I read a post in a writers’ group on Facebook recently that said that the author had done their “research” and come to the conclusion that there were just two approaches to marketing a book. Approach One was to plug your book relentlessly on social media. Approach Two was to make sure you get your keywords right, a good cover, a snappy title and a top notch blurb so that your book would show up in searches and sell that way. The person who made the post had decided he was going to put all his eggs in one basket and just pursue one of those approaches. I’ll not say which in case it influences you to do the same, which is not the objective of this blog. In fact, the objective is exactly the opposite. I’m not going to say that either of those two approaches are wrong in themselves. What I will say is that narrowing things down to just one of two approaches is like saying there are only 2 ways to cook eggs (I can think of 6 without breaking sweat). Marketing, like any discipline, is multi-faceted. Tossing a coin and saying that only one option will be taken is like taking a binary view of any activity. It rules out more than it includes and what it rules out is valuable. Good marketing is analogue decision making, not binary. Using social media to plug a book is important to an Indie author. First of all, it is all some authors can afford because everyone can afford free. Secondly it raises the author’s profile, even if it is only amongst a limited size group of people. Finally, it can actually sell books if done the right way. But having the right keywords, cover, blurb etc is also essential. Keywords get the book found in searches. But they don’t sell the book. Once the book has been found, the cover attracts attention, the blurb increases the reader’s curiosity, and the sale is around 70% made. But it is either the reviews or the free sample (sometimes both) that actually sells the book. Reviews because people will buy what other people have liked and the free sample because it allows the reader to decide if the book lives up to the expectations raised by the blurb and the cover. But that assumes that the book appears high enough up in the search results. There can be no doubt that Amazon ranks search results by popularity. At the top of Page 1 of the results is always the “sponsored” books, the ones that authors or publishers have paid to be there. Then you usually get the best-sellers in the genre because Amazon knows that they are money makers. The rest of the results can be spread over many pages and there is no way of knowing how far readers will go through the results before they buy their next read. Yes, your book will be there if you used the right keywords, but they may be on page 100. I suspect it’s going to be one of those 80:20 things. 80% of all books that will be purchased will appear on the first 2 or 3 pages of results and only the remaining 20% of sales will be made on subsequent pages of results, with the percentage declining the further you go through the pages. I have no evidence to support that, BTW, but intuitively it would seem to make sense. So, if you want to be in that 80% you have to do something else to make that happen. And that falls outside the second approach described above. To get your book into the 80% you have to find some way of marketing the book that doesn’t depend just on search results. You have to find a way of getting the reader to go looking for that book specifically, rather than doing a search. And that means finding a way of getting the reader to click on a link so that they go to exactly the right page for the book. So, we’re back to social media. Yes and no. Social media is just one route that can be taken. We’ve already mentioned paid advertising as a way for readers to find a book the reader didn’t even know they wanted to buy. We use it and it pays for itself many times over. But for people who have a more limited budget that isn’t always a viable route to take (but check it out because it’s probably cheaper than you think). When you use social media and search results together, you start to harness the best of both worlds. It isn’t an either/or situation. It is a “both in the right place” situation. Then you can add in things such as email lists, promos, blogs and so much more. I could list all the approaches that we at Selfishgenie Publishing use, but you would end up reading all day and you probably aren’t up for that. Scroll down to read the blog we posted a fortnight ago, because that says a bit more about what successful book marketing involves. Suffice to say – there is more than one way to skin a cat and using several ways, at the right time and in the right way, is always going to produce better results than just limiting yourself to one approach (apologies to animal lovers, but it’s just a saying. No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog). That is why marketing is such a time consuming activity for the Indie author and if you aren’t prepared to commit the time, you are always going to get disappointing levels of sales. One of the most frequent questions Indie authors ask about marketing their books is “Which is the best place to market my book?” The answer to that is so subjective that there simply is no answer. Just because Author A had huge success using Platform X, it doesn’t mean that Author B will have the same success if they also use it. This is why you have to know your readers, especially when it comes to using social media. For example, TikTok is used a lot by younger people. Now, don’t get the idea that it is only used by them, because older people use to too. But if you want to reach younger readers, then you are better off using TikTok than using, say, Facebook. Many women find X (formerly Twitter) too hostile for them, so if you want to reach a female audience you would be better off using Instagram or perhaps Pinterest, where more women tend to hang out. And that is why Author A may be having more success and why Author B won’t because their readership is different and therefore their readers’ social media habits are different. There are even some readers who don’t use social media at all, or the internet for that matter (I know, weird, huh?) so reaching that group of people is going to be really hard, which is where book fairs and other real world forums fit into the equation. I’m not saying you have to be everywhere, all the time. You would have to be superhuman to do that. But you do have to think in terms of being in more than one place at any time. This is why real research is so important. You have to know where the majority of your target readership hangs out and when they hang out there, so that you can be in the same place at the same time. For example, there is little point in targeting YA audiences between 9 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon, because they will be in school or college. You have to target them in the evening. So, what would we like you to take away from this blog? 1. Book marketing is not a binary choice. It is multifaceted. 2. Taking multiple approaches to marketing covers more bases, which means it is likely that you will sell more books. 3. Know where (and when) to find your readers, so your readers can find you. 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.
0 Comments
Disclaimer: We are not connected with Kindlepreneur in any way and have no financial interest in the product reviewed in this blog. This review has not been paid for by Kindlepreneur, Dave Chesson, or anyone else. Let me make it clear up front, if you only have one book published and never intend publishing another, you aren’t doing much marketing and you don’t intend paying for marketing, this product may not be of much use to you. But if you intend having a lengthy career as a self-published author, if you are planning to publish a series, or if you are a small, independent publishing house like us, then there is probably something here to interest you. Warning: This is a lengthy blog because for authors and publishers to understand the value of the product we are reviewing, they also have to understand the need for it. What need do you have that this product satisfies? You may not even know you have that need until you read this blog. Publisher Rocket is an aid to marketing and an aid to advertising using Amazon Ads and other advertising platforms. One of the things every publisher (I include self-published authors in that) has to know is which keywords to include in their book’s description in order for it to attract the attention of readers when they are looking for something new to read. If you have ever uploaded a book onto KDP, you will know that you are allowed to enter 7 “keywords” into your book’s details. Actually, you can use more than 7 words, because you can enter “strings” of words. For example, you don’t have to limit yourself to “romance” as a keyword, you can enter “modern romance” instead and it will still only count as one keyword. When readers are searching for books to read they may use Google, other search engines, or the search bars of retail sites such as Amazon. Very often they don’t know exactly what they are looking for, so they can’t enter a title or an author’s name. Instead, they enter a word or string of words that describes (for them) the type of book they want. For example, as a fan of historical fiction, I may do a search using those two words. Or I might add “military” to the description because I like historical fiction set around military themes. Or I might use “World War II” as my search term. "they are wasting one of the 7 keywords that KDP allows them." If the author knows what search words the readers are using, they can make sure those words are included in their 7 keywords for their book’s description on KDP, so they are guaranteed to be found when a search is done, and the book will appear in the search results - though not necessarily near the top of the list. But authors also need to know which words not to include; the words that readers rarely use for searches. If the author uses them, then they are wasting one of the 7 keywords that KDP allows them. The problem is, identifying which words the readers are using. It may not be the ones we think they are. You may think I’m talking about “Search Engine Optimisation” (SEO) and you are dead right – I am. Only we don’t need to use a fancy term like that, and we certainly don’t need to pay someone to do that for us. Manual targeting on Amazon Ads is the most cost efficient way of using that advertising platform. But it relies heavily on the advertiser (you) knowing how to get the best out it. The first type of manual targeting uses your book’s genre. Anyone who buys books in the same genre will have your book in their “recommendations”. Amazon Ads suggests the genres and you can delete any that you don’t think really apply. For example, Amazon Ads may suggest both modern and historical romance for your book, but your book can’t be both, so you can delete the one that doesn’t apply. But you can also insert your own genres. For example, if yours is a fantasy book with a strong romantic sub-plot, you don’t have to limit your advertising to the fantasy genre. You can add romance genres too. Do you know which genre listing on Amazon is going to be the best for your book? Some are better than others for getting your book seen and, according to Publishing Rocket’s publicity video, there are “hidden” genres too. For some genres you can even get to the number 1 bestseller spot by selling only a handful of copies. That is useful stuff to know – but how do you find out which genre(s) you should be advertising to? Read on to find out. By the way, did you know that you aren’t limited to just 2 genres on KDP? That only applies when you first upload your book. Once it is published, you can select up to 7. You need an account on Author Central and then you need to go to Help>Contact>Amazon Store & Detail Page>Contact us>Amazon Book Page>Update Amazon Categories. The second type of manual targeting uses keywords. Amazon Ads tutorials suggest using between 100 and 150 keywords (or keywords strings) in an ad such as this. If you struggled to come up with 7 keywords for your book, how are you going to come up with 100-150? Well, using author names and the titles of similar books is one way. But whose books and which titles? Which is where Publisher Rocket comes in. OK, it took a long time to get here, but if you don’t understand the basics of Amazon (or other platform) advertising, you aren’t going to understand the value of this product. What Publisher Rocket does is gather together the search terms that are used on Amazon and presents them to you for your consideration. But it also does much more than that. It also provides data which tells you which of those terms is best at turning advert “clicks” into sales. "Publisher Rocket helps to sort the wheat from the chaff" Not all search words are equal, you see. Sometimes the reader enters fairly random words into the search bar and therefore the results they get back don’t provide them with what they are looking for, so they have to have another go. But if the reader clicks on a book out of curiosity, those random search words still appear as results, so it is essential to know that they aren’t that useful, so as to exclude them. Publisher Rocket helps to sort the wheat from the chaff by providing the user with a wide range of data that they can download into a spreadsheet to filter and sort to their heart’s content to answer the vital keyword questions they may have. The one thing they don’t want to do is pay for clicks on their ad which won’t be converted into sales. Just because they and Isaac Asimov both write sci-fi, it doesn’t mean that their readers and Isaac Asimov’s readers like the same sort of books. They may want to exclude that name as a keyword for that reason, so that they don’t pay for clicks from curious Isaac Asimov readers who aren’t going to buy their books. OK, if that sounds complicated, that may be something for just the real data nerds to get into. For the rest of us, Publisher Rocket provides us with some simpler tools to use to find words that are good to use for our books, by genre, and what aren’t so good. Using the app is easy enough, but Publisher Rocket’s owners make it even easier by providing “how to” webinars to guide you through the various functions and offer advice on how to get the best results. The owner of Publisher Rocket is a company called Kindlepreneur, a company created by self-made Kindle millionaire Dave Chesson. This isn’t their only product, but it is the one we have found to be most useful in helping us to increase the efficiency of our advertising campaigns. If you saw our blog last week (see below the end of this blog), you will know that this is something we have been focusing on in recent months and it has paid off for us. Publisher Rocket costs $97 (around £85) for a lifetime subscription, which is why it may not be suitable for people who only ever plan to publish one book and who don’t intend getting into marketing. In other words, it isn’t any use to an author who doesn’t want their book to be read. Those that do want their books to be read may find it more useful. "As a publisher this was a no brainer for us" But even if you only have one book, the purchase price could be paid back quite quickly (it is the equivalent to approximately 50 extra sales) if you use the results to improve your advertising efficiency. As a publisher this was a no brainer for us. We bought Publisher Rocket in November last year and it had paid for itself by Christmas. We don’t use it every day, but when we do use it we know we are going to get the most bangs for our buck out of our advertising. So, if you need some help with your Amazon Ads, this product may be just the thing and we are happy to recommend it. If you want to know more about the product, 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. In an earlier blog, a book review as it happens, I mentioned that I created a mental image of the sort of people that I think buy my books. It helps me if I have them in mind when I’m writing, because I can tailor my writing style to them. There is nothing new in taking this sort of approach. In marketing terms, it is P for people, which means understanding the sort of people who are going to buy a product. If you are creating fashions that appeal to women in their late teens to early twenties, for example, it is important to know what sort of styles, colours and fabrics those consumers are attracted to. It will be totally different to those that appeal to women in their 50s and 60s. Get it right and you sell lots of product, get it wrong and you are left with thousands of items unsold – and a reputation for being a brand that is out of touch. I could give loads of examples of how manufacturers adopt this approach, but I would quickly bore you and I have no desire to do that. But market research plays a huge part in developing a product, just to find out what the buying public finds attractive and what they don’t. Pretty much every product has its “ideal” consumer. And, at the most basic level, a book is just another product, so knowing your audience, or consumer, is important to authors for the same reason. If you use a lot of modern slang in your writing, you are not going to write a book that appeals to readers for whom such slang is as alien as a foreign language. But there is more to it than that. Certain types of fiction attract different types of reader. Research was carried out into readers of sci-fi and fantasy, collectively known as SFF. It was discovered that there is a strong correlation between people who take an interest in science and those who read SFF. The findings report that SFF readers start at a young age, typically under 20. They read more than the average number of books per month. Boys have a higher preference for sci-fi and girls have a preference for fantasy, though both are likely to read either. And perhaps most importantly, the study found that SFF readers have a higher level of educational achievement compared to other reading genres. The most important take-away from that is educated readers usually have more sophisticated tastes. They won’t put up with poor quality writing. So, if you are an author who writes in either of those genres, expect your readers to be well educated. They will have a good understanding of science and, for fantasy, they will probably have a good working knowledge of mythology, demonology etc "There are obvious age divides in some markets." If you forget that, you might find your books don’t attract readers and you may also find that those that do sell don’t get good reviews. Are you an SFF author? Did you know that? There are differences in other genres as well. Unsurprisingly, women are bigger readers of romance, but they are also bigger readers of thrillers, which came as a bit of a surprise to this author. Also, thriller and crime readers tend towards the older generations, with 35% being over 65, but less than 5% being under 30. So, in terms of the language used in thrillers and crime novels, it is best to stay away from modern idioms and slang if you want to reach the largest audience. There are obvious age divides in some markets. “Young adult” is such a market. Those readers will be well versed in modern slang. So much so that in three year’s time, a whole new audience will have emerged who can’t relate to the language that was used just a few years earlier. This means that YA fiction dates very quickly, unless the author is very careful in their choice of language. It has to be “young” enough to appeal to that age group, but also won’t go out of date too quickly and result in poor sales in a few years’ time. YA readers outgrow the genre quite quickly, looking for new authors that appeal to their developing maturity, so there is no longevity, the way there is in other genres. Capture the attention of a thriller reader at 30 and you pretty much have their attention for the rest of their life. Capture a YA reader at 13 and you’ve probably lost them by 18. So, the YA author has to keep looking for the next audience, not just for their new books, but also for their existing books. Personally, I would avoid writing YA for that very reason, because the marketing effort is never ending. It also means that output has to be higher to satisfy the existing audience before they outgrow the genre. This same problem also applies to writers of children’s books. If Mum or Dad were fans 15 to 20 years earlier, then they may buy the books for their children, but otherwise the author has to rely on a lot of peer influence to make their books popular. My grandson reads the books his school friends read, not the ones his parents want him to read. For example, The Chronicles of Narnia collection, by C S Lewis, rank only 5,600 on Amazon, but the latest David Walliams book is ranked at 13. In 20 years time you can say “David Walliams” and the children won’t reply “Yeah, I read his books”, as they do now, they’ll reply “Who?”. The author of the books they will be reading is probably still at school him or her self right now. So, who is your generic reader? Are they male, female or both? What age are they? What sort of educational levels have they achieved, or will they achieve? What are their hobbies and interests? What language will they relate to and what will make them throw your book at the wall? It isn’t always easy to answer those sorts of questions, but you can start close to home. Do you write the sorts of books that you also like to read? If so, then you probably conform to the norm for your genre except for, perhaps, gender. Just because you are male (or female) it doesn’t mean that only men (or women) will like your books, because some genres have cross gender appeal. Others, however, don’t. Some men won’t buy books with a female protagonist and some women won’t buy books with a male protagonist, because they can’t identify with them. Others have no problem with either. And if there are gender issues that limit your audience size, then you can bet your life that there are also further limiting factors, such as sexual preferences. Will a book with strong LGBTQ+ content have a wide appeal amongst heterosexual audiences? It's more like to be read by a niche audience and niche markets are unlikely to result in fame and fortune (if those are your goals). Ultimately this is important not just in terms of who will buy your books, but also how you market your work. There is no point in directing your limited advertising budget towards the wrong audience, or one that is heavily biased in terms of gender, age, educational achievement or any other characteristic. It also matters when it comes to where you promote your work. If you are a writer of children's books or YA, don't bother with Twitter or Facebook, because your readers are all on Tik-Tok. As for the older generations, the older they are, the less likely they are to be on social media in the first place. Reader loyalty doesn’t come about by accident. It comes about because you understand your readers and your readers understand your books. If you have enjoyed this blog and want to be sure of not missing the next one, just sign-up for our newsletter by clicking on the button below and you will also qualify for a FREE eBook.. Many an “Indie” author will tell you that the hard part of being an author isn’t the writing of the book, no matter how hard that seemed at the time. No, the hard part is actually selling the book to readers. Let’s face it, it doesn’t matter how good the book is, if no one knows it exists then they can’t buy it. Readers rarely, if ever, just stumble across a new author’s work. It may occasionally appear on Amazon under the heading of ‘People who bought …. Also bought …..” but that is the equivalent of hoping to hit a fish by throwing a stone into the sea. OK, theoretically you could, but it’s unlikely you will. Do not confuse marketing with advertising, because advertising is just a small part of the marketing mix which we will discuss later in this blog. It is covered under the P for promotion part of the mix, but even then it is quite a minor part. Back at the beginning of this year we published a series of blogs that discussed marketing in depth. If you want to read the whole series then look under February in the archive and scroll down to the bottom of the page to start at the beginning. Don’t be confused by the fact that the first blog is Week 5 – the first 4 weeks were looking at the dark arts of publishing. The series continues into March and April But before you go and look at the archive, we’re going to reprise some of the highlights of those blogs to give you a few things to think about. Call them the ‘key messages’. We’ll start with the marketing mix – the 6 Ps. Some marketing blogs talk about the 4Ps, but we’re a bit like Spinal Tap, our Ps go all the way up to 6 (Younger readers may not get that reference). These are:
You might think that ’promotion’ is the most important part of the marketing mix, but it isn’t. It’s people. You can 'promote' your ‘product’ as much as you like, but if you aren’t reaching the right people, then you are wasting your time and, probably, your money. Your ‘people’ are the people who read books similar to the ones you write. They are the ones you need to identify and engage with on social media. I say ‘engage’, because if you just ‘promote’ you will lose their interest very quickly. Yes, you can promote, but only as a small part of engagement. You need people to want to follow you, which means having something interesting to say. And if you doubt that, consider this – you’re reading this blog, aren’t you? That is part of our ‘engagement’ with you. Maybe, as a consequence of our engagement, you might take a look at the ‘Books’ page of our website to see what we have to offer – or maybe you won’t. The choice is yours, but the important thing is that you are here, which makes the choice easier. Paying companies to blast out Tweets about your book won’t get you sales -despite their promises of having a gazillion followers. Because only the Tweets (or other social media posts) that reach the sort of people that read your sort of books are of any use and only you can identify and engage with those people. Just as an aside – doing a #writerslift on Twitter isn’t engagement, it is just becoming increasingly annoying because so many people are doing those. And everyone in the list replying to it and filling up notification boxes is even more annoying. We’ve started blocking all the people who do it. We’ll assume from the start that your book is well written, has a good plot, interesting characters, has been properly edited, proofread and corrected. It is therefore fit for purpose. Only you and your Beta Readers can judge that. So that part of the next P, ‘product’, is OK. After that the most important part of the product is the cover. Despite the warning in the old proverb, people do judge books by their covers. So, yours must be right for your genre. The cover image is what is going to attract people’s attention, so it has to be eye catching and genre appropriate. A picture of a woman in a big bonnet walking through a field of daisies isn’t going to sell many sci-fi books. The second thing about the cover is that it should tell the reader a little bit about what is happening in between the covers. Call it a visual representation of the plot. A picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say, so make sure that the picture on your cover is using those thousand words to best effect. Here’s one of ours which, we think, tells you a lot about the plot. What about price? How much should you charge for your book? If you are a big-name author, you (or, more likely, your publisher) can get away with charging £12.99 ($14.99) for your book. If you are an unknown or Indie author, don’t even think about it. There is some interesting psychology related to pricing. On the one hand, people expect to pay more for a quality product. On the other hand, everyone loves a bargain, even readers. Where you pitch the price of your book is therefore important. Price it an 99p (99c) and readers may think ‘It can’t be very good if they’re practically giving it away’. On the other hand, price it at £12.99 and readers may say ‘I’m not going to pay that much to read a book by an author I’ve never heard of’. We price our ebooks at £4.99 ($5.99) and that seems to be about right for us. But the key messages are (a) don’t undersell yourself and (b) don’t price yourself out of the market. When we talk about ‘place’ we mean the places where you promote your books rather than the places you sell them. We’re going to assume that your book is listed on all the relevant ebook etailing sites and, for those of you that don’t want to give money to Geoff Bezos, all we can say is that if you aren’t on Amazon, you aren’t anywhere. Internet searches always place Amazon at the top of the results, so if someone is actually trying to find your book, that is where it will appear first – and perhaps the only place on the first page of results. Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing offshoot also allows you to publish in paperback without paying expensive set-up charges or buying a minimum number of copies. But in our terms, place means your choice of social media site(s) on which to engage with readers and promote your work and your choice is important. If you want to reach young people, then Facebook isn’t the place and Twitter is iffy at best, because young people are always on the newest, trendiest platforms. Only 51% of social media users between ages 12 and 18 use Facebook – the second smallest group. So you need to do some basic research to make sure the platform(s) you are using are the right ones to reach your target audience. But don’t rely on social media alone. Local newspapers and radio stations are always looking for content, so a short item (written by you) will fill some column inches for them or an interview will fill five minutes of radio time. But, again, don’t expect them to find you. You have to reach out to them. Also, check your local community resources (libraries, schools, colleges churches, clubs, societies, etc) for events where you can go along and talk about your work (and maybe sell a few copies). Promotion can be anything from a Tweet or Facebook post to a video, podcast, a free extract or paid for advertising. I don’t aim to cover all of those. Instead I’ll focus on the one that you have to pay for – advertising. Social media has given us all the ability to run relatively cheap advertising campaigns – but which ones work and which don’t? Ask us a question that we can answer. Because, again, it depends on the advertising channel you use. There is no point in paying for and advert on Facebook if hardly any of your target audience ever uses Facebook. We can tell you where we get the best return on our advertising budget – but that would be more confusing because we use different platforms for different books, because different audiences use different social media platforms. What we can tell you is that spending money on Amazon doesn’t seem to work for us. We don’t know why that is, but we have had very little success there. Other publishers and authors tell us that they have had significant success using Amazon, so we can’t explain it. But one important detail about advertising. Makes sure your advert includes the following:
You’re now wondering what I’m going to say about ‘process’. Actually, not a lot. I’ve tried to get the messages in this blog in the order you need to address them. That’s about all the ‘process’ you need to worry about. But if you want to be successful your ‘process’ must also include research:
Without that research, you may as well be standing on a street corner shouting ‘buy my book’. And you will be no more successful. And, if doing research sounds like too much hassle, then good luck getting people to stumble across your book by chance. If you have found this blog informative or entertaining (or both) then make sure not to miss future editions by signing up for our newsletter. Just click on the button below. Here at Selfishgenie Publishing we use social media as a marketing tool. If you read our series of blogs on the subject (still available in the archive) you will see that it is cheap and quite effective if used well. However, there is a darker side to social media marketing and people are falling for it every day. Actually, there are two dark sides. The first is dark, the second is very dark. The plain dark is the way social media is used to capture your personal data, which is then sold to third parties so they can bombard you with advertising. We’re not talking about the usual clicking of the “agree” button for terms and conditions. That is just the way that social media sites make money by letting you use their platforms for free. If you don’t agree, you can’t use the platform. Seemples. No, we mean the way memes are used to capture data. You may think it’s just a fun question for you to answer, but it isn’t. It is aimed at grabbing a little snippet of personal data from you that will be of use to someone in targeting their adverts. Not only that, but you even give them the address to which they can send the advert. I’ll give you an example. One meme that appears quite regularly is “Name something from your childhood that young people today wouldn’t understand.” Sounds harmless, doesn’t it? Just a bit of fun. But your answer puts you firmly into a specific age bracket. That tiny scrap of data can then be used to target you for adverts aimed at your age group. If you happen to be our age, it might be stairlifts, funeral plans or walk-in bathtubs. And how do they get your address? It’s your social media username, which shows up every time you reply to one of these posts. That gives them access to your profile as well, which probably provides them with even more personal data. It also tells the person that posted the meme something else about you. It tells them you were gullible enough to respond to the meme. And if you were gullible enough to do that, you may be gullible enough to fall for an advert for a substandard, or even non-existent, product. Other age-related questions are based around subjects such as music (a song or band name can give away the decade when you were a teenager), films, books, TV shows, the car in which you learnt to drive etc. So, what is the “very dark” side of these memes. It relates to cybercrime. It’s the questions that are aimed at trying to get hold of your passwords so that your accounts can be hacked. You may think I mean your bank accounts, Paypal etc, but I don’t. I mean your social media accounts, because many of these are used as the basis for scams of one sort or another. "You may think that none of your friends would be stupid enough to fall for a scam" If I can make myself appear to be you, by posting on one of your social media accounts, then your friends may trust what has been posted. It also allows me to access the list of all your social media friends, which I can sell. You may think that none of your friends would be stupid enough to fall for a scam, but hundreds of thousands of people across the world, good, honest and above all intelligent people, have fallen for these scams. It only needs one of your hundreds of social media friends to fall victim for the scammer to win. So those sorts of posts will ask you about your first car, your first pet, your first school and a whole lot of similar things because those are the sorts of things that are used as passwords or as the answers to security questions. These also include you “pornstar” or “stripper” names, or even your secret agent name. eg “The last thing you ate and the name of your first pet is your secret agent name.” You wouldn’t tell someone your account number and password for your bank account, but you are happy to tell them the name of your first pet – which is almost as revealing. There are other ways of getting the account number and password, you’re just making things a bit easier for them when they try to hack your account, by providing the answers to the security questions or memorable information So, other than the age-related memes, what others should you be on the lookout for? The most obvious ones are worded like this. “You are about to be attacked by a zombie. The last thing you bought is the weapon you must use to fight it. What will you use?” That’s quite an easy one to identify, because it relates directly to products. If you bought the thing you are going to use against this hypothetical zombie, then you’re likely to buy more of the same. How about this one. “It’s your best friend’s birthday today. The nearest thing to your right hand is what you will be giving them as a birthday present. What will they get?” Again, this is product related, because whatever you answer can then be used to target you for similar products. If you say “a plate of biscuits”, then you’ll be targeted for biscuit advertising (or, more likely, sweet things in general). You may also become a target for advertising for plus sized clothing or dieting aids. An answer related to smoking products may result in you being targeted for nicotine replacement therapies, books on how to stop smoking or drugs to help you stop smoking (which may or may not work and may even be harmful to your health). OK, how about something a little bit different. “The last place you visited is where you will spend your honeymoon. Where will you go?” Whatever your answer, you will be targeted for advertising for similar destinations, cheap airline seats, hotels, etc. Now, if you don’t mind being targeted for advertising, then there’s nothing wrong with any of this. But if you’d rather spend your social media time actually socialising, rather than scrolling through adverts, you might do well to avoid responding to those memes. You may think that your “advertising preferences”, which you have carefully selected on your favourite social media sites, will protect you against these adverts. You would be wrong. These simply tell the site’s owners (Facebook, Twitter, Insta et al) who they can direct adverts for certain products towards in order to maximise the number of clicks for the advertisers. They won’t prevent you from seeing advertising from other sources that are paying those same sites to “boost” a post or whatever term the site uses. Believe it or not, there is no way that you can actually prevent advertising from appearing on your social media pages. All you can do is tell the sites which products you’re not too unhappy seeing. You’ll see all the others anyway because they’re paying the social media site to blast the adverts out to anyone who has an account. But giving away your little bits of data allows those “blast it out” type of advertisers to refine their audience by targeting you personally, by age, gender, interests, purchasing habits, cultural tastes etc And, when you ask yourself “How did they know that about me?”, the answer will be “Because you told them.” Many of the products will be genuine but remember what we said about targeting the gullible. That’s how scams work, because they’ll try to get your money by selling products they have no intention of ever delivering. How do you know they actually own that holiday cottage or Spanish villa they are offering to rent you? They will also try to sell you products which may not conform to safety standards. You have no idea where the sellers of the products may be based, so you have no way of finding out if they are reputable. There are ways of countering this form of data snatching and that is to tell lies. If the data that is captured is inaccurate it becomes useless, because the advertiser is directing their adverts towards people who won’t buy their product or service (whether it’s real or a fake). That means they are wasting their money and will have to find some other way of identifying their target audience. They will find that way, of course, but there’s no need for you to collaborate with them in their search. “Does this tell somebody something about me that they didn’t, or couldn’t, otherwise know?” There is one thing we can all do when we read these memes. It is to ask ourselves one simple question: “Does this tell somebody something about me that they didn’t, or couldn’t, otherwise know?” If the answer is yes, you are making an informed choice about whether or not to post your answer. You don’t have to. It isn’t compulsory. And if you choose not to answer, you will reduce the amount of advertising (real or scam) that appears on your social media feeds. For the darker forms of data capture, the ones that are aimed at finding out the answers to security questions, then the questions is much simpler. “If I answer this question, could it compromise the security of any of my accounts?” Again, telling lies in answer to the questions makes the information useless and it will frustrate the scammers, which is actually a result for us good guys. One thing of which we can be sure is that the people who post these memes aren’t acting in your best interests. If they were, they wouldn’t be hiding behind fake user IDs and asking seemingly innocent questions in order to grab your personal data. It’s up to you whether you co-operate with them, but we recommend you don’t. If you have enjoyed reading this blog, or found it informative, why not make sure you don't miss future editions by signing up for our newsletter. We promise not to spam you, or to sell your data to scammers. Just click on the button below. Week 12- Location, Location, Location 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 view and I respect it. But let me tell you something. 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 favourite platform, 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 phone handsets and an estimated 1.14 billion tablets. 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. Can you really afford not to be on Amazon? Can you really afford not to link your book to Amazon if you are already on there? 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. 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.
books. That is part of your market research. For example, women are more likely 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 earlier blogs 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 2021. 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, not Twitter. This becomes even more significant when it comes to spending money on advertising (a topic for a later 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. " 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 users of social media 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”. 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. I may not need to, because the insights I got from them without paying were high value in terms of audience profiling. Why Bernard Cornwell? Well, I’m a fan. 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 leftover 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 of this blog 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 and found it informative, make sure you don't miss future editions by signing up to receive our newsletter. Just click the button. Week 6 - The Big Shout Out I’m starting this week’s blog with some basic maths for you. Let’s say you write at a rate of 1,000 words every two hours and you produce a book that is around 90,000 words long. That means that it took you about 180 hours to write. Those 180 hours may be spread over a few weeks, a few months or even a few years, but it doesn’t matter. If you were to pay yourself the UK national minimum wage (at time of writing) for your work, you would get £8.72 per hour if you are over 25. So, multiply the number of working hours by the hourly rate and it means that you need to receive £1,596 in “royalties”, just to pay you for the time taken to write your book, which doesn’t include time spent editing, re-writing, proofreading, formatting, up-loading and marketing. But we’ll keep it simple and call it £1,600. If you sell your book as an ebook on Amazon for £4.99, which is a typical price for an Indie author, you will receive about £3 in royalties, which means you need to sell 533 books just to cover your wages for writing the book.
royalties, because the publisher takes the other 50% to cover the work they do (they don’t work for minimum wage). That means you need to sell 1,066 books to earn £1,600. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? There are many self-published authors who sell a lot more books than that. Actually, that is quite a lot of books for an unknown author to sell. So, the unknown author has to find a way to become a “known” author and that is where marketing comes in. There are 4,000 new books published every day, that’s over 115,000 a month. Most of those books will be by unknown authors and most of those authors will remain unknown – unless they learn how to market their product. Trust me, 1,066 people aren’t going to stumble across your book by accident. But if I’ve got a publisher, why do I need to do the marketing? A good question. All authors, even those signed to big publishing houses, have to do some marketing – remember it’s the authors that do the book tours and radio interviews, not the publishers, and those are marketing activities just as much as the sort of things I’m going to talk about. But the short answer is that your publisher has several authors on which to concentrate, but you can concentrate on you. Double the marketing activity means double the likelihood of selling some books. You have to work as a team on this to get the best results. But this blog is actually aimed at all Indie authors, so this is aimed at the self-publishing community just as much as the published community.
number of things. If you are good at it, it may cost you almost nothing. If you aren’t any good at it, it could cost you sales. This is where “social media marketing” comes in, because that is the cheapest form of marketing there is, short of standing on street corners and shouting about your book. However, just putting something on Facebook or Tweeting your book's title isn’t going to work. Why not? Let me use an analogy. Let’s say you live in a house and on the wall outside your house you hang a loudspeaker. Inside you have a microphone connected to the speaker (for the nerds, yes it is connected through an amplifier). Then you close the curtains so you can’t see the street. Now you stand in your house, speaking into the microphone saying “buy my book” over and over again. Will this sell your book? First of all, lots of people who might buy your book won't even come along that street, they'll be using another street entirely, so they will never hear your message. Then you don’t know if there are any people outside your house to hear your announcement. At some times of the day the street might be quite busy, but at others it will be empty. Even if people are there, you don’t know if they read books and, finally, even if they read books, you don’t know what sort of books they read. If they don’t read books like yours then you are wasting your time. "your announcements are getting lost amongst theirs" But it’s worse than that. Because there are 99 other houses in your street and in each one of them there lives another author and all 100 of you are doing exactly the same thing, so your announcements are getting lost amongst theirs and theirs are getting lost amongst yours. And that is why social media marketing fails for so many authors. Which means that just posting on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter is probably not going to sell you many books. Which brings me to paid posting services. There are dozens, even hundreds, of online suppliers offering to Tweet your book to their millions of followers – at a price. The problem is that they are doing exactly what I have described in my analogy. Not only that, they are trying to add even more authors to their list, which makes the noise worse, not better. Which means you are paying them to do something that you already know doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how many followers they have, or how many likes their FB and Insta accounts get, if they aren’t reaching the right people, they aren’t selling your book for you. "you are paying them to do something that you already know doesn’t work" Our recommendation is not to pay for services like that. But if social media marketing doesn’t work, why do so many businesses spend so much money on it? Because it does work, but not if you just stand in your house shouting “buy my book”. There is a science behind social media marketing and if you learn how to use that science, your book will sell. If you have been following this series of blogs you will know that we are great advocates of “learning” and this is something else you can learn about. This course with Future Learn is free and serves as a good starting point for learning how to use social media marketing. It is only two weeks of study (you could complete it in a day if you felt like it) and you can sign up from anywhere in the world. And it isn’t just for authors – any small business can use social media marketing. In last week’s blog I listed the 6Ps of marketing and I said I’d return to them. So, I’m going to start with that first P – product and how it relates to social …. Tell you what, let’s call it SMM for short. What is your product? Yeeeees, it’s a book, we know that. But is it just a book? For example, is it fiction or non-fiction? There’s no point in trying to sell a fiction book to someone who only reads non-fiction. Next, what genre is it? Some people read only one genre, some read a few different genres and some people read anything and everything. The problem is, you have to assume that they only read one genre and that it is yours.
they may be people just like you. But if you write in several different genres, you may have several different types of reader and you need to address each one in a different way. You won’t attract a reader of Young Adult (YA) fiction in the same way as you attract a reader of military history – they are two very different people. This is called audience targeting. If you know what your audience looks like and behaves like, then you can target them better. You can be online, on Twitter for example, at the same time of day as them. You can shape your marketing messages in a way that appeals to them. Most importantly, you can engage with them. Because social media marketing isn’t about advertising, it is about engagement. No, not that sort of engagement. If you can establish a relationship with your target audience – even if it is only via a social media platform - they are more likely to take an interest in you and more likely to take an interest in your work. I’ll give you a frinstance (as my Mum called it). If your ideal reader is likely to have an interest in brewing craft beer and you have an interest in brewing craft beer, you can engage with them by talking about craft beer brewing. The fact that you are also an author becomes incidental. One day they may decide to look at your profile on whatever social media platform you are using and then they will discover that you're an author (it does say you're an author, doesn't it?), at which point they may take a look at your book(s). But you haven’t forced it on them.
to themselves “Oh, I didn’t realise he/she was an author as well as being a craft beer brewing enthusiast. I wonder what his/her books are like?” and they might take the time to find out. Because you have done your research on your “ideal” audience, the chances are they will read the sort of books you write and that’s the battle half won. But most importantly, engagement builds up your audience numbers, because you will be joined by more people who want to talk about craft beer brewing (or whatever), which means more people see what you post on social media. This is what is known as "organic growth". The opposite to organic growth is "paid growth", which is where you pay to reach an audience, usually through advertising. Does this sound like manipulation? We’d prefer to think of it as understanding human behaviour. In any business, of any size, there are people earning salaries far bigger than mine who are “understanding human behaviour” and using it to sell you something. At least you do have a genuine interest in craft beer brewing (or whatever). So, a bit of homework for you for next week. Draw a pen picture of your ideal reader. Here’s a few things for you to consider:
Identifying your target audience is an important first step in your marketing strategy. Strategy: that’s a big scary word. Don’t let it scare you though because it is far easier to understand than you may think. It is the implementation of the strategy that is actually the hard part. But I’m getting ahead of myself because we'll be discussing strategy in more detail in our next blog. See you next week (I hope). If you have enjoyed this blog and found it informative, make sure you don't miss any future editions by signing up to our newsletter. Just click the button. |
AuthorThis blog is compiled and curated by the Selfishgenie publishing team. Archives
April 2024
|