.com, but sold no books there, then there's no point in wasting your money advertising there again. Spend it in the territories where you are getting sales and you will get even more sales there. So use the measurements that various platforms provide for you for free, because they can help you.  So, measurement may be boring, but it can make the difference between a lot of wasted time and a successful marketing campaign.
There is one word of warning, however. You don’t fatten a pig by weighing it (apologies to vegans, Jews and Muslims). In other words, there is such a thing as too much measurement. Businesspeople talk about the “vital few”. These are the critical measurements that tell you how you are performing. It is very easy to let the vital few become the irrelevant many. You can use some measurements for a quite a limited period of time. For example, the only time you are really interested in knowing how many followers you have on Twitter is when you start to establish your social media presence. Once you have a reasonable level of followers all you need to do is check back from time to time to make sure you haven’t lost too many. So, work out what you need to measure and when. At other times, you can let those measurements drift down the priority list and promote some that are becoming more relevant. The important thing is to use the results to inform your marketing strategy because your marketing strategy is what is getting your books noticed – or not. Next week we’re going to take a look at how you put the ideas in this whole series of blogs together into a single, cohesive plan to deliver what you want. If you think that sounds boring, just remember the old saying “Fail to plan – plan to fail.” If you have enjoyed this blog and want to make sure you don’t miss future editions, you can sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below.  Fact: there are currently over 33 million individual book titles listed on Amazon. OK, some of those are in foreign languages or their subject matter is of no interest to your readers, but even taking them into account, there is a lot of competition for the Indie author to contend with. So, two questions: 1.What can you say about your book that will stand out from the crowd? and 2.How can you present that message in a way that will appeal to the reader? If you can answer those two questions you have a fighting chance of selling your book. If you can’t, then I suggest taking up fishing or knitting, or anything that isn’t writing books. "you are creative with words" But you are an author. That means you are creative with words. That is a good start. But you also need to engage with other forms of creativity because words alone will no longer sell books. Back in the days when the written word was king it would suffice, but in the 21st century, written promotions are as out of date as water mills to grind corn. Think about the amount of different media that is now available and then think about the sort of content that is most popular.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video has to be worth ten thousand. That’s why Twitter sets its character limit at 280. They know that some people don’t want to read messages that are longer than that – but they will watch a video. It also accounts for the popularity of Instagram and Tik-Tok. Differentiating a product is the art of making it more appealing when compared to its competitors. Car makers do that by adding different features to their cars, changing the exterior shape or providing different colour schemes and interior finishes. Ice cream manufacturers do it by selling different flavours. Some businesses differentiate on the basis of quality (“luxury” chocolates, for example) while other differentiate on the basis of price; making their product cheaper than the competition. And the author must do it by making sure that their book is more appealing to the reader than the hundreds of similar books that are available. But authors have to do it before the reader has even sampled the product. “sell the sizzle, not the sausage”  There is a saying in the world of sales: “sell the sizzle, not the sausage” What that means is that you have to create a vision of the product, rather than the details of what it is. Imagine a sausage (a vegan one if you wish) sizzling away in a pan, the aromas wafting through the air to reach your nose. Imagine it being placed on a plate alongside potatoes and vegetables. Imagine it being raised to someone’s lips as they start to eat. Compare that to the actual description of a sausage I found on the internet: “an item of food in the form of a cylindrical length of minced pork or other meat encased in a skin, typically sold raw to be grilled or fried before eating.” Which of those two paragraphs is going to make your mouth water and make you think about going out to buy some sausages? That is how you have to differentiate your books. Saying that your book is a love story about two strangers who meet on a train before being separated by a railway accident may be factual, but it isn’t exciting. It is the equivalent of the dictionary description of a sausage. But saying “Alex and Sam were doomed to be parted. Fate had its own plans for them and it would take all their hopes and dreams to bring them back together once again. That’s the sausage sizzling in the pan description. "everyone can now be a movie director"  Now, imagine that you are watching TV or perhaps Youtube and you were actually presented with the image of Alex and Sam being parted and searching for each other across whatever divides them. Wouldn’t you want to know if they find each other once again? And that is what modern technology allows us to create. Because everyone can now be a movie director. All they need is a phone, some software and a bit of imagination. You don’t even have to have the phone. You can create videos from montages of photographs or other images (providing you have the right to use them). A little bit of training is always helpful and this free course offered by Future Learn is all about creating the right content for the right audiences,  Throughout this series of blogs, we have focused on social media as the way to market books, because it is free (unless you use their paid advertising services). But just because it is free it doesn’t mean that you can’t get creative with it. Microsoft Moviemaker 10 (other free film making packages are available) allows you to do a wide range of things just using slides created from Powerpoint or similar packages, but if you can create video clips with your camera’s phone then you can do even more. It isn’t hard to learn to use so go, play, have fun and be creative.  If you think making a movie is too complicated, try a podcast instead. These allow you to read extracts from your books to stimulate interest. Platforms such as Spotify for Podcasters allow you to upload your podcasts and you can promote them through your social media channels. Podcasts are very popular with people who spend a lot of time driving, as a change from listening to music.  But whatever media you are using for promoting your work, make sure the language is:
If you are writing for a young audience then you can use the sort of relaxed forms of language that young people use, but if your target audience is older, then more formal language may be appropriate. By tone we mean that the words you use match the type of book you have written. If your book is supposed to be humorous, you can adopt a bantering type of tone. If it is serious you have to use a more serious tone. If it is dramatic, then dramatic language is appropriate.  Make sure your tone is right. Record yourself saying the words and play them back to yourself or to a friend. Do they sound right, in the context of the book you have written? If they don’t, your audience may be put off. They certainly won’t be engaged by what you have produced, regardless of the media you are using. Above all you have to create the “sizzle” for your book to encourage the reader to click a link and go to the place where they can buy the book. If they don’t do that then your message has failed. OK, you won’t get a click from very viewer/listener/reader, but if you get enough clicks you will get sales. There are two areas we have yet to cover in detail. First of all, if a reader wants to buy a new book but hasn’t seen any of your social media content (despite your best marketing efforts that’s still a possibility), how do you help them to find it? This is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). We’ll be discussing that next week.  We have covered measurement in passing, within other blogs, but it is an important subject in its own right, because if you don’t measure the right things at the right time, you’ll never know if your marketing strategy is working. And if you don’t know if it’s working, you can’t improve it. So, we’ll also be covering that in next week’s blog.
* Jack Trout, marketing guru. If you have enjoyed this blog and want to make sure you don’t miss future editions, you can sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. This week's updated blog looks at advertising for Indie authors.  Marketing pioneer John Wannamaker There will come a time when you, as an Indie author, are tempted to spend some of your hard-earned money on advertising your book, but is this a wise thing to do? The short answer is "yes". The longer answer is the subject of this week’s blog. The marketing pioneer John Wannamaker (1838-1922) is famous for saying “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” That quote resonates especially with small businesses and people like Indie authors, because you can’t afford to waste any money, let alone half of what you spend on anything. But we have to remember that times were different back in Wannamaker’s day.  True, it is sometimes difficult to establish cause and effect. If you launch an advertising campaign and you then you sell a book, is it because of a response to the advert, or because the purchaser had the book recommended to them by a friend? But that is just a single purchase. If sales increase over the entire period of an advertising campaign, it is far easier to establish cause and effect. "it is sometimes difficult to establish cause and effect" We also have to consider the metrics (measurements) available in Wannamaker’s day. They were fairly primitive; basically, just money spent, newspaper and magazine circulation figures, and sales achieved. Today, however, on-line advertisers can provide users with a wide range of information regarding the performance of their adverts.  For example, Facebook Ads offer these measurements:
Technically speaking, Facebook doesn’t call this an “advertisement”, it is just “boosting your post”, but it is the same thing. Click on Facebook’s “Ad Centre” and you get exactly the same range of posting options, but they charge you a lot more – a £100 minimum budget compared to a £10 minimum for boosting your post. "If your ad is being seen by a lot of people, but you aren’t getting many engagements, something is wrong" If you can see how much “reach” you get, you can compare that to the number of engagements you got (clicks, likes and shares). If your ad is being seen by a lot of people, but you aren’t getting many engagements, something is wrong with the ad or its targeting. If you know how many clicks you got, you can then compare that with sales made and make a calculation of conversions from clicks to sales – and therefore work out how much each click cost you and earned you, eg, if your ad cost £10 and you got 1,000 clicks, each click cost you a penny. If you then made 10 sales, each sale cost you £1, with a conversion rate of 1 sale per 100 clicks. If you made £3 from each sale, it means you made £20 profit on the campaign. I know that doesn’t’ sound very exciting, but if you are an unknown author, those are the sorts of figures you are going to get until you become better known. And you become better known every time you sell a book. Trust me, it doesn’t take too many sales to get from a £20 profit on a campaign to £200 profit, especially if you have more than one book on the market.  Trying to disentangle multiple campaigns The problem comes when you mount multiple campaigns running concurrently, using different advertising platforms. Although you can see which advertiser is getting you the most clicks for your money, there is no way to work out which clicks are generating the sales. You may be getting 1,000 clicks a day from an ad on Facebook, but you may be getting 10,000 clicks from an ad on Google. But if you got a total 10 sales from the two campaigns, you won’t know which ad on which platform generated the most sales. You are forced into assuming that Google is delivering the better results because they generated more clicks - but assumptions can be wrong. For this reason, we at Selfishgenie Publishing only advertise each of our books on one platform at a time, so we can be sure which adverts are generating our sales. That is also our recommendation for you, at the beginning at least.  We then compare advertising platforms to decide where to spend our money next time. We don’t necessarily ignore a platform, but we may reduce our spending on one and increase it on another. We are also able to compare budget size to results. For example, doubling the budget for an ad campaign might double sales, but it might also treble them or quadruple them – or have no effect at all. "Advertising a bad book will never lead to a profit" Throwing money into advertising can work. On all the social media platforms we discuss, the more you spend, the more people who will see your advert which means more potential buyers. But be very sure about the quality of your product. Advertising a bad book will never lead to a profit. Money saving tip - if you have published a series, advertising the series is cheaper than advertising each individual title. But you have to make sure that the series is properly set up on Amazon so that you can link to it. Consult the KDP website on how to do that.  When it comes to social media advertising, we have used four platforms: Facebook, Amazon, Google and Twitter (we treat Google and Amazon as social media for these purposes, even though they aren’t). Some of them are better than others for producing results and why that should be comes from the discussion we had in earlier blogs about audience targeting. Google has by far the largest “reach” of all the platforms. An incredible 10 billion Google searches are made each month. It is used by more people per hour and in more countries than any other platform on the internet. But that doesn’t mean that it’s the best place for advertising books. Facebook allows far better targeting of audiences, which means that, although fewer people will see our advertisement, more of them will be the people that our books are aimed at. But we have to also consider age profiles in terms of their use of social media. Older people prefer Facebook to Twitter, whereas it’s the reverse for younger readers. So, although Twitter may not be as good an advertising platform as Facebook in general terms, it may be better for us than Facebook if a book is aimed at younger readers.  In terms of rankings for advertising, this blog rated the following platforms in terms of their number of users, genders and age demographics: 1. Facebook, both genders, 18-65 2. Twitter, both genders, 18 -49 3. Instagram, both genders, 18-64 4. Pinterest, women, 18-64 5. Linkedin, both genders 25-64 The principal criteria used for ranking, however, is number of users. Numbers of users doesn’t tell the whole story, however.  The ability to refine target groups is one of the most important considerations in advertising. It’s called market “segmentation”, being able to break a potential audience down the way an orange can be divided into segments, so that you only direct your advertising to the segment(s) that are most likely to be receptive. The ability to reach over 2 billion users with Facebook isn’t much good if most of them don’t read books. Because it is the book readers that you want to reach. So, I have done a bit more work to show you what each platform is able to provide.  Notes: 1. Targeted by Amazon’s website extensions, eg amazon.com, amazon.co.uk etc, which means coverage isn’t global. 2. Targeting is based on previous purchases, so readers of a particular genre will see similar books. 3. Based on keywords used in the book’s description (SEO). 4. Your book’s page on Amazon becomes its advert. 5. It shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but I will. If you don’t sell your books through Amazon, there is no point in advertising there. From the above, you can see that Amazon provides the least amount of targeting, with Google second. Facebook and Twitter appear to be more or less equal. However, I now take you back to what we discovered in an earlier blog.  If people are browsing Amazon’s book pages, it means they want to buy books. This isn’t the case for other social media, where they are browsing for other reasons. In other words, while they are on Amazon they are a receptive audience. Amazon’s other advantage is that it targets readers based on previous purchases, which is a usually a reliable source of data. Twitter posts get their highest visibility for only 24 minutes after posting, whereas Facebook ads remain most visible for 3 hours after posting, Amazon ads are seen while people are browsing or as a result of searches, so they are bound to be seen – so long as they appear on the first page of search results. The further down the search results, the less likely it is they will be seen, which is why SEO is important. 75% of all the people who will see a Twitter ad will see it in the first 3 hours, whereas 75% of all those who will see a Facebook ad will see it during the first 5 hours. This longevity for Facebook means that you cover longer time periods each day. If you post at midday and one of your targeted readers doesn’t log into Facebook until 4 pm, it is quite likely that they will still see your ad. But on Twitter it is less likely. On Amazon, however, it depends on the search criteria and their purchasing history. It is highly likely that an Amazon customer will see your advert if they read your genre of books. You may think I’m pointing you towards Facebook, but I’m not. There are reasons for choosing Facebook over Twitter and reasons for choosing Twitter over Facebook. And there are also reasons for using Amazon (which is generally more expensive). If your target audience is older, Facebook is the place to spend your money. If they are younger, then its Twitter. If your customers don’t use Amazon, then there’s no point in advertising there.  A downside for Amazon is that it is hard to attract readers new to your genre through advertising. Because recommendations are based on previous buying history, if they haven’t bought a book in your genre before, they are unlikely to have it recommended. On Facebook or Twitter there’s always the chance that a reader will see your ad and say “Not my usual thing, but I might give it a go.” You will notice that I haven’t mentioned Instagram, Pinterest or Linkedin much. That’s because they aren’t platforms with which we have much experience. Certainly, in terms of audience rankings, they fall behind Facebook and Twitter, but we also know that, in Instagram’s case at least, they are more used by younger audiences. "a lot of decision making" So, where does that leave us? Basically, with a lot of decision making. First of all, it is no use advertising unless you analyse the data that is collected during your campaign. If you aren’t getting much engagement from your ad, these may be the reasons:
If you are getting engagement but few sales, then these may be the reasons:
 The only one of those things that you can’t fix is the last one. Actually, there is something you can do about that last one. You can “unpublish” the book. It isn’t selling and it isn’t helping you, but it may be affecting the sales of other titles, or it may affect the sales of future books. There is nothing you can do about the reviews themselves. If you have 100 good reviews (4 and 5 star) and only a couple of bad ones, then the bad ones don’t really matter. But if you have 100 bad reviews but only a couple of good ones, then you have a problem. If you unpublish the book, it is as though it never existed (except for those few people who did read it). You can start afresh with the next book. But don’t try to republish under a different title or pen name to fool the readers. If a previous reader buys it and spots what you’ve done, they will complain to the retailer and that could get you barred from their site.  Advertising does work; if it didn’t businesses wouldn’t spend so much money on it. We have also proved it works, over multiple campaigns. But we also know, from the adverts we see on TV, that there are good adverts and bad adverts and a bad advert is a waste of money. Sometimes, however, it isn’t always easy to see the direct success of an advertising campaign. I’ll give you an example. We have run several adverts for Operation Absolom, the first book in Robert Cubitt’s “Carter’s Commandos” series. The campaigns did alright but didn’t set the world on fire in terms of results; they covered their costs and returned a small profit. However, a couple of days after the campaign ended we noticed that sales started to increase for book 2 in the series, then book 3 all the way up to book 7. By advertising the first book, we had created some new fans who read the rest of the series and, hopefully, will now also buy book 8, which has now been released. The end result, measured over a much longer time period, was a much higher profit on the campaign. This delayed reaction is something to consider if you are the author of more than one book. We’ve discussed “content” before, but it is an important subject, especially if you have to create your own to support your social media marketing, so next week we’re returning to that topic. * Henry Ford If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, be sure not to miss the next one by signing up for our newsletter. We'll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below.
This week's blog re-visited looks at where you should sell your books - and where you should promote them.  There is one P of the marketing mix we haven’t really touched on yet and that is Place. This comes in two different forms for the Indie author – where to sell your books and where to promote them. We’ll start with where to sell. There are a lot of Indie authors (and other people) who get very snooty about Amazon. Because it is so big and because its owner is so rich, they take a “stand against the man” and won’t trade with them. OK. You’re entitled to your views and I respect them. But let me tell you a few things you should know about Amazon. In 2019 Amazon accounted for 47% of all self-published books sold in the world, in all formats. That leaves all the others (Kobo, BookNook, Smashwords, Lulu, et al) dividing up the other 53% between them. No matter what your platform of choice, it is never going to match Amazon in terms of market share. "it is never going to match Amazon in terms of market share  Amazon are shy about revealing details of how many Kindles have been sold, but the estimates are between 20 million and 90 million. Some of those will probably be shared between users. There is no data that I can find on how many times the Kindle app has been downloaded, but it is available to everyone who has a digital device if they fancy reading a Kindle book. That is an estimated 5.2 billion telephone handsets and an estimated 1.14 billion tablets. 72% of all books read on an ereader, are read on a Kindle or the Kindle app. Trust me, Amazon aren’t paying me to tell you these things. I’m just providing the data and you can make your own decisions. But can you really afford not to be on Amazon? OK, that’s just going to make Amazon bigger, but it is in the hands of the other retailers to try and compete with Amazon, but right now they aren’t even in the game, let alone inside the stadium and fighting for a win.  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be on the other platforms. It makes sense to be everywhere you can, but the most likely place for your book to sell is the Big A. One of the advantages of some of the other platforms is that some of them allow the author to offer coupons and other ways to provide discounts and free books to readers. You can do this on Amazon but it is far harder and you usually have to pay for the coupons. For example, we passed a milestone for a number of followers on Twitter, so we Tweeted a Smashwords coupon code for a 100% discount on one of our books that was only valid for 24 hours. We got several downloads (and lots of new Twitter followers) and then a couple of sales from people who missed the cut-off time for the coupon but decided they wanted to read the book anyway. We couldn’t have done that with Amazon.  Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) programme is the biggest subscription service/lending library for Indie books. This puts the Indie author into a bit of a quandary. Because it is part of KDP’s T&Cs that you can’t enrol your eBook on KU if it is published on another platform. Sneaky, I know. So, you now have to try to work out whether you are going to be financially better off by not enrolling in KU and selling through multiple platforms, or whether your sales on other platforms aren’t worth you being there, so it is better to be on KU instead. That’s not always an easy choice to make. "That’s not always an easy choice to make." What does help is if you know where your target audience normally goes to buy their books. That is part of your market research. For example, women are more likely to buy Kindles than men – but men are more likely to become permanent Kindle users than women, if they have one. Maybe it is just that women buy the Kindles as gifts for men in the first place, but I have no evidence to back up that supposition. The good news is there’s room for some trial and error. You can enrol your book in KU at any time, so if you aren’t making sales on the other platforms you can de-list the book and enrol it on KU instead. It’s harder to unenroll from KU as you have to wait until the end of a 3 month period and if you miss the date it will auto-enrol you for another 3 months.  Now, which social media platforms are you going to use to reach your target audience? We touched on this in an earlier blog but it is time to take a more in-depth look. The demographics of social media usage varies from platform to platform. Those that are better for visual images, especially video, tend to be more popular with young people. The ones that allow you to “tell a story” in words, like Facebook, are more used by people in the 30 to 50 age group. This is going to affect your choice of platform and your choice of messages. You can be on all of them, of course, but you are going to waste some of your effort by concentrating on the wrong ones. Platform usage also varies from country to country, so here’s some stats:
 From that you might assume that the UK is all on Twitter. You would be wrong. When you look at the actual number of users it goes FB (38 million), Insta (28 million) then Twitter (17 million) so the place to be seen would appear to be FB. The same applies to the USA (310m, 95m and 68m) What makes it more difficult is that these numbers change every year. Those are the ones for 2020. Who knows where people will be by the end of 2022? But what this means is that if you are targeting a global population for your books, you can analyse data like that and decide which platform is going to be best for you to concentrate on in that country. In both the USA and UK, it is most definitely FB. This becomes even more significant when it comes to spending money on advertising (the topic for next week’s blog), then clearly you are better off spending your hard-earned cash on FB advertising, not Twitter, because FB can reach more people. "In both the USA and UK, it is most definitely FB, not Twitter. "  Facebook founder, mark Zuckerberg Of course, that takes us back into the world of personal politics because a lot of people don’t like Mark Zuckerberg and don’t want to make him any richer than he is. On the other hand, those same people want to sell books. Whatcha gonna do? You can slice and dice the data in a number of other ways. For example, is your target audience college educated? If yes, then more college educated people use Facebook than Twitter. Is your ideal reader a high-income earner? Then Facebook is also the place for you. On all 3 platforms the largest proportion of users is amongst the higher income bracket, but on FB it is a massive 74% of high-income earners. That is to say, of all those social media users who are high income earners, 74% will use FB but only 31% will use Twitter. "You can slice and dice the data in a number of other ways" Where did all that data come from? It came from this website, to which we provided a link in a previous blog. The data relates mainly to users in the USA, but there is no reason to suggest that the data doesn’t transpose to the UK, especially when you look at that number of users for the different countries that are shown above. Market research companies allow some of their data to be accessed, which can be helpful. For example, on the Yougov website (registration is free) I discovered that fans of Bernard Cornwell are more likely to be male, over 55, interested in history and politics and follow the news and, when it comes to reading, they want to find a series that “they can dive into for a while”. If you are an author of a series of novels involving historical military fiction, that is a very good picture of your target audience. Now that I know that age bracket, I can find out which social media platform they are most likely to use and target them on that and I know what sort of messages they are going to be interested in reading and engaging with. OK, the amount of data I got from Yougov wasn’t that much, but they make their money by selling data, not giving it away for free. Having registered with them I’ll probably be bombarded with emails inviting me to take out a subscription. Maybe I will, because the insights I got from them without paying were high value in terms of audience profiling.  Author Bernard Cornwell Why Bernard Cornwell? One of our authors writes historical military fiction, not that different to Bernard Cornwell’s, so by finding out who reads his books, I’ve found out who is likely to read our author’s books.
But I could have got similar data for the readers of authors of any genre of book that we publish. Because their fans are probably the people we want to target for advertising. As you can see, this is again very time-consuming stuff. If you are juggling family, work and being an author, you haven’t got much time left over for marketing. Well, I don’t want to pressure you, but you can always find someone who can do some of it for you. Yes we will take a share of your royalties, but a share is better than no royalties at all. In the next edition we’re going to look at the one place where you may be tempted to spend some money – advertising. Is it something an Indie author should be considering? If you have enjoyed this blog or found it informative, be sure not to miss our next one by signing up for our newsletter. We'll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. Our continuing updates to our series of marketing blogs takes a look at book pricing. Author Bernard Cornwell Last year Bernard Cornwell brought out a new “Sharpe” novel and to order it for Kindle will cost you £12.99 (July 2022 price). The price last year to pre-order it was higher - £14.99. So, as a self-published, Indie author, what price should you set for your next masterpiece? Let’s look at the economics of pricing a book. Publishers, even quite small ones, have costs they must cover: rent, utilities, editing, proofreading, marketing, distribution, “back office” staff etc. All of these costs have to be recovered and, to help the company’s balance sheet, they like to recover those costs within the financial year in which the book is published. To keep the shareholders happy, the company also needs to make a profit. "the author needs to make a living" Then the author needs to make a living, so some income for the author has to be factored into the price, which also has to take into account the percentage that will be paid to the author’s agent, anywhere between 10% and 20% of the author’s royalties (the author pays the agent, not the publisher). Finally, a well-known author like Cornwell has a loyal fanbase who are prepared to pay that price to read about Sharpe’s latest adventure. You have seen a similar effect with fans queuing to be the first to be the owners of the new iPhone or PlayStation. Put those things together and you get the price that is being asked for the latest Bernard Cornwell book. Once the publisher has recovered their initial costs, usually after a year, they start to reduce the price of the book while maintaining the level of royalties they pay to the author. You can pick up most of Cornwell’s earlier work as an ebook for around £6.99. The price of the hardback is usually reduced when the paperback is released, perhaps 6 months after launch. Even paperback prices are reduced over time.  So, how much do you think you should charge for your books? Firstly, you don’t have most of those overheads. You have expended time to write the book and you may have paid for some services, such as editing or cover design, you may also have to pay for some marketing activity, but those costs are miniscule when compared to those of a major publisher. Interestingly you can make the same royalties, per copy, for your book charging quite a modest price as Bernard Cornwell will at £12.99 a pop. The difference in income between you is that he will sell hundreds of thousands of copies, but you will probably be doing well to sell a few hundred copies. At least, until you are better known. I don’t know why you got into writing, but if it was to become a millionaire, you are barking up the wrong tree. According to this research, the average annual royalties for an author in the UK in 2018 was a fraction over £16,000. The top 10% of authors earn 70% of all royalties. These are the big, well-known names. A statistician will tell you that it is the top 10% that is keeping the average as high as it is. I’ll just to do the maths for you: if you price your book to pay you £3 per copy in royalties, you have to sell more than 5,600 to make the national minimum wage – without taking your other costs into account. The mode (that’s statistics jargon meaning what the largest number of authors earn) is much lower than the average. It’s less than £11k, or 3,700 sales. "If you want to make money don't become an author, become a publisher." So, even if you can climb to the dizzy heights of earning the average income for an author, you will struggle to live on it. By comparison, the 2022 UK national average full-time salary is a fraction over £31k. It is interesting to note that many of the authors who are signed to mainstream publishers are probably earning less than their editors. They are certainly earning less than the middle managers in the publishing company. If you want to make money out of books, don’t become an author, become a publisher!  The big money for authors isn’t in selling books; it is in selling the TV and film rights to their books. Not only do they go for a large lump sum (and probably a “percentage of the gross”), they also catapult book sales into the stratosphere. It should be remembered that the first print run for “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (Sorcerer’s Stone in the USA) was only 500 copies, 300 of which went to libraries. It took two years to sell 300,000 copies in the UK. You need to sell around 100,000 copies to make it to the Sunday Times best-sellers list.  But that hasn’t answered the question: for what price should you sell your book? The answer is, it’s up to you. Some authors believe in setting a low price, hoping to sell more copies. Others set a higher price because they place a higher value on the content. I don’t believe in setting too low a price. I think the readers look at the price and say “If it’s that cheap it can’t be very good” and pass it by. Besides, if you want to drop the price to boost sales, perhaps ahead of the release of a sequel, then you have nowhere to go. "When you sell on Amazon, they set a minimum price" When you sell on Amazon, they set a minimum price (some other platforms also do that). The minimum price is what Amazon thinks they deserve for allowing you to use their platform, which includes delivery via their internet channels. Above that you can sell at whatever price you wish. We set a price of between £2.99 and £5.99 depending on the length of the book. That gives a total royalty between £1 and £3 (approx) per copy. But that is shared 50:50 with the author. If you don’t have a publisher, you get the whole lot.  As suggested, there are times when we reduce the price. Amazon will allow us to do that once per title every three months, for up to 5 days per quarter. We will take advantage of that if we want to stimulate interest in a series ahead of the next book being released. Amazon also allows a book to be given away for free using the same parameters and we have also done that. What do the experts say? Well, we came across this article which seems to cover the main points. Now to Kindle Unlimited (KU), Kindle Select and Kindle Lending Library. These are three names for pretty much the same thing. Readers pay a subscription to these services (they also get it free with their Prime subscription) and the income for that (after Amazon has deducted its fees) is pooled. Every time a reader downloads and reads a book, the author gets a share of the pool. This is currently about 0.5p per page read, what KDP calls the Kindle Edition Normalised Pages (KENP). This bears no relation to the actual number of pages in a paperback. So, if your book is 400 KENP long and the reader reads it all the way through, you will earn about £2. Depending on the sale price, that may be less than if they bought the book.  Because of this disparity, there is a difference of opinion about whether to allow your book to be listed on these services (you do have a choice). Books on KU can’t be sold anywhere other than through Amazon, which is why the big names don’t use these services. But there’s another reason they don’t use them – it takes too long for publishers to recover their overheads. But Indie authors don’t have that problem. “But if they download my book for free, I won’t make so much money.” is the usual objection. But you will make some money and if they don’t download your book for “free”, you don’t make any money. Let me give you an example. If someone sees a film on Amazon they want to watch, but they also subscribe to Netflix, are they going to buy the film from Amazon? No, of course they aren’t. They’re going to download it for “free” from Netflix. The same applies to these other subscription services. The reader may be interested in your book, but if they can’t download it for “free”, they’ll pass it by and find one they can. Just so you know, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited paid out over $250 million (quarter of a $ billion) to Indie authors in 2019. It currently accounts for 14% of all books read. And here at Selfishgenie Publishing, income from Kindle Unlimited makes up around 66% of our total income. Yes, we make far more money from “free” downloads than we do from sales. So, we enrol most of our titles in those programmes, unless the author asks us not to.  By the way, if you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber and you download a book but don’t finish it (for whatever reason), don’t just stop turning the pages. Please keep swiping through until the end. That way the author gets the full share of the pool for that book. It’s a small thing, but it is a good thing to do to help other Indie authors and it costs you nothing. Giving away books for free - other than through the subscription services - is something we are reluctant to do. The thinking is that the free book will raise the author’s profile and the reader will buy other titles by the same author. We have little evidence that, for example, giving away the first book in a series will encourage a new reader to buy the second book. There seems to be plenty of readers who are only interested in free books and will take them, but that is all they do. We don’t even know if they actually read them. It’s a bit like a pub giving away a beer brand for free for a period as a promotion. The drinkers will take the free beer for as long as it lasts, but they won’t necessarily buy it when it’s sold at its normal price. They often go back to their usual tipple.  We do give away one title for free every Christmas as a good will gesture. It’s called “An Alternative Christmas Carol” and it gets a lot of downloads. Strangely, when we take it off free offer after Christmas, we often sell a couple of copies. Bizarre!
So, that’s pricing for you. If you think you can sell at a high price – try it, but don’t be surprised if readers don’t buy the book. Better to be modest when you start out (< £5) and increase your prices later when you have established your reputation. If you have enjoyed this blog or found it informative and want to be sure not to miss the next edition, just sign up for our newsletter. We'll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. Continuing with our updated series of marketing blogs, first posted in march 2021  It doesn’t matter how many people you engage with on social media, if the messages you send them aren’t clear, they won’t buy your book. So that is the subject of this week’s blog – coming up with clear marketing messages. There are a number of ways to create content and creative people are coming up with new ways all the time. But we’ll start with the basics and you can get creative yourself once you have got the idea. If you’d like to do some training in this topic, our old friends at Future Learn offer a 2 week online course (it can be completed in a single day if you wanted to) that is (yay) free and you can sign up for it anywhere in the world. We recommend it. For this blog we’re going to look at two specific types of content.  You will probably have heard of “the elevator Pitch”. If not, this blog tells you all about them. Elevator pitches are very useful on social media, to get quick, concise messages across about your book. If you haven’t read that blog and don’t know what an elevator pitch is, it’s a short description of your book, designed to catch the attention of a potential audience in a very short space of time – typically the duration of a ride in an elevator, hence its name. One of the things we see quite often on Twitter is authors saying they've been asked about their book and suddenly become tongue-tied, they panic and fear they may even sound stupid. And that is where the elevator pitch comes into its own. Imagine you are at a party or a BBQ and you find yourself in conversation with a stranger. “What do you do for a living?” They ask.  “I’m an author.” you reply (because you are if you want to sell your books, no matter what you actually do to earn a living). “Oh, that’s interesting.” They say, because this is a party/BBQ and they feel obliged to make small talk. “What sort of books do you write?” “Well, my latest book is …” And that is your elevator pitch, basically; your book’s description in thirty to sixty seconds. Then you pause. If their eyes have glazed over and they change the subject, let it drop – don’t bore them to death with it. But if they say “Oh, that sounds intriguing,” they may ask you more and you can feel free to elaborate until they run away screaming. "that elevator speech is your basic marketing message" I could try to come up with my own recipe for creating the killer elevator pitch, but there are so many available on the internet already. But the elevator pitch is your basic marketing message for use on social media because it is concise and easy to understand. If you can get it down to 280 characters, then it’s ideal for Twitter, but if you can’t then it can be used on other social media.  Here’s a trick for Twitter. Turn your message into a picture. Use Powerpoint (other graphics packages are available), put your elevator pitch into a text box, insert the cover image alongside it and save it as a .jpg (image) file. All you need to do then is upload it into your Tweet and add a link so that anyone interested can click through to its retail page on whatever platform you are using for sales. But, of course, you can also use the same “slide” for other social media. But you don’t have to stop there. If you can set up a series of slides you can join them together and make them into a video using packages such as “moviemaker”. Or you can make some actual videos with yourself or family members in them. These are ideal for use on Youtube and Instagram (you could actually video yourself in a party/BBQ situation, in conversation with a “party guest”). There are also providers on Fiverr.com that will create short videos for you, using your book cover and elevator pitch as the basis. Take a look at the one we had created for one of our titles, Operation Absolom, on our "Books" tab In this respect you are only limited by your own imagination. But you’re an author, so you have a great imagination. I have what is known as a “good face for radio”, which is a euphemism for being ugly, so I wouldn’t want to be in a video, but there’s nothing wrong with my voice, so I can do a voiceover for a video made up of slides.  Some music helps and you can find stuff to download for free on this website. You can also find some sound effects there. You may want to edit the soundtrack or music clip, and there is a package called Audacity which can also be downloaded for free. It isn’t easy to use, so be prepared to take some time to learn how. With Audacity you can also create and edit your own podcasts and you can upload them to sites such as Spotify for Podcasters. (other websites for podcasters are available). But if you are going to do a podcast, you are going to need a lot more material than just your elevator pitch. "you are going to need a lot more material" Perhaps you can read an extract from the book, like using the “look inside” feature on retail platforms. Your elevator pitch provides the intro, to “hook” the listener and then the extract reels them in. I think you can see that this is all very time consuming, which is why small publishers want 50% of your royalties if you sign with them. If you are a full-time author you may have time to do all this marketing, but if you have a day job and a family to juggle, then it becomes more challenging. But if your books aren’t selling and you aren’t doing some (or all) of this stuff, then that may be one of the reasons. "But if your books aren’t selling [....] that may be one of the reasons."  Next, I’m going to take a look at your book’s “blurb”. The blurb is the book’s description that appears beneath the cover image on the retail website and will also appear on the back cover of a paperback book – or maybe on an inside page. You will find a lot of blogs about writing elevator pitches, but not nearly as many about writing blurbs. That’s because elevator pitches are mainly considered as being a tool to catch an agent’s eye. If you do that, they will find you a publisher and publishers have people who are paid to write blurbs, so the author doesn’t need to know how to do it. But you are here, reading this blog, which means you haven’t got an agent, nor a publisher who employs a blurb writer. So, you need to know how to do this for yourself. Imagine yourself walking along the street and you happen to glance sideways through a window before looking ahead again to where you are going. After a fraction of a second your brain catches up with your feet and says “Hang on, there was something going on in there, but I don’t know what.” Well, that is the elevator pitch. Now you go back and take a proper look through the window and see someone being attacked with an axe. That is the blurb.  Like the elevator pitch, the blurb has to be concise. If it starts to go on too long the reader will lose interest and move onto another book. But it also has to tell the reader that this is a book that they will enjoy reading, which means it can’t be too short. We found this blog that provides some useful tips. They tie in well with an approach using a fishing metaphor: hook, line and sinker (it’s also the titles of the books in a trilogy by Len Deighton, but that’s another story (groan at bad pun)).  The hook is a short, snappy statement designed to catch the eye, just like the hook catches the fish (that would make the elevator pitch the “bait”). This is the sort of thing we mean: “When you’re up to your backside in alligators, it’s hard to remember that the object of the exercise was to drain the swamp.” That sort of sentence excites all sorts of questions, not least, “what does it mean?”. Thinking about your own book, what sort of short, snappy sentence or couple of sentences could you come up with that would catch the eye? Typical romance ones usually focus on unrequited love. Crime thrillers mention the bizarre nature of a murder. The hook for Operation Absolom is “There’s an old saying in the Army, ‘Never volunteer for anything’. It has been said many times, so why on Earth did Steven Carter ignore it?” Straight away you get two things from that: The book has something to do with the Army, and also the main character’s name. But he obviously volunteers for something that he later regrets – but what is it? If you ask that question, it means you are “hooked” and you will want to know the answer.  The “line” is where you flesh out the plot and characters for the reader. It will be about a paragraph in length, saying enough to keep the interest going, but not so much that you are giving the book away for free. That’s why it needs to be limited a to a paragraph in length – probably no more than 100 words. Returning to Operation Absolom, here’s the “line” we used: “After volunteering for the Army Commandos, Carter finds himself cut off in enemy occupied Norway. It’s winter, it’s cold and the enemy are hunting for him. Can he survive against all these odds? Even if the Nazis don’t capture him, can he find a way back to England?” So, now we know what Carter volunteered for and why he may now be regretting it. We are also setting up the background against which the story is told – Nazi occupied Norway. Finally, we are asking the “cliff-hanger” question – will the hero escape? If the reader wants the answer to that question, they know what they have to do.  For people who have never been fishing - these are "sinkers". People like to read books similar to the ones they have already read and enjoyed. It is a comfort to them – even if it is frustrating to new authors. So, if you can compare this book to well-known books that the reader may have enjoyed, it tells the reader that they might enjoy this one as well. So, the “sinker” is “If you enjoy the stories of (inset well-known author’s name) and (insert another well-known author’s name) then you will love (insert book title) by (insert author’s name). You can jazz that final paragraph up a bit more if you want, by saying things like “tenser than …. more dramatic than …. more tear jerking than ….” etc. But you don’t have to name authors. You can just use a well-known title or even a film or TV series. The blurb for “The Deputy Prime Minister” compares it to “House of Cards” and “The West Wing”. Amazon, who know a bit about book marketing, suggest a word count of about 150 for a blurb. That’s only a target, of course, but it gives you something to aim for.  The whole idea of the blurb is to encourage the reader to “look inside” ie start reading the book, just as they might if they were standing in a bookshop with the book in their hand. If you succeed in getting them to “look inside” you have a better than 50:50 chance of the reader buying the book. If they like what they see, that turns into 100%. Let’s face it, if you have got the reader this far, the only reason for not buying the book is that, based on the ‘look inside’, they don’t like it or they think it is poorly written. Which is the other main reason your book may not be selling. It doesn’t matter how much marketing you do, if the reader doesn’t like that ‘look inside’ bit, they aren’t going to buy your book. But that is for you to reflect on. "the other main reason your book may not be selling" So, those are your two main messages. You can “refresh” your elevator pitch whenever you want, but it’s not so easy to refresh your blurb. Basically you have to republish your book, so taking your time to work on your blurb is time well spent. Why not try it out on your beta readers as well? Send them two or three versions and see which one they prefer. They might even be able to suggest improvements. Like your elevator pitch, your blurb can be used on social media. It is quite well suited for Facebook, for example, with a link to the book’s retail page so the reader can ‘look inside’, or perhaps to a website where they can get a free extract, as discussed in a previous blog. Your blurb can be turned into a video or used as the introduction to an extract in a podcast. If you know how to do it, you could even produce an animation. The limit is your own imagination and skills – and how much you are willing to spend on software packages. We would advise keeping things simple (and free) to start with, then perhaps re-investing some of your royalties later, once you have sold some books. Talking about selling, how much should you charge for your book? That’s what we take a look at next week. If you enjoyed this blog or found it informative, make sure you don't miss future editions by signing up for our newsletter. We'll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. Continuing the updated series of blogs on marketing that first appeared in March 2021. Imagine, if you will, that you are a British author, but for reasons we won’t go into, you are living in Australia. Your books are aimed at a mainly British audience. Australians may read them as well (you hope they do), but when you were sitting writing your book, you had visions of leafy Surrey lanes or majestic Scottish glens. Q. You want to use social media to tell your British readers about your new book. When is the best time for you to post on social media? A. When your audience is awake and using social media, of course. Ah, but you are in Australia, which means that when they are awake, you are asleep and vice versa. That is going to present a problem. But that is an extreme example. There are, however, many different times when different people are online and knowing when your audience is online is critical to your social media marketing campaign.  Nurses, who work shifts, don’t get much time for social media while they’re at work, so they use social media when they finish their shift, which could be midnight, 5 am or the middle of the day. But if your target audience includes nurses (eg you write romances set in hospitals), you will want to be posting to social media at the time they are using it. Think about it – when do toy manufacturers advertise their toys? When they know children will be watching TV. Yes, we know that it’s the adults who buy the toys, but it’s the kids who pester the life out of the parents to buy them. When do online gambling companies step up their advertising? During televised sporting events, of course – but also when people are getting back from the pub after having one drink too many and not wanting to go to bed just yet. Excessive alcohol consumption and gambling go hand in hand. The timing of your messages has to be just as targeted. It’s no good knowing who your target audience is and what they are interested in, if you are in bed when they are on social media – or when you are on social media, but they’re in bed. There is a myriad of information on the internet that can help you to identify the best times of day to use different social media platforms and even what days are best and what worst; Saturday isn’t a good day for Twitter, apparently. But Saturday might be a good day if your book is about sport and you want to reach an audience who are on-line chatting about what is happening at similar live sporting events. So, audience targeting, which we covered several blogs ago, comes back into the equation once more.  You’ll have to do some digging (Well, you didn’t think we were going to do it all for you, did you?) And make sure you specify the country in which you are interested. We’re a UK based company but most of the searches came up with results for the USA until I changed the wording of my query. OK, we’ll help a bit. This website shows what times to post in generic terms, but doesn’t give you much insight into such things as age, employment, gender, interests etc. There are plenty of blogs on the subject on that website, dig around a bit and you may find what you are looking for. Here’s a couple of facts for you. A post on Facebook is most read during the first 1½ hours after posting. After that the number of people who will see it starts to dwindle towards zero. 75% of the people who will see it, will view it in the first 5 hours after posting. "That’s why timing is so important." For Twitter, on the other hand, the shelf life (for want of a better term) is only 24 minutes. Yes, 24 minutes after you post your Tweet, fewer and fewer people will see it. On Twitter, 75% coverage is achieved after 3 hours. That’s why timing is so important.  These statistics are vital for engagement. If you want to stay engaged, you have to be there when people see and respond to your post, especially on Twitter. If you go back the next day, or even later the same day, the world has moved on already. That’s why you have to be careful of claims such as “We have a gazillion followers who you can Tweet to”. Very few of that Gazillion will ever actually see your Tweet. A portion (of unknown size) of that Gazillion followers will actually see it and out of that portion, 75% of them will see it in the first 3 hours after posting. That could mean that only ten people from your target audience will see it. "to keep your marketing message “fresh” on social media, you have to keep posting at regular intervals" If your head is starting to hurt, we don’t blame you. Ours is hurting too. What that all means, however, is that to keep your marketing message “fresh” on social media, you have to keep posting at regular intervals. But that means that you have to interrupt your work, sleep, leisure time, etc to keep on posting. Fortunately, help is at hand. There are websites that will allow you to set up and schedule posts in advance. When the clock ticks over to the appointed time, your post will magically appear on the chosen platform while you continue to snore your head off or play golf or complete the monthly report on the snail population of the Galapagos Islands, or whatever it is you are usually doing at that time of day. Unfortunately, most of these websites charge for their services. This one, Hootsuite, does offer you a 30 day free trial so you can see if it is right for you. But the big advantage of sites like this is that you can sit down for a couple of hours once a week, or even once a month, to schedule all your posts to that one platform in one go, then get on with of your life without having to worry about them. Hootsuite is quite picky about you sending out the same message time after time, but that’s because of their rules governing spam. We like to post in the afternoon and again in the evening, so when we duplicate a post, we schedule it for the evening of the next day, rather than the same day. That seems to get past the rules. Changing the wording for each post also helps.  But you don’t have to rely on Hootsuite entirely. Facebook and Twitter both let you schedule posts and this article tells you how to do it.
This blog is posted at midnight every Friday night, but do you imagine we spend our Friday nights with our fingers hovering over the mouse, waiting to click on it? No. Our website has the facility to schedule our blog posts. When this went live, I was probably deep in the arms of Morpheus, or at least draining the dregs from a bottle of wine. So, our big messages this week are:
But, of course, you can’t get into conversations via scheduled postings, so you do still need to spend some time each day “live”, so you can engage that way. Being “live” at the right time of day is important for making sure you engage more deeply with the sort of people who are going to read your books. And remember - engagement is a two way street. It's post and respond, not post and forget. We have talked a lot about “engagement” with your audience, but we haven’t talked much about what actual messages to send them, so that’s where we will start next week. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then be sure not to miss future editions by signing up for our newsletter. We'll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. Continuing our series of marketing blogs, which were first posted in early 2021.  While this blog starts off talking about blogging, it moves onto other topics later, so don’t be put off if blogging is never going to be your thing. As discussed last week, writing a blog is one of the ways that you can engage with potential readers in your target audience. So even if you aren't planning on blogging right now, it may be something worthy of your consideration. But we’re not just talking about written blogs like this one. It also covers things like videos on YouTube, Instagram and Tik-Tok. If you are trying to engage with a young audience, you are going to have far more success with those than you are with the written word. There are also podcasts, which are audio blogs and have a considerable following of their own, especially among people who spend a lot of time driving. So, anything you read here about blogs, transpose to those other media as well. BTW, recording a reading of a chapter of your book and posting it as a podcast is a great way of generating interest. What is a blog? Time to look in the dictionary. I came across this definition, which is good enough for my purposes: “a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style.” "What should your blog be about?" So, what should your blog be about? Lord Reith, the first Chairman of the BBC, said (long before the www was a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye) its purpose was to “Inform, educate and entertain”. We couldn’t put it better ourselves. That is what your blog should aim to do. You can do just one of those three things or any combination of them. We hope this blog covers “educate” and “inform”, but if you are entertained as well, that’s a bonus. The important thing is that after reading our blog, readers don’t feel they have wasted their time.  If people like your blog, they will come back again for the next one. They may even look forward to the next edition eagerly. And if they are doing that, they are almost certainly going to be interested in anything else you have written. They may even sign up to your email list so that you can email them and tell them when the next blog has been posted – but be careful not to start spamming people. That’s a quick way to lose friends and followers.  The “tone” of your blog is very important, it says a lot about you and affects the way readers will perceive you. If your tone is too stiff and formal, then you will come across as “stuffy” and it may be assumed that your books will be stuffy too. On the other hand, if you are too chatty and informal, people may not take you seriously enough and, therefore, they may not take your books seriously. We’d be interested in hearing from you about what you think of our “tone”. Is it right for what we are trying to do? Is it too stiff and formal or is too laid back and relaxed? Or, is it something else? Feel free to use the comments section to let us know what you think. We have talked already about what interests, other than reading, your target audience might have and that is one thing you can use in your blogs. If your target audience is likely to be interested in dogs, then you can blog about dogs. If they are likely to be interested knitting, you can blog about knitting. If you have done your homework on your target audience, you will probably have come up with a list of things they may be interested in and you can blog about most of them, because you are interested in them too. We have a list of other possible blog topics and you can download it at the bottom of this blog.  Where can you post your blog? There are a number of websites that will allow you to host a blog for free. Some of them might try to flog you a range of other services, such as a full-blown website, but they will let you post your blogs as well, so that’s the important thing. We Googled “free blog hosting” and came up with this list, which also happens to be a blog (though not by us). Is there anything that you shouldn’t blog about?  You are trying to make friends and there are two things that will lose you friends quite quickly: politics and religion. To that I might add climate change, veganism, gender issues, conspiracy theories and a few more. I once read the following Tweet “If I’d known that Val McDermid (a popular Scottish crime writer) was a socialist, I’d never have bought any of her books”. OK, that’s a particularly extreme viewpoint, but not untypical of the sort of narrow mindedness that exists. Venture into those fields if you feel you must, but make sure they aren’t minefields. It doesn’t matter how open-minded, reasonable or rational you think you are being; you are going to alienate someone. There are times when blogging on those sorts of issues is justified. "This isn't a hard and fast rule." If you have written an exposé of a political scandal, then it may be OK to blog about politics. This is particularly true if your book is aimed at people with a specific political perspective. If your books are religious themed, then you might be justified in blogging about religion. Just be careful, that’s all we are saying. You took a lot of trouble to identify your target audience, so don’t throw it away by alienating them with one ill-advised rant about Brexit, the Pope or Greta Thunberg. You are entitled to your opinions, but not everyone will share them – even in your target audience. And please remember that once you have posted something on a blog it is there forever and, if it's a controversial view, it could come back to haunt you.  It is time consuming to write blogs and that is enough to put some people off taking that route. So, it’s a good job it isn’t the only way to engage with your potential audience. There are also chat groups and discussion forums. One of the best known of these is Mumsnet so I’m going to use them as my model, even though I’m not a Mum (I am a dad though). These groups offer the opportunity to discuss a wide range of topics that are of common interest. It is probable that if you try to plug your book there you will get kicked off, but a popular topic for discussion is “what to do during maternity leave” (as if raising a child wasn’t enough) and that is where you can drop into the conversation that a good way of using time is to write a book. You can also discuss books by other authors quite legitimately, under the appropriate thread(s). That at least allows you to let it be known that you are interested in books. "if you try to plug your book there you will get kicked off" The aim of using these chatrooms is to attract new followers to your other social media channels, where you can and do plug your books. And that is what happens when you engage with people. You turn them into friends and friends stay in touch. I’m a keen golfer myself. In researching this blog (yes, we do that), I discovered that there are some golf forums that run like Mumsnet. We also happen to publish a book about golf. Guess who’s going to join a couple of those fora as soon as they have enough time between writing blogs, promoting books and editing.  Now onto another popular way of engaging with your readers. The “freebie” or “teaser”. It is another strand of “engagement”, but one that is a bit more direct in its approach. The idea of the teaser is for potential readers to look at your work before they buy it. This ability already exists on some retail platforms with “look inside” or similar features. But they rely on you having a manuscript (MS) uploaded to the platform and on sale. What if you are still a few weeks away from getting the final version ready for launch? You want to start engaging your audience’s interest, but the book isn’t yet ready for publication. There is a facility on many retail platforms for customers to pre-order. This is great for getting a boost up the sales rankings on Amazon and other sites. If your books have been pre-ordered, then all the pre-orders get counted on the day the book goes “live”. That can catapult you up the sales rankings, which means that your book might feature in the “best-sellers” list for the day which, in turn, can lead to more sales. This is known as “momentum”. "That can catapult you up the sales rankings" And the best part is that you don’t have to have the final version of the book ready when you set up the pre-order. You can set the pre-order up a year in advance. That’s great for well-established authors who already have a loyal following eagerly awaiting the next book but, for you, a month or two in advance is all you need. But why should anyone pre-order a book when they don’t know if they will like it? Because if there’ no MS uploaded, there’s no “look inside” to read.  Because you have posted a teaser elsewhere and that has whetted their appetite. We encourage our authors to do this – and it works. One of our authors books got to 300 in the Amazon sales rankings for their book on the day it was released, thanks to pre-orders. OK, it isn’t quite Harry Potter – but it encouraged more sales on launch day. What is best practice for teasers? Well, whatever you offer has to engage the reader, so it really has to give them a flavour of what the book is about. If the first chapter or the first 10% of the wordcount does that, then that’s the bit to use, but you may want something a bit more dramatic, a bit more emotional or a bit more exciting, in which case you may want to cherry-pick from elsewhere in the book. You might even assemble a collage of extracts from different parts of the book – but for goodness sake don’t give away the ending. But the most important part is the last line of the extract. It has to be a “call to action”. This will include a link to the specific page on the website where the book can be bought or pre-ordered.  Something like “We hope you enjoyed this extract. You can find out more about “Book Title” by “Author Name” here. “Here” being the link to where the book can be bought or pre-ordered. Note that the call to action didn’t use the words “buy”, “order” or “pre-order”. This is because people may feel pressured by those words. You are just being helpful by pointing them to the place where they can find out more. If they click the “purchase” button once they get there, it must be because they have made up their own mind to do that. Of course, giving people a teaser relies on having somewhere they can download it, which usually means a website, but some social media does allow you to post things that can be downloaded. Here at Selfishgenie we have a specific Free Stuff page where our authors can post their teasers and we promote them through our social media and they promote them through theirs. There is also a website called Wattpad where you can post extracts (or even complete books) and link them to other social media or websites. In last week’s edition of this blog, we used an almost throwaway line when we said that YA readers are mainly online between 7 and 10 pm and that’s when you may be drinking your cocoa and watching Corrie and Midsomer Murders. But it isn’t such a throwaway. Reaching your audience at the right time of day is critical and we’ll be taking a closer look at that in next week’s edition. See – we even use teasers when we’re blogging. If you enjoyed this blog or found it informative, be sure not to miss next week's edition by signing up for our newsletter. We'll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. 
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November 2024
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