 I’d like to start this week’s blog by asking you to use your imagination for a moment. Imagine you are at a book fair and a potential customer stops in front of your table. They pick up your book, examine the front cover and then turn it over to read the back matter. Then they raise their eyes and are clearly going to speak to you. “Did you write this?” they ask (they always ask that for some reason, that or “are you the author”?). “Yes.” you reply. “Is there anything you want to know about it?” There then follows a conversation about the book, which can take too many forms for me to cover all possibilities. But one question that is often asked is “What inspired you to write this book?” This is the solid gold question. If you can answer that, you have an almost certain sale. Readers love to know the “origins” story of a book. Not the origin in the way “Batman Begins” is an origins story. This is the origin of the idea, the inspiration that caused the book to be written.  But on Amazon (and other retail sites) you are unable to tell that origins story that increases the likelihood of making the sale. Except that you can tell the story. This blog is about how you can tell it. You might think that you could include it in your blurb. But that is not effective. Readers rarely read all the way to the end of a blurb. After 200 – 300 words they are either interested enough in the book that they stop reading or are so disinterested they are already scrolling through the search results looking for something else. Those latter readers are lost to you, so we can dismiss them for the purposes of this blog (though why they are disinterested is the subject of lots of blogs about blurb writing). The trick now is to turn interested readers into buyers. They are the person stood in front of your table at the book fair asking about how your book came to be written. But they are viewing the book on Amazon, so how can you answer that question?  Finally, we get to the point of this blog, which is that you use A+ Content. This is exclusive to Amazon and Amazon claims that using A+ Content increases conversions to sales by up to 10%. In terms of ad clicks, that’s one extra sale for every 10 clicks. Those extra sales alone could pay for the ad. We have blogged about using A+ Content in the past, so this is something of an update based on what we have learnt since then. First of all, what is A+ Content?  It is space on your Amazon sales page that you can use to provide additional information about your books. There are several ways of using it and different types of sellers will use it in different ways. You have probably seen A+ Content when you have shopped on Amazon and not even been aware of it. You can insert graphics, graphics and text, product comparisons and all sorts of other stuff. But the key thing for this blog is that you can provide that “origins” story. The wordcount is limited, so you have to be brief, but a good writer can pack a lot into very few words. A+ Content is inserted as “modules”. Each module is a combination of graphics, text and other elements that allow you to provide the additional information. In addition, you can add keywords to the graphics, so the measly 7 sets of keywords that KDP allows you for your books is now capable of being multiplied. You can use up to 5 modules. The type of content we are about to describe uses 3 modules, but don’t let that limit you. If you can think of ways to use 5 modules, then use 5 modules. Below is the total display we used for one of our books. We’ll talk you through each module below it.  The top module is the attention grabber. It is the sort of thing we use in our ads, so some of our potential readers may already have seen it. As you can see, it makes it clear that the book we are trying to sell is part of a much longer series, which appeals to a lot of readers. Below the main graphic we have used a module that inserts 3 images side-by-side. Each image features a quote from reviews of the book. We created these as images so we could make them stand out more than just using plain text. Reviews are known to be a critical part of the “sales funnel” because good reviews stimulate a desire in the reader to read the book. Our 3rd and final module is the one we think is doing the heavy lifting. It is where we tell the “origins” story. It is an image on one side (it can be either left or right) along with accompanying text which we have headlined “The Inspiration”. You don't have to use an image, of course, but we think that adds greater interest as images draw the eye to the text. It is this final module that will turn interested readers into buyers. Yes, they may still scroll down the page to see more reviews. Yes, they may still go to the “free sample” to read the opening chapter(s). But mentally they have already bought the book if they like the “origins” story that goes with it. Just an FYI, when the Amazon page is viewed on a phone, the A+ Content is usually the first content to be seen, so you can get a strong message across even before the reader gets to the blurb.  How do you upload A+ Content onto your page?
Go to your KDP bookshelf and select “promote and advertise” from the drop-down menu to the right of the book (3 dots). On the marketing tools page, look for “A+ Content”. Select the marketplace for your book (you can use different content for different Amazon territories) and then go through the various steps to select and insert the modules you want to use. I suggest you read the KDP tutorials on A+ Content before you start if you want to avoid wasting time, because the process isn’t as intuitive as KDP’s designers would like to think. You can find more information here. A+ Content If you want to use A+ Content on both an ebook and paperback page, you have to create it twice, once for each ASIN. If you have enjoyed this blog or found it informative, make sure you don’t miss future instalments by signing up to our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook if you do.
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 Many an “Indie” author will tell you that the hard part of being an author isn’t the writing of the book, no matter how hard that seemed at the time. No, the hard part is actually selling the book so someone can read it. Let’s face it, it doesn’t matter how good the book is, if no one knows it exists then they can’t buy it. Readers rarely, if ever, just stumble across a new author’s work. The book may occasionally appear on Amazon in search results, but that is the equivalent of hoping to hit a fish by throwing a stone into the sea. If the book has no sales history, it will be so far down the results that you would need a submarine to reach it. We have published many blogs on book marketing, but we thought it might be timely to reiterate the key messages.  We’ll start with the marketing mix – the 6 Ps. Some marketing blogs talk about the 4Ps, but we’re a bit like Spinal Tap, our Ps go all the way up to 6 (younger readers may not get that reference). These are:
You might think that ’promotion’ is the most important part of the marketing mix, but it isn’t. It’s people. You can promote your ‘product’ as much as you like, but if you aren’t reaching the right people, then you are wasting your time and, probably, your money. For this reason we are going to discuss each of those Ps in the order we think is of most importance.  The most important “people” is you. It is your knowledge of marketing which will sell books and it is your lack of knowledge that will hold you back. So, the most important thing we can say at this point is to invest in your “people” and learn how to do it properly. You don’t have to undertake a 3 year marketing degree course, but you do need to learn. There are free courses on FutureLearn and there a lot of books on book marketing available. Invest in yourself before you spend money on paying others to do things for you.  The rest of your ‘people’ are the people who read books similar to the ones you write. They are the ones you need to identify and engage with on social media. I say ‘engage’, because if you just ‘promote’ you will lose their interest very quickly. Yes, you can promote, but only as a small part of engagement. You need people to want to follow you, which means having something interesting to say. And if you doubt that, consider this – you’re reading this blog, aren’t you? That is part of our ‘engagement’ with you. Paying companies to blast out posts about your book won’t get you sales -despite their promises of having a gazillion followers. Because only the posts that reach the sort of people that read your sort of books are of any use and only you can identify and engage with those people.  We’ll assume from the start that your book is well written, has a good plot, interesting characters, has been properly edited, proofread and corrected. It is therefore fit for purpose. Only you and your Beta Readers can judge that. So that part of the next P, ‘product’, is OK. After that the most important part of the product is the cover. Despite the warning in the old proverb, people do judge books by their covers. So, yours must be right for your genre. A picture of a woman in a big bonnet walking through a field of daisies isn’t going to sell many sci-fi books. That cover image is what is going to attract people’s attention, so it has to be eye catching and genre appropriate. The second thing about the cover is that it should tell the reader a little bit about what is happening in between the covers. Call it a visual representation of the plot. A picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say, so make sure that the picture on your cover is using those thousand words to best effect.  What about price? How much should you charge for your book? If you are a big-name author, you (or, more likely, your publisher) can get away with charging £13.99 ($15.99) for your book. If you are an Indie author, don’t even think about it. There is some interesting psychology related to pricing. On the one hand, people expect to pay more for a quality product. On the other hand, everyone loves a bargain, even readers. Where you pitch the price of your book is therefore important. Price it at 99p (99c) and readers may think "It can’t be very good if they’re practically giving it away". On the other hand, price it at £13.99 and readers may say "I’m not going to pay that much to read a book by an author I’ve never heard of". We price our ebooks at £4.99 - £5.99 ($5.99 - $6.99) and that seems to be about right for us. But the key messages are (a) don’t undersell yourself and (b) don’t price yourself out of the market. There are times when you can price at 99p, but those are for promotional purposes. That shouldn't be your basic price.  When we talk about ‘place’ we mean the places where you promote your books rather than the places you sell them. We’re going to assume that your book is listed on all the relevant websites and, for those of you that don’t want to give money to Jeff Bezos, all we can say is that if you aren’t on Amazon, you aren’t anywhere. Internet searches always place Amazon at the top of the results, so if someone is actually trying to find your book, that is where it will appear first – and perhaps the only place on the first page of results. But in our terms, place means your choice of social media site(s) on which to engage with readers and your choice is important. If you want to reach young people, then Facebook isn’t the place and X (aka Twitter) is iffy at best, because young people are always on the newest, trendiest platforms. Only 51% of social media users between ages 12 and 18 use Facebook – the second smallest group.  So, you need to do some basic research to make sure the platform(s) you are using are the right ones to reach your target audience. But don’t rely on social media alone. Local newspapers and radio stations are always looking for content, so a short item (written by you) will fill some column inches for them or an interview will fill five minutes of radio time. But, again, don’t expect them to find you. You have to reach out to them. Also, check your local community resources (libraries, schools, churches, clubs, societies, etc) for events where you can go along and talk about your work (and maybe sell a few copies). One thing about newspapers and other media – don’t pay to go chasing it. If it is offered, great, but the sales it brings aren’t worth the money you have to pay PR people to get it for you.  Promotion can be anything from a Facebook post to a video, podcast, a free extract or paid for advertising. I don’t aim to cover all of those. Instead I’ll focus on the one that you have to pay for – advertising. Social media (and Amazon) has given us all the ability to run relatively cheap advertising campaigns. But which ones work depends on the advertising channel you use. There is no point in paying for an advert on Facebook if hardly any of your target audience ever uses Facebook. We can tell you where we get the best return on our advertising investment – but that would be more confusing because we use different platforms for different books, because different audiences use different social media platforms. What we can tell you is that each platform (including Amazon ads) has its peculiarities when it comes to advertising. Whether it’s how you use keywords, what images you use, what text you use to accompany the images, etc are all different on different sites. It pays to advertise but you have to know how to advertise on each specific platform you use in order to get the best results.  You have to learn to use each site. There are myriad books on the subject and videos on YouTube. Read and watch before setting up your first ad and you may save yourself a lot of money and heartache. Test your ads before you commit a large budget to them. A few £ or $ spent running a test can save you a lot more in the longer term. One tip we will give you is that Google Ads don’t seem to work. Not for us and not for the gurus we have consulted. Google Ads may be great for some types of product, but they don’t seem to work for books. But one important detail about advertising. Make sure your advert includes the following:
 You’re now wondering what I’m going to say about ‘process’. Actually, not a lot. I’ve tried to get the messages in this blog in the order you need to address them. That’s about all the ‘process’ you need to worry about at the moment. But if you want to be successful your ‘process’ must also include research:
Without that research, you may as well be standing on a street corner shouting ‘buy my book’. And you will be no more successful. And, if doing research sounds like too much hassle, then good luck getting people to stumble across your book by chance. If you have found this blog informative or entertaining (or both) then make sure not to miss future editions by signing up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for joining. Just click on the button below.  In our blog a couple of weeks ago I posted a table (the one to the left) that showed the way read through rates for books in a series declined the longer the series ran. I said at the time that there were reasons for that decline – some author driven and some reader driven – and that the explanations were really the subject for a whole different blog. This is that blog. This table shows the “benchmark” average read through rates for a series. The average is probably skewed by series with very high read through rates, such as the Harry Potter books, Jack Reacher books and others. I suggested that read through rates of 70% from book 1 to book 2 for the average Indie author probably weren’t to be expected. But I also suggested that a read through rate of less than 50% was a matter for concern.  Let’s start with the reader driven reasons why the read through rate for a series isn’t 100% every time. Firstly, not every series is going to appeal to every reader. They may enjoy book 1, but they may decide that 1 book is enough and they want to find something different to read. That’s fair enough. I have enjoyed many a book but not gone on to read anything else by the same author, because I fancied something different. The next reason is “reader fatigue”. This is readers who have read book 1 and maybe also book 2, but are starting to get a little bit bored with the series. Like the first cause above, the reader is hankering after something a little bit different and book 3 of your epic saga is not going to provide that - or so they believe. I have experienced that with the Jack Reacher books. Having read several, I have taken a break, and I haven’t yet gone back to them.  The final reason is distraction. The reader has every intention of reading the next book in the series, but they just happen to see a “shiny object” on Amazon, or maybe someone recommends a book to them, and they decide to read that instead. They feel sure they will return to your series later, but they never seem to get around to it because there are always more shiny objects and book recommendations. eBooks make distraction so much easier to interfere with sales, because a hard copy book sitting on a table or bookshelf is hard to ignore, but one hidden away on a Kindle is far less intrusive. I am as guilty of this as anyone. I have actually returned to a series downloaded through KindleUnlimited only to be told that the reading date has expired and I’m going to have to download it again. So, I go onto Amazon to do that, only to be distracted by another shiny object. There is nothing much you can do about any of these reader behaviours. The best you can hope to do is make your series so compelling that boredom and distraction can’t find a way in.  Now we come to author-based reasons for poor read through rates. These the author can fix, but they have to realise that they have a problem so that they know they have something to fix. First of all, there is optimising the series to improve read through rates. It has to be set up on Amazon (and elsewhere) as a series. If it isn’t then read through rates will suffer because people think they are buying a standalone book. It also has to have a series blurb that is every bit as compelling as the blurbs for the individual books. The easiest book you will ever sell is to someone who has just enjoyed one of your books and wants to read another. This means setting up your “back matter” at the end of the book to make it easy for the reader. Include the opening chapter of the next book (perhaps more than one chapter if they are short). I would suggest at least 5k words. It is normal for readers to read those and once they have started, they find it difficult to stop – so you don’t really have to do anything else except make it easy for them to find the rest of the book.  Which means putting a link of the extract in the ebook so that they can click straight through to the sales page and hit that “buy now” button. Make it a universal link so it goes to the right page for the territory in which the reader lives, because the more times they have to click the less likely it is that they will buy. Make sure the link goes to the series page – not to the individual page for book 2 (or whatever book it is). There are very sound reasons for linking to the series page. First of all, there are no adverts on that page – so no shiny objects to tempt the reader away. Secondly, there is a great big button that allows the reader to buy the whole series at once – which some readers do. Even if they don’t buy the whole series, they may buy more than one book. It is a smart button, so it knows which books in the series the reader has already bought and doesn’t include those in the price. It even knows when you are running a Kindle Countdown Deal so it will adjust the price for the series. One important thing to know about series pages is that every time you add a book to the series, Amazon changes the ASIN. That means that you have to create new universal links for it and change them in all your marketing and your backmatter. If you don’t the reader will see a “page not found” message and you will lose the sale.  Next up is category selection. Some readers only read a single genre of book. They have seen yours, thought it was in the genre they like and bought the book. They may even enjoy it up to a point. But they won’t buy the next in the series because it isn’t in their favoured genre. Book covers are the usual cause of the reader being misled, but if it shows up in a category search under the wrong category, that will also cause the problem. So, choose your category or categories with care and make sure the cover is appropriate for those categories. You may think that is a pretty obvious point to make, but some authors mistakenly think that listing their book in the most popular categories will be good for sales. It isn’t, because the readers who buy by category alone don’t like being misled. It can also screw up your advertising strategy big time but that, again, is the subject for a different blog  But the main reason for poor read through rates is a bit more difficult for authors to accept.
It may be that readers just don’t like the first book, so they aren’t interested in buying the second. There can be many reasons for that dislike: poor quality writing, uninteresting characters, poorly structured plot, too many typos and a whole lot more. You have to identify those issues and fix them, or you will never get good read through rates for the series. It is the major reason for the benchmark read through rate from book 1 to book 2 being only 70% in the first place. For the Indie author that rate (as explained above) is going to be lower anyway, but you can improve it if you can fix the worst issues. So, to summarise. There is nothing much you can do to change reader behaviour when it comes to improving read through rates, but there is plenty you can do to fix author behaviour. You can either accept your poor read through rates – or you can take action. It’s over to you. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  One of the perks of enrolling your ebook in Kindle Select is that you can also register them for Kindle Monthly Deals. These are like Kindle Countdown Deals, but they run for a month rather than the normal maximum of 7 days. And you can't just ask for it. Your book has to be selected for a deal - The author has no idea when they will happen, they just get an email saying their book has been nominated and, if selected, they get another email saying when the deal will start, which is usually the 1st day of the following month. But the author doesn’t have to accept the deal and whether they should or not is the subject of debate in some Facebook groups. Authors aren’t sure if they are worth the loss of royalties inherent in discounting their book to 99p (or 99c, or whatever), The time authors normally want to provide discounts is when they are launching a new book and want to garner some interest in their existing books by running a promotion, in the hope that new readers will buy into the new book as well. It’s a well-established marketing strategy and is known to work.  But if you are being offered a Kindle Monthly Deal at a time when you aren’t marketing a new book, is there any point in accepting the deal? That was what we wondered when a book by one of our authors was selected for a deal for February. It was actually a second bite at the cherry, because the same book had been nominated for a deal in January but hadn’t been selected for the deal that month. That was convenient because it had given us some time to consider the pros and cons and advise our author accordingly.  The selected book is Book 1 of a 9 book series and if the deal created enough interest, we could hope for some good read through rates further down the line. Unfortunately, while Amazon are happy to discount the book for a whole month, they do little or no marketing for it, so it is up to the author or, as in our case, the publisher to invest in the marketing in order to make the best out of the opportunity. And this is the dilemma faced by most Indie authors when offered a Kindle Monthly Deal. Can they afford to invest in marketing in order to capitalise on the deal? For us it wasn’t too difficult a decision. We had run Kindle Countdown deals for the same book on several occasions and always got a good read through rate, so we believed we would get a good enough read through rate this time to justify the marketing costs. But it wasn’t guaranteed. There was still a risk. Running a marketing campaign for the 28 days of February wasn’t going to be cheap. But we decided to take the chance anyway.  So, we set up some Facebook ads for the book to start on the first day of the deal and run for the full month. We already run ads for the book on Amazon, so there was no need to do anything additional there. In addition to the ads, we put together some social media promotional posts as well, using our usual channels, as they are free, so we may as well use them. And then we waited to see what would happen. The most obvious thing was that we got significantly more sales for the book during the month than we would usually get. To be precise it was 5 times more than we would get for the same book in an average month and double what we got for the month when we ran our last Kindle Countdown Deal. But what about payback – would we get the read through levels we needed to pay for the marketing and leave us in profit? The answer to that was immediate.  Sales of Book 2 of the series started to increase above the average level from about halfway through the month, as early readers finished Book 1. Towards the end of the month, we started to see an increase in sales for Book 3 and, as we moved into March, we started to see the same trend for books 4 onwards. As this blog post goes live, I can tell you that we have run into profit and sales are still rising. But there is a knock-on benefit that has to be taken into account. As we have mentioned before, the Amazon algorithm loves an upward sales trend, and a Kindle Monthly Deal provides that. If the algorithm sees a book that is selling, it does its best (within the rules laid down by Jeff Bezos) to help it sell more, because that helps Jeff Bezos to make more money. What the algorithm does is include the book in the “recommended for you” and “also bought” carousels that a lot of readers use to find their next book. So, the Kindle Monthly Deal has created momentum that is going to carry the book forward for several weeks into the future. And the other thing that the algorithm does is push the book towards KindleUnlimited readers, so you get an increase in KENP reads off the back of the deal.  If you are the author of standalone books, you will be wondering what this might mean for you. Unfortunately, as we were marketing a series, we can’t answer that.
But if you have more than one title in your catalogue, it would make sense for satisfied readers to go looking for more books by you if they have enjoyed the discounted book. But if you don’t have any other titles, then there isn’t really any way to make a profit on a Kindle Monthly Deal. You might be able to break even during the campaign if your marketing budget isn’t too extravagant. But you may also gain from the momentum that we mentioned above, which may mean you make a profit further down the line. However, we wouldn’t want you to think that the profit is guaranteed. Much will depend on how much you spend on your marketing and how targeted it is. If you only have one book out, this is not a time for a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” approach to marketing (if there is ever a time for it nowadays). So, if you are offered a Kindle Monthly Deal, please do give it serious consideration, but make use of data to inform your decision. We would not have been so confident about accepting the deal had we not previously seen such good results when running Kindle Countdown deals, or if we hadn’t seen good read through rates for the series in general. 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.  How much can you afford to spend to promote a series when you have a new book coming out? Let’s say Book 1 has been out for a while and you have Book 2 coming out shortly. You decide to run a discounted price promo for Book 1 hoping to get sell through for Book 2. It’s a common tactic and it is known to work. We use it quite regularly. But people have to know about the discounted promo, so you decide to either run some ads focused on Book 1, run some stacked promos with some of the reputable sites (BookBub, Fussy Librarian etc) or a combination of the two. But how much can you afford to spend on those promos and ads?  Because of its discounted price, Book 1 isn’t going to give you much of a financial return (in fact, we’re going to totally ignore it), so you are going to be relying on Book 2 selling well in order for you to end up in profit. Unfortunately, you don’t have any sales data on which to base any assumptions about sales for Book 2, so you could spend a lot of money on your promos and ads but end up making a loss. That is what this blog is all about. We have come up with a calculation to allow you to forecast your royalties for Book 2 so you can make an informed judgement. But first some “health warnings”.  1. This method provides a forecast, not a prediction. It is not guaranteed that the reality will match up. 2. You will have to base some of your calculations on historical data which might not be replicated in the future. 3. It makes some assumptions based on industry benchmarks and your books may not perform to the benchmarks. 4. Because of 1 – 3 above, the figure you end up with is “ball park”, an estimate. It may not be 100% accurate. But that is a limitation we feel is acceptable. Please bear those health warnings in mind when you do your own calculations.  Your first step is to gather data on the cost of your promos (before you actually pay for them), which means looking at the promo sites and identifying the cost of the packages you want to use. Add those costs together to give you your promo costs, which I shall refer to as PC. Next decide what daily budget you want to set for your ads and for how long you wish to run them. So, if you want to set a £5 daily budget and run the ads for 5 days, that’s a total of £25. We’ll call that AB for advertising budget. Add AB to PC to give you an overall cost for your marketing, which we will call MC for marketing cost. Next you need to look at your historical sales data. If you have run a discounted promo for Book 1 in the past, how many books did it sell? If you are running a Kindle Countdown Deal, you may have to go back 90 days or further to find that out. If you haven’t run a discounted promo before, work out your average daily sales for the previous 90 days (total sales over 90 days divided by 90). A discounted promo would be expected to sell more copies than the 90 day average, but we don’t know how many more so we have to stick with data that we know is accurate. Whichever figure you are using, we will call it SD for sales data.  The benchmark for “read through” from Book 1 to Book 2 is 70%, which means that for every 100 copies of Book 1 you sell, you can expect to sell 70 copies of Book 2. So, work out 70% of SD to predict how many copies of Book 2 you can expect to sell per day during the promo period, then multiply by the number of days over which you are going to run the promo (PD), so the sum will be SD x 70% x PD. That will give you your forecast sales (FS) for Book 2. Now you have to calculate your royalties for Book 2. The amount per book is displayed on the pricing tab of your KDP pages for the book, so it is FS x R (for royalties) to give FI (forecast income). If you divide FI by MC you will get a number. If that number is less than 1, then your promos and ads are forecast to run at a loss. If you get a number greater than 1, your promos and ads are forecast to give you a profit.  If you have forecast a loss you have some decisions to make. 1. You can decide not run your promos, not to run your ads or both. 2. You can reduce the number of promos you run, select cheaper packages if there are any, or reduce your daily budget for your ads or a combination of all of those. 3. You can go ahead as planned, hoping that the forecasts are wrong, and you actually sell more copies of Book 2 than expected. But that is much riskier. If you are going to take risks like 3, then you may as well not do the calculations in the first place. If, on the other hand, you have forecast a profit, you could increase your marketing budget in the hope of generating even more sales for Book 1 which should translate into even greater sales of Book 2. What if you have more than two books in the series? OK, that means you will have to forecast sales for Book 2 to Book N, where N is the number of books in the series. First of all, you have to know that it is normal to lose readers after each book, so the audience gets smaller the longer the series runs. There are a variety of reasons for this, some of which are reader related and some of which are author related, but those are the subject for a different blog. I have already told you that the benchmark read through rate from Book 1 to Book 2 is 70%, but the readthrough to Book 3 is 90% of that 70%. The read through to Book 4 is then 90% of that 90% etc. Below is a table showing how many copies of each book in a 9 book series you can expect to sell if you sell 100 copies of Book 1. You can extrapolate those for however many copies of Book 1 you actually sell (figures have been rounded to the nearest whole number). Using the table, you can calculate your total FI from read throughs using the method described above, to work out whether your campaign will make a profit or loss. You will notice that I haven’t mentioned KENP reads from KindleUlimited. That’s because they would muddy the waters quite a bit. If you have solid income data for those page reads which relate directly to previous promos, you can add that into your FI if you wish, but it is a simpler calculation to leave them out.  OK, we will be the first to admit that this method is a little bit “rough and ready”. But ask yourself this question: “Is it better to have a rough and ready calculation, or no calculation at all?” We think you will conclude that rough and ready is better than nothing when it comes to risking your money. Before we end this blog, we have one more thing to say about those benchmark figures. They are based on industry averages for read throughs for a series. However, we don’t know what the shape of the bell curve is that produced those benchmarks.  It is highly likely that bestselling series like Harry Potter, Jack Reacher, Game Of Thrones etc are skewing the figures and producing a high average. That means that it is possible that your Indie pubbed space opera or dark fantasy series isn’t going to achieve a 70% read through from Book 1 to Book 2.
That is a reasonable assumption to make. However, if your series is achieving less than a 50% read through rate, you need to be asking yourself why. What is it about Book 1 that is discouraging readers from reading Book 2? Is it a marketing thing? Or is there something wrong with Book 1 and readers don’t like it, so they aren’t buying Book 2? You have to decide that for yourself. If it’s something wrong with the book, your reviews will probably tell you, but that is by no means certain. But something is definitely wrong, and you need to find out what it is, or you are going to be spending a lot of money on promos and advertising for little or no return. 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.  A recent post in a writers’ group on Facebook asked for “tips on marketing” and I wept. The person making the post might as well have asked for tips on building a space rocket. Yes, they would get a few tips from people with some knowledge of building space rockets, but they would not provide sufficient depth of information to allow the questioner to build an actual working space rocket. Marketing is something you have to learn from the ground up. If you don’t understand the basics you are probably doomed to waste a lot of time (and possibly money) doing the wrong things, before you eventually discover the right thing to do.  I’m not going to try to write a blog about the whole subject of book marketing. It would require a whole series of blogs to discuss that, and we have written them before (see our blog archives). No, this blog is about one small, but very important, part of book marketing. One of the things that I have never seen anyone say in Facebook writers’ groups, when discussing book marketing, is that the very first marketing decision that has to be made is actually made before a word of the book has been written. It may not seem like a conscious decision, but it is one that is being made anyway. Each author decides whether they are going to (a) write to market or (b) write something truly original.  This is a crucial decision when it comes to marketing a book. A book written to market has a far higher chance of finding an agent and, if self-published, of selling a lot of copies. Writing to market is about riding the current trends in books. For example, according to this article, a rising trend in 2024 was romantacy. This is a mix of fantasy and romance. So, if you like writing fantasy or you like writing romance, then conflating the two stands a good chance of success right now. The author of the article talks about it as though it is a genre, but it isn’t. Romance is a genre, fantasy is a genre, but romantacy is a subgenre of the two. It will generally be listed under the fantasy heading. But that is a technicality. If you want to make a quick buck out of writing, then that is one of the subgenres to head for.  However, the book will only do well so long as it adheres to the norms for the subgenre. It must contain the sorts of tropes that the readers expect to see in a romantacy novel, or the readers are likely to post unfavourable reviews and that will kill the book. Some people (not us) would describe that as “formulaic” and turn their noses up at the very idea of writing to market. Many authors choose not to write to market. They don’t like their creativity being curtailed in that way. They want to be free to write their story their way. So, many authors eschew writing to market and concentrate on trying to find something original to write about. And there is a market for originality too. There always has been and always will be. But it isn’t quite as attractive to agents who want something they can take to publishers which the publishers are actively seeking.  To use a metaphor, it’s difficult to sell fish to someone who wants to eat fowl. And it is even harder to sell a species of fish that no one has ever seen before, even to people who like eating fish. But all trends start somewhere. No one had ever heard of romantacy until quite recently. The earliest articles discussing it that I have been able to find were in early 2024, it is that new. So, your new original novel may be the big “write to market” subgenre for next year. But in marketing terms, the two approaches to writing are very different, so they require different marketing strategies. Yet no one is mentioning that in social media posts about marketing. Which means the Indie author can spend a lot of time using an unsuitable marketing strategy to sell their books. We are not advocating either approach to writing. If someone were to submit a written-to-market romantacy to us we would give it due consideration because we are a business and we like to make money.  But part of our mission is also to discover new creativity, so we would also consider something that isn’t written to market and to give the author a start in the business.
But we would use different strategies to market the two different books. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  The Amazon algorithm hates spikes in book sales. There, now you know. Authors used to use a technique called the “book bomb” to get their books selling, but no one talks about those anymore. A book bomb was a splurge of advertising and promotions on a single day to send a book zooming up the sales rankings, so it would get noticed. But Amazon decided it didn’t like those sorts of spikes, because they weren’t sustainable in terms of sales. If all the marketing was happening on a single day, sales soon started to drop off on subsequent days. Part of that is because of the way that Amazon calculates sales rankings. A sale is counted as a whole number on the day it’s made, but the next day it is only counted as ½ a sale. The day after that it is a ¼ of a sale and so on until the fraction becomes so small it is meaningless.  That is why you can be riding high in the sales rankings one day and you’re pondlife the next. So, Indie authors had to find a new way of getting the Amazon algorithms working for them that didn’t create a spike but created a trend instead. What they came up with was the stacked promo, or promo stacking if you want to express it the other way around. A well-planned stacked promo campaign can gather you a lot of sales over a longer time period, which creates a trend and gets the attention of the Amazon algorithms. They can also be used in conjunction with Facebook and Amazon ads  That’s because Amazon wants to sell books because selling books makes them money. And the easiest books for Amazon to sell are the ones that are already selling because the author is promoting them. So, if your sales are creating an upward trend, as they should be over the period of a stacked promotion for a discounted book, the Amazon algorithms will do two things. The first is that they will start to include them in their recommendations listings. You know the ones in the carousels that appear on the sales page for books and act as competition. That’s the “recommended for you” list and the “also bought” list.  That’s basically free advertising for your book, as a lot of people buy from those lists because it saves them having to do more searches. The second thing it does only applies if your book is subscribed to Kindle Select, the driver behind Kindle Unlimited. A lot of “wide” authors don’t know this, but if your book is in Kindle Select and its starts to sell as an ebook, then it will be recommended to Kindle Unlimited subscribers for them to download. This is because Amazon assumes that if people are buying your book, other people will download it for free on KU and that justifies the subscription price Amazon charges. That is more free advertising and the majority of 6 figure earning authors make most of their money this way, not through sales of the ebook.  But if you just go for a sales spike, none of that happens. Do stacked promos work? All I can say is that we have just run one for our book The Magi and yes, it worked. How much does it cost? The most expensive book promo site is BookBub and their Featured Deals start at around $100 (£80) and can run as high as $1,000 for the most popular genres. I think it is fair to say that you need to be selling quite a lot of books already if you want to book a slot with them. But many sites offer far cheaper packages than that and they also have a significant reach. They start from around $20 and I don’t think any charge more than $100, but check their prices for yourself.  Unsurprisingly the best sites are much in demand, so plan ahead. You need to be looking at least 30 days ahead if you want to secure a slot on a specific day or in a particular week, but for some genres you might have to look as far ahead as 60 days. There are so many book promo sites, how do you know which are good, which are bad, and which are scammers? I’ll provide a link at the end of the blog to another blog by book marketing guru David Gaughran, that lists sites he has used personally, and we have also used some of them. You can trust all those sites. But by all means check with other sources if you don’t trust us or David Gaughran. In fact, I recommend that you do. So, there you have it. Stacked promos are great for promoting your back catalogue on a tight budget, but they also work well as a promotion for a new book in a series, where you can list Book 1 at a heavy discount (99c or even free), Book 2 at a higher price and the latest book at full price. Basically, you are building a pricing ladder to encourage the reader to climb down deep into your series and you can do that for anything from a 3 book series to a 10 book (or more) series.  RESOURCES
For David Gaughran’s blog on stacked promotions, including the best sites to use, click here. For more information on making the Amazon algorithms work for you, we recommend David Gaughran’s book “Amazon Decoded”. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  When is a book not a book? When it is a Christmas Gift. This blog may be a little late for you to do anything with the content right now, but we hope that by passing on its message it gives you something to think about when marketing for the next year. If you already have a marketing plan, this is something that you can add in and if you haven’t – why not? Those books aren’t going to sell themselves! Fail to plan - plan to fail.  As regular readers will know, we are great advocates of advertising, both on Amazon and on Facebook, so we thought we’d like to share a bit of a success story with you. You could call this a “case study” but that makes it sound a bit fancier than it was. We have one book in our catalogue that makes it ideal for a certain type of person. We’ll get to the details in a moment, but we’ll start with the “back story” first. We noticed back in December 2023 that sales of the book picked up quite considerably and we sold more copies that month than we had during the previous 11. Being curious sorts of people, we wondered why.  We had almost no data that we could analyse, because the growth in sales was “organic”. We hadn’t advertised the book and we hadn’t even promoted it that much, so we had no idea who had bought it. But we did have one very important bit of data. All the copies sold were in paperback, not ebook format. That was what gave us our biggest clue. Asking a few contacts in the book marketing world brought us the suggestion that the copies were being sold not as books – but as Christmas gifts. Yes, of course they were books, but that wasn’t why they were being bought. They were being bought so that they could be wrapped up in nice Christmas paper, to be given to someone else. The buyer had no intention of reading the book themselves, which is very unusual in the book marketing world.  So, in our marketing plan for November and December 2024 we decided we would aim not at the book buying market, but at the gift giving market. Not all of it, of course. That market is huge and not everyone who buys gifts is going to buy a book as a gift. But there was still quite a large segment of the market that we could aim at. We estimated the market size to be in region of 2 million people. OK, so how did we arrive at that figure?  The book in question is aimed at golfers, of whom there is an estimated one million in the UK. But we weren’t going to be targeting the golfers, we were going to be targeting the people who would be buying Christmas gifts for golfers. That is likely to be a much larger figure, when you take into account spouses/partners, children, siblings and friends. In creating our ads, therefore, we didn’t use our normal approach of saying “This is a great book for all you golfers” We changed our approach entirely and said “This is the ideal gift for the golfer in your life”. That affected the way we targeted the book in our advertising. We are looking primarily at Facebook and Amazon ads here.  The crossover was in pricing. We reduced the book’s price to make it a little bit more attractive to gift givers who were on a tight budget. That would also make it more attractive for children to give to parents, uncles, aunties etc. In our Amazon keyword targeted ads we also used keywords related to Christmas gifts. Christmas and Xmas were included in all the keyword phrases we put into the ads. But on Facebook it meant we didn’t try to target golfers, as they weren’t the people we were trying to sell to. We left our targeting as wide as possible, so that anyone who was buying a gift for a golfer might consider it.  In terms of the graphics and the advertising text, we also focused on the gift giving opportunity. The image next to this para is one of the ones we used. As you can see, we magnified the gift giving potential of the book as well as pointing out the price reduction.* In the ad’s primary text, we also focused on the gift giving opportunity, making more of that than we did of the content of the book. Non golfers would hardly pay attention to the book’s content. They probably read little, if any, of it before they wrapped it up.  So, to the results of the advertising campaigns. Immediately after launching the ads at the beginning of December sales weren’t any better than they had been throughout the year, but they got better rapidly. As the month progressed and people started to run out of time to buy gifts for their loved ones, sales started to accelerate. In week 2 of the month sales doubled. In week 3 they quadrupled and hit their peak over the weekend of 20th/21st December, which was pretty much the latest date by which delivery could be guaranteed in time for Christmas. Part of the slow start to sales we experienced at the beginning of the month we think was down to the Facebook algorithm “learning” who it should show the ads to. After all, we hadn’t given it a target audience to work with. From its scan of the images and text we used it probably thought it should be showing the ad to golfers. But it would then have learnt that the audience was much wider, which was when we started to see the acceleration in sales.  So, the lessons we learnt:
While this blog has mainly been about marketing for Christmas, it also suggests opportunities for selling other genres of books at other times of the year. For example, selling romance books in the run up to Valentines Day, or selling books as birthday gifts at any time of the year. There are many different days throughout the year dedicated to particular causes or events (Hint: May The Fourth Be With You) and many of those offer opportunities for specially targeted sales campaigns. *Editor’s note: the book is no longer available at that price. 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. This week we have a guest blog from Gene Ramsey. Gene , a seasoned marketing professional, is sharing his downsizing adventure. After his youngest son, Jacob, recently got married and left home, Gene and his wife found themselves in an empty nest. Recognizing the marketing principles of consumer behaviour and market segmentation, Gene and his wife embarked on a strategic downsizing journey. With "Downsizing Dad", Gene shares the ups and downs of their experience, offering valuable insights for others considering a similar lifestyle change. He demonstrates how his marketing background informed their decision-making process, from identifying their needs and preferences to effectively navigating the complexities of the downsizing market. In this blog Gene adapts his approach to strategic decision making to show how it can be used by the Indie book publisher. All images courtesy of Pexels.  In today’s vibrant digital landscape, creatives such as artists, fashion designers, and writers have unprecedented opportunities to showcase their work and carve out a unique space. However, the vast sea of talent also poses a challenge: standing out. This article from delves into robust strategies to not only capture attention but also sustain a growing audience in your creative endeavours. Harness the Power of Social Media  You must consider social media platforms as your digital stage. Platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok cater specifically to visual and creative content, making them ideal for displaying your work. Build a following by consistently posting high-quality images, engaging videos, and insightful stories about your creative process. Engage actively with your followers by responding to comments and messages. This interaction fosters a community around your work, enhancing your visibility and appeal. Seek Wisdom Through Mentorship  Navigating the creative industry can be daunting without guidance. Seek out mentors who have successfully carved a niche in your field. These relationships provide you with a wealth of knowledge on navigating market trends, pricing, and consumer behaviour. Mentors can also introduce you to networks and opportunities that were previously out of reach, accelerating your growth and helping you avoid common pitfalls. Kickstart with Crowdfunding  Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo offer more than just funding—they provide a platform to validate your ideas in the real market. Launch a campaign for a new project or collection, and you’ll gather not only funds but also a base of supporters who believe in your vision. This initial validation is crucial and can serve as a springboard for future endeavours. Craft a Comprehensive Business Plan  To ensure your creative talent flourishes, anchor it with a robust business strategy. Your business plan should detail your vision, analyze the market landscape, define your marketing approaches, and project financial outcomes, serving as a comprehensive roadmap for success. This pivotal document not only steers your creative projects but also attracts the investors or partners necessary to expand your reach and impact. Personalize with Email Marketing  Through email marketing, you can forge a direct and intimate link with your audience, turning casual viewers into dedicated followers. By sending out newsletters filled with exclusive content, sneak peeks, and early access to new releases, you invite your subscribers into the inner circle of your creative process. This approach not only deepens customer loyalty but also continuously re-engages your audience, keeping their enthusiasm for your work alive and vibrant. Market Your Masterpiece  For writers, understanding how to market your books effectively is essential. Develop a marketing plan that includes book signings, readings, online promotions, and collaborations with other artists. Utilizing platforms like Goodreads for writers or Etsy for crafters can also help you reach audiences looking for your specific creative niche. Optimize for Visibility  As a creative, using SEO techniques to sprinkle relevant keywords throughout your online content can significantly boost your visibility. By optimizing your portfolio, blog, or online store, you ensure your work ranks higher in search results, capturing the attention of more potential fans and customers. This strategic visibility not only draws increased traffic but also connects your art with audiences that are actively seeking your unique expressions. Educate Through Workshops  Conducting workshops or online courses elevates your status as an expert while drawing in an audience eager to learn from your expertise. As you share your skills, you simultaneously open a new revenue stream that benefits both you and your participants. These learners often become advocates for your work, spreading the word through their own social channels and broadening your influence. This ripple effect not only increases your exposure but also solidifies your position as a leader in your creative domain.
Achieving prominence in your creative career goes beyond mere talent; it calls for an active engagement with both digital tools and traditional tactics. Each piece of content you create and every interaction you have are integral to constructing your legacy in the arts. By embracing these tools today, you can forge a path that will lead audiences worldwide to recognize and celebrate your work. Engage relentlessly, innovate consistently, and watch as your efforts transform into a celebrated artistic journey. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  When you try to do something, whether it is new to you or familiar, it is always useful to know how the process works. So, it is with selling a book. But to understand how the selling process works, you have to understand it from the point of view of the buyer – which could be you. Imagine you go to a shoe shop to buy new shoes. You may not realise it, but before you even enter the shop you have already made some critical decisions. For example, why did you choose that particular shop and not a different one? Now you are inside the shop, you browse the styles available, and you pick one out. Why did you pick that particular style and not of the hundreds of others on display? What drew you to it? You may not end up buying that shoe, but something about it captured your interest, if only fleetingly. Now, fast forward to the point where you are at the checkout, paying for the shoes you have selected. In terms of decision making, how did you get from picking a style to actually handing over your money? As you can see, from deciding you need new shoes to actually walking out of the shop with your new shoes in your hands, you have gone on a decision making journey. And you go on that same journey no matter what you are buying.  More importantly for you as an author, when readers want to buy a new book they go on that same decision making journey. Your job, as an Indie author, is to guide them through that journey so that it is your book that they buy and not one by another author. It is your job to make sure they buy your Nikes and not someone else’s Adidas. BTW, I’ll be providing some links to useful resources at the end of the blog (for selling books, not shoes) Fortunately, psychologists and experts in sales have mapped out the selling journey for you so that you can learn the path. Unfortunately for you, knowing the path by itself is not enough. You have to do some practical things in order to ensure that the path you know is the same as the path your readers will take. But the path on the map can be described using a simple acronym: AIDA*.  A – Attraction. I – Interest D – Desire A – Action. Those four words make up the “sales funnel” as it is known. That’s the path someone takes while making buying decisions. And we do it every time we buy something, whether we realise we are doing it or not. It is so ingrained in us that a lot of the decisions we make while going through the sales funnel have actually become subconscious. OK, those four words by themselves don’t mean a lot, so I’ll now expand on each in turn to describe what you have to do in practical terms.  Attraction Returning to our shoe shop analogy for the moment, you have to attract the buyer to your shop and make sure they don’t go to another shop instead. In terms of your book that means attracting them to wherever you sell your book. Generally speaking that means the Amazon sales page for whatever book you are trying to sell. But if you don’t sell on Amazon, the same techniques apply. This is about how you communicate with your readers to tell them what book you are selling and where you are selling it. This communication can take many forms, but typically they are social media posts, email newsletters or advertisements. Making these things as attractive as possible is key to the “A” in the sales funnel. So, you need professional standard graphics for your social media posts, newsletters and emails. But the graphics are going to feature your product, which means that your book cover has to be attractive too. And if the reader is attracted by what you have done, they will click the link to find out more about the book. The same applies if the book shows up in search results (I’m not going to get into keywords. If you don’t know about them by now then search the archives for past blogs on the subject). However, in search results the reader will only have the book’s cover and title to work with, which means they have to do an even better job.  Interest OK, you’ve got the reader into your shop - onto the Amazon page (or wherever you sell) for your book. Now you have to turn attraction into interest and that is the job of your blurb. Many authors think that the blurb actually sells the book. It doesn’t. It just nudges the reader through the sales funnel to the next stage. That doesn’t diminish the importance of the blurb, because if it doesn’t pique the reader’s interest, they won’t take that next step and the sale will be lost. So, learning how to write a good blurb is a critical skill in marketing your book. And once you have learnt how to do it, you need to test the blurb to find out if it is as good as you think it is. But the important thing to remember about the blurb is that it has to make the reader want to know more about the book. So, trying to tell the story in your blurb isn’t a very good idea, because if the reader knows the story, they don’t have to buy the book. A lot of blurbs read more like flash fiction than they do a sales pitch. A good blurb stimulates questions, and the reader has to move along the sales funnel in order to get the answers. If you provide the answers in your blurb the reader doesn’t have to buy the book. So, you have to tease the reader. There are just four things you need to tell the reader within the blurb.
Nothing else really matters, so:
But above all, it has to sound exciting, it has to engage with the reader at an emotional level, and it has to leave the reader wanting to know answers to questions they have asked themselves subliminally! When it comes to blurbs, always leave the reader wanting more.  Desire If your blurb has piqued the reader’s interest, they will move along the sales funnel to the next step, which is to desire the book. Many of us will have experienced this in our purchasing lives, that moment where we say “I must have that” about a product. For me it’s usually golf related, for some people it's shoes, for some it's a particular model of car. But for readers it has to be your book! But for your reader it has to be your book. Desire comes from one of two sources and is often a combination of both. Social proof stimulates desire. If other readers are saying your book is a great read, then a new reader will feel confident about buying it. They may buy on the strength of that social proof alone, or they may move on to the other part of the desire equation, which I’ll return to in a moment. On a sales page, social proof comes in the form of reviews. Good strong reviews at 4 stars or better reassures the reader that they are on the right track. This is why reviews have such an impact. I a reader is saying "I loved this book" then other readers will be influenced by that. OK, a brand new book may not have many (or any) reviews, but all is not lost. The other place where desire is stimulated is in the “free sample” (aka “look inside”). Let’s travel back in time to the days when people still went into bookstores to buy books. They didn’t just walk into a bookstore, grab a book and go and pay for it. No, they picked it up, read the blurb on the back cover and, if they were interested, they opened the book and started to read the first few pages. If they got to the point where they ran out of time, there was no way they could put the book back on the shelf. They had to buy it in order to keep reading. The modern day equivalent is the free sample, and it works exactly the same way. If, by the end of the sample, the reader just has to keep reading, they are bound to buy. They may actually reach that point before getting to the end of the sample, which is even better. So those first few thousand words of your book, the ones that are going to be in the free sample, have a lot of work to do to close the deal. If you start off with an info dump about your world, or page after page of backstory, then it is likely that the reader won’t want to carry on reading. Never before has the start of a book been so important.  Action.
This is the “call to action “ or CTA. Fortunately, the retail sites take care of this for us. On Amazon there is a CTA at the end of the free sample, and even if the reader has made up their mind before reaching the end, there is a nice big CTA on the sales page anyway. But your reader has to reach the point where they desire the book, or they won’t respond to the CTA and all the work (and possibly money) you expended on the attraction and interest phases has gone to waste. So, there we have it, the sales funnel from start to finish. If your book isn’t selling, then you have to ask yourself which bit of the sales funnel is letting you down. You then have to ask yourself how to fix it, which is where the resources below may help. For a video on how to make some great graphics for your book, click here. The focus is on Facebook ad graphics, but the same lessons apply to all graphics. The best guide to creating book blurbs I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of them) is Robert J Ryan’s book “Book Blurbs Unleashed”. It really gets into the psychology of blurb writing and once you understand that it will help you to create really effective blurbs. And, bonus, it’s free on KindleUnlimited. Click here to find out more. * The name of a Verdi opera set in Ancient Egypt. If you have never seen it, it’s very good, 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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