 We launched a new book, “Operation Chariot”, at the beginning of June this year. Given the popularity of our “Carter’s Commandos” series of books, we expected this new title to fly off the shelf, as fans of the earlier series came back to read this new offering. We were disappointed, The new book did sell, but not in the volumes we had expected. This puzzled us because we had put a lot of time and effort into marketing the book in advance of its launch. We were sure that the thousands of readers who had enjoyed Carter’s Commandos would be thrilled by this new book. So why wasn’t it selling as well as the Carter’s Commandos series, which is continuing to do well?  We checked the data from our marketing campaign and found that we were getting plenty of link clicks to the sales page. But the clicks weren’t converting to sales. Well, not as many sales as the number of clicks suggested we should be getting. If you are familiar with our previous blogs on marketing, you will know that we have always said that if you are getting link clicks but not getting sales, it means that there is something wrong with your book’s sales page. It might be your cover, it might be your blurb, it might be the reviews, or it might be the “free sample” as Amazon now call their “look inside” feature.  We analysed each of those four things in turn to see what might be putting readers off. We quickly ruled out a problem with the cover. The cover image has been used in all our marketing, so people have seen it already and clicked on the link. That is “social proof” (as it is known) that readers aren’t being put off by the cover, so seeing it again on the sales page is hardly going to put them off buying. This applies to the blurb too. The blurb is the primary text we use in our advertising, so if people have seen the cover image, read the blurb and then clicked the link, it means that the two things have encouraged the link click, not discouraged it. Reviews are a tricky one. This is a new book. It hadn’t been read before, so it doesn’t have any reviews. We’ll have to wait for the jury to return on that but at the time of writing this blog the book has garnered 5 "ratings", all of which are 4 or 5 star. So that just left the free sample.  We clicked on it and saw immediately what the problem was. The free sample opened up on the book’s “foreword”. This was a few paragraphs intended to introduce the reader to the new series, why it had been written and the differences in writing style that might be seen by readers of the “Carter’s Commandos” series. What it didn’t do, however, was get the reader engaged with the story. To get to that the reader had to scroll through the whole thing before they got to the proper opening of the book. Why was the free sample opening on the foreword and not on the first chapter? Because KDP and Amazon’s formatting engine interpreted the foreword as a chapter. So as far as Amazon was concerned, it was displaying the start of the story. Readers, however, could see that it wasn’t the start of the story and some of them were deciding not to scroll through to find the actual start. They just went back to scrolling through whatever platform they had been on before they clicked the link.  We had lost a potential sale. Worse than that, we had paid for a link click before we lost the sale! So, what could we do about that? The answer was simple, if a little unconventional. We moved the foreword from the start of the book to after the end. We even added a short explanation to it, to say why it was at the end and not the beginning. This only affects the Kindle version, of course. The paperback version still has the foreword at the beginning where it should be. But by the time the reader has discovered that, the book is in their hands, and they can flick past it if they don’t want to read it. But the free sample is always taken from the ebook version, so paperback readers will also be taken straight into the story when they read that.  Did it change anything?
Yes it did. The sales graph for the book, which had been consistent but low, suddenly took a step upwards. More copies were sold each day from that point onwards. And it cost us nothing but a little bit of time and effort to find the reasons for the disappointingly low sales and to make the changes to the manuscript. So, if your sales aren’t doing as well as the link clicks from your marketing say they should be doing, why not take a look at the book’s free sample to see if the reader is being excited by what they see on the first page, or being bored by the non-essentials that are put into the opening pages of books. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.
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 Writer’s groups on social media are very popular, and quite rightly so. Writing is, by its nature, a solitary life so it is nice to know that you aren’t alone. A real life writer’s group is better, but if you don’t have regular access to one of those, social media provides a useful alternative. People use writer’s groups to seek advice on a wide range of topics: writing techniques, gaining feedback on their work and, the reason behind this blog, they seek advice on book marketing.  The problem with seeking advice on marketing on social media is that it as an extremely wide ranging subject and few writers have the knowledge and experience to more than scratch the surface. That means that the person seeking advice tries out a few approaches, many of them the same ones as everyone else is using, and some of the most basic techniques are by-passed because the people using social media don’t know enough about the subject.  As with any subject, you have to understand the basics if you want to understand how to apply the techniques. To use a metaphor, if you don’t know how the internal combustion engine works, you will never get as far as diagnosing a blocked carburettor as being the reason why your car won’t start. The same applies to book marketing. If you don’t understand the basics, you’ll never understand why all the things you are doing to promote your books aren’t working or, at least, not working as well as they might. As an example, some authors never get as far as understanding that using social media as a marketing channel isn't about plugging your book all the time. It's about building relationships with readers so that they want to know about your books.  As professional book marketers (that’s what publisher are, really) we contribute to those social media groups when we think we can offer good advice and we stay quiet if we aren’t so sure. One of the bits of advice we offer on a regular basis is to study marketing properly. Marketing of any product needs a wide range of skills and knowledge. Within marketing itself the professionals tend to specialise in certain areas and hardly scratch the surface in others. If they need a specialist in an area they aren’t so well versed in, they seek one out. So, for amateurs, it is even harder to know where to concentrate their efforts.  Marketing is a subject that continues to evolve. The “marketing mix” as it is known (aka the 5Ps, 6 Ps, 7Ps or even more Ps depending on who you listen to), first started to be discussed in the 1940s, long before Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea for the internet, so marketing has had to adjust to cope with new technology while at the same time having to continue to deal with physical marketplaces such as bookshops. Take the P for People heading. This used to mean the people who sold the product – their recruitment, training, personalities, product knowledge and sales skills. But so much of our modern marketplace is now on-line, where people play almost no part in the sales. We have to hope that the website designers know what they are doing as they are now the people who influence the direct sales. The real salesperson is now the author or publisher, as they decide what words and images to use on the product page. Never before has cover design, for example, been so important in selling a book (that's covered by another of the Ps: Product). The P for People topic is now more about who reads the books – the demographics of particular genres, or “who reads what”.  If you are putting a book on the shelves of bookshops then you don’t have to worry about that so much. Books sellers have their stores laid out in subject order and people of the appropriate age, gender and interests know where to find the books they like. But if you are trying to promote a book on social media you have to know where on social media your target audience is likely to hang out. That’s the opposite of the bookshop. Which is why asking for marketing advice on social media isn’t really going to help an Indie author. Let’s face it, if you are asking a question on Facebook and it is being answered on Facebook, then the chances are that the person answering the question probably knows quite a lot about Facebook, but probably doesn’t know much about how to market on TikTok or Instagram. For the modern marketplace, the Indie author has to be almost as knowledgeable about marketing as his counterpart in one of the Big 5 publishing houses. And to become that knowledgeable requires proper study, not asking a few random questions on social media.  I’m not talking about a full 3 year course of study at a university (though it would be great if you can afford the time and money to do it), but I am talking about study of some sort (don’t worry, I’m not going to try to sell you a marketing course, because we don’t sell one). One of the owners of Selfishgenie Publishing has a Masters Degree in business management. He knows quite a bit about marketing. But when he decided to set up the company he didn’t realise how much more he was going to have to learn. In the few years that elapsed between him picking up his MBA certificate and setting up the business, the whole world of marketing had moved on. The internet was now King (or Queen if you prefer, or even President). What worked for business in the early years of the new millennium was no longer working. That meant he had a lot of catching up to do, so he did what any sensible person would do and went back to school. Not full time residential school, but part time online learning. And if you need to learn about marketing, that is what you have to do too.  Some people are reluctant to go back to school, however. We can’t understand why. You are not a failure just because you don’t know something. In fact, it is a mark of maturity to be able to admit that you don’t know some things, especially if they're in an area that you have never studied. Besides, only you know that you are studying, unless you choose to tell the world. Yes, it can cost money – but it doesn’t have to. There are organisations that provide free training and at the end of this blog we will provide a link to one of them. And you can sign up from anywhere in the world. OK, you can ask questions on social media and the answers may sell you a few books, but they will never sell you as many books as a fully developed marketing strategy, backed up by a plan and the knowledge and resources to deliver it.  That can only come from in depth knowledge of the subject.
So, if you want to climb the ladder of success to become a bestselling author, we advise going back to school. For information on free online training courses in marketing, click here. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Do you know what a datapoint is and why it is important to authors? No, neither did we until a few weeks ago. But knowing about them may explain why some social media advertising is less than effective. Essentially a datapoint is one tiny bit of data that an algorithm can use to connect it to another datapoint. Think about it the way you would think about a pattern matching game such as “Mahjong” (the computer game, not the ancient Chinese tabletop game). If you find tile A in Mahjong and then find a second copy of tile A, you click on the two of them and you remove them from the puzzle, at the same time as winning points.  Every time you do something on social media, you create datapoints which the platform then uses to direct advertising towards you. You are creating multiple sets of Mahjong tiles which the algorithm will use to match the same tiles that advertisers have used. Every time you “like” a post; every time you comment on a post; every time you share a post, you create a datapoint for the platform to work with. Even the words you use in your posts and comments become datapoints. For example, a friend posts an image of a donut they are about to eat. If you “like” the post, you tell the website’s algorithm you that you like donuts. If you comment on the image, you create more datapoints related to donuts.  It should, therefore, come as no surprise if you start to see advertisements for donut brands or donut shops on your timeline shortly afterwards, because the algorithm now knows that you have an interest in donuts, and it can make money for the platform by targeting you with donut related adverts. The reality may be that you “liked” the post because you like the friend, not the donut (you may actually hate donuts), but the algorithm doesn’t know that. It has made up its mind that you like donuts so that is that. Knowing this can help you when you use social media for advertising, because the platform wants to know which users to send your advert to so that they see it. Because when they see it they may click on it and then the platform can charge you for that click.  So sending the ad to the right people is not only important for you, it is important for the platform. So, this is something you need to know about if you want to use social media efficiently for advertising. For example, if you pay for an ad on Facebook, its advertising algorithm goes looking for the right people to whom it should show your ad. It could show it to everyone on the platform, but that isn’t efficient because not everyone will interact with your ad, so it won’t earn Facebook any money. First it scans all the content in your ad (the image, the text, the link etc) and converts it into data points. Then it goes looking for users to match your ad up with. To extend the Mahjong analogy, if your ad is tile A, the algorithm looks for users who also have tile A. How does it know? Your book is the equivalent to the donut we used in our analogy. If your ad includes references to fantasy, the algorithm goes looking for users who have fantasy related datapoints recorded against them.  But the algorithm won’t send the ad to people who have “romance” in their datapoints. We will use Facebook (Meta) as an example, but all the social media advertising algorithms work the same way. Your ad for your book works like the ad for the donut brand or donut shop. It looks for people who (a) like books, (b) like books in your genre and (c) anyone who has ever interacted with posts that use any of the words in your ad and who therefore might be interested in your book. Point C in the para above is the most important if you advertise on social media, because it can make the difference between your ad being seen by the right readers and it not being seen at all. But success breeds success for the algorithm. When it finds a user who clicks on the link in your ad, it then uses that user's other datapoints to find more users like them. It "learns" from its successes to improve its targeting of users. Typically, authors use the blurb for their books as the primary text for their social media ads. That’s fine, it makes sense to do that. However, it can also cause problems. A good blurb will be between 250 and 350 words long. Take out all the common words: prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, adjectives, adverbs etc which are useless as datapoints (because they are so common) and you are probably left with less than 100 datapoints (proper nouns, nouns and verbs mainly).which can be used to connect your ad to the right audience.  Let’s say you write fantasy or sci-fi and you use a lot of made up names for characters and locations in your books. Now let’s say that you use some of your made up words in your blurb, which forms the text for your ads. They are useless as datapoints because they won’t appear as datapoints that Facebook users have reacted to in the past. They have never heard of the land (or planet) of Gigariga and so Facebook’s algorithm won’t be able to find any datapoints that relate to Gigariga. Which means that using your blurb may have reduced your potential number of datapoints from around 100 to a much smaller number, which means that Facebook will show the ad to fewer people. It may even show the ad to the wrong people, the ones who would never think of buying your book. The lesson to be taken from this, therefore, is the same one that applies to using Keywords on Amazon. Make sure you use the right datapoints. This may mean re-writing your blurb.  If your book is a fantasy, then you have to use that word and as many synonyms for it as possible in order to maximise the number of fantasy readers who will see your ad.
The same applies to other datapoints, such as action, adventure, mystery, challenge and thousands more words that you might use. You don’t want to be too general in your wording, so that your ad is shown to readers who never read fantasy, but at the same time your datapoints mustn’t be so narrow (like using your made up words) that Facebook can’t find anyone to which it can show your ad. Just copying and pasting your blurb into your Facebook ad may seem to be quick and easy, but it may also be sabotaging your efforts and causing you to waste money. So, think about those datapoints and make sure they are present in your advertising copy. That is what professional copywriters do every day; which is why their advertising works. 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.  You would think that a box set of 9 full length sci-fi novels, each story 80k+ words in length, priced at £9.99 ($9.99 if you are in the USA) would be flying off the shelf. But it wasn’t. We were wondering why, so we got the team together in Selfishgenie House (a Zoom call made from my living room, to be truthful) and had a bit of a brainstorming session on the subject. Along the way we started to discuss the psychology of purchasing and how it might be working against us. The box set is priced at £9.99, which we think is a bargain. But for the reader that may not appear so. Perhaps they are thinking “If I read the first story and don’t like it, I’ve wasted 8/9ths of my £9.99”.  Why would they think that? Because, at some point, they have bought a box set and that has happened to them, so they don’t want to risk doing it again. We know that books at much lower prices than the box set don’t sell because readers don’t want to take a risk on an author that isn’t well known. So the possibility must exist that people don’t want to risk their money paying more for a box set they may not like. The author of The Magi series is quite well known and has a strong following for a different series. The problem is that the other series isn’t sci-fi, so most sci-fi readers probably don’t know about him and his books. So, as problem solvers, what could we do about this barrier to sales for a box set that should be flying off the shelves but isn’t?  We knew that Kindle Countdown deals had worked for the author’s other series. We had sold the first book of the series at 99p and then got lots of follow-on sales for the rest of the series at the normal price. Would that also work for the sci-fi box set? We decided that maybe we should put book 1 of the sci-fi series on a Kindle Countdown deal for 99p (99c USA) and then promote the hell out of it. But then one of our team pointed out that wouldn’t work unless the reader also knew that they could get the box set for a bargain price. So, how could we get that message across? If we tried to make it part of the advertising copy, it would be far too cumbersome, something along the lines of “Get a sci-fi book for 99p and then, if you like it, buy the whole series for £9.99.” It hardly rolls off the tongue, does it?  But there was something we could do. We could strike while the iron is hot. If someone has just read a book they liked, then the time to sell them the next book in the series is right then, immediately after they have read the words “The End”, because they are probably wanting more of the same. So, it should also work if we do the same thing for the box set. Which is what we decided to do. We edited the manuscript for the ebook of the first book in the series and added this bit immediately after the “The End”. “An Kohli* says, “If you have enjoyed ‘The Magi’, the first book in the Magi series, you can read books 2 to 9 for the bargain price of $9.99 (USA) or £9.99 (UK) with ‘The Magi Box Set’.” Find out more here.” * An Kohli is the name of the main character in the book. We then uploaded the new manuscript to KDP, set the dates for the Kindle Countdown deal and waited to see what happened. Did it work? We are delighted to say that it did.  The 99p book flew off the shelf, though we did pay quite a lot for advertising over the period of the Kindle Countdown deal. But then the box set started to sell as readers bought into the whole series. That was enough to pay back the advertising costs and then reap the rewards. But that wasn’t all. We started to get KENP reads for the box set too, off the back of the same advertising campaign. OK, we don’t earn as much from KENP reads, but money is money! Would the same tactic work for your series box set? We see no reason why not.  Authors are often reluctant to discount their books because they see it as devaluing their brand. Fair enough. If that’s the way you think, then it’s your privilege – but how are your sales looking from on top of your high horse? Some authors have a better reason for not discounting their books, which is that if someone buys the book at the cheaper price, they aren’t going to buy another copy at full price.  But this approach is different, because it uses a sprat to catch a mackerel as we say over here (or my mother used to say, to be more accurate). Even if you haven’t got a box set to sell, but do have more books in the series, the same principle works, though you do have to sell more individual books to recoup your advertising costs. There are other factors that come into play when using this approach. First of all, the surge in 99p sales pushes your book up the Amazon sales rankings. “The Magi” jumped from around 500,000 in the Amazon rankings to 18,000 literally overnight. Its category rankings were even better, at 117, 129 and 196.  Many readers only buy books that other people are reading, so the book appearing to be popular, by being well up the sales rankings, is a definite selling point. The book also starts to appear in a very important list on Amazon, the "also bought" list: “People who bought (insert title of another author’s book) also bought (insert title of your book)”. That list (usually shown in a carousel format) influences some readers, again because they like to read what other people are reading. They feel reassured by other people’s reading choices. And, finally, even though the book only cost the reader 99p, some of them will still review it, so you can gain a few extra reviews for your book which should, if it’s a good review, encourage more people to buy, probably at full price if the Kindle Countdown deal has ended.  And you can do the same thing every 3 months, because that is how often you can run Kindle Countdown deals.
Paying for advertising for a book that only costs 99p appears to be a taking a big chance and we would agree that there is a risk there. But with risk comes reward. People who never take risks never achieve anything and that includes not achieving best-seller status. We can’t promise you that your series or box set will start to fly off the shelf. All we can tell you is that after taking this approach, we had a considerable increase in the sale of our box set. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  We very rarely recommend products on this blog, so when we do you can be sure of two things. (1) We haven’t been paid to make the recommendation and (2) the product we are recommending has been of some tangible benefit to us.  This is the case with “Meta Ads Mastery for Authors”, a training course provided by Matthew J Holmes. To prove that it works, later in the blog we have posted a graphic showing the increase in Amazon sales we experienced over a 90 day period, for just one of the series of books we publish. Now for our upfront warning. This isn’t a “magic bullet”. It is not going to turn you into a bestselling author overnight. It will take time to learn the strategy and to refine it to make it work for your books. It will also involve some financial risk taking. Most importantly, it can’t turn a bad book into a bestseller (nothing can do that). BUT, if you stick with it, you will get results and those results are going to repay your investment.  Now, fair warning, for Indie authors adopting this strategy - it requires strong nerves. The financial outlay is far higher than we have had to make when we have tried out other marketing tools. It is also quite time consuming both in terms of working through the training materials and then trying out the lessons learnt. But as the old saying goes “You have to speculate to accumulate” and speculation, by its very nature, is risky and not for the faint hearted. However, we wouldn’t be recommending this product if the lessons it teaches didn’t work and here is the proof. We paid for the product on 2nd March 2024 and started to implement the early lessons on 4th March. The graphic below shows results for first 5 months of the year. The red arrow on the graphic shows where we started to use this new strategy (sorry we’ve redacted the actual royalties and sales data, but that is commercially sensitive information). In terms of orders, you can see a dip in month 2 of our experimental period. That is because the orders for month 1 were skewed by a 99p promotion that ran for 7 days. When the orders for that are discounted, the peak for month 1 is much lower, so the overall upward trend is more visible..  To assess whether our ad campaigns were successful or not we have used a calculation called “Return On Advertising Spend” (ROAS) which Matthew teaches in his course.  Essentially, this is the amount of royalties we received divided by the amount of money we spent on advertising, which gives us a number. If the number is greater than 1, our ads earned us more money than they cost. If they are less than 1, they cost us more than we made. We have included some of the cost of purchasing Matthew’s course in the ROAS calculation, as that is part of our costs. We decided to allow 12 months to recoup the cost, so we allotted 3 months’ worth of recovery to the ROAS calculation. Our ROAS for the 90 day period was 1.2 which means we made £1.20 in royalties for every £1 we spent on advertising. While that may not sound every exciting, when you scale that up to the hundreds or even thousands of pounds, the profit actually starts to look very impressive.  We also saw a considerable increase in KENP reads (KundleUnlimited (KU) downloads) during the same period, taking us from around 30% of total income to over 50% of the total. That means our ads reached a lot of KU subscribers. The book we were advertising is Book 1 of a series. We saw an up-tick in the numbers of sales we were getting for Books 2 to 9 during our 90 day experimental period, but some downstream sales won’t appear for several weeks yet, so we have to take them into consideration, but we haven’t factored them into our ROAS calculation because we don’t want to count our chickens before they are hatched.  An unexpected bonus during this period was for increased sales of the audiobooks for the series, of which there are 3 so far. During the 3 month testing period, sales surged to exceed the total for the financial year 22/23 and 23/24/ They now make up 40% of the lifetime total for the 3 books. While the sales link took the Facebook users to Amazon, it appears that listeners to audiobooks saw the ads and went looking for the audiobooks on their preferred sites. But there is no doubt that there is a large financial risk to using this strategy and that risk may not be acceptable for some authors, even though we are able to demonstrate through our own experience that the risk is reasonably low. Which is fair enough. It’s your money so it is you that is taking the risk. But we took the risk so you didn’t have to (you’re welcome).. Matthew does explain that you can spend less each day on your advertising, but that means it will take longer to achieve meaningful results. At the end of the day, it is up to you how much risk you are prepared to take in order to benefit from the sort of rewards that we have shown in our graphic. If that hasn’t convinced you that the product is worth the investment, then nothing will, so thank you for reading this far and we’ll see you next week for our next blog. For those that are still making up their minds, please read on for the rest of the product review.  What the course teaches you. The first thing you are taught is that an ad can’t sell your book. Your book has to sell your book. In other words, a Facebook Ad may get a click that takes a reader to Amazon (or wherever you sell your books), but if all isn’t right with your product page then the click won’t convert to a sale. Matthew recommends running your trial ads on a book that is already selling, so that you can be reasonably confident that your product page is OK, thus removing any confusing “noise” (my word). So, if your book isn’t currently making any sales, despite all your marketing efforts, look at the cover, the blurb, the free sample and the reviews. The barrier to sales is probably one of those 4 things (or maybe all 4). Fix that before you do anything else.  Whether you are new to Facebook Ads or not, the course aims to teach you a new strategy for using the platform for advertising, some of which may go against what you have been taught in the past. It provides tools and techniques both to improve your audience targeting, so you get more bangs for your advertising buck and also identifies better ways of creating ads so that they are more appealing to Facebook’s users. It also takes you into parts of the Meta platform that you may not have entered before, so there is a lot to be learnt.  One of the expressions Matthew uses is “stop the scroll” (which we blogged about in April). In other words, create ads that stop people from scrolling past them, which is the first battle to win for any advertising campaign on any platform. If your “creative” (the combined image, headline and text) doesn’t stop people scrolling, you won’t sell any books. Matthew recommends you run your trials over a 90 day period. This allows you enough time to create a variety of different ads to learn from them, to find out which techniques work best for your book(s), what sort of images work best, what sort of text etc. And those things will vary from genre to genre (its why we are only writing this review now, when we bought the product in March). That doesn’t mean you have to wait 90 days to see any results (as we have shown), only that you will start to get the best results after you have been learning for around 90 days. From experience, however, we suggest that by the time you get to the end of the first 30 days you will be earning enough to finance your experimentation during days 31 to 90.  One of the things the course focuses on is relating your ad “creative” to your sales so that you can learn from your ad’s performance. Facebook is very good at spending your money. They will show your ad to as many people as possible in order to get as many clicks as they can so they can spend your budget. However, not every ad you post is going to perform equally in terms of clicks. Some ads will get you more clicks than others and it is important that you know which are working hardest for you. You will want to “scale” a good performing ad (ie spend more money on it) so it sells you even more books and you will want to turn off poor performing ads so you don’t waste money on them. All of that is discussed during the course. In addition, you will want to identify the type of creative that is getting you the best results so that you can create similar ads and try them out. Image A may look good to you, but image B may get you more clicks because the people who see it like it better. The same applies to text and headlines. Finding out this sort of thing is gold dust in advertising terms. The course talks a lot about how you analyse your data so that you can both scale the ads that work and to identify the sorts of creative that works best for your genre. Different genres attract different readers who are attracted by different creative styles. For some people this will seem scary. For some people, data is something that someone else analyses and the thought of analysing their own data may scare the pants off them. However, listen to what is being said, because there are valuable lessons to be learnt. You may not have either the time nor the inclination to try everything that is taught, but the more you try, the more you learn about your ads and the better you can become at creating and running them. While the course may generate sales wherever you sell your book, it works best with Amazon. That is because using something called “Amazon Attribution” (taught as part of the course) you can track sales generated from your FB ads directly. That means you get the clearest indication of which ads are working and which aren’t. That isn’t possible for other publishing platforms or from your personal website. You can track how many clicks you get that take people to other platforms, but you can’t track how many of those clicks are converted to sales. While you may get sales, you won’t know if they are ”organic” or if they have originated with FB ads. That isn’t a problem with the course, it is a problem with the way sales can be tracked on those other platforms.  As we have said, the strategy works, which is why we have given it a very rare (for us) 5 star rating. Investing the time to learn it is going to benefit your book sales and it really does deliver improved sales. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t have expended so many words on telling you about the product.
Overall, we here at Selfishgenie Publishing are pleased to recommend “Meta Ads Mastery for Authors” and you can find out more about the product here. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Advertising is advertising, right? You pay for an ad and they all do the same job. No. Different platforms have different purposes, which means that users use them differently. A reader may be a reader on Amazon, but on Facebook they aren’t a reader at all. While they are on Facebook they are social media users, which means their head is in a different space. That means that you have to approach advertising on different platforms in different ways. To use the big word, you have to adopt a different strategy depending on where you are advertising. Even generic terms such as “social media” aren’t that helpful, because different social media platforms require different approaches to how you use them for advertising. Let’s start with the big differences between Amazon and social media, when it comes to advertising.  If someone is on Amazon it means they are there to buy something. That means the sale is half way to being made because there is no reluctance to spend money. The main barrier you have to cross is the one that makes the reader buy your book instead of someone else’s. On social media people are there for different reasons. Some want to keep in touch with friends and family, what is happening in their local area, they are communicating with people about hobbies, memories, work etc or they are just filling in time watching funny cat videos until they decide to do something else. They aren’t there to buy anything (there is one exception to that, which I’ll cover later), That means you have a large barrier to cross before you even start to tell them about your book.  You have to get them out of their “social” mindset into a “buying” mindset. Or, at the very least, a “tell me a little bit more” mindset. That isn’t easy to do. Which means your adverts have to be pitched in a different way. To go back to the big word used earlier, you have to adopt a different strategy. So, let’s talk about Amazon advertising strategy first as it is actually the best place to advertise. Why? For the reason I gave up above. Its users already want to buy something.  Amazon is a search driven selling platform. While Amazon may suggest things for people to buy, based on their previous purchases (Amazon is still trying to sell me Lego based on a single purchase made 5 years ago) most users have some idea what they want to buy and they go looking for it, using Amazon’s search bar. They may have a very specific idea of what they want, such as “romance involving pirates and buried treasure”, but some have less specific needs and input single or double search words such as “fantasy” or “cozy mystery”. They may even be looking for books by a favourite author, so they just enter their name in the search bar. Which means you have to adopt a strategy that allows the readers to find your books based on searches such as that. And when it comes to author name searches, just because they are looking for the latest Lee Childs book, it doesn't mean they won't buy your book at the same time if you can catch their eye. There are three parts of your book’s description that you can use to help readers to find it. The subtitle, the blurb and the 7 keywords that you put in the book’s metadata* (if you publish using KDP). Using the right words for the genre of book helps your book to show up when you run what Amazon calls an “automated category ad”.  That is the simplest form of ad to set up on Amazon, as they do most of the work for you. But it is also the least efficient because it relies on you and your readers thinking the same way and your readers selecting the keywords that you thought of when you set up your metadata (which probably didn't include author names) A more targeted strategy is to set up ads that use lots of keywords, so that you go beyond the 7 that KDP allows you (you may not even use KDP as your publishing platform). This is where tools such as Publisher Rocket come in handy, because that analyses Amazon’s sales data to see what search words were used to sell a book. So, if your book is similar, you can use the same keywords so that searches show your books to readers in the search results. But even if you don’t have Publisher Rocket, you can still generate lists of keywords because a lot of them are author names and their book titles. You can generate random search terms and see which ones produce results for books similar to yours. You can also search for books like yours and use the names of the authors and their titles as keywords in your ads. FYI, incognito browsing is best for this so that you aren’t shown books like the ones you usually read. You should be looking for about 150 -200 keywords for each ad you run.  Now to social media strategy. You can use keywords for that too – they call them hashtags – but the first barrier you have to cross is shifting people from their “social” mindset to “reader and buyer” mindset, which is no simple trick. We are so used to ignoring ads on social media nowadays that unless we see something really eye catching we just scroll past it. We posted a blog a couple of weeks back which was about “stopping the scroll” (see our archive for April 2024) and that is what we are talking about here. But different social media platforms attract different audiences, and those audiences are looking for different things, That means that the advertiser has to adopt different strategies on different platforms if they want to stop the scroll. If you want to advertise to younger readers you need to be on TikTok and that is very much a music and video based platform. If you can combine the two effectively then you have a chance that your ad will be seen,  But it is also a platform where people talk, so a talking video advert could work too. People like to see other real people on TikTok so if you are a person and you put yourself in front of the camera and start talking, you are probably going to be seen. Obviously, that isn’t going to suit everyone. Some people run away screaming when a camera is pointed at them. If that is you then fine, but it doesn’t mean you can’t use TikTok. You just have to use your creativity in a way that allows you to get your message across in a visually appealing way without you having to show your face on camera. Instagram and Pinterest go together in some ways, as they both rely heavily on images, but just putting an image of your book cover on them isn’t the best idea. The image has to be more than that. It has to stop people in their tracks and get them to say “Wow, I wonder what that is about?”. The image doesn’t even have to feature your book cover. It just has to appeal to people who like reading your genre of books.  Pinterest is a particularly good place to advertise because about 50% of users do go on it looking for ideas for things to buy, which is way more than any of the other social media platforms. It is also a good place to go if you are targeting women readers because they use it for buying more than men. X (Twitter as was) is a bit of a bear garden and I’m not sure it even counts as “social media” anymore as many of the people who use it are far from sociable. But it must sell stuff or businesses wouldn’t use it for advertising. We don’t use it for that, because we aren’t sure that it’s the right advertising channel for us. We do, however, use it as a social media platform and we promote our books on it, but we don’t pay for advertising. Finally ,we have Facebook. We use Facebook for advertising almost as much as we use Amazon Ads and it does work, once you have developed the right advertising strategy.  Research has shown that it is the image that stops the scroll. Then the user reads the headline (the words immediately under the image) and then they read the primary text (the main body of the ad). So, you have to “stop the scroll” with the image, hook the reader with the headline and then sell them the book with the primary text. If they like what they have read, they’ll click the link. They may not click the link just because they like the image, so the three things have to work together. That gives you 3 variables and you may have to try different combinations to find the one that is a winner. Without that Facebook will end up spending a lot of your money and you won’t get much in return. If you want to use your book’s blurb as the primary text, you may need to develop different versions of it to appeal to different readers.  The lack of research into what readers find appealing may be why some authors find it difficult to get Facebook Ads to work for them, because they try just one combination of image, headline and primary text and when it doesn’t sell them any books, they give up. We have proven this for ourselves, using 3 different images but with the same headline and primary text. One image always shows up as being more effective than the other two. We then reduce the spend on the less effective ads and increase it on the more effective one. Facebook even has technology (called Digital Creative Testing (DCT)) to help you find combinations that work. You can upload several different images, several different headlines and several different primary texts and Facebook will run ads using the various combinations. You then analyse the results and decide which ones are winners and which are costing you more than they make back.  Finally, you have the book promotion sites (Bookbub, BooksGoSocial, WrittenWordMedia et al) which, for a price, will send out promos for your books to their social media followers and email lists.
They have rules of their own about what you can and can’t do when using them and they vary too much for us to cover them here. But the same basic idea of developing a strategy that suits the platform applies to them, in just the same way as it applies to Amazon and to social media. So, our key message for this blog is to think about where you are going to advertise, think about why people are using that platform, then develop a strategy that will appeal to that sort of user. Don’t just assume that an ad is just an ad, because it isn’t. * Metadata in book publishing terms means the combination of book title, subtitle, genre, blurb and any keywords you are able to enter. They are critical when you are trying to get your book to show up in search results. 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 common questions seen in writers’ groups on social media is “How much do authors earn?” The question comes in a variety of forms, some trying to disguise the fact that the person asking the question is only interested in making a quick buck and thinks that being an author may be the way. But some people genuinely see being an author as being the road to making a decent living. Of course, for some authors, it is a way of making a decent living. Indeed, some authors become very rich through their writing. But for Joe (or Josephine) Average, the average author, is it a realistic way to make a living? We would say it probably isn’t. I’m afraid we have the data to back that up as there has been a lot of research into this over the years.  Let’s start with some basic facts. 70% of all the authors who publish or are published, never sell more than 100 copies of their books. Some of that is to do with marketing, of course. If no one knows about the book they can’t buy it. Some of it is because the books are about subjects that don’t have a wide audience appeal. They are either on very niche subjects or they are memoirs about lives that just aren’t that fascinating, but the author thought they were. Finally, they just aren’t very good books, certainly not as good as the author thought they were, and can’t garner enough good reviews to encourage people to buy them. Of the remaining 30% of books published, 70% of those won’t sell more than 1,000 copies. That’s about 21% of the total number of books published (so we’re now up to 91% of the published total). Again, the reasons are varied, and marketing once again takes centre stage, but the fact that the book has sold between 100 and 999 copies suggests it isn’t a bad book, per se. But that leaves just 9% of books published selling more than 1000 copies. However, you need to sell about 30,000 copies to make a living wage. That is to say, a wage good enough not to have to do any other work. Even then that will depend on other factors in your life such as the size of your mortgage (or amount of rent you pay), the size of your family and your lifestyle. One person’s living wage is another person’s poverty – or wealth. Less than 1% of authors make what we might regard as “decent” money and only 0.1% ever become rich from their writing. And even then, most of their wealth doesn’t come from their books, it comes from the TV and film rights for their books. So, if you haven’t written the first word of your novel, how do you know if you are going to be in the 99% or the 1%? You don’t.  If you get as far as completing a good draft you start to get some indication of your likely success from the reaction to your work from agents, though it takes some time to gather enough data. One rejection doesn’t mean much. It just means that the agent may be too busy or doesn’t really like your genre, or just didn’t get your “message”. Ten rejections should start the author thinking a bit, but it still isn’t conclusive evidence. According to publishing legend, J K Rowling received at least 10 rejections for her first Harry Potter book. But once you get to around 20 rejections the message should be becoming clear. Even then, the message only applies to that book. Some authors query three or four books before they get one accepted by an agent. What made that book different from the first three? The author will probably say there was nothing different about it. But the agent thought it was different enough to take a chance on it, so there must have been something.  But even then the story isn’t finished, because there is a growing body of self-published authors that are making 6 digit and even 7 digit royalties. So, the agents obviously don’t know everything when it comes to what makes a best-seller. But what makes those 6 digit self-published authors different isn’t necessarily their writing. I have read some of their books. They are OK, but I wouldn’t call them remarkable. In fact, some could be described as mediocre – but they still sell. What is different is that their authors invest a lot of time, effort and (probably) money into marketing. They have become expert at it, which is how they are able to sell so many books. As a small publisher, we have seen this for ourselves. When we market a book, we sell copies. When we stop marketing it, sales dry up very quickly. Authors think that what they are paying us for is editing, cover design, proof reading, formatting etc. Sure, we do those things, but the authors could pay anyone to do those things for them. No, what we are really being paid for, and the way we make our money, is book marketing. Yes, we do the other stuff, but until the book sells we don’t make a penny and neither does the author. Marketing pays for everything. And, while trad publishers may tell you otherwise, it is in the marketing of books that they also make their money. Everything else they do costs them money. Editors, cover designers, proof readers and the rest of the publishing team, all have to be paid before the books have sold a single copy. So, if you want to make money out of being an author, you must first learn how to be a marketer. Once you know how to do that, then start writing your book. Doing it the other way around only leads to disappointment, because it takes longer to learn to be a successful marketer than it does to write a book.  And if you do that, you might just make a decent living out of writing.
Even if you are certain your book is going to find an agent and be trad published, you can’t be certain that will happen. So if/when the horrible truth hits you, it is already too late. It’s fine to have a dream that one day your writing may make you rich but keep yourself grounded with the knowledge that it may not happen. And even if it does happen, it may take some time before it does. To quote Kipling “If you can dream and not make dreams your master;” 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. All Indie authors know how important their book cover is when it comes to selling their book (if you didn’t, you do now). But images in general are vital when it comes to promoting books. It’s no good having a great cover if you can’t get people to go and look at the book’s product page. Many authors use social media to direct people to product pages, but over recent years the effectiveness of this approach has declined. And there is a very good reason for that. The key words I want you to remember from this blog are “Stop The Scroll”. Did you know that the average social media user scrolls the equivalent to the height of the Eiffel Tower on their social media every day?  Just to put that in context, that’s the equivalent to 1,083 ft give or take the odd inch (330 metres to the tip of the radio mast). That is a lot of scrolling. Social media users are continually scrolling, scrolling and scrolling as they search for the next thing to catch their attention. Even when they stop scrolling they often don’t pay attention to a post for more than a few seconds. The average attention span for a post on social media is only 1.5 seconds according to research carried out by Linkedin. When it comes to selling books, social media is what is called a “secondary source”. That means people don’t go onto it specifically to find books, the way they would on Amazon or one of the other book selling websites. They go on social media for different reasons. Which means that the challenge for the Indie author is even greater.  The challenge is to stop the social media user from scrolling past their post for long enough to read the content and take an interest in the book, even though they aren’t looking for books to buy.. And it is a considerable challenge. They are in competition with cute kittens, people falling into rivers hilariously and pouting celebrities with big bottoms, for goodness sake. Which means the imagery used in promotional posts has to be equally eye catching, if not more so. It literally has to make people say “Wow, I wonder what that’s all about?”. So they have to stop scrolling for long enough to find out. Did you know, you don’t actually have to put your book cover in your promotional imagery? In fact, it might even be counterproductive to do so.  When people see a book cover in a post, they automatically think “Oh, just another author promoting their book” and they scroll past – even if they might actually enjoy reading the book. Because they’ve only looked at it for a fraction of a second they have no idea if it’s even in a genre they like to read. But if they see an intriguing image that doesn’t feature a book cover, they may stop scrolling for just long enough to start reading the text that goes with it. And once they start reading the text they might just find out about a book they might be interested in. For example:  If they see an image featuring a book cover with a dragon on it, they might think “Oh, just another fantasy author promoting their fantasy book” and scroll past because they’ve got a shelf full of fantasy books already. But if they see an image of a dragon without a book cover, they might say “Oh, a dragon. I like dragons. I wonder why someone has posted an image of a dragon?” Do you see how the psychology of that works? Instead of saying “Here’s my fantasy book, please buy it.” the author is saying “Look here, I’ve got something interesting to say about dragons.”  As a social media user, which approach would stop you from scrolling past? Now, I’m not saying it will turn zero sales into millions of sales by itself. But if it gets you a few more clicks to the sales page of the book, then the sales page may do the rest of the work for you. But if someone scrolls past your post because they think they don’t need another book, you get nothing. So, what sorts of images will stop the scroll? Two things mainly. One, they will be eye catching, making the viewer want to ask questions about them. Two, they will relate directly to the genre of the book.  People are always looking for memes they can share, so putting some text with an image can also stop them from scrolling because they think the post may be a meme. Not the book title, but something related to the book. An extract from a review works well, especially if accompanied by a star rating*. Make sure you say “Reader Review” or “Amazon Review” etc. Other short text, eg “Jaw dropping adventure” also works. Making different versions of the image and posting them on different days will attract the attention of different potential readers, so don’t be scared to try out different ideas. If you use the site’s metrics you’ll soon learn what works for your genre from the way people react to the posts.  Try using variations of your images. You can actually use elements from the book cover if they can stand by themselves, or you can create a scene that incorporates the cover image (minus the title, author name etc). Photoshop, Canva, Bookbrush et al have tools to help you create interesting images. Just because you normally turn them into a book cover doesn’t mean you can’t also use them as a picture by themselves.  This is one area where I have no qualms about suggesting that you use AI. It is the ideal tool to allow you to create genre specific images that result in professional quality pictures. I’ve played around with it and the image alongside this was created using AI.
Would you scroll past that? . Well, to answer our own question, we posted two versions of it on a social media page. Version 1 included a book cover and version 2 didn’t. Both versions were accompanied by the same text, which was taken from the blurb for the book, plus a link to click on. Version 2 got almost double the number of link clicks compared to version 1. So, dear reader, what are you going to do to “Stop The Scroll” past your book promotions? * Please don’t make up review extracts or fake star ratings. Readers may check them out and if they do they may make adverse comments on the original post, which will undo all your good work. I know you would never do that, but I thought I’d better say it anyway. 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 problems that Indie authors have is trying to work out whether their social media marketing strategy is working for them. How does the author know if a sale has resulted from a random search on Amazon, what we call “organic traffic”, or if it has come from someone clicking on a link in a social media post or even from an advert posted somewhere like Google Ads?. This information is important for Indie authors. They spend a lot of time on social media, finding followers, building relationships, creating posts etc. They need to know if they are wasting their time, or if they need to invest more time on Platform A and less on Platform B. The inbuilt metrics may tell them how many link clicks they are getting, but they won’t tell them how many of those clicks are being converted into sales and that conversion tells an important story. Some Indies go as far as paying for advertising on social media, or on sites such as Google Ads or on book promotions sites. How do they know if those adverts are actually resulting in sales? They may know how many clicks they are getting, but are those clicks earning them money – or just costing them money? This is vital information, because if clicks aren’t converting to sales, it means that there is something wrong with the sales page. It may be the cover image, it may be the blurb, it may be the free sample, or it may be the reviews – or lack of reviews. (BTW – this blog won’t help with diagnosing problems that are on the sales page. That is a whole different blog. Probably several blogs.) The KDP reports tell you how many sales or page reads you have had, but they don’t tell you where they came from. Connecting the different bits of information together to give you the whole picture isn't possible. So, wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a way of tracking sales back to the place where the reader found out about your book?  Well, there is. It’s called “Amazon attribution.” It’s FREE and it’s provided by Amazon itself, through Amazon Ads. Basically, what you do is create a unique link which allows Amazon to track the click back to its source. So, if the link is posted into Facebook and someone clicks on it there, then buys the book, the sale will be attributed to the Facebook post. Not only will this help you to identify where your sales originated, it will also tell you where you are getting your best results.  Did your best sales come from a Google Ad? Or did they come from a Facebook post? If it’s from a Facebook post then you might be better off not advertising on Google, but advertising on Facebook instead. Or on X, or Instagram or wherever you are getting your best results. This may also save you money, because you can now compare different platforms directly from which ones are selling your books. If you advertise on Amazon you will know if you get sales because the Amazon Ads data will show you. But what about Google Ads? From their metrics you will know if you got clicks, but you won’t know if those clicks turned into sales. With “Amazon attribution” that doubt is removed. Now, if you use a lot of sites for your marketing you will have to create a lot of attribution links. There is no point in using the same link on several sites because that doesn’t tell you which site is working best for you. You will need one link for Facebook, one for X, one for Instagram, one for Google etc. You can even use attribution links on your own website if you have one, to track sales that originate there, or to email shots and newsletters.  If you are running ads targeted at one particular country, say the USA, then you will need to make your link unique to Amazon.com sales. If you are targeting the UK as well, you will need a link for Amazon.co.uk. Etc. If you are selling on both, but you don’t know where your best sales are coming from, you may want to track sales in the two countries individually. So, you may have one link for Facebook post trying to get sales in the USA and a different link for Facebook posts aimed at the UK, even though you are using identical images and text to try to reach both countries. This could mean you creating a dozen or more links – but the information each link gives you will save you a lot of time and possibly a lot of money in the future as you will be able to make better decisions about your marketing strategy. Just to set your mind at rest, if you already have an Amazon Ads account then creating a link takes about a minute. If you haven’t got an account, it will take a bit longer because you have to set up the account first.  So, how do you get an “Amazon Attribution” link? The following instructions are aimed at use with a PC or laptop. I don’t suggest doing this on a phone or tablet because the screens will look different. I have created a short video (posted after the written instructions) which takes you through the process.. First of all, you need an Amazon Ads account. If you haven’t got one already, then you can create one direct from your KDP account. On your Bookshelf look to the right where it says “action”, click on the three dots. Find “promote and advertise” and click on it. Find “Run an ad campaign” and then locate the button marked “choose” and click on it. You will get a drop down list of all the Amazon marketplaces where you can advertise. If you are running campaigns aimed at different marketplaces and want to track each marketplace individually (recommended), you will need an ad account for each marketplace, though Amazon are planning to merge marketplaces for advertising in the near future, so by the time you read this that information may be out of date. I suggest you start with the country where you are based, or where you sell most of your books. For us that’s Amazon.co.uk but for you it may be somewhere different. Once you have selected your marketplace, you will get a new button displayed which says “Create an ad”. Click on that. You will then be taken through the usual pages needed to create an account if you don’t already have one, before you finally get to the “Ads Dashboard”. There is no need to create an actual Amazon Ad. They cost money. If you want to run Amazon ads that, again, is a whole different blog (which we have already published - look in our archive under “advertising”). On the left of your screen, you will see a vertical column of symbols which allow you to do various things. The only one you are interested in is the one that looks like a tiny bar chart. Click on that. You will get a new menu and you need to click on “Amazon Attribution.” This will open up a page which is headed “Measure Your non-Amazon Marketing Activities.” Below that is a button marked “Create Campaign”. You guessed it, click on that. This gives you two graphics, one of which says “Create manually” and the other doesn’t. Select the “Create manually” graphic by clicking on it and some boxes will appear below.. The first box asks you to name your campaign. Choose this name with care, because once you have created half a dozen of these campaigns you need to be able to tell which is which, eg which is Facebook and which is Google Ads, or whatever. Below that you will get a list of your books displayed. Scroll through the list and click on “add” to add that book to the attribution results. If you are marketing a stand-alone book, you need only select that book. If you are marketing a series, however, a customer may buy book 1 only, but they may buy other books in the series at the same time (whoop-whoop!). Or they may see the post for book 1, which reminds them that they read it and enjoyed it, and they may use that link to then go to your Amazon page and select Book 2 etc. So, for a series you probably want to select all the books in that series (and the box set if there is one). But, as a minimum, always track Book 1 because that is the series starter. If you have ebook, paperback and hardback formats you can select them all, or you may prefer to create an individual link for each format. That is your choice. We include all formats in the same campaign. Next you create your ad group. This basically provides Amazon Ads with all the information it needs to identify the source of the link when it is used, eg so it knows that it is coming from Facebook and not from Google. So, give the ad a unique name so that you can distinguish it later, when you come to analyse the results. In the “publisher” box select the platform you are using (Facebook, X, Google etc) from the drop down list provided. It is an extensive list and covers most social media and advertising platforms and some etail sites that allow links to be redirected to Amazon. You can also type in new publishers (sites) if the one you are using isn’t listed, eg your own website. If the platform you have chosen is social media, there is no deed to complete the next box. If it is something else, then there are other selections you may need to make. The “Click through URL” box is where you paste the link to the Amazon sales page for your book, in the version you wish to track. The quickest way to get to that is to go back to your KDP Bookshelf and click on “”View on Amazon” (make sure you select the version you wish to track) and then copy and paste the URL when you get to the Amazon page. Note: “View on Amazon” allows you to select any marketplace (territory) where the book is sold. So, make sure you select the marketplace you want to track. All you have to do now is look up to the top right hand corner of the page where you will see a button marked “create” and click on it. It takes a few moments for Amazon to create all the magic that is needed, but eventually you will be given a summary of your entry, along with an attribution URL. That URL is very long, but it is the one you then copy and paste into whatever activity you want to monitor. For example, if you want to monitor a Facebook post, you paste it into the Facebook post instead of the link you would normally use. Here's the video demonstration we promised. Using Facebook as an example, if anyone clicks on the link to go to your Amazon page the click will be recorded by Amazon and if they then buy your book the sale or download KENP (KindleUnlimited pages) this will also be recorded. From the name you gave the attribution link, you then know which post got you your sale. You view your results using the same “Amazon Attribution” selection in Amazon Ads, by clicking on the “Ad Groups” option instead of “Campaigns”. You can also track different channels (Facebook, Google etc) by clicking on the “Channels/Publishers” option, and you can access your links on the “Attribution tags” option if you want to copy them again for use in a new post.  When it comes to reviewing the results, Amazon are providing you with a free service, so they don’t rush to collate them. It can take several days for some results to appear.
You will start to see your link clicks and KENP (Kindle page reads) the day after you post the link. However, in most cases the sales results may not be visible until around Day 7 or even later, An enhancement of the use of attribution links is if you want to try out different posts on the same platform. For example, if you want to see which images work best for your posts, which text attracts more clicks etc, you can create a unique attribution link for each version and then view your results to decide which is getting you the best results. That means you are working less in the dark and taking a lot of the “error” out of trial and error. So, if you are getting sales on Amazon but have no idea where they are coming from, you now know how to track them using “Amazon Attribution”. 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.  Measurement is the poor relation of marketing. While Indie authors may come to realise that they have to market their books, they don’t always realise the essential role that measurement plays in their decision making. Not knowing how to use measurement in marketing is like walking blindfolded through a room barefoot, with the floor covered with Lego bricks. At some point you are going to say “Ouch, that hurt.” Now, you may think that there is only one measurement that is worth looking at, and that is sales. But you would be wrong. To tell you why, I’d like to present you with a hypothetical scenario.  Let’s say that an Indie author has spent £100 on advertising in a month. They split that 50:50 between Amazon Ads and Google Ads. They have made sales and made a profit on their advertising, so they want to re-invest some of that profit into more advertising.
With that 3rd bullet goes supplementary questions – should they keep the split 50:50 or should they spend more on one platform than the other? The only way to make a sensible decision is to analyse the data and see what it is telling them. What the author needs to know is how many clicks each ad got, how much each click cost them and how many clicks were converted to sales.  To give you a real life example, we recently ran a Google Ad for one of our titles. According to the data we got a lot of clicks on the ad, so you might think that it was a success. However, there was no change in sales volume for the book. If the clicks had been converted into sales, there should have been a corresponding rise in sales volume. Only by putting the two sets of data side-by-side could we see that. The next month we ran an Amazon Ad for the same book. We didn’t get nearly as many clicks as we got for the Google Ad, but we did get a rise in sales. Not only did Amazon Ads tell us how many clicks got converted to sales, we could see it in our KDP sales data as well, in terms of increased sales volumes compared to the previous month. So, going back to our hypothetical example and the 4 questions (plus supplementals) we asked, we might well decide to spend all our budget on Amazon Ads and none on Google Ads. The data was telling us that, so we have no reason to doubt our decision making.  But the story doesn’t end there. If we were getting so many clicks from Google Ads, why weren’t they getting any conversions into sales? Normally we would say that it has something to do with the book’s blurb, the reviews or the free sample. Maybe they weren’t enticing enough. But if that were the case it would apply to the Amazon Ads as well, which we know wasn’t the case. So, we have to look for different answers. When we drilled down into the data, we discovered that the majority of the clicks we were getting were from outside of the UK. The book is on sale everywhere, so that shouldn’t make a difference, but perhaps it was. The book is very UK centric in its story. Perhaps that put other nationalities off buying it. We can’t be certain of that, but it is borne out by our KDP sales data. 98% of our sales for that title are made in the UK and Ireland. Again, we were putting data side by side in order to interpret it.  Above, we mentioned the need to understand how much each click cost us. That is essential information, because if we don’t know that we can’t know if our ad generated a profit. Let’s say we got 100 clicks and made 10 sales (that’s a fairly typical conversion rate for a new author). That sounds good, doesn’t it? According to Amazon Ads those sales would be worth £59.90 gross if the book sells at £5.99. Cause for celebration, perhaps? Actually no. Those 10 sales may have been valued at £59.90 gross, but may only have yielded £30 in royalties. If those 100 clicks cost us £35 (again, a typical cost based on 35p per click) then our ad campaign didn’t make a profit, even though it made sales. It made a loss of £5. And don’t forget that £35 is the pre-tax cost. If you are in the UK you have to add 20% VAT to get the final cost. Maybe we would need to re-think whether or not to spend our advertising budget with Amazon Ads too! Again, we have to put data side by side to interpret it and the data may have to come from different sources, eg both Amazon Ads and KDP.  Now, I’m not saying advertising doesn’t work, because it does. What I am saying is that we have to use all the available data to measure the effectiveness of our advertising. If you are spending £100 (after tax) on advertising and you are making £101 in royalties, then whoopee. You are in profit. But you have to know that and that means measuring what you are doing. So far we have only talked about paid advertising. What about social media? Indie authors spend a lot of their time on social media promoting their books. It isn’t costing them anything except time, so no need to worry, is there? Actually, as the old saying goes, time is money (Benjamin Franklin). All the time you are on social media promoting your books, you aren’t writing new books which could make you more money. So, time has an associated cost. It is therefore necessary to work out if the time you spend promoting your books through social media is actually time well spent. Social media sites provide data on how many people have interacted with a post. That could mean a “like” or a reply, or it could be a click on a link. The more interactions there are, the more likely it is that they will convert into sales.  So, if your posts aren’t getting interactions, you need to know why, because to continue what you are doing is just going to waste your time. If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. This may mean asking other people what they think of your posts, so you can work out what is most likely to get an interaction. Also, you need to “benchmark” against posts that get a lot of interactions to see what it is about them that makes them so attractive.  Of course, we mean posts that promote books. Knowing that posting a video of a cute kitten playing with a ball is going to get lots of interactions, isn’t going to help you to sell any books. Lots of authors think that asking questions on social media and getting a gazillion answers is interacting. It isn't. yes, the post gets a lot of responses - but is it selling books? If it isn't selling books it is just wasting time. So, some of the data that has to be compared are interactions compared to books sales. Do they line up. If not, why not? But knowing that a video gets more interactions than a still image might also be useful to know.  But with measurement you must always ask the question “why”.
- Why aren’t my posts getting interactions?. - Why aren’t interactions on social media converting to sales? - Why aren't my video clips getting more interactions? Etc. I can’t answer those questions for you in a blog. I can’t even think up all the questions you might want to ask. But there will be answers. You just have to go looking for them. Social media sites provide all that data for free. All you have to do is use it. Measurement and data analysis isn’t very exciting stuff. But using it wisely can make your book sales very exciting. But, like all of book marketing, you have to invest time into it to get the best out of it. But it could help you avoid those Lego bricks. 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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