 I have always believed that everything we use in our lives can be used for more than one purpose. A screwdriver is great for driving screws, of course, but it can also be used as a lever to get the lids off of paint tins. And the same applies to the Bookfunnel website - not the paint tin thing, but other book marketing purposes. Many Indie authors will be familiar with Bookfunnel’s original purpose, which is to deliver free content to readers in exchange for their email addresses. It is a vital tool for people trying to build email lists. It can also be used for delivering free content to existing email subscribers and ARC* readers. So, it is already a multipurpose tool.  But did you know you can also use Bookfunnel to sell your books, using the power of “group promos”? And, importantly, if you are already a subscriber it won’t cost you a penny. In terms of advertising, it works out as a really cheap option. A Bookfunnel subscription costs about $10 a month, which you can easily spend in a day advertising on Amazon or Facebook. First I need to explain about “group promos”, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Bookfunnel (if you are, then please feel free to skim over this bit). Basically, you sign up to a group promo by uploading some free content (novella, short story, or a complete book) to Bookfunnel. You create a landing page for the book and then you join a group, usually one that is relevant to your genre so that the free content goes to the right sort of readers – the sort that read your genre and that you want on your email list. Once you have joined the group, you promote the offer on your social media and using your email list, while the other group members do the same. Your content then gets downloaded in exchange for a reader’s email address and that way you can build your list much quicker than you would by relying on organic growth.  A good group promo could get you as many as 50 new email addresses, though the average is a little lower. Now, substitute “sales” for email addresses. Is making 50 additional sales something in which you would be interested? Stupid question – of course you would. Well, Bookfunnel is there ahead of you. As well as what they call “newsletter swaps”, which build your email list, you can also join “sales swaps”. The basics are the same, upload your book, create a landing page and join a group promo, but one that is focused on sales instead of newsletters. The main differences is that you create a sales landing page and add a universal book link so that the “call to action” button takes the reader to the sales page for your book: Amazon and/or wherever else you sell it. The other difference is that the wording of the promo header makes it clear to readers that the books have to be paid for rather than being downloaded for free (though you can also offer free books).  Just as with the newsletter swaps, you promote the group on your social media and to your email list and the other authors in your group do the same. What are the numbers like? Well, typically a group promo of that sort will be made up of between 10 and 20 authors. We’ll stick with the lower figure so that our estimate is at the conservative end of the scale. If each author has 100 people on their email list, that’s a potential reach of 10,000 readers of your genre. And that’s before you factor in the group's combined social media reach on top. In reality the email lists are likely to be much larger (possibly 1000s of email addresses per author), so the actual reach of the promo is probably going to be considerably higher. All that exposure costs you nothing. Joining the group costs you nothing. Joining Bookfunnel does require you to pay a subscription fee, but if you already subscribe then that is a “sunk cost”. In other words, you have already paid your money, so you lose nothing, but you stand to gain a lot.  Other than their cheapness (you can’t get cheaper than free) there are several other advantages to using these swaps that you don’t get using other advertising methods. 1. You are targeting people who read books in general, but who also read your genre specifically. 2. You don’t have to spend time researching keywords or comp authors, which you do for a lot of ad platforms. 3. Readers are used to getting emails from the authors, so they open them (well, most do anyway). As all Indie authors know, January is a slow month for sales unless you write self-improvement books (people who believe in “New year – New me” buy a lot of self-improvement books in January). Everyone is strapped for cash because of Christmas, so they don’t spend much money on books.  But that doesn’t mean there is no book market. You just have to go looking for it. Many people get new Kindles or other ereaders for Christmas, so they are looking for books with which to load them up. And people who like reading will still buy books – if they are cheap enough. So, it’s a great time to run a Kindle Countdown Deal, especially if you write series. Set your series starter to 99p (99c) (or even free) and use a Bookfunnel sales promo to advertise it. You can pick up a whole lot of new readers without having to spend money on advertising, so your financial risk is zero. Just for a change you aren't paying to give soemthing away for almost no return. You can promote full prices books, but this does work best if you are offering free or heavily discounted books. And even if you don’t get sales, you are likely to pick up new readers through KindleUnlimited if your books are subscribed to Kindle Select.  Pro tip.
Email lists cover a lot of territories where you can’t run Kindle Countdown Deals, and you are limited to running them in 2 territories at a time anyway. That means that the readers in many territories get starved of bargain books. Canadian and Australian readers will be jumping up and down shouting “That’s us. We don’t get them” right now and those two countries have big book markets. This is your opportunity to get readers in those countries on board because email list are often international, but you will have to adjust the price of the book manually in the KDP price settings. Remember to do that a couple of days before the start of the promo, because it can take a couple of days for price changes to filter through the system to reach all available territories. And don’t forget to adjust the prices back to normal after the end of the promo. You don’t have to be on Kindle to make this work for you. So long as you can use a universal book link to take the reader to the right place to buy your book, you can use these swaps. So, if you are already a Bookfunnel subscriber, what are you waiting for? And if you aren’t a subscriber, this is another reason for joining. * ARC = Advance Review Copy – a book provided for free in advance of publication, in exchange for a review being posted on Amazon/Goodreads after publication.. 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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 We have to talk about blurbs again, don’t we? In writers’ groups on social media, I am still seeing such awful blurbs being posted, inviting feedback, and I have to wonder why authors don’t realise how badly they are showcasing their books. There are so many blogs and books about blurb writing, they all say similar things (including this one) and they are all quite clearly not being read by authors. If they were the blurbs wouldn’t be nearly so bad. I’ll be recommending one of these books later. I suspect that it is because authors view writing a blurb from the author’s end of the telescope. They have lavished weeks, months or even years of effort on their story and they want to tell the reader as much as possible about it in their blurb. But instead of making the book sound exciting, they try to tell the story in 300 – 500 words and that just does not work. When you view the same thing from the readers’ end of the telescope, the blurb looks very different. In the blurb all the reader wants to know is “Will I like this book?”.  Creating a blurb is not a writing exercise, it is an exercise in psychology. Everything about a blurb has to say “this is the best book you will read this year” while actually saying something completely different. Every word has to have meaning for the reader in a way that they don’t even recognise. Which is why trad published authors don’t do their own blurb writing. Trad publishers hire specialists to write blurbs. People who know how the psychology of blurbs works. So, as well as writing, editing, proofreading, cover design and marketing, self-published authors have to add a new skill set to their arsenal, and it’s called copywriting. It is a major skill used in advertising of all types and a blurb is just another form of advertising. The buying of a book is a lengthy process. It may only take a few minutes, but in psychological terms it is a lifetime of decision making.  We call these decisions the “sales funnel”. It’s the basic process that takes place between the reader first seeing your book ("awareness" in the graphic) and the point at which they click (or tap) on the “buy now” button. The thing is that in terms of the “sales funnel” the blurb is only about halfway along the path. (The "interest" section of the graphic). But if the reader isn’t attracted by the blurb, they won’t take the next step along the path (desire), so the sale is lost. Think of a blurb like a bridge across a river. On one side you have the book’s cover, title, subtitle and price, and on the other side you have the free sample (which stimulates desire), next to which is the “Buy Now” button. The Bridge of Blurbs allows the reader to cross from one side of the river to the other. I’ll return to the latter stages of the sales funnel at the end of this blog, just to remind you of what they are. But first I want to talk about the barrier of the “read more” button.  When you look at a blurb on Amazon you are only shown a few lines of text. The more “white space” the author has included, the less text there is to read. Then comes the “read more” button which will reveal the rest of the blurb. Now, ask yourself this question. If you haven’t got the reader’s attention after those few lines of text, will they click on that “read more” button? I think you already know the answer, but just to make it clear – No, they won’t. They will go and look at a different book. Getting the reader to click on the “read more” button is the first challenge to be met by the blurb. It is a barrier to sales that can be as big as the Great Wall of China.  Let’s start with the “tag line” because that is usually the first bit of the blurb the reader sees. So, what makes a good tag line? It is one that forces the reader to ask questions. If they start to ask questions, they will want to know the answers and that means reading the rest of the blurb. I came across this example of a great tagline. It’s from self-published bestselling author Mark Dawson. “MI5 created him. Now they want to destroy him.”* The first thing to notice is that there is clear signal as to the genre of the book. “MI5” can only mean spies and secret agents. If the reader likes those sorts of books, they are likely to read on. But those two sentences also invite the reader to ask questions.  With your “reader” hat on, start asking some questions about those 2 sentences. I got “Who is the ‘him’ that is referred to? Why did MI5 create him? What did they create? An assassin? A Spy? Why do they want to destroy him? What did he do wrong? Will they succeed? And, the 2 sentences together add up to one thing – betrayal. So, the reader is almost bound to feel some sympathy for the character and sympathy is a powerful emotion to invoke. Importantly, they will start to read the rest of the blurb in an effort to find some of the answers to their questions.  That isn’t the only type of tag line you can use. Some authors use a quote from their reviews, and they can work well. Research has shown that click rates for review quotes are quite high. Quotes work because readers identify with other readers. It’s a bit like being part of a club. But reading the tag line is like seeing an attractive person across a crowded room. They look nice, but are they interesting? So, you go across the room to talk to them to find out. After initial introductions, they start to talk.  “I was born in London, but my family moved to Nottingham when I was 5. I went to primary school at … then secondary school at … before starting at university where I studied …. After that I went to work at … My brother went to … and he lived with my Auntie Vi. She’s a …” Are you bored yet? Are you looking over their shoulder to see if there is anyone more interesting you can go and talk to? So, imagine your reader’s boredom when you start to tell them all about your character’s backstory, or the world you built for them, or their extensive family tree and all the other things authors stuff into their blurbs. Yet the author still expects the reader to click on the “read more” button despite the fact that they have already sent the reader to sleep.  The second para has to tell the reader what the story is about. Not the whole thing of course. You introduce the protagonist, drop in tropes that indicate the genre and the type of story within the genre. But above all you introduce the conflict because the conflict starts to raise emotions in the reader. They start to like the protagonist, they start to sympathise with them. In short, they start to engage with them. To do that you have to use words that trigger emotional responses. “Vulnerable” is one such trigger word, often used in romance. “Courageous” is one seen in action adventure, sci-fi, fantasy and more. Below is a list of words that trigger an emotional response. There are many more, of course, but these are seen frequently in blurbs. The reason they are seen so frequently is because they work. You only need to use a couple to get the reader responding at an emotional level.  Sympathy is a particularly powerful emotion. If the reader sympathises with the character’s plight, they are going to want to know what happens to the character. Which means that the character can’t be a victim. People don’t actually sympathise with victims that much because victimhood is passive. What they do sympathise with is a victim that is fighting back, because that is active.  If you can start to raise those emotions the reader will click on that “read more” button and you are a long way through the funnel to getting them to buy the book (but still not the whole way). So, the author has to hit the reader between they eyes with the sorts of words that are going to excite their imagination. These are called hooks, because they hook the reader into reading more. A hook at the end of a paragraph encourages the reader to move on to the next paragraph, so you can’t have too many of them. Hooks are often multi-layered. The top layer invites questions, the next layer invites an emotional response, the third layer will raise the level of the drama. But the most important part of the hook is the bit that will appear above the “read more” button. If it is hidden from view it might as well not be there because it may not be seen at all.  Most blogs you will read on blurb writing agree that the “sweet spot” for the length of a blurb is between 250 and 350 words, around 100 (40% or less) of which will be above the “read more” button.. Anything more than that and you will lose the reader, and they’ll move onto the next book in the search results. YOU CANNOT ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN Many authors put a call to action (CTA) at the end of the blurb. This is not a good idea because the reader is not yet ready to buy. They will see the CTA as being “pushy”.  If that was the right place to put the CTA, Amazon would put one in - and they don’t. Amazon puts the CTA at the end of the free sample, because that is when the final decision to buy will be made (I’ll return to that in a moment). But that doesn’t mean there is no CTA in the blurb at all. Any good blurb will have a CTA, it’s just that it is disguised. The form of disguise is the “cliffhanger”. This can be a statement eg “Her survival is at stake …” or it can be a question eg “Will she survive …” Note the use of an ellipsis rather than a question mark. It leaves things open ended and that is good for keeping the reader engaged.  If the blurb has done its job, the reader will now go to one of two places on the sales page as they take the next step along the sales funnel. They may scroll down to the reviews because, as I said, readers like to know what other readers thought of the book. Notice I didn’t mention the product information, which they will have to scroll past to get to the reviews. That’s where the sales rankings are displayed. Interestingly , readers don’t seem to bother with them too much. Sales ranks seem to bother authors far more. I’m sure readers do look at the product descriptions, but they don’t seem to influence sales. If the book is so new it hasn’t had any reviews, it doesn’t mean the sale has been lost. Readers aren’t stupid. They know that a brand new book won’t have reviews. So, they will take the final step along the sales funnel to the “free sample” (previously called the “look inside” segment).  Your book has excited interest and kept the reader on the page, but the free sample stimulates the desire for the book. If the free sample doesn’t keep the reader interested until they reach the “buy now” button, there is no desire and the sale won’t be made. This isn’t universal, of course. A percentage of readers will buy without even reading the blurb, because the book has been recommended to them by someone whose opinion they trust, or they are familiar with the author and like their books. It may even be the long awaited next book in a series. A percentage of readers will buy on the strength of the blurb alone. A percentage will buy because they trust the reviews. But by far the largest percentage of sales come from the free sample. So, why so many words dedicated to how to write a blurb?  Because the blurb is part of the sales funnel and if the reader isn’t captured by it, they won’t get to the reviews or the free sample. They can’t get to the other side of the river without crossing the Bridge of Blurbs. At the top of the blog I mentioned a book on blurb writing that I would recommend. It gets deep into the psychology of blurb writing but it isn’t heavy. It is Robert J Ryan’s book “Book Blurbs Unleased.” If you only ever read one book on blurb writing, make sure it is this one. It’s free to download on Kindle Unlimited. * The use of bold text for the tag line was deliberate. Tag lines should always stand out from the rest of the words. 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.
 Selling a book to someone who has just enjoyed reading one of your books is the easiest book you will ever sell. In business terms it’s called “picking the low hanging fruit”. If you have another book out, then it’s easy to do. You just put a link to the next book in the backmatter and the reader clicks on it and the sale is as good as made. But what if your next book isn’t out for a while? How will the reader know when it is out? You can’t expect the reader to go onto Amazon once a week to check and they may not follow you on social media, so how do you communicate with that satisfied reader 3 months, 6 months or even a year from now?  No matter which book marketing guru you read, they all agree that email lists are one of the top 4 ways to sell books (the other 3 being ads on Amazon, Facebook and Bookbub). So, why do so few Indie authors use this method to communicate with readers and boost their sales? Every Indie author selling in the 6 figure income bracket (and higher) has an email list as long as the Norwegian coastline and they use it every time they launch a new book (and at other times in between, of course, but more of that later). It’s why they are 6 figure plus income earners. That should tell every Indie author everything they need to know about email lists. Yet still there is an incredible amount of resistance from Indie authors to building and using them.  Here are some of the reasons that a lot of Indie authors give for not using email marketing (in no particular order), with our response beneath. "I don’t sign up for email lists, so no one would sign up for mine." You are not your readers. Lots of readers sign up for as many lists as they can because they are always looking for new book recommendations. "They are a lot of hard work to build and maintain." True, but without hard work, nothing happens – especially sales. "It is expensive to build an email list." Not true. While it isn’t free, as a marketing tool it is far cheaper than advertising (I’ll cover costs later). "I don’t have time for building and maintaining email lists." Nor did those 6 figure income authors when they started out, but they found the time and that’s why they are now 6 figure plus income authors. If you have your own pet objection which we’ve missed out, put it in the comments and we’ll be happy to respond to it.,  If, at this stage, you are still saying “email lists are not for me” then fair enough. Thanks for reading this far and we’ll get on with writing this blog for the benefit of the authors who want to make some decent money from their books. OK, now they’ve gone, we’ll admit that not everyone who uses email marketing is going to reach the dizzy heights of 6 figure plus incomes. But they can get to the mid to upper 5 digit levels. We know this is possible because we are already achieving that for our authors. So, what do you need to start? Well, you need something to attract readers to your email list. Some people call these “freebies”, some call them “reader magnets” and I know of one person (who I will name later) who calls them “cookies”, because she hands them out like cookies. I’m going to call it “content” because that covers a whole raft of possibilities. Some of these are:
 There will be some work in creating that sort of content just for it to be given away for free but, to use an old British term, they are a sprat to catch a mackerel. If your email list grows at any sort of speed you will want to automate as much of the work as possible, or you really will find yourself drowning in emails, so the next few paragraphs talk about the businesses that can do that for you. You need an email list management service. There are many of these around, some of which have free packages with limited functionality, but even if you need to subscribe they have packages starting from around $9 a month (£7 – price correct at time of writing). Mailchimp and Mailerlite are the market leaders but there are smaller providers. A word of warning. Having used one of those companies I can’t say they are not the most user friendly when it comes to setting up automated responses and emails. You will have to spend some time watching their tutorials and even then you may have difficulties and have to email for support..  Then you need a delivery system to get your content to people so you can harvest their email address (ethically and legally, of course) for transfer to your email service. If you want to follow best practice you will also want to deliver new content to existing subscribers. There is no doubt about the market leader in the delivery field. It is Bookfunnel and we have no hesitation about mentioning them. All their packages cost money and you will have to go in at above the most basic subscription level if you want to capture email addresses. What Bookfunnel calls “Mid-List Author” has a subscription price of $8.33 a month or $100 annually (£6.50 and £78.33 - prices correct at time of writing) and that is the minimum package you need. When you compare those prices with what you might have to pay for advertising, you can see that email marketing is far more economical. You can easily spend $100 a week to run a Facebook or Amazon advertising campaign.  The rest of this blog is devoted to how you use Bookfunnel to build your email list from scratch and you have to get a little bit creative to make that work. We’re not going to go into too much detail. You’ll find lots of videos on the Bookfunnel website to help you. The first way to capture emails is “Group Promos”, which offer a range of books by different authors for free, capitalising on the fact that they give readers a choice of content. In these terms a book doesn’t have to be a full length novel, but it usually excludes extracts and sample chapters. The second is more advanced and is “Author Swaps” where you promote a single book by another author in order to generate sales, and they do the same for you.  Bookfunnel has a built in system for preventing cheating and not keeping your end of the promotional bargain. If you don’t promote other authors the way they are promoting you, you’ll find it hard to join a group promo the next time. Bookfunnel calls it “reputation”, but that is all we are going to say on the subject. Feel free to email us if you want to know more. Every month there are a number of Group Promos in the most popular genres that allow a newbie to join without an established “reputation”. Of course, the group will mainly be made up of other newbies, but that doesn’t matter. You are all in the same boat and are all there for the same reason – to get email addresses. To join a Group Promo you need at least one bit of content to give away and most promos are capped to a set number of books per author (typically 2 - 4) so that no one author dominates the promo.  Now, if you don’t have an email list, how do you actually send out the link to the promo? Some promo organisers (anyone can be one of those) even insist that you have a minimum number of email addresses in your list in order to join the group. This is where you have to get creative. For a start, the promo organiser has no idea how many email addresses you have in your list. I’ll just leave that hanging there and let you decide what to do with it. Secondly, all anyone is really interested in is those clicks, so it doesn’t matter where the reader saw the link that takes them to the promo. It could have been in an email or it could have been written in crayon on the back of the door of a public toilet (public bathroom if you’re American). So long as the click is made, nobody is any the wiser. Nor do they really care.  So, instead of using your non-existent email list, you post the link on your social media instead. Don’t worry if you have only a small number of followers (I’d suggest a minimum of 1,000 on Twitter/X). You only need a handful of clicks in order to start to establish your reputation and you will also get an email address every time someone chooses your content as the one they want to download. Now, you do need to be a little bit creative about how you post the promo link. Just saying “free books” and inserting the link isn’t going to attract many link clicks. There is a video available on Bookfunnel on what sort of content to use in your promo emails or posts, so I’m not going to repeat the lesson here. Group Promos typically run for between a fortnight to a month and I suggest you join 2 groups a fortnight but no more. Joining too many promos at once could lead to things becoming unmanageable.  There is a reason for joining two groups, though. I’ll call the two different groups Promo A and Promo B. When you start to get email addresses for downloads of your content as part of Promo A, you can send the link for Promo B to those addresses, providing the promo is still running. And vice versa for Promo B, of course. The advantage of doing that is that you are sending the promo link to people you know are likely to click on it – because that’s how you got their email address in the first place. If you get 10 email addresses from each promo, 20 in total, and you do that twice a month, that may give you 40 email addresses. If your content was a series starter, there is a good chance that 50% of those people will then read through the rest of your series. If your book is a trilogy, that’s 20 sales of Book 2 and 20 of Book 3. And every month you are likely to get the same results again, so you are selling books you wouldn’t have otherwise sold, at the same time as you build your email list for future marketing campaigns. That will more than cover the cost of your Bookfunnel subscription. But don’t forget to put links in all the right places in your series starter. And if you put some different content onto Bookfunnel, you can put links in all the books in the series to get more sign-ups in exchange for that free content. That is called “organic” growth.  But, more importantly, you now have 40 email addresses to which you can send the next promo to. You can still use social media for your promos too, as that increases your “reach”. In fact, I would continue to do that even when you have 10,000 addresses in your email list. Now you have to learn how to use those email addresses in order to build engagement with those readers. You will notice that I didn’t say “sell your books to those readers” and that is because selling is the last thing you should be doing. What you should be doing is using your email list to send out newsletters which build engagement. The sort of engagement that makes the reader feel they are part of an exclusive club. And that means providing them with exclusive content. This turns a reader into a “superfan”. Not only will they buy everything you care to write, but they will tell everyone they know about your books at every opportunity. These people really exist, and newsletters are the way they are found or created.  Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expert in the craft of newsletter writing – but I know someone who is.
You will recall that I mentioned someone earlier in the blog who refers to her free content as “cookies”. That lady’s name is Tammi Lebrecque and she is one of the acknowledged gurus of email book marketing. She has written two books on the subject and they are called “Newsletter Ninja” and “Newsletter Ninja 2”. I highly recommend reading both books BEFORE you start trying to build your email lists, as they will save you a lot of time and heartache. The first book gets into the nuts and bolts of list building and engagement and the second book takes a closer look at what makes a good “cookie”. So, that concludes our brief (or maybe not so brief, looking at the word count for this blog) tour around emails and list building. It really is one of the foundation stones of a marketing strategy and if you don’t have an email list it is unlikely that you will ever reach the dizzy heights of a 6 figure income. 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.  Did you know, your book’s meta data on KDP could inadvertently be sabotaging your book? We all know that meta data is key to your book showing up in Amazon searches. I’m not contradicting that in any way. What is also key, however, is not including anything in that metadata that might confuse Amazon’s algorithms. As we all know (despite the growth of AI) computers are stupid. They do what they are told to do. So, if they are told to search for keywords in your meta data in order to place your book in front of the right readers, that is what they will do. The problem arises when we, the authors, use words that aren’t meant to be keywords. They are meant to be something else.  Let me illustrate. Let’s say you are a writer of romance novels. You have spent hours, days or even weeks crafting the perfect blurb for your book. Great! Your opening line of the blurb is “Melissa woke up feeling like a zombie.” Now, you and I know that this is a simile. Melissa isn’t really a zombie, she just went to bed very drunk and is now feeling the effects of her excess. I think that the majority of us can relate to that. The trouble is that Amazon’s algorithms don’t know a simile from a hole in the ground. For them the use of the word “zombie” suggests that this may be a horror story, subcategory “zombie apocalypse”. So, if Amazon now shows the book to lots of horror story readers who then don’t buy it, the algorithm now doesn’t know what to do with the book – or who to show it to. The use of the word “zombie” just once is unlikely to have that affect. But if the author was to say also “her hangover was of apocalyptic proportions” then the confusion would be compounded by that word “apocalyptic” which, coupled with “zombie”, now tells Amazon’s algorithms that this is a book about the zombie apocalypse.. That romance book will be forever shown to readers of zombie apocalypse books and not to the readers of romance who might actually buy it. And it could be costing the author money. If they are running ads for the book, every time a reader of zombie apocalypse stories clicks on the ad, the author will be charged but the reader won’t buy because they will soon discover that the book is a romance, not a novel about the zombie apocalypse.  The example I have used is extreme and the categorisation of the book as romance is likely to override the use of the words. But it serves to illustrate my point. Because when the book is in the right category (let’s say fantasy) but uses keywords that can be used in a number of different subcategories, there could be a real problem. If the words you use in your blurb produce results for searches in the wrong subcategories, readers won’t click on the book and then the algorithm will assume there is something wrong with the categorisation and will stop showing it completely. Your keywords will be seen as irrelevant, making your book effectively invisible. I use fantasy as an example here because it has so many subcategories, but the same can apply in a number of genres: sci-fi, romance, historical fiction et al.  So, our takeaways for this section of the blog are simple:
But there is a second way that some authors sabotage their own books with their meta data.  One of the things we often read on social media is questions about how to choose a category for a book that is, according to its author, uncategorisable. The authors seem to think that just because they have included tropes from different genres or sub genres, they have created some sort of new genre. This is both wrong and/or arrogant. It is also very dangerous for the author. Every book has a central story and that is the one that dictates its genre (or category to use Amazon’s terminology). If you try to outthink the categorisation system for books on Amazon all that will happen is that your books won’t be shown to the right readers and therefore won’t sell. OK, there are some readers that won’t read a book in genre X if it contains trope Y, but they are the minority. Most readers are sufficiently liberal to accept a few intrusions from other genres providing the main tropes of the book remain faithful to the genre they love.  So, listing a grimdark novel under romantacy just because it contains a love interest is not a good idea, because romantacy readers won’t read it. If romantacy readers won’t read it, then Amazon’s algorithms will decide it is irrelevant and won’t show it to readers in any fantasy category.. For some reason there are some authors who think that they have created something that doesn’t fit into a category. Just because they have included a noblebright hero in a grimdark novel, they seem to think that their book is no longer grimdark. Likewise, if they then give their noblebright hero a romantic interest, they have strayed even further away from the grimdark category. This is NOT the case. If the main theme of the book is grimdark, then it doesn’t matter what else you throw into the mix. It is still grimdark and in that subcategory of fantasy it should be listed. The same applies to all the other myriad categories on Amazon or other book retailing platforms. Every author who claims that their book can’t be classified in that way is either arrogant, suffering from an overdose of vanity or they just don’t know how the categorisation system works.. There is no such things a new category or subcategory. If there was, Amazon and the other retailers would be all over it, because they employ professional market researchers to stay on top of those sorts of things..  Ask yourself a few simple questions:
- What genre of book did I set out to write? - Does the main plotline include tropes appropriate to that genre? - Do the additional tropes that I have included amount to a major change in genre? This will help you to decide if your book is whatever you set out to write. You have not created a new genre just because you included a romance, or a quest, or … well, you get the idea. So, for the second part of this blog, our takeaways are:
With a bit of luck, you won’t then sabotage your own book. 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.  One of the most time consuming parts of advertising with Amazon is having to do all the research to find those hundreds of keywords that the Amazon Ads gurus tell you that you need in order for your ad to show up in searches. I’m not decrying the advice, because you really do need all those keywords to run keyword targeted ads. I’m only bemoaning the fact that it takes so long to find the right keywords. Tools such as Publisher Rocket can help save time on this research, but if you haven’t got that and don’t want to subscribe to it, you are stuck with doing trial and error research to find what sort of search terms produce the best results for books like yours. But just suppose, for a moment, that there was an easier way to advertise your book than using keywords. And, just suppose some more, that you get better sales using this approach. Is that something in which you might be interested? If it is, then read on.  Now, for a moment, I want to take you away from the world of book marketing and into advertising products in what is called “pay per click” or PPC marketing, which is used both on Amazon and places like Google Ads to advertise a wide range of products. This is a huge area of marketing, generating $ billions per year in sales and the people who market in this area know how it works. They don’t want to do hundreds of trial and error searches to find out what keywords to put into their ads. They haven’t got time for that. They have money to make and, in their world, time is money. This is where we get our inspiration. If one of these PPC marketers wants to sell an electric drill, for example, they don’t go looking for synonyms for electric drills that could act as keywords. They also don’t put in random search terms for electric drill type products that may result in an electric drill coming out top of the search results.  No. What they do is tell Amazon Ads “When someone searches for an electric drill made by Acme, show them my electric drill as well.” And it works. It has probably happened to you. It has certainly happened to me. When I searched for Ping golf bags recently, I was also shown a lot of golf bags that weren’t made by Ping but which might also suit my purpose. Some of those were cheaper than the Ping bags and it was one of those that I bought. And very nice it is too. So, substitute a book title or an author name for “Ping golf bag” and that is how this system works for authors.  It is called “product targeting” and it needs far fewer searches to find suitable targets than hunting down 2 or 3 hundred keywords. And you can be very specific about which products you want to target. because you use the product’s ASIN to identify it, rather than phrases that can be either too broad or can be misinterpreted. If you do happen to subscribe to Publisher Rocket, their competitor analysis tool will also speed up this process, but for the purposes of this blog I’ll assume you aren’t a subscriber. Where “Science Fiction” can produce thousands of potential books in the search results, some of which are like yours but many of which aren’t, ASIN 123456ABCD can produce only one result – and that result is a book that would sit comfortably right next to yours on a bookshelf.  That’s providing you have selected the ASIN with care, of course. If you just pick a hundred books from the best-seller list and include them in your ad, your ad won’t work because the results won’t be relevant to the readers - and Amazon hates irrelevancy in ads. It hates it to such a point that you will have to pay more just for your ad to be seen. You will also pay for a lot of clicks that could never result in sales because the wrong readers are seeing your books. So, what do you have to do to create a product targeted ad? First of all, you have to select your “targets” and those are the books like yours that people are searching for. Let their authors go through all the pain of finding the right keywords. All you have to do is say “When this book appears in search results, show them my book too.”  So, you do your searches by category (genre) and sub category to find books that are similar to yours. If you write “space opera” you are looking for space opera books specifically, but you might also look for neighbouring categories such as space marines, space military, deep space exploration etc whose readers might also buy your books. But just a health warning here – if you stray too far from your own book’s category your readers may see your book as less relevant to them, with all the consequences that will bring regarding how Amazon will treat your ads. When we do this we look for books that are doing well in the sales rankings for the subcategories in which they are listed, so in our example we would be looking at “science fiction – space opera” books that are doing well in the charts.  We don’t want the big names though. Targeting Isaac Azimov probably isn’t a good idea, because readers of his books may be prejudiced against Indie authors. Just an aside here, the reading world seems to be dividing into three camps these days. There are those who will never read books by an Indie author, no matter how good the reviews for the books are. There are those who are only reading Indie authors these days because they know they can get good books at better prices from Indies. And there are those who will read both but will tend towards selecting the Indies that are higher up the sales ranks or whose books are getting better reviews. As an Indie author you are better off looking for the Indie authors who are doing well, because their readers aren’t so prejudiced against books by Indie authors. Our starting point is the best seller lists, but you can also use the sales rankings that are shown on the product pages if you are using titles/authors provided by Publisher Rocket.  And don’t forget to include your own books as targets, especially if you are advertising a new book or you have a new series out. Readers may be searching your book titles and your author name, so you want to be sure your new book shows up in the results, not just your old books. Then you copy and paste all the ASINs into a document for later use. How many ASINs do you need? Well, you are looking for the books that are selling well and which will be appearing in readers’ searches, so perhaps 20 to 30 books. If you can find 30 books by different authors then that is great. Many readers search for their favourite authors because they know they’ll get lots of other suggestions to pick from in those “also bought” and “recommended for you” lists. Once you have your list of ASINs, it’s time to go across to Amazon Ads and set up your ad. There is a second way of selecting targets and it is very much quicker.  Just as with keyword targeting, Amazon Ads will suggest products (books) that it considers are similar to yours and you can select your targets from that list. However, a word of caution if you would like to go that route. Amazon doesn’t understand your book as well as you understand it. The targets it selects for your book are not necessarily going to be the best targets. They are going to be the books that Amazon thinks are the best targets and that may be very different. Don’t just accept them willy-nilly. Check them out first to make sure they are a good match for your book. If you don’t you may be doing more harm than good by accepting them as targets.  When you set up a “Sponsored Product” ad you will be familiar with selecting manual targeting and keyword targeting. This time you will be using different options. You will still be selecting manual targeting, but now you will need to select “product targeting”. The options you are now presented with are similar to those used for keyword targeting. You need to select “Individual products”, “Enter list” and click on “expanded” for matching. If you want to take Amazon’s suggested products as your targets, then you don’t have to use the “Enter list” option. Using “expanded” matching allows other books by the same author to be selected by Amazon, increasing your range of suitable targets Now all you have to do is paste your list of ASINs into the target box (or select your targets from Amazon’s list of suggestions) and enter them.  Which brings us to bidding strategy. Many gurus that advise on keyword targeting tell you to bid low. This is because you are using hundreds of keywords and if you set high bids you’ll burn through your budget very quickly. So, they advise you to use custom bids and default bids which conserve your budget but will still result in your ad being seen. When you are product targeting the bidding strategy is the opposite. In PPC marketing of this sort, you are in a dog fight for visibility. You have a much smaller number of targets, so you have to make sure your books are seen alongside them. It is a real auction and the only way you can win is to outbid the competition. So, not only do you select the suggested bids, you actually need to increase them. We usually add 5 pence (5 cents) to each bid. Even that may not be enough, so there is some trial and error here. We have seen suggested bids that are so high we would struggle to make any profit from the ad. We tend to delete those targets for ‘standalone’ books, but if our book is part of a series we may decide we can make enough profit on read throughs to the rest of the series, so we aren’t too bothered by a high bid for Book 1. So, does it work? Yes it does. Sales are better than we get for keyword targeting, which is what this is all about. Our return on advertising spend (ROAS) is higher when we take KU reads and read throughs for the series into account, which is the only true picture of advertising profit and loss. Which brings us to analysing results.  It is the nature of PPC marketing of this sort that your ad will get a lot of clicks, but not all clicks will result in sales. Some ASINs will get you lots of sales and some will get you none, depending on how well matched your book is to your target. This is why you have to select your targets with care and not use the “throw lots of targets in and hope for the best” philosophy that you can get away with in keyword ads. It is important to cull ASINs that aren’t bringing you sales because, unlike keyword ads, these could be costing you a lot of money every time they are clicked. That means checking your advertising results data at regular intervals to see which targets are performing and which aren’t and switching off the poor performers. As you are targeting specific books, your ads will become dated after a while. Books that are riding high in the best seller charts today may be bumping along in the gravel in 3 months’ time and won’t be showing up very high in the search results, even when the searches are done on the author’s name. This means shutting down your ad when sales start to drop and setting up a new ad with new targets. The longevity of targets will vary, but unless you are targeting a best-selling author (not advisable anyway because the bid costs are too high) you should be shutting down your ad when it gets close to the “break even” point in terms of its ROAS. You don’t necessarily have to create a brand new ad every time. By analysing your results data, you can identify targets that are no longer performing and switch them off, replacing them with some new targets. But eventually this piecemeal approach may make it more difficult to analyse your results, so starting afresh from time to time is advisable.  As with all things, you don’t have to take our word for the effectiveness of this tactic.
Run your own trial. Take a book that you advertised using keyword targeting and which has had reasonable sales and use its data as your baseline, then try running an ad for a month using product targeting and see what happens. If it doesn’t result in better sales, email us and let us know. So, our main takeaways from this blog:
If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Bookbub ads sell a lot of books. The numbers don’t lie. When it comes to books, it is probably the most effective advertising platform other than Amazon ads. Some might say it’s better, but we aren’t going to get into that argument. If it is such a good way to sell books, how come so few Indie authors use it or, at least, don’t use it more than once? Lots of Indie authors try Bookbub ads, don’t make the sales they expected and so don’t go back again. But the problem doesn’t lie with Bookbub, it lies with not using Bookbub ads correctly.  Such is the size of Bookbub’s reach (about 10 million subscribers), and the way it is able to target a book to the right reader, a single Bookbub Featured Deal can catapult a book into the stratosphere in terms of sales. The key thing about Bookbub, however, is that its subscribers are looking for deals. If they weren’t, they could just scroll through Amazon like everyone else. And that means if your book isn’t a bargain at the time you advertise it, it is less likely to get responses. But Bookbub is expensive to use. Well, yes – and no.  A Bookbub Featured Deal is expensive. They start in the $ hundreds for niche genres and can go well into the $ thousands for the most popular genres. But Bookbub ads are quite cheap, certainly competitive with Amazon and Facebook ads. Bookbub Featured Deals are difficult to get. It sometimes takes months to get one and some books may never be selected. True, but a Bookbub ad can be up and running today.  Perhaps it may help if I explain the relationship between the two things – because they are linked. Bookbub Featured Deals are in high demand (despite their expense) so you have to apply for a deal and go onto a waiting list and then be selected. Some books may never be offered a deal at all. Bookbub favours some books over others. It will take longer to get a deal if:
Even if you tick all those boxes it is still possible to get a Bookbub Featured Deal, but you could grow very old while you are waiting.  The way the deals work is very simple. An email is sent out to the relevant subscribers (by genre and subgenre) and it contains a list of perhaps a dozen books, along with the price and a link to where the book can be bought. But if the readers scroll down to the bottom of the list, they will see something slightly different. They won’t see a featured deal, they will see an ad – and it could be the ad for your book. Because those ads are selected by bidding, just as Amazon ads are. If you make the right bid, your book will win that prized slot at the bottom of the email and it will sell enough books to make it worth your while.  Provided you set the ad up correctly, of course. And that is the bit that Indie authors get wrong, which is why some Indie authors leave Bookbub shaking their heads and vowing never to return. So, what is it that makes a Bookbub ad work? The first thing is to remember where the ad is going to be seen. It is going to be seen at the bottom of an email that is chock full of special deals. So, if the Indie author tries to sell their book at full price, they aren’t going to stand much chance of success. 99c (99p) deals work the best, as most of the deals above the ad will probably be higher priced, even though they are special offers. The expense of paying for a featured deal has to be recouped somehow!  Secondly the graphic has to be right. There are no words to sell the book, only an image. So, if the image isn’t attractive, the ad won’t get a click. Just putting up the book’s cover is not going to sell it. The image must also contain the price, because there is no other way that the Bookbub readers will know they are getting a bargain. The image we show here is one we used for one of our books (BTW it is no longer on special offer, so don’t expect to find it for that price). Bookbub is very specific about the size of the graphic. It has to be 300 pixels wide and 250 pixels high – not a pixel more and not a pixel less. Bear that in mind when creating the graphic. Some graphics packages have Bookbub specific ad templates to help you get it right. Bookbub does offer its own template to create the graphic but it has very limited capability to be customised so it will never be as good as one that is you create for your book. You can create something quite quickly using a free graphics package such as Canva, but we use Bookbrush as it has a lot of other features that we need that Canva can’t provide. But the big thing to note about that graphic is the big “99p” that is visible, so that the reader knows the book is a bargain. The next critical part of using Bookbub is getting the targeting right for the ad.  Bookbub will quite happily send your ad to everyone on its mailing list – but you are paying for that, and the vast majority of subscribers won’t be interested in your book because it isn’t in the genre(s) they read. But you will pay for that exposure anyway and it will eat through your budget in double quick time.. Targeting by genre (category) saves you money and increases the chances of your ad selling your book because the readers who see it are the right sort of readers for the book. But it isn’t just about genres, it is also about selecting good comparable (comp) authors as well and Bookbub allows you to do that too. These are authors whose books would sit well next to yours on a bookshelf. You could go for the biggest sellers in your genre, but that isn’t actually the best comp for an Indie. Those people are best sellers because the readers like their books specifically. It doesn’t mean they would buy your book too. You may reach a massive audience but hardly get any sales.  Selecting lesser comps is usually a better tactic. You can type in the name of a good comp author and if they have a profile on Bookbub (I’ll return to profiles later in the blog) you can select them as one of your comps. Bookbub will then include their audiences in the email list to which it sends your ad. A good mix of genre selection and comp authors should give you an audience that will be receptive to your books and sits in the middle of the green section of the dial that shows the potential audience size for your ad. If the pointer is in the yellow the audience is too broad, and the ad will cost you money by being seen by the wrong readers. If it’s in the red the audience is too narrow, and your ad might not be seen at all. You should be looking for 3 – 5 comp authors. Finally, we get to budget and bidding.  Your budget is whatever you can afford, of course, but if it isn’t high enough your ad won’t reach enough people and may not sell many books. If you can afford $10 a day (about £7.80) you are at the bottom end of the scale. You should be looking for $15 if you want significant results and you can go as high as your wallet will bear. Series authors will be able to afford to pay more because they will make their money back from “read throughs” to the next book in the series. If you are doing ad testing (which you should, and I’ll return to that in a minute) then you want to spend your overall budget as quickly as possible so you can get results for analysis. If you are running an ad that has already been tested, you may want to spread your ad over a defined period. If it is a tested ad you can set your budget higher at less risk. Never leave an ad to run without setting an end date. It could work out to be very expensive if you forget to terminate it. Finally, do you want to pay at a cost per click (CPC) rate or a cost per thousand clicks (CPM – M standing for “mille”, the Latin for 1,000)? The recommendation is CPM as that works out more economical, but it’s your choice. The key thing is to set a bid that’s going to win the bidding war. Bookbub makes a recommendation as to what level of bid to set according to the genres you have selected for the ad. Always bid higher than the highest suggested bid if you want to win that war. It doesn’t mean that your bid will cost you that, because it will only be charged at the level necessary to beat the next highest bid. But it will mean you will outbid every other ad most of the time, which increases your ad’s visibility.  When it comes to CPM bids it may mean your bid is higher than your daily budget, but don’t worry about that. It just means your ad will be seen by less than 1,000 subscribers each day. But it will still be seen by several hundred. Now to return to ad testing. There are two variables that need to be tested, but Bookbub has no facility for doing A/B testing, so you have to do it yourself by trial and error. The first variable is the graphic. A poor graphic won’t sell your books. If you have a graphic you know to be good because it worked for you elsewhere, eg Facebook ads, then it is fine to use that without testing, but if you are using a brand new graphic you have to be sure it is going to sell you books. So, you may want to test 3 or 4 different graphics by running an ad for each and analysing the results. Once you have tested all 3 (or 4) images, you will be able to decide which was the winner from the data Bookbub provides and that is the one you will run with. The second variable is your comp authors. If you don’t pick the right ones, your ad won’t be seen by the right audience. That will require additional testing, running each ad with the winning graphic but a different comp author for each ad. By setting your budget to be spent as quickly as possible, you will get your results more quickly for each test. No doubt some of you have seen the flaw in the testing tactics.  Kindle Countdown deals only run for a maximum of 7 days, and testing will use up between 2 and 4 days of that period, leaving fewer to make significant levels of sales.
So, if you are running an ad for the first time you may have to set your book’s price to 99p manually for the duration of the testing, then set up a Kindle Countdown deal for the final winning ad, increasing the budget and spreading the spend over the 7 day countdown period. However, you only have to do the testing once. When your book is eligible for its next countdown deal, in 3 months’ time, you can use the same graphic and the same comp authors with the knowledge that you already have a winning ad. Now, I mentioned profiles above and it is recommended that you set up your own author profile on Bookbub. That isn’t so that other authors can use you as a comp, it’s because readers can see your profile and find out about your books. Your books will show up in searches that readers do on Bookbub itself, when they go looking for the latest bargains. As there are fewer books listed on Bookbub than there are on Amazon it is more likely that your books will be seen there, and it costs nothing to have a Bookbub profile. If you would like to dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of advertising with Bookbub, here’s a video from David Gaughran. 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.  What the difference is between a book’s Amazon’s sales ranking, it’s position in the Amazon Best Seller lists and the book’s actual popularity may not seem like a big thing, but it can affect the way your marketing strategy works. In fact, understanding the differences can make the difference between you selling a few books and selling a lot of books. It can definitely increase your KU downloads, if your book is enrolled in Kindle Select. You may think that sales rankings, best seller lists and popularity are just different names for the same thing. You would be wrong.  Popularity, in Amazon’s terms, is very different from the first two and it has a far greater impact on how visible your books are on Amazon. Visibility is just another way of saying “free advertising”, because books that are visible are likely to sell, whereas a book that isn’t visible can’t sell unless a reader is looking for it specifically, which is unlikely if they haven’t heard of it. So, let’s take each of those terms in turn and unpack them to see what the differences are. Sales ranking is a very volatile feature. First of all, it is relative to the millions of other books that are listed on Amazon. Secondly it changes by the hour, depending on who buys what and when. A book that has a sales rank of 1,000 today may be down at 5,000 tomorrow and 10,000 the day after. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t popular. Some people think that KindleUnlimited (KU) downloads don’t count for much when it comes to sales ranking, but this is an urban myth. A KU download is treated the same as the sale of a book, ie 1 KU download = 1 sale.  The problem is that the value of sales diminishes by 50% each day. So, a sale today is only counted as ½ a sale tomorrow and will only be counted as ¼ of a sale the day after. This is part of the reason that sales rankings are so volatile. If you sell 10 copies of your book today but none tomorrow, then today’s 10 sales are only worth 5 sales tomorrow and your sales ranking plummets. This means that promos have a disproportionate impact on sales ranking when they end. All those books that were downloaded during the promo period are only worth a fraction of what they were the day after the promo ends. A sale on day 1 of a 5 day promo is only worth 1/16 of a sale by the time the promo has ended.  Best seller lists are driven by sales rankings, so they are just as volatile. Yes, you may have earned that elusive brown “best seller” tag for your book, but you may only be at number 99 for an hour before dropping out of the list, because the lists are limited to the top 100 books. However, the lists are category specific, so even low sales in some niche categories can keep you in the best seller lists for days, weeks or even months. But those sales levels will never get you into the Kindle Store best seller list, which is dominated by the high volume sellers. By contrast, popularity isn’t calculated hourly, like sales rankings and best seller listings. Popularity is calculated as a 30 day rolling average. What’s more, your sales on day 1 don’t lose their value on day 2, 3, 4 etc. 100 books sold on Day 1 is still worth 100 books sold on day 30. It is only on day 31 that they drop out of the calculation. BUT – and it’s a big but for a reason – KU downloads aren’t counted at all. I’ll get to that reason later.  Unlike the bestseller rankings, popularity rankings don’t cut off at 100. If you are patient enough to keep scrolling, you could find out which is the 1 millionth most popular book on Amazon. If a book has made just one sale it will be in that list somewhere. The popularity listings aren’t easy to find on Amazon, so I’ll provide an easy to use guide for you to download. But viewing the listings isn’t the important part anyway. Very few readers even know they exist or how to find them. The important part is how Amazon’s algorithms use the popularity data to make books more visible. Promotions can play a big part in that visibility too, because they have so much influence on a book’s popularity during the rolling 30 day period within which the promo is running..  Amazon doesn’t like spikes in sales, which you often get with promos. They want to see consistency in sales. Which is why popularity is part of the algorithm and sales rankings aren’t. If your book is selling consistently even at a low sales rank, it can find its way into the algorithm and will be made more visible. For example, when people do searches, the results aren’t presented to them in sales rank order, they are presented in popularity order. So, if your book is more consistently popular than the No1 best seller, it will be more visible while the best seller is ignored, especially after the best seller starts drifting down the charts. Yes, your newly self-published book could appear higher in the search results than Harry Potter or last year’s Jack Reacher (but not this year’s Jack Reacher, because that will still be popular). The other way visibility is improved is through appearing in the “also bought” and “recommended for you” listings that appear when someone is actually viewing the page of a specific book.  Don’t underestimate the value of those listings. People like to read what other readers are reading, so the “also bought” list is particularly influential. And some people buy solely from the “recommended for you” lists because they know that their buying history is telling Amazon to show them the sort of books they like to read and it saves them having to do searches to find their next book. So, popularity feeds into popularity. Because if your book appears in those listings they will sell more copies - which indicates that they are still popular. So, you are into a virtuous circle. This is also why the relevance of keywords is so important in Amazon Ads these days. If you are getting lots of impressions but few clicks, it means that the ad isn’t appearing as relevant to readers. If you are getting clicks but few sales, that also tells Amazon that the keywords you are using aren’t relevant to the readers who are seeing the ad. If they were, more readers would be buying the book.  And relevance is important when it comes to your book being displayed in the “also bought” and “recommended for you” lists, because if the algorithm doesn’t think your book is relevant for the reader, it won’t be displayed. Relevance and popularity work hand in hand. So, all those broad targeted, scatter gun approach keywords that some authors use in their ads are actually harming the sales of the book, not helping them. The ad may make a few sales, but it won’t benefit from increased visibility, because the algorithm can’t work out its relevant audience. Now, to that reason why KU downloads aren’t included in the popularity calculations.  Essentially, the popularity list is about selling more books so that Jeff Bezos becomes richer. KU downloads don’t earn Mr Bezos anything. KU has its own popularity listings based on books that are downloaded, but including KU popularity data in with ebook popularity would skew the picture. The ebook popularity data is fed through to make recommendations for KU downloads. If you sell more ebooks you will see a corresponding rise in KU downloads at the same time. You can see this for yourself when you run a promo. Not only will you sell more books at 99p, you should also see a rise in KU downloads for the same book (there is a time lag of up to 4 days for the KU data to appear) However, if KU download data was fed back to the ebook popularity chart, it would create an inflationary spiral, with KU popularity driving more KU popularity. The ebook’s sales might be tanking, but it would still be flying high in the popularity rankings fuelled by KU. But if an ebook’s sales are dropping, Mr Bezos wants the book to drop lower in the popularity chart so that better selling books can rise. So, to make sure that the popularity chart reflects ebook sales and not KU downloads, KU download data isn’t fed into the ebook popularity chart. How can you get your book higher up the popularity chart so that more people see it and buy it? Promos sell books, so that is the simplest way of doing it, But there are nuances to that. Promos are a great way of making books popular, but they have to be managed carefully. The algorithm is set up to reward steady sales over a period and to ignore spikes in sales. It also rewards an upwards trend rather than a flat trend line and a descending trend will be reduced in value as it indicates a drop in popularity. Knowing this, you can set up the marketing campaign for your promo to produce that rising trend. The following is provided for illustration purposes only. We are not suggesting it as an actual marketing plan (though you can use it if you wish). If you are doing a 99p Kindle Countdown promo over 7 days, you can plan your marketing activity to increase steadily over the promo period. Day 1 – Launch Facebook ad to run for 7 days. Day 2 – Launch Bookbub ad to run over 6 days. Day 3 – Send promo info to ½ of your email list Day 4 – Launch Amazon ad to run over 4 days. Day 5 – Increase spending on Facebook ad. Day 6 – Send promo info to other ½ of email list Day 7 – Change wording on Facebook ad to “Offer Ends Today”.  With each new activity layering onto the top of the previous one, sales are bound to take an upward trend rather than all being made on Day 1 and then starting to tail off by Day 3 as you start to run out of interested readers. And because your ebook is trending in the popularity chart you will continue to get sales after the promo has ended because it will be appearing in those other lists I mentioned. Supported by continued advertising, this can maintain your book’s popularity for a lengthy period, certainly until you become eligible for the next Kindle Countdown Deal for your book in 3 months’ time – when you start all over again. And, because your books are already popular, the new campaign will push you even higher up the popularity charts and get you higher up those lists, making your books more visible and driving organic sales - which feed back into the popularity calculation. So, there we end our quick look at the popularity chart, what it means for your book’s visibility and how to get your book higher in the chart. Don’t forget to download our guide (below) to assist you in locating the popularity charts. As with the best seller charts, they are broken down by categories so you can see where your book is in relation to other books in the same category. You will see that some of the books have the “best-seller” flag attached, but many more of them don’t. 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. 
 Do you know your book marketing strategy from your book marketing tactics? The difference is quite important. Think about it in terms of what you intend to achieve (strategy) and how you are going to achieve it (tactics). Tactics are shorter term and you may need to change them if they aren’t working. But strategy is a longer term thing. If you keep changing strategy every five minutes, you are unlikely to achieve anything. But you can’t decide on your strategy until you have first defined your goals. The connectivity between goals, strategy and tactics is often described in business speak as “getting your ducks in a row”.  What follows is used for illustration purposes only. We are not advocating any particular marketing strategy. That is for you to decide, based on your own goals. As an Indie author you probably know your major goal. It will be to sell as many books as possible (that may not actually be the goal for some authors. They may just want to write books and aren’t concerned with sales. But because you are reading a nook marketing blog, we’ll assume you want to sell books). That probably won’t be your only goal. We’ll stick a pin in the “Sell as many books as possible” goal, because we know that’s always going to be there. So, what other goals might you have?  Well, you may not want to spend a lot of money on marketing in order to sell your books, so there may be a goal related to achieving the major goal as cheaply as possible. You may also have a goal to build a loyal fanbase in order to make sure that you are able to make sales of future books, without having to start from scratch every time you launch one. You may have other ideas about your publishing goals. By all means add those to your personal list of goals.  “Selling lots of books” and “Not spending any money on marketing “ may be conflicting goals and your strategy may be unable to deliver both, so you may have to re-think which goal you want to achieve and remove the competitor so as not to get into any strategic conflicts. Having decided on your goals, you can now consider what strategy you must use to achieve those goals. Note the use of the singular version of the word. You may have several goals, but you only ever have one strategy. And if that strategy can’t deliver all your goals, you’ll have to reconsider your goals and perhaps prioritise them. Why only one strategy?  Because if you have more than one you will have difficulty focusing your efforts and resources on achieving your goals. If you divide your resources between strategies then it is likely that you won’t have enough resources to achieve all your goals. The two strategies may even be pulling in different directions, You create competition for yourself about what you consider to be most important. That is why I said that you have to consider your goals carefully, so that you focus on what is most important, rather than trying to achieve everything and ending up achieving nothing. Goals and strategy have to be aligned. For example, if your goal is to spend as little as possible on marketing your book, having a strategy based on paid advertising is contrary to your goal. Instead of achieving your goal, you will fail to achieve it – spectacularly. So, let’s pick out one of the goals I suggested above: to spend as little as possible on the marketing of your books. One possible strategy for that is to use social media for your marketing, as that is free. So, your strategy is now aligned to your goal. Now you can think about your tactics. You might have several of these all directed by the same strategy. Tactic 1 might be to build up a following of readers on X (formerly Twitter) who will see your marketing messages and buy your books.  Tactic 2 might be to create great videos which you can use to market your books for free using TikTok and Instagram. Maybe even Facebook and X too. Tactic 3 might be to create “reader magnets” so you can build an email list, so you have a fanbase who have bought your current book and who are ready and waiting for news about your next book. Are those tactics aligned to your strategy? Yes, because 1. They all use social media (except the email list). 2. They are all free (except the email list). 3. They are proven ways of selling books. What about that email list? To do this effectively you will normally have to subscribe to a suitable email management app, such as Mail Chimp or Mailerlite. Those subscriptions aren’t too expensive (certainly not as expensive as advertising) so they do align to spending as little money as possible. They only fail to align if the goal was “spend no money at all”. All you have to do now is implement those tactics and see if they are going to achieve your other goal of selling books.  What happens if they don’t achieve that over-arching goal of book sales? Well, in the first instance, you don’t change your strategy (at least, not yet). You have to identify why those tactics aren’t achieving your goals, and that means analysing your results. All your results. For tactic 1, for example you would have to dive into your X engagement data to find out how many people are reacting to your posts. Not just in terms of clicks to your book’s sales page, but in terms of likes and shares. But you also have to identify how many of your followers are engaging in conversations with you, because it is engaged followers who are most likely to respond to your promotional posts, not those who just scroll past while looking for something more interesting. (Follower count is vanity. Engaged followers are sanity) I’m only using that as an example, of course. Once you have identified the problems with your tactics, you can then modify them or even scrap them and introduce new tactics. But the strategy of using social media remains unchanged.  Remember your goal was to spend as little money as possible on promoting your books. So perhaps you need to drill down into that a little bit and decide what “as little as possible” actually means. Maybe you need to set a budget that you are prepared to spend. With that budget you can then modify your tactics to spend a bit of money on creating better “content”, such as more exciting images or videos. That still sits within your strategy, while still meeting your goal. All you have done is to define your goal more tightly to identify what “as little as possible” actually means and then modifying your tactics accordingly. It is only when you have run out of suitable tactics that you consider changing your strategy. So, if you have been using social media for a year and you’ve changed your tactics to the point where you can no longer look at your goal of “as cheaply as possible” and not start crying, then you have to consider whether using social media for marketing is the right strategy. Or at least if using it as cheaply as possible is the right goal.  But by that time you will have built up a mass of evidence in the form of data that will be able to advise you on that. You won’t just be guessing. This is where the problem of “shiny objects” comes in. If you follow writing groups on social media you will often see someone raving about the latest shiny object they have used to sell their books. The temptation is to chase that same shiny object and try it out, which is where things start to go wrong. Because you have no idea what strategy that person was using. That is if they have a strategy at all and aren’t just jumping from one shiny object to the next - which isn't a strategy, it is just chaos. Remember your goal was “as cheaply as possible”, whereas their goal might be “make sales at any cost”. The shiny object could therefore fit in with their strategy – but it would undermine yours. Shiny objects are often short term in nature, a tactic at best, and, as we suggested above, strategy is a long term thing. So, our takeaways from this blog are illustrated in the graphic below.  Put simply they are:
1. Strategy has to be aligned with goals 2. Strategy dictates which tactics are selected. 3. Measurement of the effectiveness of tactics drives review. 4. Review results in tactical changes. 5. Review can also result in the modification of goals. 6. It is only the modification of goals that changes strategy. If you try to miss out any of those steps, or to do them in the wrong order, it is likely that you will fail to achieve your goals. It may even cost you money in the form of lost sales, increased expenditure, or both. So it is really important to get your book marketing ducks in a row. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.   Some readers of this blog may already have heard of David Gaughran. On YouTube he has a lot of “How To” videos on self-publishing and the marketing of self-published books. I’ll provide a link to one of them at the end of this review, because what he has to say is based on solid research and first hand experience. Which is why I have given “Amazon Decoded: A Marketing Guide To Kindle Store” 5 stars (hereafter referred to just as Amazon Decoded). Many of us feel that our books just aren’t getting a fair shake on Amazon. When we do incognito searches for them they appear so far down the search results that we know that no reader is ever going to scroll that far and discover our book. Which is the problem this book aims to rectify "turn an ad that yields 10 sales a day into an ad that yields 100 sales a day" Now, neither I nor David Gaughran would claim that this book will propel your book into the global best-seller category overnight. But what it will do is make your book more visible to readers and if it is more visible, there is a greater chance of the book being bought. When you couple that increased visibility with advertising, there is the potential to turn an ad that yields 10 sales a day into an ad that yields 100 sales a day (but please note the use of the word “potential” - nothing is guaranteed). But what is great about this book is that all the things David talks about doing are FREE. "the way Amazon can make your book visible to readers is as good as advertising it." That’s right. You can make your book more visible without having to pay a penny. In fact, you can get Amazon to do your advertising for you for FREE. Amazon doesn’t call it advertising, of course, but the way Amazon can make your book visible to readers is as good as advertising it. David refers to this as “Visibility Marketing”, because it is all about making your book more visible amongst the 8 million ebooks (and counting) that are on Amazon. First, a little bit about the author in order to establish his credentials for writing this book.  Author David Gaughran David Gaughran. has been in the business of self-publishing for several years and he writes fiction as well as this sort of non-fiction. But, importantly, he is a very successful self-published author because he understands the marketing side of the self-publishing equation. But David also used to work for Google, which means he has a lot of insider knowledge on how Google’s search engine works. This is crucial, because Amazon’s search engine works pretty much the same way because Jeff Bezos went to Google to ask them to show him how their search engine works – and Google showed him. You may think that the Amazon search engine just scans the search words that are typed in, looks for matching words in books' metadata and then lists what it finds. Of course it does that, but it then selects the order in which the results are displayed based on a whole lot of other factors. And equality rules on Amazon. Your book, if it meets the right criteria, can appear in the search results right below – or even above – those of the big name trad published authors. Yes, really.  Your book will also appear in “also bought” and “recommended for you” lists, which are a great way to sell books. That is what “Visibility Marketing” is all about. And making that happen is what this book is all about. Some of the things David talks about you may be familiar with already. For example, one section covers keywords and if you don’t know how important having the right keywords for your book is by now, then you must have been living on Mars. "Some of the things he suggests are so simple" Some of the things he suggests are so simple that it left me with my mouth hanging open thinking “Why haven’t I heard of this before?” (Answer: because I hadn’t read this book before) I don’t want to spoil David’s sales, but I’ll give you just one example, as a teaser. It relates to books that are set up as a series. When you link your book to Amazon from a non-Amazon ad (eg a Facebook ad), don’t use the link that takes the reader to the Amazon page for Book 1. Use the link that takes the reader to the Amazon page for the series. Why? Three reasons (but there may be more): 1. There is less competition on that page – it is reserved for the books in your series and if there are any “also bought” or “recommended for you” lists they will appear below all of your books. Which is probably well below the bottom of the screen where readers won’t see them unless they scroll down. 2. If someone is on the series page, they may buy not only book 1, but possibly book 2 as well. So, you get two sales for one ad click. You may get lucky and they buy book 3 as well. 3. Holy of holies, they may buy all the books in the series in one go (series readers love to binge), because that is an option on the page. "I’ll email you back a photo of me eating my hat." So, when I was saying that an ad that sells 10 books a day could sell 100 books a day, this is one of the ways that it might happen (if there are 10 books in the series). You see how simple that idea is, and how simple it is to implement. And it appears very early in the book, so you know there is a lot more to come. This book is full of stuff like that and if you don’t find something that you can implement straight away then email me and tell me and I’ll email you back a photo of me eating my hat. But that is the simple stuff. The real secrets are a lot more complicated. If I were to ask you what the difference is between best-seller lists and the popularity of your book, what would you answer? "it is the popularity of your book that decides how visible it is on Amazon" Obviously I can’t hear you, but I’m guessing you said “there is no difference”. You could not be more wrong. And it is the popularity of your book that decides how visible it is on Amazon, not the best seller rankings (or the book's sales rank). OK, the two things can be the same, but a lot of the time they aren’t. Popularity, rather than best-seller rankings, drives what Amazon puts into “also bought” and “recommended for you” lists which are crucial for selling without having to advertise. They also drive recommendations for Kindle Unlimited subscribers, which is something I covered in a last week’s blog (you see, all these things join up). I won’t try to explain the differences, because that is David Gaughran’s job. All I can say is that once you have read the book you’ll be wondering, as I was, how you didn’t know that before. (Answer: see above re not having read this book before). It is this insider knowledge and the intensive research into the subject that makes this book (a) worth the £3.99 you paid for it (UK price) and (b) a good investment because the purchase price will be repaid very quickly. And this concept comes before we’re even halfway through the book! David provides links to free resources on his website so that you don’t have to remember everything he says in the book. These resources will help you to implement some of the ideas within the book. Towards the end of the book, David also provides marketing plans that you can tailor to match your own needs and then implement. He is well aware that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to book marketing and therefore he understands the need for flexibility. There is some use of jargon within the book – the word “algorithm” is used a lot, for example. But if you aren’t technologically minded, you don’t have to understand how the guts of the Amazon search engine work. You only have to understand what you have to do to make it work for you, which is what this book is all about. As you can guess, I highly recommend “Amazon Decoded” by David Gaughran and if you want to find out more about the book, click here. If you want to take a look at David Gaughran’s videos on YouTube, I recommend you start with “How To Sell Books” but there are many others. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  The pros and cons of enrolling books in Kindle Select, the Amazon programme behind KindleUnlimited (KU), are many. It is a constant subject of social media debate amongst Indie authors as to whether it is worth doing or not. But most Indie authors don’t know about the hidden secret behind KU which makes it a much more attractive proposition than you might think. But we’ll circle back to that later in the blog. We know that the amount paid by Amazon for Kindle Enrolled Normalised Pages (KENP) read is quite low. Depending on what price you sell your ebooks for, it could be as low as 10% of the royalties you receive for the sale of an ebook. Conversely it could be as high as 90%. It’s a difficult comparison to make because Indie authors sell their books for a far wider range of prices than trad publishers – anything from 99p to £9.99 or more (99c - $9.99).  Our standard price point means that for a complete read of a book enrolled in Kindle Select we get about 50% of the amount we would if the book was purchased as an ebook. Compared to our paperbacks, KU downloads provide a slightly better return, as we have to keep our paperback prices low so we can be more competitive compared to trad publishers and therefore we receive lower royalties for paperbacks. One of the arguments against enrolment is that, under Amazon’s T&Cs for Kindle Select, you can’t “go wide”.  That is to say, you can’t distribute your books through other on-line retailers, such as Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords et al. Here we have a bit of a paradox, because Amazon’s market share for ebooks is around 67% (USA market). So, if you distribute through other channels you only get access to an additional 33% of the total US market. In the UK Amazon’s market share of the ebook market is 79%, which means “going wide” has the potential to reach only an additional 21%. So, what do you gain by “going wide?” Well, obviously you gain access to that wider ebook market. But access is not the same as sales.  To get those sales, you have to market to people who won’t see Amazon ads. Even if you market using universal book links which can direct readers to both Amazon and those wider markets, there is no guarantee that the reader will choose the wider market in preference to Amazon. Given that marketing on platforms other than Amazon is usually more expensive, you could be paying more for sales you would have got with Amazon Ads anyway. And of course we have to take paperback prices into account as well. Amazon’s economies of scale make them the most economic Print on Demand (POD) seller of paperbacks through the internet. None of the other on-line POD providers can get anywhere close to Amazon’s price structures. Whereas the printing costs from most other POD providers means setting a price much closer to that for physical bookshops, which loses you the competitive edge of selling online at a lower price. So, for readers who want to buy paperbacks on-line, Amazon is the first choice seller. At least, it is if they want buy their paperbacks for the lowest prices.  There are other business models of course. If you buy your own ISBN you can use distributors such as Ingram Spark to print and distribute your books, which means it is possible to get books into physical bookshops, which is an ambition for many authors. We have lost the chance to sign up some new authors because our business model doesn’t include distribution through physical book shops. You can even sell your books direct to the public yourself through sites such as Etsy, but they still require marketing if you want to direct readers to your Etsy store.. By going wide you can put your book out for free all the time through platforms such as Smashwords (permafree as it is known) which can sell you the other books in a series. Amazon doesn’t allow you to do that. But a permafree book doesn’t, itself, make you any money. So, there are solid arguments for not enrolling a book in Kindle Select – providing you can convert potential sales into actual sales.  We take a different view. We know that if a book is selling well as an ebook it will also be downloaded through KU. For the current month (July 2024) KU downloads are accounting for 46% of our total income. Based on an average number of KENP per book, the equivalent number of downloads for our books on KU exceeds the number of actual sales we make of those same books. OK, we don’t make so much money from those downloads, but we do make money. And our authors’ names are better known because their books are being read more widely. At the time of writing, we get the equivalent of 1.7 complete KU book downloads for every book we sell in ebook and paperback format combined. To put that in simple numbers, for every 100 ebooks/paperbacks we sell, we get 170 KU complete reads. Now, we have to ask ourselves – and you – how much more marketing would we have to do to sell 170 more books if we wanted to go wide and therefore didn’t enrol those books in Kindle Select? And, of course, marketing costs time and/or money.  Every click we get for an Amazon ad gives readers three buying options: ebook, paperback or KU. If we don’t enrol the books in Kindle Select and go wide instead, readers would only have two buying options: ebook or paperback. Even if our marketing is successful, with the market shares we have quoted above, for every hundred books we sell through Amazon it is unlikely that we would sell enough books through those other retailers, at a high enough price, to make up for the loss of the 170 equivalent book downloads we get through KU. OK, some of those wider channels also offer subscription library services similar to KU, but they are nowhere near as well subscribed as KU and they don’t pay any better.  And now to that secret we mentioned at the top of the blog. If your books are popular as ebooks, Amazon will actually recommend them to their KU subscribers. And the more ebooks you sell or are downloaded on KU, the more Amazon recommends your books, creating a virtuous circle. Basically, you are getting FREE advertising from Amazon – and let’s face it, they don’t give much away for free. KU subscribers get regular email recommendations and, of course, the books appear in the “recommended for you” listings specifically targeted at them. Yes, KU subscribers get their own recommendations listings because not all ebooks are enrolled in Kindle Select, so the standard "recommended for you" listings aren't suitable for KU readers because not all the recommendations will be available to them - and yours will be one of them if it isn't enrolled in Kindle Select. There are reasons why Amazon pushes KU subscribers towards the more popular books, which we won’t go into here. But one thing is for sure – if you aren’t enrolled in Kindle Select, you can’t benefit.  “But”, I hear you say, “To use KU the reader has to have a Kindle.”
“To start with,” we reply. “Kindle is the most popular ereader in the world by a wide margin. But Amazon has thought of that, and the Kindle app allows readers to download books on any phone or tablet, turning them into Kindles as well. It’s been available for years!” Now, we aren’t being paid by Amazon to promote Kindle Select. We are just telling you what we have found and what we have calculated to be the better choice of sales channels for us based on real life data. We do “go wide” with some titles, but they are the ones we have found aren’t downloaded very often through KU, so there is no reason to keep those titles exclusive to Amazon. We don’t know why those books don’t appeal to KU subscribers. We do know that some genres do better on KU than others and that may be one of the reasons. Perhaps we need to do some research into that. But, until then, we lose nothing by going wide with those books. But for all the rest, we enrol our books in Kindle Select so that we can maximise the exposure we get for our authors, which also maximises the income that both we and our authors earn. For us, being enrolled in Kindle Select is a “no brainer”. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. |
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