 The pros and cons of enrolling books in Kindle Select, the Amazon programme behind KindleUnlimited (KU), are many. It is a constant subject of social media debate amongst Indie authors as to whether it is worth doing or not. But most Indie authors don’t know about the hidden secret behind KU which makes it a much more attractive proposition than you might think. But we’ll circle back to that later in the blog. We know that the amount paid by Amazon for Kindle Enrolled Normalised Pages (KENP) read is quite low. Depending on what price you sell your ebooks for, it could be as low as 10% of the royalties you receive for the sale of an ebook. Conversely it could be as high as 90%. It’s a difficult comparison to make because Indie authors sell their books for a far wider range of prices than trad publishers – anything from 99p to £9.99 or more (99c - $9.99).  Our standard price point means that for a complete read of a book enrolled in Kindle Select we get about 50% of the amount we would if the book was purchased as an ebook. Compared to our paperbacks, KU downloads provide a slightly better return, as we have to keep our paperback prices low so we can be more competitive compared to trad publishers and therefore we receive lower royalties for paperbacks. One of the arguments against enrolment is that, under Amazon’s T&Cs for Kindle Select, you can’t “go wide”.  That is to say, you can’t distribute your books through other on-line retailers, such as Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords et al. Here we have a bit of a paradox, because Amazon’s market share for ebooks is around 67% (USA market). So, if you distribute through other channels you only get access to an additional 33% of the total US market. In the UK Amazon’s market share of the ebook market is 79%, which means “going wide” has the potential to reach only an additional 21%. So, what do you gain by “going wide?” Well, obviously you gain access to that wider ebook market. But access is not the same as sales.  To get those sales, you have to market to people who won’t see Amazon ads. Even if you market using universal book links which can direct readers to both Amazon and those wider markets, there is no guarantee that the reader will choose the wider market in preference to Amazon. Given that marketing on platforms other than Amazon is usually more expensive, you could be paying more for sales you would have got with Amazon Ads anyway. And of course we have to take paperback prices into account as well. Amazon’s economies of scale make them the most economic Print on Demand (POD) seller of paperbacks through the internet. None of the other on-line POD providers can get anywhere close to Amazon’s price structures. Whereas the printing costs from most other POD providers means setting a price much closer to that for physical bookshops, which loses you the competitive edge of selling online at a lower price. So, for readers who want to buy paperbacks on-line, Amazon is the first choice seller. At least, it is if they want buy their paperbacks for the lowest prices.  There are other business models of course. If you buy your own ISBN you can use distributors such as Ingram Spark to print and distribute your books, which means it is possible to get books into physical bookshops, which is an ambition for many authors. We have lost the chance to sign up some new authors because our business model doesn’t include distribution through physical book shops. You can even sell your books direct to the public yourself through sites such as Etsy, but they still require marketing if you want to direct readers to your Etsy store.. By going wide you can put your book out for free all the time through platforms such as Smashwords (permafree as it is known) which can sell you the other books in a series. Amazon doesn’t allow you to do that. But a permafree book doesn’t, itself, make you any money. So, there are solid arguments for not enrolling a book in Kindle Select – providing you can convert potential sales into actual sales.  We take a different view. We know that if a book is selling well as an ebook it will also be downloaded through KU. For the current month (July 2024) KU downloads are accounting for 46% of our total income. Based on an average number of KENP per book, the equivalent number of downloads for our books on KU exceeds the number of actual sales we make of those same books. OK, we don’t make so much money from those downloads, but we do make money. And our authors’ names are better known because their books are being read more widely. At the time of writing, we get the equivalent of 1.7 complete KU book downloads for every book we sell in ebook and paperback format combined. To put that in simple numbers, for every 100 ebooks/paperbacks we sell, we get 170 KU complete reads. Now, we have to ask ourselves – and you – how much more marketing would we have to do to sell 170 more books if we wanted to go wide and therefore didn’t enrol those books in Kindle Select? And, of course, marketing costs time and/or money.  Every click we get for an Amazon ad gives readers three buying options: ebook, paperback or KU. If we don’t enrol the books in Kindle Select and go wide instead, readers would only have two buying options: ebook or paperback. Even if our marketing is successful, with the market shares we have quoted above, for every hundred books we sell through Amazon it is unlikely that we would sell enough books through those other retailers, at a high enough price, to make up for the loss of the 170 equivalent book downloads we get through KU. OK, some of those wider channels also offer subscription library services similar to KU, but they are nowhere near as well subscribed as KU and they don’t pay any better.  And now to that secret we mentioned at the top of the blog. If your books are popular as ebooks, Amazon will actually recommend them to their KU subscribers. And the more ebooks you sell or are downloaded on KU, the more Amazon recommends your books, creating a virtuous circle. Basically, you are getting FREE advertising from Amazon – and let’s face it, they don’t give much away for free. KU subscribers get regular email recommendations and, of course, the books appear in the “recommended for you” listings specifically targeted at them. Yes, KU subscribers get their own recommendations listings because not all ebooks are enrolled in Kindle Select, so the standard "recommended for you" listings aren't suitable for KU readers because not all the recommendations will be available to them - and yours will be one of them if it isn't enrolled in Kindle Select. There are reasons why Amazon pushes KU subscribers towards the more popular books, which we won’t go into here. But one thing is for sure – if you aren’t enrolled in Kindle Select, you can’t benefit.  “But”, I hear you say, “To use KU the reader has to have a Kindle.”
“To start with,” we reply. “Kindle is the most popular ereader in the world by a wide margin. But Amazon has thought of that, and the Kindle app allows readers to download books on any phone or tablet, turning them into Kindles as well. It’s been available for years!” Now, we aren’t being paid by Amazon to promote Kindle Select. We are just telling you what we have found and what we have calculated to be the better choice of sales channels for us based on real life data. We do “go wide” with some titles, but they are the ones we have found aren’t downloaded very often through KU, so there is no reason to keep those titles exclusive to Amazon. We don’t know why those books don’t appeal to KU subscribers. We do know that some genres do better on KU than others and that may be one of the reasons. Perhaps we need to do some research into that. But, until then, we lose nothing by going wide with those books. But for all the rest, we enrol our books in Kindle Select so that we can maximise the exposure we get for our authors, which also maximises the income that both we and our authors earn. For us, being enrolled in Kindle Select is a “no brainer”. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.
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Note: The views expressed in this book review are those of the review's author, not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing. No payments or inducements were received for this review and the author purchased the book at his own expense.   In my book reviews I only award 5 stars to books that have had some profound effect on me, so you can tell immediately that “Operation Ark” by Pen Farthing (full name Paul Pen Farthing) had that sort of effect and not always in a good way. Well, It did have some uplifting parts and I’ll get to them later, but mainly I read this book with horror that a lack of foresight and planning could lead to such tragedy. Because this is the story of real events that took place almost exactly three years ago . It is not the job of this review to editorialise about who might be to blame for what happened. However, should you choose to read this book, I am confident that you will be drawn to the same conclusions as me. Not only were these events disastrous for the country of Afghanistan, but they also ruined the life of a man who was trying his hardest to make something good come out of the chaos he was witnessing around him. The story starts in 2020 when President Trump signed a treaty with the Taliban for the final withdrawal of American troops from that country. He did so without consulting either the existing Afghan government or his allies in the west. In 2021 his successor, President Biden, implemented that treaty and ordered the withdrawal of American troops. Only he didn’t tell anyone on what date that would happen. "but hundreds of people died trying to flee the country" Unprepared for events, Afghanistan descended into chaos. What happened is a matter of public record, but hundreds of people died trying to flee the country and more have died since because they were denied the opportunity to get out before the Taliban completed their takeover of Afghanistan. I am referring to the Afghans who had worked with the western allies and therefore would be targeted by the new regime. Twelve American marines also died while trying to police the crowds at Kabul airport, when a suicide bomber set off his device. Against this background a former Royal Marine turned charity worker decided that the animals he and his team had rescued would not fare well under the new regime and he must do whatever he could to get them out of the country. His staff of dedicated veterinarians and animal welfare workers had close ties to the western allies and so they were considered to be vulnerable and everything possible had to be done to help them leave the country as well This should have been a simple matter. 1. Apply for permission for the Afghan charity workers to enter a safe country, namely the United Kingdom, demonstrating why they were at risk. 2. Apply for import licences to the UK for the animals, providing medical certificates to prove they didn’t represent a health risk. 3. Arrange, at the charity’s expense, for a charter flight to land at Kabul airport to transport both the animals and the people. 4. Leave the country. "That Pen Farthing succeeded at all must be regarded as something of a miracle." Over the next couple of hundred pages the story of what really happened is told by the author. That simple four step process took almost 2 months to organise against a backdrop of chaotic local conditions and the inept British government and public servants. The charity’s chartered aircraft was one of the last to leave the country. That Pen Farthing succeeded at all must be regarded as something of a miracle. In the end, while he was able to get the animals out by air, the charity’s staff had to undertake a lengthy and dangerous cross country journey to leave the country through the border with Pakistan, which led to several more weeks of suffering for them. "a lie will run around the world while the truth is still tying its boot laces." But the worst, perhaps, was about to come, at least for Pen Farthing. The British government needed a distraction from their own incompetence and Pen Farthing was to provide that. His name was dragged through the mud in the British and international media through a series of carefully managed leaks to the press, accusing him of putting animals before people, endangering the lives of both Afghans and British soldiers. The accusations were false but as the old saying goes, a lie will run around the world while the truth is still tying its boot laces. Pen Farthing’s reputation has still not recovered. And that is before you take into account the cost to his personal life. I have fact checked as much of this book as possible to ensure that what Pen Farthing has said stands up under scrutiny. It does. After reading this book I wonder if the country I live in is the country I thought it was. I wasn’t present in Afghanistan during the events described, but the emotions this book raised in me make me feel as though I might have been. It certainly made me very angry at times. So, what was the uplifting part of the book referred to at the start of this review? It is the way that Pen Farthing and his team, some operating from distant locations around the world, managed to save the lives of so many animals and people. Whether you like animals or not doesn’t matter, because there are human stories to celebrate as well. This book should be a set text for leadership and teamwork training, but sadly Pen Farthing’s undeservedly damaged reputation will prevent it ever becoming that. I cannot recommend Pen Farthing’s book “Operation Ark” highly enough. To find out more about it, click here. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  When it comes to book marketing, it is never possible to do too much - but it is very easy to do too little. I was reminded of this on a couple of occasions recently, for different reasons. The first was when I attended a local writers’ group for the first time. I had wanted to join them for some time, but the meeting day always clashed with something else I do on the same evening. However, that week my normal activity was cancelled, so I went along. It was the sort of thing I had expected, with the writers reading out bits of their work and being given constructive feedback. All very pleasant and friendly. It was at the end of the evening when I found that nobody there was really thinking about basic marketing. I was asked for my contact details, so that I could be added to the email group. Everyone seemed surprised when I produced a business card with the Selfishgenie Publishing contact details printed on it. I expected to be handed cards in return but wasn’t. None of the dozen or so people present had that most basic marketing tool to hand. Not even the organiser! I commented on it and the attendees seemed bemused by the possibility that anyone outside the group would want to make contact.  “What do you do when people ask about your books?” I asked. “How will they know what name to search for on Amazon or wherever?” I could see from the puzzled faces that they didn’t get it. “Well, I tell them my name and my book title, and they remember, I suppose.” Someone replied. I wanted to say “But 30 seconds after you part, they will have forgotten both. But if they find your business card in their pocket, or purse, they will be reminded of you and may look you up then.” But I didn’t say that. I let the matter drop. I just hope that the expression on my face said enough to make the people think about investing a few pounds in the purchase of some business cards for future use. I have found that in the past many people have introduced themselves as “I’m a nurse/plumber/whatever” first and author or writer only as an afterthought.  But if you want to be taken seriously as an author you must first take yourself seriously. You are an author first and whatever else you do second. You are only doing that to pay the bills until you can give up being a plumber/nurse/whatever and write full time. And that means having a business card that says “author”, with the relevant contact details on it so that people remember who you are and look up you and your books, OK, not everybody will do that. Hand out 50 business cards and maybe only 4 or 5 of the recipients will actually look you and your books up. But that is 4 or 5 that wouldn’t have looked you up if they have forgotten your name 30 seconds after you have parted.  The second incident (two actually) was almost as bad, but this time the offender wasn’t standing in front of me at the time. I had just finished reading a book by an author I hadn’t read before. It was by an Indie author, as most of my reading is these days as I try to support Indie authors as much as possible and the best way to do that is to buy their books. The book was pretty good, and I was sorry it had finished. I knew the book was part of a series and I was keen to buy the next title. I was even more keen after I had read the preview chapter the author had inserted at the back of the book.  But when I went to click on the link to take me straight to the book’s page on Amazon …. it wasn’t there. Another simple marketing tool overlooked. The best time to sell one of your books to a reader is when they have just finished reading one of your books. There are a lot of psychological factors at work at that moment and it is important that the author makes them work in their favour. When a reader finishes a book that they have enjoyed they feel a sense of loss. It isn’t as severe as grief, but it is from the same source. They want to ease that feeling of loss and you, the author, can make that happen. It’s why we put sample chapters of our other books after the end of the story.  Strike while the iron is hot – get the reader when they are wanting more. But if you don’t include a link to where they can buy the next book, they’ll just say “I’ll look it up tomorrow.” The problem is that by tomorrow the feeling of loss has gone and they may already have started to read the next book in their TBR list, whether it is a paperback or an ebook. The moment has passed, and the sale may have been lost forever. Obviously, you can’t put a link in a paperback (but you can include the URL as ordinary text), but there is no excuse for not putting one in the ebook version. OK, if the next book hasn’t yet been published and isn’t even on pre-order, then you can’t put a link in. But you can go back and put the link in the moment the book does go on pre-order or is published. If you don’t write series, that’s OK. You just insert the link for the next book you published. Finally, there was the second sin that the same author committed.  There was no request for a review. We all know how important reviews are for authors when it comes to selling books. Some people always post them, some people never post them, but some people will post them if you give them a nudge in the right direction. Just a simple request along the lines of “Reviews are important to authors, so if you have enjoyed this book please post a review wherever you normally review the books you read”. You can even post a link to the sales page on Amazon (if that’s where you sell your books) just to be helpful. That’s all it takes.  We use a publication and marketing checklist when we prepare books for launch, just to make sure that we don’t overlook such simple things. We would recommend that you develop your own checklist so that you don’t forget the same little things.
My takeaways from this blog are: 1. Everybody you meet is a potential new reader of your book(s). 2. Everybody you meet needs a way of remembering who you are, what your book is called and how to find out about your books, and 3. If someone has read your book, that is the time to persuade them to review it and to buy another of your books, so make it easy for them. And if you have forgotten, it isn’t too late to do it now. You may have lost sales in the past but that is no excuse to lose more in the future. As a well-known supermarket used to say in its adverts “Every little helps”. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  We blogged about Publisher Rocket a couple of years ago, but Dave Chesson, the man behind the product, has just released a brand new version and it is even more powerful for Indie authors than ever before. For that reason, we are bringing you this update. Unfortunately, along with its new features has also gone a price hike. It now costs $199 (special offer price, correct at time of writing) for a lifetime subscription (that’s about £155 for us Brits). Naturally, you have to sell more books to repay that investment. What must be borne in mind, however, is that the tools Publisher Rocket provides actually help you to sell your books, whether you advertise or not.  The key thing about publisher rocket is its ability to provide you with genre, competitor and keyword information that makes sure that your book not only appears in searches on Amazon, but it appears higher up the results list, so that it is more likely to be seen. It also makes advertising on Amazon a whole lot easier by providing you with keywords appropriate for your book, so your ads are seen by the right people – people who read books like the ones you write. It is able to do this because it makes use of Amazon’s search history data. That data is gold dust when it comes to both publishing and advertising books and we, as Indie authors and publishers, have no way to access it by ourselves.  Amazon has become very concerned about what is known as “customer experience”. Basically, how easy shoppers find it to use Amazon. Part of that experience is the customer’s reactions to seeing irrelevant products in search results. Seeing a dark fantasy novel appearing in a search for high fantasy is probably not something that most shoppers would worry about. But seeing a Regency romance novel appear in a search for high fantasy is likely to irritate customers. If it happens a lot, it will irritate them a lot. And that is why Amazon have introduced a major change into their advertising process. The relevance of keywords has never been more important. Having irrelevant keywords in your ads can cost you more money and they may result in you selling fewer books. This is the exact opposite of what many Amazon Ad gurus used to advise, which was basically to load up your ad with as many keywords as possible, even if they were only remotely connected to the genre of your book.  I’ll run through this briefly, but it is important. When you set up a “sponsored product” ad with Amazon, using your own list of keywords, Amazon now scans your book’s meta data* and gives the keywords a “relevancy score”. The better that score, the higher up the pecking order your ads will be placed when it comes to the bidding process that decides which ads are shown to the customer in response to a search.. When the bidding process is carried out, the higher the relevancy score, the more likely it is that your ad will be the one chosen. If Ad A and Ad B both have a maximum bid of 50c set, then the ad with the higher relevancy score will be the one that is shown to the customer. This helps Amazon to prevent irrelevant ads being shown to the customer, which annoys them. What this could mean is that ads with lower relevancy scores have to spend more money to win the bidding process. Depending on their maximum bid setting they may never be seen at all. And an ad that isn’t seen can’t sell your book.  As publishers we use Publisher Rocket a lot to help us find the right category listings for the books we publish, to find the right 7 keywords to put into the book’s meta data and to find the right keywords to use in our Amazon Ads. To indicate how useful this tool is, we’ll tell you what happened the first time we used one of the new features. Like a lot of authors, we have always struggled to find the right 7 keywords to put into the meta data for the books we sell. This is why we have found Publisher Rocket so useful, because it helps to take the hard work out of finding keywords. One of the new features allows us to do a “reverse search” to find books like our own, and then find the keywords that are helping those books to sell, so that we can use them too.  So, we pasted the ASIN for our book into the box in Publisher Rocket, then pasted in the 7 keywords that we had used in the meta data for the book when it was last uploaded. The app then provided us with a list of books that Publisher Rocket, using Amazon’s search data, thinks are similar to ours. We were very, very surprised to find that all the books that were provided for comparison were non-fiction. The reason that we were so surprised is because our book is fiction. Now, things aren’t as bad as they might seem, because the book has actually been selling as a result of the searches that it showed up in. But it could obviously have been doing better if it had shown up in searches for fiction rather than non-fiction. The next bit of the process was a bit more time consuming, but necessary.  To find comparable fiction books we had to go onto Amazon (using incognito browsing) and do searches of our own to find our direct competitors. Once we had found the right sort of book, we pasted its ASIN into Publisher Rocket so that it could do its magic. We needed to provide 3 ASINs from books by different authors, to give Publisher Rocket enough data to work with. We then got back a lengthy list of search terms that had been used to find the three books we had identified. After that it was just a case of picking the seven most relevant terms for our book and entering them into the meta data and re-publishing it. So, if those same search terms are now used again by readers, our book will show up alongside those competitor books. But we didn’t stop there.  We run Amazon Ads for the same book and none of those keywords were included in the list of keywords for the ads. But now we were no longer limited to just seven selections, we could use more, which we did. So, in the space of about 20 minutes we were able to make both our meta data and our Amazon Ads more relevant and therefore more likely to be seen by the right readers - the readers that will actually buy the book. The most noticeable thing to be seen was that almost immediately we started to get more clicks on our ads. Quite clearly our book was now more relevant to the searches readers were doing. But more importantly, because the book was more relevant to the readers, more clicks were being converted to sales. Obviously, we can’t guarantee that you will experience similar results, but when marketing a book every little thing you do makes a difference and the most important thing to do when you launch a new book is to make sure that it is in the right categories and has the right meta data. If nothing else, Publisher Rocket will put you on the right path to success.  While we’re at it, we’ve discovered a way of getting 14 keywords into your meta data and it’s so simple we feel a bit stupid for not spotting it before. Most people set up their ebook before their paperback because it is less complicated and because an ebook can go on pre-order. The meta data for the ebook is then copied across to the paperback version’s meta data automatically when it is set up. Which means the same 7 keywords are copied across. But those keywords can be changed! Which means that you can use Publisher Rocket’s capabilities to use 7 different keywords for the paperback. Double the number of relevant keywords means double the chances of your books showing up in appropriate search results. The key messages for this blog are therefore: 1. The relevancy of the keywords in your meta data has never before been so important, 2. If you use Amazon ads, your ads may be more expensive and might not even be seen if your keywords aren’t relevant. 3. Finding more relevant keywords for your books is now much easier using the latest version of Publisher Rocket. To find out more about Publisher Rocket, click here On the website you can also gain access to a free course on using Amazon Advertising more effectively. You don’t have to buy Publisher Rocket, but you do have to subscribe (free) to the website.  And here’s a one time special offer for you as readers of this blog.
If you don’t have Publisher Rocket, but would like to check the relevancy of you book’s keywords, we’ll run a free check for you. Just sign up for our newsletter (button below), then email us at enquires@selfishgenie.com to claim your free relevancy check. You’ll get an email back from us asking you to provide some basic information about your book, so please check your spam folder to make sure you don’t miss it. You’ll also get the free ebook that we always give to new subscribers. * For those of you not sure what we mean by meta data, it is all the information you provide on the first page of KDP when you start to upload your book: Title, subtitle, blurb, categories and, of course, 7 keywords/phrases. FYI, a “keyword” can be up to 50 characters long.  There are so many new fads and trends in book marketing that we don’t always try them out when we come across them. We take a look at them, ask ourselves if they are really going to sell us more books and then decide if we are going to invest time on them or leave them until we have nothing more important to do. That was what happened when we received the email about the introduction of A+ content to Amazon sales pages way back in 2016 (was it really 8 years ago?). But we saw a video recently that made us go back and explore A+ content a little bit more to see what it might do for us.  Now, I’m not going to pretend that A+ content is going to propel your book sales into the stratosphere. But it may make a contribution towards moving some readers a little closer to buying your books. Its main advantages are that it is relatively quick and easy to use and, more importantly, it is free to use. First of all, what is A+ content? It is additional images and text that you can put onto the sales page of your book to either catch the reader’s eye or to provide additional information about the book. Why should you use it? It provides an opportunity to customise your sales page with additional images which can be used to fire up the reader’s imagination. Something got the reader to click through to the sales page, now you can present something even more exciting for them to look at. The images we have used below are for our Magi Box Set.    How do you add A+ content on KDP? On your KDP bookshelf for the book, go to the actions button on the right hand side and click on the 3 dots (…) to get the drop down menu, then select “promote and advertise”. On the promotions page you will find the A+ content section lower down the page, beneath the advertising and Kindle countdown deals sections. Select the marketplace where you want the content to be displayed (for us that’s usually Amazon.co.uk) and then click on “Manage A+ Content” Amazon offers a lot of different layout options for the content, from product comparison displays or technical specifications to different layouts for images and text options. The most popular for books seems to be the type we have displayed above.  We use Bookbrush to create a lot of our images and they have a template that will produce the three sections from a single image. However, if you use other graphics packages they may also have suitable templates. If not, you may have to resort to cropping your images into separate portions. A+ content is uploaded into “modules” and the module we use is the ones titled “Standard Image & Dark Text Overlay”. Each of the 3 sections of the image is uploaded separately. This module offers the opportunity to include a headline and other text below the segment but, as you can see, we have incorporated our text into the images, so we just left the text boxes blank. You can use them or not. It’s entirely up to you.  After that it is just a matter of assigning your content to the right book by pasting the ASIN into the relevant place, and then submitting the content for approval. Amazon suggests approval can take up to 7 days, but we have found that the A+ content is usually displayed on the sales page within 24 hours. Creating the images took us 10 minutes (using an existing image as our starting point) and creating the A+ content on KDP took us another 5 minutes, so this really is a quick and easy way of improving your sales page.  Aside: We used AI to create the image we have shown, and we make no apologies for that. It is the one place where we think AI can be of help to an author, by allowing them to create exciting imagery. Graphic designers may disagree with us, but we have to stick to tight budgets and AI allows us to do that.. As you apply the content to the sales page for a single market, it means you can use different content for different markets. For example, for Amazon.com you might want to use American spellings. For markets where English isn’t spoken, you can use images that use the appropriate language for the country – even if your book is only available in English. You can also use different images for different markets if you think that might affect sales. Images of scantily clad women or women with uncovered hair, for example, may not go down too well in some parts of the world. Amazon review quotes are great when included with A+ content, as shown in the image below.  Firstly, the reader only has to scroll down the page a little bit to find the review from which the quote was taken. That makes the quote more trustworthy. Secondly, readers read what other readers recommend and you can't get better than a 5 star recommendation  Did using A+ content make a difference to sales?
That’s hard to say. For the books where we added A+ content, we were already running advertising campaigns, so we don’t know what effect having the additional content had on sales. If the reader was responding to an ad, the A+ content may have helped to make the sale, or it may have made no difference. As we can’t get inside the mind of the readers we’ll never know. What we can say was that we started to use A+ content in June 2024 and we had our best sales ever that month. We aren’t going to try to claim a cause-effect relationship, but at the same time we don’t believe in coincidences. Maybe we got one extra sale thanks to A+ content, or maybe we got 100. Or maybe we didn’t get any additional sales and it was all down to the advertising campaigns we were running at the time. However, Amazon claims that having A+ content on a sales page can add between 3% and 10% to average sales volumes. As they are providing this facility for free, they must be making money from the use of A+ content from the extra sales or they wouldn’t be so generous. What we can say is that our A+ content added visual impact to our Amazon sales pages, and we think that is a good thing. We certainly think it is good enough to invest a few more blocks of 15 minutes’ worth of effort into the sales pages of our other books. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  We launched a new book, “Operation Chariot”, at the beginning of June this year. Given the popularity of our “Carter’s Commandos” series of books, we expected this new title to fly off the shelf, as fans of the earlier series came back to read this new offering. We were disappointed, The new book did sell, but not in the volumes we had expected. This puzzled us because we had put a lot of time and effort into marketing the book in advance of its launch. We were sure that the thousands of readers who had enjoyed Carter’s Commandos would be thrilled by this new book. So why wasn’t it selling as well as the Carter’s Commandos series, which is continuing to do well?  We checked the data from our marketing campaign and found that we were getting plenty of link clicks to the sales page. But the clicks weren’t converting to sales. Well, not as many sales as the number of clicks suggested we should be getting. If you are familiar with our previous blogs on marketing, you will know that we have always said that if you are getting link clicks but not getting sales, it means that there is something wrong with your book’s sales page. It might be your cover, it might be your blurb, it might be the reviews, or it might be the “free sample” as Amazon now call their “look inside” feature.  We analysed each of those four things in turn to see what might be putting readers off. We quickly ruled out a problem with the cover. The cover image has been used in all our marketing, so people have seen it already and clicked on the link. That is “social proof” (as it is known) that readers aren’t being put off by the cover, so seeing it again on the sales page is hardly going to put them off buying. This applies to the blurb too. The blurb is the primary text we use in our advertising, so if people have seen the cover image, read the blurb and then clicked the link, it means that the two things have encouraged the link click, not discouraged it. Reviews are a tricky one. This is a new book. It hadn’t been read before, so it doesn’t have any reviews. We’ll have to wait for the jury to return on that but at the time of writing this blog the book has garnered 5 "ratings", all of which are 4 or 5 star. So that just left the free sample.  We clicked on it and saw immediately what the problem was. The free sample opened up on the book’s “foreword”. This was a few paragraphs intended to introduce the reader to the new series, why it had been written and the differences in writing style that might be seen by readers of the “Carter’s Commandos” series. What it didn’t do, however, was get the reader engaged with the story. To get to that the reader had to scroll through the whole thing before they got to the proper opening of the book. Why was the free sample opening on the foreword and not on the first chapter? Because KDP and Amazon’s formatting engine interpreted the foreword as a chapter. So as far as Amazon was concerned, it was displaying the start of the story. Readers, however, could see that it wasn’t the start of the story and some of them were deciding not to scroll through to find the actual start. They just went back to scrolling through whatever platform they had been on before they clicked the link.  We had lost a potential sale. Worse than that, we had paid for a link click before we lost the sale! So, what could we do about that? The answer was simple, if a little unconventional. We moved the foreword from the start of the book to after the end. We even added a short explanation to it, to say why it was at the end and not the beginning. This only affects the Kindle version, of course. The paperback version still has the foreword at the beginning where it should be. But by the time the reader has discovered that, the book is in their hands, and they can flick past it if they don’t want to read it. But the free sample is always taken from the ebook version, so paperback readers will also be taken straight into the story when they read that.  Did it change anything?
Yes it did. The sales graph for the book, which had been consistent but low, suddenly took a step upwards. More copies were sold each day from that point onwards. And it cost us nothing but a little bit of time and effort to find the reasons for the disappointingly low sales and to make the changes to the manuscript. So, if your sales aren’t doing as well as the link clicks from your marketing say they should be doing, why not take a look at the book’s free sample to see if the reader is being excited by what they see on the first page, or being bored by the non-essentials that are put into the opening pages of books. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  It is a worrying trend being seen on social media, for people to ask questions about how motivation to write is achieved, or how people make time for writing. Part of the reason it is worrying is that it is obvious that the person asking the question hasn’t done the slightest bit of research into what being a writer actually involves. They seem to think that you just sit down, start to write and a short while later you have a finished book to sell. Which means they are really looking for a quick way to make a buck and think that writing may be that way. Poor deluded fools. However, it is the questions around motivation that really puzzle me. The questioner seems to think that motivation comes from without and not from within.  Now, we know that part of the job of a leader is to motivate their team. Having attended (and tutored) numerous leadership courses in my time, I’m quite familiar with the concepts of leadership in terms of motivation within a workplace. For writers, however, there is no leader to provide motivation. It appears to me that the concept of people motivating themselves to do things is an idea that is dying out. Not completely, of course. Talk to any sports star and you will find self-motivation very high on their list of personal qualities. But in the wider world, where people work for vast corporations, it seems to be expected that motivation is something that will be provided by the company, just like they provide toilet facilities. But that is where the world of the Indie author is so different from so many other professions.  There are many types of writer and, for some of them, if they don’t write they don’t get paid. That is probably motivation enough. Some may also lose their jobs if they don’t produce high enough quality writing. Again, it’s a strong motivation to perform well. But for the Indie author, if they don’t write then nothing happens. They don’t get paid, but they weren’t getting paid anyway, at least, not for writing. They can’t be sacked because no one employs them as an author. But the one sure sign that you are an author is that you can’t NOT write. You have to tell the story. You don’t need any other motivation. A real author would never ask on social media “I write a couple of hundred words, then I run out of motivation. How do you keep going?” If you have ever said that, or thought that, then you are not an author. At best you are a wannabe who wants the “glory” of being an author but doesn’t want to actually do any writing.  The same applies to the question of time management, which is really a sub-set of motivation. A real writer always finds time to write, be it formally at a desk, or on the fly while waiting for a bus. They could plan their time better, so they could get more writing done, but they find the time anyway. But the most fundamental thing about time management for Indie authors is being prepared to sacrifice something else in order to make time for writing. Let me use an analogy. If someone wants to be a footballer, their coach will expect them to put in a number of hours each week at practice, honing and developing their skills. If they aren’t prepared to put in the time, their coach will be very blunt with them and tell them they’ll never make it as a footballer because they aren’t prepared to put in the time.  If the footballer says they don’t have time to attend practice, their coach will tell they have to make time, otherwise they are out of the team. And any real footballer would understand that. If you want to make it big, you have to be prepared to focus your whole life around what you want to do. But writers don’t have coaches, in that sense. No one is standing over them telling them they have to practice their writing for the next two hours or they’re going to be dropped from the writing team. But if they are really a writer, they don’t need to be told that anyway, because there is nothing they would rather be doing than writing. So, if you can’t think of a single thing that you would be prepared to drop from your life so that you have more time to write, then you probably aren’t a writer. And yes, that may mean not seeing friends so often, or not watching so much TV or not going to the movies. It may even mean not playing football. But a real writer won’t notice the sacrifice they are making because what they really want to do is write.  So, to summarise. If you have to ask “How do you make time for writing?” you may not be a writer. If you have to ask “How do you maintain your motivation for writing?” you almost certainly aren’t really a writer. But, if you are sat at a bus stop hoping that the bus will be delayed for a few more minutes so you can complete the paragraph you are working on, then you may be a writer, because you are both motivated and you have made time for your writing. However, for those of you that may still be having doubts, I’ve devised this short Q & A to help you decide.  Q1. You are working on a tricky bit of dialogue for your book and your baby starts crying. Do you
a. Stop what you are doing and go and see to the baby, or b. Go to the coffee shop so you can work undisturbed? Q2. You have had a long hard day at work, when you get home do you a. Open a bottle of wine/beer/whisky, and sit down in front of the TV while you drink a glass, or b. Sit down and start working on your book? Q3. Your favourite music act is appearing in town, and you have been offered tickets to their show. Do you a. Take the tickets and go to see the show, or b. Turn down the tickets because you want to get started on the next chapter of your book? Q4. Your grandmother’s funeral has been scheduled for the only day that week when you can devote some time to your writing. Do you a. Go to the funeral, or b. Go to the funeral but take your laptop and hope you can sit at the back and do some writing at the same time? Q5. Your partner has won a holiday for 2 at your dream destination, but the dates are for the same week that you were going to attend a writers’ retreat. Do you a. Go on holiday with your partner, or b. Go on the writers’ retreat? ANSWERS 5 b’s. There is no point in fighting it, you are a writer. 4 b’s. You are probably a writer, but you are easily distracted. 3 b’s or less. Sorry, you’re just a wannabe writer. Note: The above questions and answers are not to be taken too seriously, but if you found yourself seriously considering answering b to all the questions, then you really are a writer. We certainly don’t advocate leaving your baby to cry while you go to the coffee shop to write. No, really, that is not a good thing to do. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Writer’s groups on social media are very popular, and quite rightly so. Writing is, by its nature, a solitary life so it is nice to know that you aren’t alone. A real life writer’s group is better, but if you don’t have regular access to one of those, social media provides a useful alternative. People use writer’s groups to seek advice on a wide range of topics: writing techniques, gaining feedback on their work and, the reason behind this blog, they seek advice on book marketing.  The problem with seeking advice on marketing on social media is that it as an extremely wide ranging subject and few writers have the knowledge and experience to more than scratch the surface. That means that the person seeking advice tries out a few approaches, many of them the same ones as everyone else is using, and some of the most basic techniques are by-passed because the people using social media don’t know enough about the subject.  As with any subject, you have to understand the basics if you want to understand how to apply the techniques. To use a metaphor, if you don’t know how the internal combustion engine works, you will never get as far as diagnosing a blocked carburettor as being the reason why your car won’t start. The same applies to book marketing. If you don’t understand the basics, you’ll never understand why all the things you are doing to promote your books aren’t working or, at least, not working as well as they might. As an example, some authors never get as far as understanding that using social media as a marketing channel isn't about plugging your book all the time. It's about building relationships with readers so that they want to know about your books.  As professional book marketers (that’s what publisher are, really) we contribute to those social media groups when we think we can offer good advice and we stay quiet if we aren’t so sure. One of the bits of advice we offer on a regular basis is to study marketing properly. Marketing of any product needs a wide range of skills and knowledge. Within marketing itself the professionals tend to specialise in certain areas and hardly scratch the surface in others. If they need a specialist in an area they aren’t so well versed in, they seek one out. So, for amateurs, it is even harder to know where to concentrate their efforts.  Marketing is a subject that continues to evolve. The “marketing mix” as it is known (aka the 5Ps, 6 Ps, 7Ps or even more Ps depending on who you listen to), first started to be discussed in the 1940s, long before Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea for the internet, so marketing has had to adjust to cope with new technology while at the same time having to continue to deal with physical marketplaces such as bookshops. Take the P for People heading. This used to mean the people who sold the product – their recruitment, training, personalities, product knowledge and sales skills. But so much of our modern marketplace is now on-line, where people play almost no part in the sales. We have to hope that the website designers know what they are doing as they are now the people who influence the direct sales. The real salesperson is now the author or publisher, as they decide what words and images to use on the product page. Never before has cover design, for example, been so important in selling a book (that's covered by another of the Ps: Product). The P for People topic is now more about who reads the books – the demographics of particular genres, or “who reads what”.  If you are putting a book on the shelves of bookshops then you don’t have to worry about that so much. Books sellers have their stores laid out in subject order and people of the appropriate age, gender and interests know where to find the books they like. But if you are trying to promote a book on social media you have to know where on social media your target audience is likely to hang out. That’s the opposite of the bookshop. Which is why asking for marketing advice on social media isn’t really going to help an Indie author. Let’s face it, if you are asking a question on Facebook and it is being answered on Facebook, then the chances are that the person answering the question probably knows quite a lot about Facebook, but probably doesn’t know much about how to market on TikTok or Instagram. For the modern marketplace, the Indie author has to be almost as knowledgeable about marketing as his counterpart in one of the Big 5 publishing houses. And to become that knowledgeable requires proper study, not asking a few random questions on social media.  I’m not talking about a full 3 year course of study at a university (though it would be great if you can afford the time and money to do it), but I am talking about study of some sort (don’t worry, I’m not going to try to sell you a marketing course, because we don’t sell one). One of the owners of Selfishgenie Publishing has a Masters Degree in business management. He knows quite a bit about marketing. But when he decided to set up the company he didn’t realise how much more he was going to have to learn. In the few years that elapsed between him picking up his MBA certificate and setting up the business, the whole world of marketing had moved on. The internet was now King (or Queen if you prefer, or even President). What worked for business in the early years of the new millennium was no longer working. That meant he had a lot of catching up to do, so he did what any sensible person would do and went back to school. Not full time residential school, but part time online learning. And if you need to learn about marketing, that is what you have to do too.  Some people are reluctant to go back to school, however. We can’t understand why. You are not a failure just because you don’t know something. In fact, it is a mark of maturity to be able to admit that you don’t know some things, especially if they're in an area that you have never studied. Besides, only you know that you are studying, unless you choose to tell the world. Yes, it can cost money – but it doesn’t have to. There are organisations that provide free training and at the end of this blog we will provide a link to one of them. And you can sign up from anywhere in the world. OK, you can ask questions on social media and the answers may sell you a few books, but they will never sell you as many books as a fully developed marketing strategy, backed up by a plan and the knowledge and resources to deliver it.  That can only come from in depth knowledge of the subject.
So, if you want to climb the ladder of success to become a bestselling author, we advise going back to school. For information on free online training courses in marketing, click here. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Disclaimer: All views expressed in this review are the opinion of the reviewer and not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing.   Dancing In the Ring, by Susan E Sage, is something of an oddity for me. It is part biography, part drama and part love story. The book tells the story of Robert (Bob) Sage and the woman he marries, Catherine (Kate) McIntosh. If you notice a similarity between the name of the author and the name of one of the characters, it is because Bob Sage was her great uncle, who she never met. This is the biographical part of the story, as the author tells what she knows of the life of her great uncle and his wife, pieced together from family stories and documentary evidence. Kate is less well documented, so much of her story is a dramatization. It means that a lot of the scenes in the book are imagined rather than real, and that tends to undermine the biographical basis for the book. On the other hand, the author can’t change what is known about the two characters, which undermines the drama and love story elements. Where a writer of romance or drama might put the characters on a different path, Susan E Sage is constrained by historical fact. Bob and Kate meet at law school where Kate is much the better student. However, the chauvinism of the age (the book is set in the 1920s and 30s) means that Kate can only ever dream of a lofty legal career, while the less academically able Bob is assured of an easier path. "the course of true love never did run smooth" To pay for his education Bob Sage enters the boxing ring, where he displays some talent. That, and the love of dancing of both characters, gives the book its title. Over the course of the first third of the book Bob and Kate’s romance is played out sensitively and with some well observed romantic highlights. It is after their marriage that the real drama starts. I can’t say too much because of the risk of spoiling the story for readers but, as Shakespeare said, the course of true love never did run smooth. The book is set in its real life location of Detroit, Michigan, against the background of first Prohibition and then the Depression. Both present problems for the lovers, who enjoy nothing more than a night out dancing and drinking. "The book is well observed and well written, and the author has a real feel for the period." The Depression then impacts on Kate’s career in particular. In the 21st century she could expect a glittering legal career, but a hundred years ago she was far more limited, and she spends a lot of her working life as a paralegal (as we would call it today) and doing pro-bono legal work for those who are unable to pay for legal advice. The book is well observed and well written, and the author has a real feel for the period. Having enjoyed reading the book overall, I have elected only to award four stars and there are reasons for that. The story is told in a very “matter of fact” style, which means that a lot of emotion is stifled, especially in the case of Kate’s feelings. I’ll give just one example. "Kate is clearly suffering from mental health issues" Kate’s father, Mickey, was physically abusive towards her mother, which Kate often observed and her distress at this is noted. Bob Sage does, sometimes, physically assault Kate and given her feelings about her mother’s abuse, you would expect highly emotional responses from her. However, that is not felt. The emotions of fear, distress, humiliation, anger and others just aren’t visible to the reader. Or to this reader anyway. Later in the book, when Kate is clearly suffering from mental health issues, no attempt is made to analyse the possible causes of those. At this distance after the events it would not be possible to make an accurate diagnosis, but some introspection and reflection on the part of Kate might help the reader to identify with her better and to understand why she is the way she is. Both characters come across as quite self-centred at times. As a young couple in love you might expect them to focus a lot of their time and emotional energy on making each other happy, but such behaviour is noticeably lacking in places. Bob, in particular, displays symptoms of narcissism, putting his own ego before that of everyone else, except perhaps his mother. Perhaps that was what they were really like, and the author is painting an accurate picture, but it means that the two central figures in the story aren’t always likeable, so the love story part of the book is less than successful. However, even after saying all that I still enjoyed the book and did become quite engrossed in Bob and Kate’s life. I recommend “Dancing In The Ring” by Susan E Sage to readers who want to understand life in the early part of the 20th century a little better, with a bit of romance and drama thrown in. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are those of our guest blogger, author Chris Graham, and not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing. Making a Name for Yourself… from a novelist’s point of view  Names, where do we get them from? They usually come from our families, both the surnames we get automatically, and the forenames that can be reliant on a number of factors. Sometimes a kid gets lucky, and is given a nice normal everyday name, often from the annals of his or her family’s history. “Oh look… she’s got old uncle Samuel’s eyes. Let’s call her Samantha.” Of course this can backfire. We can all think of a celebrity cook whose father was a famous politician. Doubling the ‘l’ and bunging an ‘a’ on the end of her dad’s name could have gone so badly wrong, but our favourite middle aged man’s fantasy kitchen goddess seems to have done OK out of it (Yes, I do know that ‘Nigella’ is also the name of a herb - case of nominative determination perhaps?).  The Emperor Justinian - who gave his name to all the little Justins in the world. Sometimes it’s the time of the kid’s birth that lumbers them with a name. How many little girls born in the eighties answer to ‘Kylie’, or from more recent years, ‘Beyonce’? I’m sure there are young Bieber fans pushing buggies carrying little ‘Justins’ around the supermarket aisles too, although Justin has been a forename for many centuries. There was a Roman Emperor called Justinian back in 527 AD. Of course, there’s those who simply want to be different, whether famous or not, just for the sake of being being different. Those who, without a thought about when their offspring goes to school and gets the mickey taken out of them, give their little ones names more suited to a pet, a dessert recipe, or an address in downtown New York.  ‘Fifi Trixibelle’ or ‘Strawberry Shortcake’ are not what a strapping thirteen year old lad wants to be known as. Even for a girl they’re a bit on the bizarre side. ‘Brooklyn’ doesn’t sound too bad, though like ‘Lourdes’, and ’Chelsea’, it sounds more at home on a girl. I worry that this is setting a trend. Are we going to see classrooms filled with young ‘Shepherds Bushes’ or ‘Neasdens’ in the future? Perhaps for a transatlantic equivalent they’d be ‘Yonkers’, “Bronxes’ or ‘Haight Ashburys’. But I’m not really talking about our own names, or our children’s names. I’m talking about the names we writers choose for our characters. Where do we get those from? Do they work? Can our readers identify with them? Can our readers even remember which one is which as they make their way through our novels? I was reminded of this when a former publisher asked me to look at a few pages of a submitted manuscript. There were a number of characters introduced within the first couple of pages, of which there were several with the same forename, and others who, because they were related, had the same surname.  Now I know that in the potluck world that we live our real lives in, this kind of thing isn’t uncommon. The crowd I hung around with (and still know most of) had a surfeit of ‘Ians’ at one point. Fortunately, as was the spirit of the time, they all acquired nicknames, and so became ‘Ahmed’, ‘Abdul’, ‘Fang’, ‘Screwy Lewie’, ‘Mr Magoo’ and ‘Ian Mac’. However, to help our readers, we need to have ‘real’ names for our characters that define them. During the narrative, and particularly as markers in dialogue, we may call a character by his forename - full or shortened - his surname, his nickname, his rank - as in ‘the Sergeant said’ - or some other descriptive title, such as ‘the older man’ or something similar. One of my police characters, Detective Chief Inspector Nick Wilson, is known as ‘Nick’, ‘Wilson’, ‘The Guvnor’, ‘Guv’, ‘the DCI’, ‘The Chief Inspector’, (or just plain ‘Inspector’) throughout periods of dialogue and narrative to avoid too much word repetition. Others have similar selections to identify them. So… How do we deal with this? How do we populate our novels with names which are individual?  Every writer needs to compile a list, and keep topping it up: a pool of names for their characters, but how do we come up with these characters’ names in the first place? Where do we find them? Do they grow on trees for us to just go out and pick? Well the answer to that is ‘almost’. In fact trees are as good a place as any to start, as are any other interests that you might have. Trees? Well there’s ‘Beech’ and ‘Birch’, ‘Sycamore’, ‘Redwood’, ‘Ash’, ‘Pine’, ‘Maple’, just for a start. All of them perfectly believable surnames, or they can be with suitable modification like ‘Ashwood’, ‘Oakley’, ‘Elmsleigh’, etc.  I’m into motorcycles, so I’ve gleaned names from that world like ‘James Villiers’ - most post war James motorcycles used Villiers engines - ‘Frances (Frankie) Barnett’ (though she prefers ‘B’ as a nickname) - my first bike was a Francis-Barnett, or ‘Fanny B’ as they were known. Another is ‘Lucas Bright’, and I’ve used ‘Plug Champion’, ‘Tillotson’, ’Douglas’, ‘Benelli’, ‘Blackburn’, ’Henderson’, and ‘Ancilotti’ with appropriate forenames. If these aren’t familiar words to you, Google them. It’ll be a fun game looking for the motorcycle connections. From an interest in pioneer aviation comes names like ‘Saulnier’, ‘Anson’, ‘Guynemer’, ‘Voisin’ and ‘Fonck’. Then there’s towns and counties, with ‘Georgia Didcot’, ‘Noel Caversham’, and ‘Adrian Kent’… more Googling games for you to play. A fellow author published by Selfishgenie litters his books with the names of well-known rugby players from both the present and the past. They say, ‘Write what you know’ ...  Turn your friends into characters Most productive of all, though, is that rich vein of people we know, or have met, that we can mine for suitable character names, though when putting these in my pool, I have a certain convention that I try to follow. I’ll almost always mix the names up, rarely using both forename and surname from the same person as a character’s name. Usually I’ll only use full matches in the case of people who were either long deceased acquaintances, family, or friends, of my late parents’ generation, or are just names I’ve heard. There’s no point in upsetting your mates by using their names in print, then describing 'them’ as someone they may not like to be, though there is one old friend who actually asked me to use his name and physical description as a character in a novel. It was on his bucket list. As he’s a cat lover, and tireless worker for local animal charities he, of course, became a corrupt vet in one of my novels. Sometimes it’s particularly satisfying to name a nasty piece of work as an old boss or other bad memory from your past, but there’s one thing to beware of. When you do choose a name for a really nasty villain, it’s a good idea to Google that name to make sure that he or she isn’t someone really famous, even if you’ve never heard of them, and particularly if your character falls within a similar field. It might not look too good if your mad wheelchair bound evil genius was called Stephen Hawking, would it? Remember history  A lot of names fall out of favour over time (You won’t find many Germans called Adolf born after 1945), so you can add a flavour of authenticity to your historical work by including period names. Archibald isn’t a name you hear much these days (If at all), but right up until the 1960s there were plenty of them about. One was even a ventriloquist’s dummy on a radio show (No, I kid you not). Similarly, Ernest, Stanley, Norman, and others all had their day in the Sun then fell out of favour. A friend of mine said she could tell the age of a woman by her name, with gemstones (Beryl, Pearl, Amethyst and others) all denoting pre-war births, alongside Mavis, Agnes, Agatha, Cecilia and a whole lot more. Flowers were also popular as names until the late 60s but now are hardly used at all (Though I do know a Primrose who is under 30 and there's also the singer Lily Allen). After World War II, many boys were given the name Winston in honour of Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, but you won’t find many with that name these days. Helpfully, there are lists of names popular in different decades available on websites. The “Gender Construction Kit” website provides popular names for decades between the 1950s and the 2000s, for example. And, of course, the national census provides lots of historical names for you to conjure with and you can access that in the UK through the Office of National Statistics website. Get it right… Do the research, then save for a rainy day  Even fictional character names have to be believable, so for foreign characters, or those from different ethnic backgrounds, it’s worthwhile to Google ‘common names’ for a nationality or culture for names, or to mix and match the names of well known people from that nation’s culture or history. But be aware that some cultures alter names to suit a gender, even surnames. For example, in Icelandic culture, a surname ending in ‘son’ may denote its bearer to be the son of the first part of the name… e.g. Erikson as ‘son of Erik’… However the female offspring of ‘Erik’ in Iceland won’t take her father’s surname, but instead will have the surname ‘Eriksdóttir’ (Erik’s daughter). Thanks to a change in Icelandic law, parents can now use the mother's name instead and children can switch to their preferred parent's name when they grow up, if they wish. Yes, I found this confusing too. Likewise, even in English speaking cultures, some forenames that are considered female in one country will be more commonly male in another. In the UK, ‘Tracy’ is usually a girl’s name and ‘Robin’ a boy’s name, but in the US these are more likely to be the other way around. Keep your ears and eyes open. If something comes into your sights, whether in the local curry house, or on the TV news, remember to put it into the pool, even if you’ve no use in your current work in progress. These things will always be useful one day. Add all these names into your list. Don’t bother with putting them in any order as they’re as random as the opportunities to use them but keep adding to the list as new ones come to mind. Don’t forget that there are forenames that can be surnames, and vice-versa. In Scotland the likes of Fraser, Cameron, Donald and others can be either a forename or a surname.  Finally, if you are really stuck, there are lists of gender appropriate baby names published for almost every country in the world.
Many of those lists also provide a “meaning” (real or imagined) for the name, so if you want to indicate that a character has the strength of a lion, you can find which name might be appropriate; Leona for a girl, perhaps, or Leonard for a boy, but there’s also Aerial, Braylen, Dillon and others. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. |
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