 Back in June of this year we blogged about the way some authors don’t engage properly on social media, so they don’t get the best results out of it. We called it “fake engagement” and there is a lot of it about. We are happy to say we now have a case study we can use to demonstrate the value of good quality social media engagement, so we can show how it is superior to fake engagement.  It is the basic principle of social media marketing that selling should always be secondary to engagement. If people think that all you want to do is sell them something, they will scroll past your posts. That means you spend a lot of time and effort trying to market on social media, only to get poor results. So, to our case study. A reader of our blog about fake engagement, we’ll call them Red Bus, got in contact with us to say they make regular posts to their account on X (formerly Twitter) related to the themes of their books. They are just statements of fact that Red Bus thinks readers may find interesting. The posts don’t have URLs linking them to Red Bus’s books, because that wouldn’t be engagement, that would be selling.  This week Red Bus got a response to one of the posts from someone we will call Maple Leaf. Red Bus responded back and a virtual conversation started up, with Maple Leaf talking about their dad’s experiences and Red Bus making contributions based on personal experience. This went on for about two hours, off and on (maybe a dozen posts each) when Red Bus had to end the conversation, as there were other things that needed doing and X is too much of a distraction. Red Bus said goodbye and thanked Maple Leaf for the chat, logged off X and thought no more about it.  Red Bus logged back onto X the next day and found that Maple Leaf hadn’t quite terminated the conversation the previous day. Maple Leaf had asked a couple of questions about Red Bus’s books, relating to where they were available. Naturally, Red Bus replied, providing the necessary information. But Red Bus didn’t include a link to the books. That would be too pushy, Red Bus decided. Again, Red Bus didn’t think too much more about it and got on with the business of the day. Later that day Red Bus logged onto their KDP dashboard, to see that there had been a sale in the territory where Maple Leaf lived. A coincidence? Maybe. But Red Bus didn’t think so. Logging back onto X, Red Bus saw a notification from Maple Leaf, and sure enough, Maple Leaf said they had purchased one of Red Bus’s books. So, quality engagement on social media had led directly to a sale. At no point did Red Bus link to any of the places their book is sold. At no time did Red Bus suggest to Maple Leaf that Maple Leaf might like Red Bus’s books.  Maple Leaf took the decision to ask, and then took the decision to buy, without any prompting. Now, you may think that a single sale is no big deal, and you would be right – and wrong. Firstly, if Maple Leaf likes Red Bus’s book, they may buy the other books that Red Bus has written, so one sale turns into several. Secondly, if Maple Leaf likes the book(s), they may leave a review and we all know how valuable reviews are. But, most importantly, Maple Leaf may tell their family and friends about the new author they discovered on X, and suggest that the family and friends take a look for themselves.  Because Maple Leaf has had a positive experience as a result of this engagement and that is so rare it may be worth mentioning to others.
That is the sort of result you can get from proper engagement. It is not the sort of result you will get with posts saying “Can anyone see my posts?” It is not the sort of result you will get with posts like “Who is the best band in the world?” Or with “Should you put pineapple on pizza?” And it is certainly not the result you will get just by posting links to your books. Growing a market through social media is a painfully slow process sometimes. But if you do it right, it can pay off, as Red Bus found out this week. 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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 In writers’ groups on social media, authors often post drafts of their blurbs, asking for opinions. It’s a good idea, because it can gain valuable feedback. But in reading these drafts, it is quite obvious that some authors haven’t read any of the numerous blogs that have been written on the subject of blurb writing. In the vast majority of cases, the blurbs won’t sell the book because they fail to capture the interest of the reader within the first few words. Instead, they try to precis the story and what they end up with doesn’t sound interesting enough to sell the book. But experts on blurb writing often say they can write a blurb that will sell a book without even reading the book. And this is a theory we subscribe to, in broad terms, because in the blurb you aren’t telling the story, you are telling the excitement of the story. You aren't selling the story, you are selling excitement. Let’s take visual media (movies, TV and games) and think about how they sell their product. They never try to tell the story. They try to show the viewer/player how much enjoyment they are going to get if they watch the movie or TV show or if they play the game. Depending on the genre, you will get car chases, explosions, gunfights, people falling out of aeroplanes, zombies trying to eat people, people expressing anger, fear or love. If it’s a comedy you will get jokes, either visual or spoken. What’s the most memorable scene in the movie Dumb and Dumber? Yes, that’s right, the one where Harry (Jeff Daniels) has his tongue frozen to the street sign. Yes, that’s in the trailer! By the time a good thirty second trailer is over, people are already setting reminders on their TV, booking seats at the cinema or they are downloading the game. The movie, TV show or game may be the worst ever, but you would never get that from the trailer. Because the trailer looks exciting/horrific/emotional/funny, and the audience wants to see more. The blurb is a book’s trailer, so it has to work the same way.  The reaction many book blurbs get. So many book blurbs just don’t sound entertaining enough. By the end of the first paragraph the reader has already lost interest and is scrolling onto the next book in the search results – somebody else’s book! We try to follow a three paragraph structure for blurbs. If you haven't sold the book by the end of the third paragraph, you probably aren't going to sell it at all. Research has shown, however, that many readers never get past the first paragraph. So that is the crucial one. If that hooks the reader, then the other two paragraphs clinch the sale.  We call this approach (very unoriginally) “hook, line and sinker.” Hook gets the readers’ attention, line reels them in and sinker makes the sale. (Note for the pedants: we know that is not what a sinker does, but we don’t care about that. We just want three simple words to remind us that the blurb comes in three parts. We don’t claim that our fishing metaphor is perfect.)  But the hook is crucial. It does 80% of the work in selling the book, because if it isn’t sharp enough, the reader’s attention will already be moving onto the next book in the search results. A good hook is made up of three parts (do you see a trend emerging here?): character – conflict – consequences. Who is the character, what conflict have they become embroiled in and what are the consequences of failure? But it also has to indicate the book’s genre without wasting words by making it explicit. If you write westerns, you might use the words gunslinger, drifter or cowboy. If you write medical romances, you might mention a doctor or a nurse. These indicate the genre without having to describe the genre. The hook can be written as three sentences, or as a single sentence. That isn’t so important. The important thing is that you have less than fifty words to get those things across in an exciting manner. Yes, 50! So, no room for lots of adjectives. No room for descriptions. No room for sub plots. No room for backstory and definitely no room for “world building”.  It has to be the tightest writing the author has ever done, because, if the reader’s mind starts to wander, they’ll never get them back. Here is an example: “When Private Eye Harry Jones was asked to investigate an errant husband, he had no idea it would nearly get him killed.” So, from that sentence we get genre (crime), we get the main character (Harry Jones) and we get the conflict and the consequences in the single word “killed”. To save you having to count, that was just 22 words. I didn’t need 50 and the reader will either be interested in finding out why a routine investigation nearly got Harry killed, or they won’t. I’m not trying to say that example is perfect, but it is the sort of thing blurb writers aim for as a first attempt. A 3 sentence example might be “A private investigator. An errant husband. A deadly assignment.” We still have the character, but without using his name. We still have the genre. We still have the conflict and the consequences. Some genres lend themselves to that approach better than others. I probably wouldn’t use the 3 sentence structure for a romance (though that doesn’t mean it can’t be used).  The second paragraph, which we call “line”, expands on the first to provide it with context. There are a few rules, mainly “don’ts”. 1. Don’t include other characters, focus on the protagonist (or MC if you prefer). 2. Don’t include sub-plots – stick to the main plot throughout. 3. Don’t get into world building, locations or time periods. If the book is set in a specific time period, use a generic term, eg Regency, medieval etc, or just refer to a century. 4. Don’t include backstory. It loses the focus of the blurb. 5. Do ramp up the conflict and the jeopardy. Continuing from our example hook, above, we might develop the line as follows: “When Harry Jones is asked to find out if a client’s husband is having an affair, it leads him into the seedy world of drugs and prostitution. He stumbles on the daughter of an old friend, enslaved to a drug gang. Desperate to help the girl, Harry takes on the gang's boss to set her free.” We can now clearly see the conflict that Harry has to deal with, without using a lot of unnecessary words. At the same time, we introduce a victim that needs help (the girl) and a villain (the gang's boss).  The sinker. All that needs to happen now is for the levels of danger to be ramped up so high that the reader has no choice but to buy the book to find out what happens. That is the job of the “sinker” paragraph: “In order to rescue the trapped girl, Harry fights not only the drug gang, but also his own fears. Old memories return to haunt him, paralysing him with indecision. Can he overcome his past and get to the girl before she is killed, or must he watch his friend’s daughter die? Finishing on a question leaves the reader wanting to know the answer. And to find out the answer, they have to buy the book. Yes, it is manipulation, but all marketing is manipulation of some sort.  Different genres use different types of wording. Romance blurbs use phrases like “torn apart by fate” or “star-crossed lovers” or “mutual dislike”. But whatever wording is used, the blurb has to show that the possibility of an unhappy ending is real, so that the reader will want to know the final outcome. The final message we must give you is that the hero must always have control over their actions. They must never be coerced into involvement. So phrases such as “Harry must fight…” or “Harry has to overcome…” are a no-no because they make it look like Harry has no say in the matter. Instead, phrases such as “Harry fights …” or “Harry overcomes…” take out the element of coercion and leave Harry as a hero.  This is because heroes do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, not because they have been made to do it by some outside agency. This is a pretty safe rule when writing a novel anyway. The hero is the hero because they don’t walk away, even though they could. It's is a tough thing to do with some professions. Police, military, firefighters etc have to obey orders, so what we are talking about in a blurb has to be the character going above and beyond the call of duty. Yes it’s the cop’s job to catch the killer, but it isn’t their job to dangle from a ledge a hundred feet up while they do it.  Here’s a free offer for you. If you want to try out your ideas for your blurb, email it across to us at the address on our “contacts” page, we’d be happy to provide you with a bit of feedback, free of charge.
Of course, if you’d like to browse our books catalogue while you’re waiting, we’d be delighted. You’ll find some stuff to read on our “free stuff” page. Pull up a seat, pour yourself a cup of coffee and we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can. 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. Note: The names of companies are provided for information purposes only and are not recommendations. We warn you now, this is a very long blog, but it contains a huge amount of useful information.  Author Robert Cubitt at Newark Book Festival One of our authors, Robert Cubitt, has attended several book fairs as a seller this year and learnt quite a few tricks about selling books direct to the public. This blog acts as a “case study” for anyone else who is considering taking this route to sell some of their books. I’m sorry that this blog only relates to UK events, but most of what we talk about can be applied in any country in the world, so it still makes it a worthwhile read. But first of all, a reality check. Book fairs and similar events aren’t going to turn you into a best selling author. All the exhibitors that Bob spoke to while attending these events had the same stories to tell regarding sales volumes.. You may sell a few books and people may search out your books on-line later, but don’t load up a van with hundreds of copies hoping to go home with an empty van because it isn’t going to happen.  But book fairs aren’t just about selling books direct to the public. They are a shop window. Not everyone who looks in a shop widow buys what they see straight away. Sometimes they go home, think about it for a bit and then come back and buy. Obviously, by that time the book fair is over, but there are ways of accommodating that which we will discuss later. Firstly, it is essential to do some research on the fairs you want to attend before you reserve your place. There is usually a contact email address to which you can address questions, but finding out who else has been to them in the past and what experiences they had is also helpful. Not all book fairs are the same. One of the ones Bob attended was aimed mainly at the second-hand book market and it’s pretty hard to sell your book at a profitable price when the stalls around you are selling all their stock at a fraction of what you are charging. It was noticeable from the behaviour of the people attending that they were interested only in bargains. The fair wasn’t an entirely wasted journey, but Bob barely covered his costs.  Some book fairs have speakers or people reading extracts of their work. You could even offer to speak yourself. It almost guarantees sales (but make sure to take someone with you to look after your stall while you are speaking. You don’t want to miss any sales). The next thing to consider is the cost for the “pitch”. Costs range from about £5 at smaller fairs up to £40 or £50 ($35-$45) at the larger ones. For one event, which ran over a weekend, Bob also had to have a hotel room which cost a further £100, plus meals. Including fuel, you can call it a £200 investment for the weekend and you won’t be far out. There were a few other costs, and a we’ll be discussing some of them.  Given what we said about the potential to make sales, it is therefore advisable to work out how many books you would have to sell to recoup your costs, to see if it is worthwhile going. Obviously, the closer you are to the venue, the more profitable it is likely to be. However, a lot of the value in bookfairs isn’t in actual sales. It is part of a marketing strategy and has to be treated with that in mind. You may not sell a single book on the day, but it could result in several sales after the event. It isn’t unusual to see people photographing the book covers and they aren’t doing that because they’re into photography. Bob actually asked someone why they were doing it. and they said it was because they were compiling a list of books they were interested in so they could compare and contrast them later, before buying on-line.  The next cost is that of the “author copies” of books, because you can’t sell product and promise to post it later! Of course, all of that expense is tax deductible, but has to be paid out in the first place in order to reclaim it later. So, was it worth that investment? Yes for 3 events, no for one (the one focused on secondhand books). Oxford was a particularly profitable one, with good reasons why. It is advertised as an “Indie” book fair, which means that customers know what to expect. Bob didn’t realise how many people actually search out Indie authors until he saw hundreds of them coming through the doors for that fair.  So, what did Bob learn from these events? The greatest thing about them was the opportunity to meet and interact with readers. These people are the life’s blood of authors, and we need to understand them. The best way to do that is to talk to them and book fairs provide an excellent opportunity to do that. While the main purpose of being at the book fair was to sell books, this opportunity to meet readers shouldn’t be underrated.  Booking a place at a book fair isn’t always easy. There isn’t a universal directory that lists them all (business opportunity?). Some book fairs leave it quite late to decide what dates to hold their events. It also isn’t easy to find out about the smaller fairs. The search results are dominated by the big, international events, which aren’t suitable for most Indie authors. Even if you could get a stall, the cost would be prohibitive. So, finding the smaller fairs is a bit of a challenge. We’ve provided some links to help you out, at the end of the blog. (sorry if you aren’t in the UK. You’ll have to do your own research).  The value of networking at bookfairs is important when it comes to finding out about other book fairs, but we’ll talk more about that later in the blog. Most (probably all) book fairs provide a table on which to set out your stall, but for outdoor fairs in the summer (and some at Christmas), you may need to check whether you need to provide your own shelter from the weather. Two were outdoor events and provided covered market stalls, which met Bob’s needs. But you should definitely plan to take something to sit on. Folding camping chairs or garden chairs are ideal. Once at the fair, there are many other things you have to consider, but they divide mainly into “selling your book” and “other things to think about”.  Social Media Turn your social media connections into customers by advertising your presence at the book fair through your social media posts. Bob posted the day before the event took place and again on the day of the event itself. By using the “schedule” facility that most social media channels have, the details can be posted even while you are driving to the event. If the event has a website, post a link to it. The organisers will appreciate it and it will help people to find out more information. Also link to the organisers’ social media accounts where appropriate. Bob also posts after the event to thank people for turning up.  Selling Your Book Make sure you have enough stock. There is no point in exciting interest in your work, only to have to tell the buyer that you’ve sold out. Exactly how many copies of a book you need will depend on the size of the book fair. If it’s big one, like Newark, then 50 books in total is probably enough. For a small event in a village hall, as few as 20 copies may be adequate. What you don’t sell at one book fair will give you a head start for the next one. If you write series, have at least the first and second books in the series available. If it’s a trilogy then having all three titles available is OK, but if it is a longer series there is no point in having later titles, because people are unlikely to commit that much money to an untried series. But make sure that buyers have some way of finding your books when they are ready to buy the next book in the series (see more below).  The next thing is to have all your “elevator pitches” prepared, one for each book you have on sale. While some of the people browsing the stall will pick up the book and read the back cover blurb, many of them just pick it up and ask “What’s this book about?” At that point it doesn’t do to be umming and ahing. You have to be ready to tell them about the book in as concise a way as possible. If you aren’t sure what an elevator pitch is, or how to compose one, Google one of the many blogs on the subject. Here’s one we found, but there are many others. https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2022/08/16/elevator-pitch-examples-templates You should have elevator pitches ready anyway, even if you don’t plan to attend any book fairs, because people will ask about your books if they know you are an author. One of our authors once sold a book at a wedding she was attending, based solely on her elevator pitch.  Which brings us to stories. Not the story that is told in the book, that has already been covered above. No, I mean the story of how the book came to be written. Readers love those stories and once they’ve heard them it is far more likely that they will buy the book (but there is no guarantee). Bob has a very good story about how he came to write the biography of his father’s war service. That story has sold him more copies of the book at book fairs than any of his other titles. Then he tells the customers about how that biography inspired his Carter’s Commandos fiction series, and that sells copies of those books. Next you have to be able to deal with all the usual annoying “Would I like this?” sorts of questions that authors always get. And you have to be able to respond without sounding sarcastic. The best way our author found of responding was to reply with a question of his own, such as “What sort of books do you usually read?”  Be prepared to grasp at any straw to connect their reply to your book. It doesn’t matter how far removed from your genre their preferences may seem, making a connection of some sort could lead to making a sale. But don’t be afraid of directing people to other stalls, where they may find what they are looking for. Some people just don't have an interest in your genre (whatever it is). I’ll talk more about that later in the blog. People love a bargain, so being able to discount the price of your books compared to bookshops and on-line retailers is a big plus. Bob charged about £1.50 ($1.35) below the Amazon list price and was still able to make the same level of royalties as he does on-line. His printed price list shows his price and the Amazon price side-by-side, so people know they are getting a discount (they can also check for themselves). Bob also offers further discounts if people buy more than one book. Know what royalties you expect for each book, how much the books cost you to buy (don’t forget the delivery charges) and price accordingly.  One of Bob's props - his father's medals. Take “props” with you because they attract attention and encourage questions. Bob displayed the original cover art for his father’s biography and his father’s medals but on other stalls he saw artefacts that relate to fantasy, sci-fi and horror genres. There are internet retailers that sell that sort of stuff, so making a small investment is often worthwhile. If nothing else they are conversation starters and conversations sell books. Other things to think about. Display is a critical part of attracting attention to your books. Not only must the browsing public be able to see the cover, but they should also be able to see the blurb. Bob uses upright stands (available online) to display the book’s cover and lays a copy out flat in front of it showing the back cover blurb. Some sellers print fliers that show the same information, but Bob noticed that fliers often fly away when the wind blows. Books don’t do that. Some sellers also use boxes or small bookshelf units to raise the height of the books. Maybe this is something that you will want to play around with at home to see what works best for your books, when placed alongside other promotional materials such as props. Getting stuff up to peoples’ eye level often helps with sales. Take some freebies and giveaways with you. Bob takes some bookmarks that a colleague made for him. These are handed out to people regardless of whether or not they buy a book.  Cheap pens with the title of your book, your name or your website details printed on them are another good giveaway. They can be bought for as little as 20p (about 16c) each, but you have to buy in bulk. Make sure you have plenty of business cards to place on the stall. Even if you don’t sell a book, the browsing public will take something away with them and they may check out your titles later. And slip a business card inside each book, to be found later. This is especially important if you write series. If you don’t have any business cards, they can be purchased on-line from companies such as Vistaprint. You should always carry business cards anyway, because everyone you meet is a potential customer - they just don't know it until you tell them about your book. Another useful marketing tool is to have small bags into which to put purchased books, with a book title, author name or perhaps a cover image on the outside. In these environmentally conscious times, make sure the bags are made of paper, not plastic. Branded bags are expensive, so buy cheap plain brown paper ones then buy a separate roll of stick on labels with your message printed on them and apply one to the other before you go. Bob bought his bags on Amazon and his labels from Stickythings Limited and the total cost was another £50 ($40).  Bob also bought a tablecloth with our Selfishgenie branding on it (see photo above - we paid some of the cost as it is part of our marketing). It wasn’t cheap, but the cost can be recouped over several book fairs. Take plenty of small change with you. You don’t want to lose a sale because you haven’t got change for a £20 note. Make sure you have a way of accepting credit cards, debit cards, Applepay etc. There is no point in losing a sale because you only take cash. There are a number of companies that provide Bluetooth connected card readers these days and their charges are quite reasonable if you are going to attend a lot of book fairs or “meet the author” events. Bob Cubitt uses Sumup. There is also a long list of sundry items that you might need to have with you. Bob has a checklist he uses before he leaves home, just to make sure he has everything. You can download a copy (yes, it’s free) at the end of blog.  One of the big opportunities offered by book fairs is networking with other authors. They know things that you don’t, and you know things they don’t. Find out about the sorts of books they sell and if that turns out to be the genre your browsing members of the public read, don’t be shy about pointing them in the direction where they can find the right sort of books. And make sure that the authors on other stands know about your books, if they haven’t stopped by to find out for themselves. Ask them about other book fairs they’ve been to and note down the details. Also discuss writers’ groups, both in real life and virtual ones. Other authors are your allies, not your rivals. So, that was our quick whizz around the world of book fairs and other book selling events. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments section or you can email us at the address on our “Contacts” page. if you have enjoyed this blog, or found it useful, be sure not to miss future editions. Just sign up to our newsletter to be kept up to date. We'll even give you a free ebook if you do. Here’s a few websites for Indies who live in the UK (and one for Indies who live elsewhere). http://smallpublishersfair.co.uk/book-fair-calendar/ https://www.casita.com/blog/uk-book-fairs-you-should-check-out https://www.oxfordindiebookfair.co.uk/ https://10times.com/publishers-fair https://fromesmallpublishersfair.co.uk/ https://www.newarkbookfestival.org.uk/ Multiple nations: https://publishersarchive.com/2023-book-events.html Children’s books: https://www.theschoolrun.com/best-childrens-literary-festivals-uk Black History Month: https://curlytreats.co.uk/2023-uk-black-history-month-events/black-british-book-fair/ For people in the North West of England (or who can get there easily), try this Facebook page. This Facebook page deals in book signing events, which are just another form of book fair. And the download of Bob's book fair checklist: 
Traction and momentum are things that marketers talk about in terms of their campaigns. It relates to the amount of effort that needs to be put in to get results from a marketing campaign and how, once traction has been gained, momentum can be achieved. In terms of money spent, this usually means a lot of it is at the beginning of the campaign, but once traction has been achieved, a lot less has to be spent to maintain momentum.  Let me use an analogy. If you put your child on a swing (assuming you have a child – if you haven’t, you’re a writer, use your imagination) and do nothing, then the swing will just hang there and the child will get no enjoyment from being on the swing. So, you need to apply some effort to get the swing moving so that the child can enjoy the experience. Depending on the size of the child and your own strength, you may have to put in quite a lot of effort to get the swing moving. However, once the swing is moving, all you have to do is step in from time to time to give it another shove to keep it moving. That is what it is like marketing a book.  Newton's 1st Law of Motion - an object at rest will remain at rest. If you just upload your book to your distribution platform (I’ll use KDP and Amazon for the sake of ease) then it’s like putting the child on the swing. Nothing will happen unless you make it happen. Yes, Newton’s first law of motion applies even to book marketing – an object at rest will remain at rest. So, once your book has been published, you have to provide the outside force that acts on it to take it from a state of rest to a state of motion and get sales moving. If you are an unknown author publishing your first book, you will have to put in a lot of effort. If you are an established author with a loyal readership, you won’t have to do quite so much – but you still can’t do nothing. Even loyal readers need to know that you have a new book out. But the amount of effort you put in will eventually pay off. You will make sales. The sales will put your book higher up the sales ranks, so Amazon will help you by steering readers towards your book because that will make Amazon more money, and your readers will help you by leaving reviews of your book.  But you can’t back off entirely. Once your new readers have bought your book, they aren’t going to buy it again. This means that your book will start to slide down the sales rankings, the automated systems will pay it less attention and you won’t make so many sales. So, you have to step in and give your swing another push, just to get things moving again. Social media marketing has a part to play in this, but it is never going to provide you with the big push you need to get up the sales rankings. It will sell you the occasional copy, which is the equivalent of the swing just about moving back and forward. Let’s face it, that wouldn’t be very exciting for your child and, in terms of books sales, it isn’t going to be very exciting for you. So, you need to find some way to give the book a bigger push.  On the internet there is no shortage of people willing to make you lavish promises of results in exchange for your hard earned money. Some people do find success with those book promoters, but I think that it’s true to say that the majority don’t or, at least, they don't get the level of success they had hoped for and which will return a decent profit. Most of the internet companies are using social media to promote their customers’ books and are just doing what you could do for yourself, but on a larger scale, eg more Tweets (are they X’s now?), more Facebook posts, more Instagram posts etc. Again, they may get you a few sales, but they aren’t going to get you to the heights that will get you excited. But there is one tried and tested method to stimulate books sales and we have blogged a lot about it over recent weeks. Amazon Ads do produce results.  The problem with Amazon Ads, however, is that they take time to work. It seems to take an eternity to build traction and get your sales moving. Many Indie authors place an ad for a week or a fortnight, find the results disappointing and halt the ad. Instead, they look for the on-line book promoters who promise instant results, then get very disappointed when they find that they are spending larger sums of money but getting very indifferent outcomes. So, why does it take so long for Amazon Ads produce results?  I’ll return to my child on a swing analogy, but this time imagine you are on the one on the swing, with no one to push you. By moving your body the right way, you can get some motion, because you are putting energy in and that energy has to go somewhere. But you need to keep putting in energy to get you moving faster and higher. If you stop putting in energy, the swing will slow down and stop. To start with, you have buyer resistance. Advertisers maintain that an advertising message has to be seen 7 times before some buyers respond to it. This is why you will see the same ads on TV several times in a night and several more times over successive nights. The marketers are trying to get those 7 viewings in quickly, so the ad starts to pay back through increased sales.  Think about that for moment. Let’s say that Mr X, a reader, goes on Amazon to find a new book. He does a search for the sorts of books he likes to read, and he is presented with a list of results. If you have paid for an advert, then your book will be one of the ones he sees. It’s called an impression and you don’t have to pay for it. However, Mr X has never heard of you, so he scrolls down to the next result, which may be a book by an author he has heard of. He buys their book instead of yours. But Mr X has a limited amount of free time, so it takes him about a week to read the book before he goes back to Amazon to buy his next one. He sees your ad again, but again he scrolls by, looking for a more familiar name. This happens maybe four or five times over the space of four or five weeks, but Mr X then realises that he does know your name now, because it has become familiar through repeated impressions, so this time he might click on your ad. Now, if you pulled your ad after week 2, you could never get that click from Mr X at week 6 or 7.  The ad system analyses Mr X's clicks. So, this is the first time you have had to pay, and it is also the first time that Mr X is seriously considering buying your book. He may buy it this time, or he may not. A lot will depend on the blurb for the book and the sample he may read. But he will remember your name now, so every time he sees your ad, you have a chance of him buying the book. But, because Mr X has clicked on the ad for your book, the ad system now knows that he might be the sort of reader who will be interested in your book. So, the system analyses the ad clicks that Mr X has made in the past, looks to see who else has clicked on the same books and shows your ad to them, even though they may not have used the same search words as Mr X. You can see this system in action on Amazon, because they show you “People who viewed this item also viewed ….” And “People who bought item this also bought…”  Someone taking a risk on your book. This means more people are now going to see your ad and every time one of them clicks on it, the ad system learns a little bit more and directs your ad to more new people. More new potential readers means more potential clicks and more potential sales. But you still need that first sale, because if your book is low down the sales rankings, it discourages some readers. So, you need to find a reader who is prepared to take a chance on your book without looking at the sales rankings. And they do exist. We know they do exist, because that’s how our authors all sold the first copy of their book. We paid for the advertising, of course, but someone took a chance on them. And someone, somewhere, will take a chance on you – but only if they see the ad for your book often enough. The same applies to reviews. Some people will only buy books if they have reviews, so you need some of those to be posted, which needs sales too (please do not pay for reviews. Amazon is able to spot them and will remove them, so you will only be wasting your money.) So, the graphic below illustrates the process by which ad clicks get turned into sales, which creates traction and leads to more sales, which creates momentum.  But, as I said above, the system needs a shove from time to time to keep things moving, so you will need to keep advertising, if only at periodic intervals. You can tell by your sales figures when that should be. If you were making 5 sales a day consistently and that starts to drop to 4, then 3 then 2 etc, it’s probably times to liven things up again with another ad campaign.  Blog Reader: “But it takes so long, and I have to spend so much money.” Yes, but if you are using the system correctly you will get that money back when you gain traction. If you put nothing in, you get nothing out. Remember Newton – an object at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force is applied. You have to be the outside force! And at least you know where your money is going and you are in control, unlike with those on-line marketing companies that promise so much but deliver so little.  It took you weeks, months, maybe even years to write your book. It can hardly come as a surprise that it could take weeks or even months to get some sales, gain traction and build momentum.
And, if you haven’t made any sales after say, 3 months, then it might be worth considering why that may be. Because advertising can only sell a book that the reader wants to read, so if they don’t want to read your book, there has to be a reason and you know the fault can’t be in the advertising, so it has to be in the product. 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.  For those of you that have come here looking for a blog about Universal Book Links, aka UBLs, fear not. We’ll get to those in a moment. But first, we want to revisit a blog we posted in April 2023, about distributing some of our books through Draft2Digital (aka D2D). At that time, we said that we had sold a few books on that site without doing any marketing for them. People seemed to have found their way there by themselves, probably via the companion site to D2D which is Books2Read (aka B2R). We said then that we would let you know how things were going once we had some more data, which is why we are blogging about it now.  To save you having to read the blog again, we’ll just give you a little bit of background to explain why we decided to use D2D as well as Amazon. Basically, while we were selling a few copies of some books in ebook and paperback formats, they weren’t being downloaded on KindleUnlimited. (KU). Putting books on KU requires the author to make them exclusive to Amazon, so they can’t be sold through any other on-line retailer. So, we thought, if they aren’t being downloaded on KU, why are we keeping these books exclusive to Amazon? We may be missing out on sales through other sites. We uploaded the books to D2D which then distributed them through several other on-line retailers. I won’t list them all. Visit the D2D website for the full list.  And it seems to have worked well for us. We have sold more copies of the books through D2D in 4 months than we had in the previous year through Amazon. It told us something, though we weren’t sure what until we did some digging into the sales reports. Most of our sales, historically, have been to the UK. That isn’t surprising considering most of our authors are British and they write mainly for the British market. We do get the odd sale through Amazon to the USA, India, Australia and a couple of other countries but when we looked at our D2D sales data it was noticeable that we were getting a far greater geographic distribution. Almost none of our new sales were to the UK and our overseas sales were far more widely spread, taking in the European Union, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and New Zeeland.. None of our titles have been translated, by the way. All of these new sales are in English.  It was also noticeable that a lot of the sales were in paperback format, costing far more on D2D than they do on Amazon. The question we had to ask was “Why”? 1. Why were we reaching countries we had never sold to before and 2. Why were we selling so many expensive paperbacks? The conclusion we had to draw was that it was because we were using Universal Book Links (UBLs). See - I told you we would get there eventually.  A UBL takes the reader (a) to the retail site they prefer to buy from and (b) the retailer’s site which deals with the country in which they live. When it comes to paperback sales, this is very important. Some retailers who sell paperbacks either don’t print them in some countries or they don’t deliver books to some countries. So, our UBLs were taking buyers to the sites where they could buy paperbacks and get them delivered to their country. They also had the price displayed in the appropriate currency for their country, or one they were familiar using. That is a strong psychological factor for some people. If someone usually pays in $, ¥ or €, seeing the price displayed in £ can be off putting. When you upload a book to D2D it creates a UBL for it automatically if you also subscribe to B2R (it’s free), which you can then copy and paste into all your marketing materials, which we did.  OK, if you click on a link to Amazon and it doesn’t take you to your local Amazon site, they will offer to redirect you to your local site but that, also, is too much hassle for some readers. So, if getting better global distribution sells more books, how could we exploit that for the books that are still exclusive to Amazon? After all, we want to sell through all the Amazon sites across the world and we want to make the process as hassle free as possible for buyers. Well, it turns out that those nice people at B2R will also allow us to create UBLs for books that are sold on Amazon but not on D2D. How cools is that? So, using this link, we sat one of our team down in front of a PC and set her to work creating the UBLs (look in the top RH corner for the UBL maker) for all the books we sell exclusively through Amazon. It took about 30 seconds for each book title, but we kept her well refreshed with coffee and donuts while she did it. A couple of warnings. Firstly, if you use URL shorteners, such as bitly or tinyurl, they can’t be converted into UBLs. You have to copy the book’s URL direct from its Amazon sales page. You also need to use the link to the Kindle edition of the book, not the paperback. If there is a paperback version, the UBL will link to it, but the link creator doesn’t like links to paperbacks if you paste them into it.  The other things is that the system does seem to be a bit flaky and doesn’t always work first time. Our colleague kept getting a warning that the Amazon link she had pasted wasn’t recognised as a link to an ebook, even though it was. She found that if she kept clicking on the “Got it” button in the warning pop-up, the link was eventually created. A couple of times she had to re-paste the Amazon URL to get it to work, but a little bit of perseverance and patience got the job done. So, having done all that work, has it increased our overseas sales?  Well, it appears that it has. We now use UBLs in all our marketing and they seem to be delivering for us.
So, our main takeaways from this week’s blog: 1. Using D2D can increase your sales, because you reach a wider book buying market. 2. UBLs help you increase sales across the world. 3. You can create UBLs which will take Amazon users to their local Amazon website, wherever they are in the world. If you want to do some experimentation, it may be worth your while, but do remember to unsubscribe your book from KindleUnlimted before you upload it to D2D, or Amazon will get a bit touchy about it. 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.  Finding the right keywords to include in an Amazon Ad can be a very time consuming activity. Gurus like Bryan Cohen, of Best Page Forward, recommend using 100 - 150 keywords in an ad, and also recommend creating 5 to 10 ads a week. So, that mean finding anywhere between 500 and 1,500 keywords A WEEK! That’s a lot of keywords and it could take a lot of time researching them all. If it takes 1 minutes to research one keyword, that could be as much as 2½ hours to generate enough keywords for a single ad. For 5 ads that could be 12½ hours a week. Who wants to spend that much time on a single marketing activity? Not us, that’s for sure.  So, we love it when we find a short-cut that will save us some time. To give you some idea of how long it took us to find 150 keywords and create an ad with them, the total was 25 minutes (if you exclude making cups of coffee and answering the telephone). It took us longer to write the first draft of this blog about it! I think most of us can squeeze 25 minutes out of our busy schedules if it means getting an increase in sales for our books. So, how is this magic worked? I’m going to take you through it step by step. The first few steps you may not need to do at all, or you may need to do them only once. The later steps are the ones you have to do every time to generate a list of 100-150 keywords.  If you have any questions after reading this and trying it out, ask them in the comments section and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. There are 36 steps to this procedure, which seems like a lot, but some of them describe just one mouse click or screen tap. Once you are familiar with it, the whole process takes a very short time, so don’t be put off by that number. You may want to do a “split screen” on this, so that you can read the instructions from the blog and then try them out as we go along. Or you may prefer to print this blog and follow the instructions that way. OK, let’s go!  1. If you don’t already have the Google Chrome browser installed on your PC or laptop, download and instal it. 2. Once you have Chrome installed, open it and instal “Kindletrends Also Bought downloader” It is free. It will instal into Chrome automatically, so you don’t have to do anything (you can also instal the extension into other browsers, but we don’t have a full list which is why we specify using Chrome). 3. Open Chrome and look at the top right hand corner of of the page and you will see 3 vertical dots. Click on those to access the Chrome settings menu. 4. Click on “Extensions” and then “Manage extensions”. 5. Locate the “Also Bought” downloader extension and click on “Details”. 6. Locate the line that says “Allow in incognito” and switch it on if it isn’t already switched on, then exit back to the Chrome home screen. That is the end of the steps that you will only have to do once. Now for the steps you have to do every time.  7. At the top right hand corner of Chrome, find the 3 vertical dots again and click on them. 8. Click on “New incognito window”. The reason you use incognito browsing is so that Amazon doesn’t identify you from your IP address and start to offer you the sort of books that you normally read. You want to find the sort of books that you write, which may be different. Now you are going to identify books like the ones you write. You may have some of these by other authors on your own bookshelves, which is a good place to start. If you haven’t, then you are going to have to take a more “trial and error” approach. We use Publisher Rocket to help us identify books and authors in the categories in which we are advertising, but if you don’t have that, don’t worry. I’ll assume you don’t have any relevant books to hand, and you don’t have Publisher Rocket. 9. In your incognito browser, go to the Amazon website for the country in which you wish to advertise. For example, you may live in UK but want to advertise in the USA, so you need to go to Amazon.com. Conversely you may be the USA but want to advertise in the UK, in which case you need to be on Amazon.co.uk. The site you choose will affect the results of your search, which you are going to do next.  Some authors have international popularity, but many don’t. There is no point in including keywords relating to an author who is popular in the USA but no one on the UK has ever heard of, and vice versa. 10. In Amazon’s search bar, type in a search term for the sort of books you write. For example, you could type in “historical romance” if that is what your write. But you may want to narrow that search down a bit by adding tropes from your book, such as “enemies to lovers” or “pirates” or whatever tropes you have used in your book. You can also search using an ASIN, a book title or the name of an author if they are in a category relevant to your book.. 11. From the search results, choose a book that you think is similar to yours and click through to its sales page. Make sure you are viewing the version you are going to be advertising, eg ebook, hardback or paperback.. 12. Read the blurb to check that it is like yours. You may even want to read a bit of what used to be called the “Look Inside” but now is just referred to as a sample. 13. If you are happy that the book is one that you might find on the same shelf as yours in a bookstore, go to step 14. If not, go back to step 11 and repeat. "You will see a whole jumble of data that doesn’t make much sense." 14. Now scroll down the page until you get to the carousels that are named either “What did customers buy after viewing this item?” or “Customers who viewed this item also viewed” (the words may vary a little depending on which country you live in). The former is the best but isn’t always displayed, so you may use the latter, but you can also use both if you wish. You will get some duplication in your results, but there is a simple step to remove them later. 15. Next to the text described in step 14, you will see a little icon that looks like a blue fairy cake with a red candle. This is the icon for the “Also Bought” plug-in. Click on this. The books displayed will start to scroll across the screen, which indicates that their details are being downloaded. When the scrolling stops, the download has finished. This could take up to a minute, depending on how many books there are in the carousel. 16. You may repeat steps 11 to 15 to gather more keywords, or you can go straight to step 17 and return later if you think you need more keywords. 17. Open “file manager”, locate the downloads folder and open it. 18. Open Excel (or whatever spreadsheet app you use) and open a new spreadsheet. 19. In the downloads folder, you will see the list of downloads that you created at step 15. There will be a .png version and a .txt version. The .png is an image of the book covers. You don’t need to use that. Double click on the .txt version to open it. You will see a whole jumble of data that doesn’t make much sense. DON’T PANIC!  20. In the text reader, go to “edit” and then “select all” to highlight the text, then copy it. 21. Paste it into the spreadsheet. It should now be nice and neatly displayed in columns, starting with the ASIN (Amazon’s catalogue number) on the left, then the title, series name, author name and then the other stuff. You can delete all the stuff to the right of the author’s name if you wish. 22. Repeat steps 17-21 for each of the .txt files you downloaded. 23. I don’t use ASINs in my keyword searches, but if you wish to you can. Everything I say from here on applies to them as well as to the other columns. 24. In an ordinary browser, Open “Keyword Cleaner”. This is a free webpage which will help you to clean up your keyword list (don’t forget to add it to your “favourites”, because you will use it a lot). 25. Copy the contents of one of the columns of your keywords from the spreadsheet. I always start with “title” and you will see why at step 34.  26. Paste that into the big box on Keyword Cleaner. 27. There are 6 buttons to the right of the big box and you will use at least 5 of them. 28. Click on the button marked “Separate”. This will remove any subtitles or series names that have been included with the title, providing they have been separated from the title by a semi-colon, colon, hyphen or brackets. They will re-appear in smaller boxes further down the page. 29. Click on the button marked “Format”. This will remove most of the special characters that Amazon Ads doesn’t like, if there are any in the list. 30. You can click on the box marked “Sort A-Z” but I don’t usually bother. Amazon Ads sorts keywords alphabetically after they have been entered anyway. 31. Click on “De-duplicate” This removes any duplicated entries. 32. Click on “Copy”. 33. Open a “Word” document (or similar) and paste the list of keywords into the document.  It may be necessary to clean up the list. 34. Keyword Cleaner isn’t smart, so it can’t always recognise subtitles and series titles and remove them, so it may be necessary to “clean-up” the list a little bit more at this point. This means removing anything from the title that shouldn’t be there. For example, if we got the result “Ten Years To Doomsday a gripping intergalactic action-packed science fiction novel”, everything after “Doomsday” should be removed because it isn’t part of the title. Similarly in the result “Battle Cruiser Elite A Military Sci-Fi Space Opera Adventure”, everything after “Elite” would be removed. 35. Use the 6th button, “Clear”, to make Keyword Cleaner ready for the next lot of data you are going to paste in. 36. Repeat steps 24 to 35 to do the same for the columns marked “ASIN”, “Series” and “Author” in your spreadsheet. They shouldn't need any additional cleaning. At the end of the process, you will have a list of keywords that is duplicate free and ready to be copied into Amazon Ads. You may want to check how many keywords you have and the quickest way to do that is to highlight the list, go to the “Review” menu on Word, click on “Word Count” and that will tell you how many lines of text you have, which is also the number of keywords in the list.
If you haven’t got enough, go back to step 10 and repeat from there. And that is that. Once you’ve done it a couple of times you will be generating keyword lists in 25 minutes or less each time. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Disclaimer: Selfishgenie Publishing has not received any payment or incentives from Best Page Forward or any of its affiliates for any of the content in this blog. This week’s blog is something of a revisit to earlier blog posts. The reason we’re revisiting it is because it has been so influential in increasing our sales over recent months that we are certain that it can do the same for you. The 5 Day Author Ad Challenge is a free programme of videos and Facebook interactions that can help authors to increase their sales. Let’s deal with the elephant in the room first. You don’t need to spend money to benefit from this challenge.  To get the best out of the challenge it is necessary to spend some money on advertising, but if you don’t have any money to spare, then the challenge does include some ideas for things you can do for free, to make sure your books show up in Amazon’s search results. Saving up some money so you can take part in future challenges could, in our opinion, be the best investment you ever make in yourself and your writing. But the challenge isn’t just about Amazon searches. If you use other platforms, such a Draft2Digital, you can improve the chances of your book being found if anyone enters the right keywords into any search engine. People who don’t have a Kindle often search Amazon for ideas for new books, then go elsewhere to buy them. So, making it easier for people to find your books on Amazon can help regardless of where you publish them.  So, the first thing you have to do is sign up for the challenge, and I’ll provide a link for that at the end of the blog (don’t skip ahead! Oh, you already have). They are run every three months or so. They are provided by a guy called Bryan Cohen who runs a business called Best Page Forward, which provides training for authors on a range of book marketing skills. The challenge is a “loss leader”, designed to entice you into buying one or more of their training packages or other services. They also publish books related to book marketing and, if you can spare a few pounds (or Dollars, Yen, Euros, Bitcoin or whatever) we would suggest you buy them if you don’t want to do the challenge – or even if you do. We’ve posted links to our reviews of the books at the end of the blog too. The principle behind the challenge is that using Amazon Ads to sell books WILL always result in increased sales of your book, but by using the techniques and guidelines described during the challenge it will also make your ads more profitable. Profit is defined as royalties minus advertising costs, NOT sales income minus advertising costs.  Here at Selfishgenie we are running a business and we aim to make a profit, so if we are able to make this pay then so can you. And we are making it pay. Now, to start with we aren’t talking about making telephone number sized incomes. If you spend £5 (or $, €, ¥ or whatever) it may return you £10. But if you then start to scale that up, £50 could make you £100, £500 could make you £1,000 and so on. So, you are able to start small to find out if it works for you. It will, so you can then start to invest some of your profits into more advertising and so scale it up over time. Bryan boasts of authors he has coached who are now on 6 digit earnings because of this challenge. We can’t verify that, but we can tell you that it has worked for us, and we are earning more profits from our ads than we ever have before, even if it isn’t a 6 digit profit. We have to be careful that we don’t infringe Bryan’s copyright in this blog, so we have to limit what we say to what is open access stuff that you can find on a number of websites. Because of that the best we can do is provide you with a taster.  Bryan starts off by talking about the metadata for your book. This is the stuff that you enter on the very first tab of KDP when you self-publish your book. It includes the title, author name and more. Getting the metadata right is crucial to your book being found by search tools, whether it is using Amazon, Google or any other search engine. Getting the metadata right is the stuff that the challenge covers that is entirely free for you to implement. If you get nothing else from the challenge, you will have given yourself a better chance of your books being found. Next Bryan goes through using the different types of ad that are available on Amazon. Amazon Ads provide their own tutorial videos for that, but it is important to recognise that the aims of Amazon and the aims of the challenge are different. Amazon teaches you to use Amazon so that you can spend money on advertising and make THEM a profit. The aim of the challenge is to teach you to use Amazon Ads more efficiently so that YOU can make a profit. The Amazon tutorials teach you to do things in a way that is best for Amazon, not for you. However, the tutorials are good for helping you to find your way around the ads system and we would recommend watching them.  There are basically 4 types of ad, but only 3 of those are available outside of the USA. If you live outside the USA and want to advertise to American readers you can use that 4th type on Amazon.com. The easiest type of ad to use is the “automated ad”. This has simple settings and draws on the keywords in your metadata to identify readers to whom it will show your book (which is one of the reasons why metadata is so crucial). We have used this type of ad in the past and it does sell books, but it isn’t as targeted as the other two types of ad. That means that you have to get more ad clicks in order to sell books, which reduces profits, because you pay for each click.  The second type of ad is the “category ad”. This is based on the categories you select when you set up your metadata on KDP. If you have selected “Romance>historical” then anyone who searches for that type of book will see your ad. They will also see that type of ad if they have ever bought that type of book. (We still see ads for Lego on our Amazon homepage because we once bought our grandson some Lego). Now, there are authors who like to call themselves “No 1 bestselling” and the way they do this without lying is to put their book into an obscure category that only requires one or two sales to get to the number 1 position in that category. For example, if an author puts their book in Kindle Store > Books > Home & Garden > Animal Care & Pets > Fish & Aquariums they can reach the number 1 spot with only 1 sale. KDP doesn’t read the book, so it will accept the entry even if the book is an historical romance. The author then gets their Mum to buy a copy and, hey presto, they are a No1 bestselling author. However, their vanity means that is the only book they will ever sell, because people who want to read historical romance will never see their book if they do a search for their favourite genre. The book will only be seen by people who are searching for books about keeping fish - and they are unlikely to buy it. So having your book in the right category is vital for sales and it is something that the challenge spends some time talking about. Vanity will be far better served by selling more books than by calling yourself a No 1 best-selling author.  The 3rd type of ad is the manually targeted keyword ad. This requires the author to generate between 100 and 150 keywords which might be used to search Amazon. By including those keywords in your ad your book will be seen by anyone who uses those words to do a search for their next book. A lot of those keywords are either the title of a book, its subtitle, the series title or the author’s name. That’s because if readers have enjoyed a book, they will use one of those things to find their next read. Some even enter the ASIN for the book they read, which is Amazon’s product identification number for it. Generating keywords is time consuming, so the challenge talks about using some public access (ie free) browser plug-ins and websites to help speed up the process.  The final type of ad, which is only available for ads on Amazon.com, is the “custom ad”. This uses up to 150 characters of customised text as the “hook” to get people to click on the ad link. Again, the challenge talks about what makes a good hook, so you aren’t working totally blind. That type of ad can be used in conjunction with either categories or keywords to improve results. One of the things that the challenge points out is that if you set a budget, Amazon often doesn’t spend it all. So, if you set a daily budget of £5 ($5) which is the level recommended by the challenge, it doesn’t mean you will spend £5 x 30 = £150 a month. Our experience backs that up, because we only spend a fraction of the budget we set each month. But if your ads are profitable, the actual budget you set doesn’t matter anyway, because you will always come out on top. If you have never done this before, then saving up £150 so you can give it a try is very worthwhile. And you have time to do that before the January challenge. The next challenge is actually October, but you may not have had time to save up before then, but if you are someone who has a bit of spare cash, then we would recommend doing the challenge sooner rather than later. After all, why wait until January to find out how to sell more books?  There is a word of warning we must give, however: patience isn’t just a virtue, it is an essential.
Results aren’t instantaneous. It can take 2 or 3 days just to get the first click on an ad, and it may need 10 or 20 clicks to make your first sale. But the system learns from those clicks and gets better at sending ads to the right people, so sales increase and the number of clicks needed to make a sale goes down. By “sale” we include KindleUnlimited downloads. A good result is 6-8 clicks per sale. We are getting a sale for every 4.8 clicks for one of our ads, which is excellent. As you can guess, we are very happy to recommend the challenge to you, our readers. Remember, it is free to undertake, and you don’t actually have to spend money on Amazon Ads if you don’t want to. But we think you will gain far more than you spend if you do. You can find out how to register for the next 5 Day Challenge by going onto the challenge's Facebook Page and following it. It is closed for posts and comments right now, but will re-open nearer the time. I would suggest checking it from about mid-September onwards. For our review of “Self Publishing With Amazon Ads” click here. (you will need to scroll down to find it) For our review of “Fiction Blurbs, The Best Page Forward Way” click here (again, you will need to scroll down). 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.  Bryan Cohen of "Selling For Authors". I watched a very interesting webinar recently, about using keywords to improve sales on Amazon (and other retailing websites). I can’t provide a link to it, because it expired on 2nd July, but it was created by Bryan Cohen, owner of the Selling For Authors website. Bryan provides training for authors who need help marketing their books and he has also published a number of books on the subject, some of which have been reviewed on this blog page. We’re big fans of Bryan because he has helped us to increase our sales. So, with the webinar no longer being available, we thought we would tell you about some of the things we learnt from it.  Basically, the webinar was about “Search Engine Optimisation”, aka SEO. But rather than being about using SEO techniques to help people find your website (you may not even have one), it is about helping readers to find your books on whichever websites you sell them. Although I will be talking almost exclusively about KDP and Amazon, the same techniques can be used for whichever websites you use to publish and sell your books. The secret is keywords. Those are the seven words you are able to input into the metadata for your book when you upload it onto KDP.  Metadata, if you are unfamiliar with the term, is the stuff you enter in the first part of the KDP process: Book title, author name, blurb, etc. That is all copied across to other versions of the book, such as paperbacks and some of it also appears on the Amazon sales page. But from the point of view of this blog, I’ll be talking about keywords and subtitles which are a very important part of the metadata.. Now, I’ve already said KDP allows you to enter 7 key words for your book. That is misleading, because you can actually enter whole phrases. If you enter 7 phrases of five words each, that’s 35 words you actually use. The critical thing is, the closer you can match those phrases to the ones people use when they search for books on-line, the higher your book will appear in the search results.  If you use a generic term in your keywords, such as Sci-fi, then it generates thousands of results, and your book will be hidden away in amongst all the others. But if you get an exact match on a longer phrase, the only books that will appear higher in the results are those which have been “sponsored” (paid for adverts) and other books with keywords that are an exact match for the same search term. A book that hasn’t sold a copy since Adam was a lad can appear on the first page of the search results if the right keywords have been used. And experience shows that a book that appears on the first page of search results has a far higher chance of being purchased than one that appears on the subsequent pages. Bryan advises us that there is a process for finding the right keyword phrases to use. Trying to short-cut that process is likely to give disappointing results, so you are advised to set some time aside for this activity. 2 to 3 hours should be enough for a single book.  If you can’t spare 3 hours out of your busy schedule to sell your books, then you will never sell any books. The first thing to do is to think what your book is actually about in the simplest terms. This is not about writing a synopsis or even a back cover blurb. This is about finding a few words that describe it in the most basic form. So, let’s say your book's genre is sci-fi.
Having decided what sort of book you have written, you now need to brainstorm some phrases that might be put into a search bar by someone who is looking for books like yours, eg Sci-fi set in space but including time travel. Why do you need more than one phrase? Because this isn’t an exact science. We don’t yet know which words are going to provide the best results, so we are indulging in trial and error. This is why you need to set time aside to do this.  The next step is to try the phrases out in Amazon’s search bar to see what sort of results they generate. Use “incognito browsing” for this, so Amazon doesn’t show you your own books, because you are looking to see what results are produced for successful books (I’ll define successful a bit better in a moment). Having entered your first phrase, take a look at the results. Ignore the ones that have been sponsored and also ignore any books that are being offered for free, because you don’t know if they are popular because readers like them or because the readers just want a free book. Click on the book that is highest in the results (after excluding sponsored and free) and read the blurb. Is it like yours in basic terms? If no, then the phrase you have used isn’t producing the correct results and you can discard it. If yes, you can now scroll down to the book’s details and look at the sales rankings. This is where you consider if the book is successful or not.  If the book’s overall sales ranking is better than 50,000 it is probably selling reasonably well. But also look at its rankings within its categories. If they are looking pretty good (better than 5,000), then that confirms your initial feelings. But are they the same categories that you have selected for your book? Because that is an important factor too. If they aren’t you can change your categories in KDP later, because if their book is selling well in those categories, yours have a good chance too if they are similar. Don’t bother with books that have a sales ranking worse than 500,000. They aren’t selling enough copies, which means that the keywords you used aren’t going to sell you many books because the results aren’t producing what the readers are looking for. Also don’t try to compete with the books that are at the top of the rankings. They are probably being written by well-known authors, which means you stand little chance of your book being selected as the one to buy. You are looking for the “mid-range” results that will sell you around 10 copies a day. If you get momentum from that you will climb the sales rankings naturally and you may end up competing with the bestselling authors that way, which is a happy place to be.  Repeat this process until you have 2 or 3 phrases that are producing the sorts of search results you were hoping for. Now go to KDP and enter those phrases into the keyword boxes, replacing any keywords that you feel probably aren’t working for you. If you use “Publisher Rocket” (we do) these will be easier to identify. Finally, the hardest part of all – be patient. If you have chosen the right keywords, sales will come, and they will be better than the sales you have had before. If you don’t have the success you expected after about a month, then repeat the process, generating new phrases to try. Don’t try to change all 7 keywords in one go. You won’t know which ones are working and which aren’t, and you may delete keywords that were selling you a few books before you tried this. If your sales are worse than they were before you started then not only are your new phrases not working for you, but you may have deleted useful keywords and you need to reinstate them.  Now, before we go on to talk about subtitles, just a word about the section of the metadata that asks you if the book contains “adult” content. Amazon isn’t too clear on what adult content is and what it isn’t. Accordingly, Bryan Cohen advises that you click on “no” for that question. If you write books that are erotic, contain a lot of extreme violence or lots of strong swear words, then maybe you should click the “yes” option. But otherwise, your books may end up in the adults only dungeon (Bryan’s words) and not be seen by a lot of potential readers. Ask yourself this: “Would I be happy with my 14 year old child reading this book?” If the answer is yes, then no harm will come from clicking the “no” button as children below that age tend not to buy books, their parents do the buying so let them make the decision. Now, subtitles.  We hadn’t thought about these too much in the past and hardly ever use them, but it turns out we should have. Using a subtitle allows you to have an 8th keyword phrase in your metadata that Amazon can find when people do searches. Naturally, as the subtitle appears on the book’s sales page it needs to be grammatically correct, but it can be used to provide guidance to the reader about the book’s content, which may not be apparent from the title. For example, one of our sci-fi titles is called “The Magi”. For some readers that could be interpreted (despite the cover showing an image of a spaceship) as being a book about the Three Wise Men who visited Jesus in Bethlehem. But by adding a subtitle that says “A sci-fi action adventure” we are describing the book in a way that can’t be misinterpreted. Subtitles like that can be used for any book written in any genre. Again, using trial and error, generate some potential subtitles and put them into Amazon’s search bar and see what results they produce. If they give you a list of books that use the same or similar subtitle, which the blurb tells you are the same sort of books that you write and which have reasonable sales rankings, then you are onto a winner. If your books have been organised into a series on KDP, as they should be if they are a series, then don’t use the series title in your subtitle. That will appear in search results if a reader uses the series title as a search term. The series title appears on the sales page anyway so you will be duplicating the wording and that looks amateurish. You don’t have to include your subtitle on your book cover. If you use KDP’s cover creator, it will pull the subtitle through from the metadata if there has been no previous cover created, but you can delete it from the cover if you want to. If you designed your own cover, you don’t have to change it to include the subtitle. Just a note about paperbacks (and hardbacks). Once these have been published you can’t go back later and add a subtitle. However, if a search throws up your ebook, then the other buying options will also be shown on the sales page so readers will see that there is a hard copy option if they want it.  I have tried to cram into less than 10 minutes of reading what Bryan took an hour to say in his webinar, but of course he went into a lot more detail. So, if you want to know more, I suggest you contact Bryan through his website.
As well as selling training he also runs regular “author challenges” where he provides coaching for free, so you may care to sign up for one of those in order to expand on what we have discussed 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.  Why aren’t my books selling? It’s a question that we hear many authors asking, especially on Twitter (Good old Twitter – we’d be stuck for blog ideas without it it). Well, first some expectation management. There are a thousand reasons why a book might not be selling, so it is impossible to answer that question for any individual book in a simple blog. All we can do is look at some generalities and let you compare and contrast those with your book and your marketing to see what conclusions you can draw. But those generalities are important, as they may point you towards the single reason your book may not be selling. You will have to identify and address the precise issue, but at least you will be closer to the right answer than you would be if you hadn’t read this blog.  We are going to start with two assumptions. We will be discussing marketing later in the blog, but our starting point assumes that you have done some marketing, which has led to a potential reader finding their way to the Amazon page for your book. If you don’t sell through Amazon (Why not? They account for 80% of ebook sales!) then the same basic messages apply to other on-line book selling sites. The second assumption (and it is the big one) is that your book is actually up to the required quality. Your Beta readers will have told you that. Sadly, your family and friends probably won’t tell you if it wasn’t, because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. If you haven’t used Beta readers, or you haven’t acted on Beta reader feedback, you are entering a lottery and nothing we can say will change that. You may find it helpful to have your Amazon (or whatever) sales page open in another tab, so you can flip between it and this blog to see what we are talking about. So, what is the first thing a potential reader will see when they click on a link to take them to your book’s sales page? Cover image  We blogged about cover design just a couple of weeks ago, so we aren’t going to go over that ground again. I think it is safe to say that if your book showed up in someone’s search results, they must have found the cover appealing enough to click on the link or they wouldn't be looking at the book's sales page. But what if they didn’t click on the link? If you have been running an advert for your book, you will have data from the results to tell you how many clicks you got (a 10% conversions rate is good). If you aren’t getting enough clicks, your cover design may be part of the problem. But if you haven’t run any ads, you won’t know. You may want to scroll down and read that blog about cover designs, just in case.  Title A lot has been written about titles, with many gurus suggesting titles should be short. All we can say is that “Dune” was a best seller and so was “The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Nighttime”. You can draw your own conclusions with regard to the impact of title length on sales. We don’t think it is a critical factor unless you have used words that might alientate the reader. Price I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, if you aren’t J K Rowling, you can’t charge J K Rowling prices for your books. The ability to set their own price is one of the few competitive advantages that the Indie author has, so they need to use it. “I’m not going to under-sell my talent.” is an objection that is often raised when I say that.  OK, here are the facts. A mainstream published author only gets about 10% of the royalties from each sale. So, for a 9.99 ebook (forgive the lack of currency, it just saves me having to provide $, £ and other conversions), the author will only get about 1. But for a 5.99 ebook an Indie author will get between 1.75 and 3.50 (approx) depending on whether they took the 35% or the 70% royalty option. So, who is underselling their talent? The mainstream published author makes their money not from individual sales, but from total volume of sales. That is as much about having a big marketing budget as it is about having talent. Even some pretty bad writers (naming no names) can sell a lot of books if they have a big enough marketing budget behind them. You, on the other hand, aren’t making any sales, so no one knows about your talent and, if you insist on charging 9.99 for your books, they may never know about it. I’m actually surprised that more mainstream authors don’t opt for self-publishing once they have established their name – they would make far more money. Blurb  After price, this is the next crucial part of the sales page. If the reader is intrigued by the book’s blurb, they will either buy the book, or take the next step towards buying the book, which is to read the “Look Inside” portion. There are many blogs about blurb writing available, including some of our own and they all say pretty much the same thing. There are even books the subject (try Bryan Cohen’s). Google “How to write a good book blurb”, read what the blogs have to say and then make sure your own blurb is doing its job. If it isn’t, change it. “Look Inside” feature. If you have got the reader as far as looking inside the book, you are 90% of the way to making the sale. But it’s that final 10% that is the killer. If the “Look Inside” sample captures the reader’s interest, the sale is guaranteed. If it doesn’t then the reader will go and look somewhere else for their next book.  Once upon a time authors were permitted to take their time telling their story, using the opening chapters to create atmosphere and develop characters, before having to think about “inciting incidents”. Films, TV and computer games have changed all that. Nowadays you have to capture the reader’s interest within the opening few pages of the book and the “Look Inside” portion aids and abets that approach. If you fail to capture the reader’s interest, that 90% is all for nothing and you don’t make the sale. So, ask a few people, who you trust to give you an honest opinion, to read that “Look Inside” portion and then get them to tell you if they would buy the book if they didn’t know it was by you. It may still not provide a definitive answer, because they may not want to hurt your feelings, but if they are really good friends and really trustworthy, they will be honest. Reviews  If the “Look Inside” portion of your book has done its job, readers may never look at the reviews it has been given. I almost never look at reviews myself, having made my decision based on the above factors. But some people do look at reviews, which is a problem if you don’t have any. You can pay for reviews. I’m not recommending it, but it’s your money. If you want to pay, that’s your call. But the real problem is bad reviews. There are two things to be done if you have a lot of bad reviews. A good reviewer will be helpful and provide reasons why they didn’t like your book, so learn from that. The first thing to look at, therefore, is what the reviewer said and then fix the problems. But that won’t get rid of the bad reviews, so there is a second thing you may need to consider. You may wish to “unpublish” the book from Amazon and re-launch it on another self-publishing site, such as D2D. The reviews on Amazon will no longer be seen and the book will start off on the new site with a clean slate. If you are already on multiple self-publishing sites, you really are stuck. Also, if you have bad reviews on Goodreads and other review sites, there is nothing that can be done about those. You may have to unpublish the book entirely and start anew by writing a brand new book. But use those reviews to learn from your mistakes, so the new book doesn’t suffer the same fate. An author who refuses to learn from their mistakes (or even admit they made any) will never sell books. Marketing  We said at the top of the blog that we would be discussing marketing, so here we are. However, this is too vast a subject to cover in one blog. We have written more blogs on this subject than on any other and we are still only scratching the surface in many aspects of the craft. The best thing we can advise is that you undertake some free training in marketing to help you market your books effectively. Effective marketing comes from knowledge, not luck. What we can do is summarise some of the key messages we have put out about this subject in the past. 1. No one is going to stumble on your book by accident. Marketing is not a choice – it is an essential. 2. Did you put the right “keywords” in into your book’s details on KDP? The most common way for people to find new authors on Amazon (or any site) is through searches using keywords. 3. Social media was a better marketing tool in the early days but is now largely past its “sell by” date.  4. Blasting out Tweets to try to sell your book doesn’t work, so don’t pay people to do it. Social media users just scroll past those Tweets nowadays – or they block the username.
5. Social media is still a useful tool if you remember to use the "social" part correctly. 6. Paying for marketing services is an option – but only if you know which service is going to work for your book. You can’t cure a broken leg by taking an aspirin, so you have to know what is wrong with your marketing strategy before you pay someone to fix it, otherwise you risk trying to fix the wrong thing and throwing your money down the toilet.. 7. We’re sorry to have to be the bearers of bad news, but if you really want to sell books you are probably going to have to pay to advertise. We have found Amazon Ads and Facebook Ads to be the most cost effective. If you want to read any of those myriad blogs we have written on the subject of book marketing, you can find them in our archive. So, have you some inkling now about why your books aren’t selling? Maybe you haven’t found the final answer yet, but I hope we have shone a torch into the dark corners where you might find the final answer. 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.  Why do bookstore chains have big displays of book just inside their doors, showing the covers of the books that they are trying to sell that week? Firstly, the publishers are probably paying for the space that the display is taking up. But, more importantly, it is about the only place in a bookstore where it is possible to display the books so that the cover can be shown off. In the bookshelves themselves only the spines can be seen, with the odd book being turned “face outward” to show the front cover. Again, the publisher is probably paying to use that extra space.  There is an old saying amongst chefs that the first taste of a dish is with the eyes. Which is why chefs take so much care over the presentation of the food. It is sometimes a work of art in itself. "It LOOKS delicious." is something most of us have said in our time. And exactly the same rule applies to books. The first taste is with the eyes and the taster is the cover of the book. But instead of saying "It looks delicious" we say "It looks interesting". Cover design is something we have blogged about in the past, but we came across a book recently that reminded us of the importance of getting the cover right. Let me say up front that the book itself was excellent. It wasn’t published by us (more’s the pity), but we are happy to compliment the author on a job well done. One of our authors had been sent the book to review it, which is why he knew what it was about. We only became involved when the reviewer asked our opinion on the cover – which gave rise to this blog.  Just because a cover is artistic, it doesn't make it a good cover. here was nothing wrong with the cover in artistic terms. The problem was that it didn’t say anything about the book. From the imagery it used, it wasn’t possible to know what genre the book was written in. The title didn’t tell us either. In a recent Tweet an author showed three potential covers for her latest book and asked followers which they preferred. I thought they all had a very dated, 1950s/60s, look about them and none of them excited my interest, despite the book being in a genre I read. I Tweeted back to say as much. She probably didn’t like the feedback, but better for the author to get it now than in several weeks’ time after the book has been published. The cover is the first thing a reader sees, regardless of whether it is a bookstore or on-line. The only place a cover isn’t required to make an impact is in a library, where all the books are displayed spine outwards, so only the title and the author’s name are visible.  "Don't judge a book by its spine." The quote from George Eliot (1819-1880), “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is actually a misquote. What she actually said was “Don’t judge a book by its spine”. There are pretty obvious reasons why that version is true. But readers constantly judge books by their covers. It is why publishers spend so much money on cover designs. So, the cover and the title combined must tell the reader everything they need to know about genre, so the reader knows that it is the sort of book they like to read. If that is the case, they will then read the blurb, or the “look inside” portion, or both, and the reader is well on the way to buying the book. If that initial impact isn’t made, the reader will move on to the next book on the shelf, or they will scroll on by to the next book in the search results.  Joseph Heller's classic was already well known by the time this cover was used. Authors choose their book titles for many reasons, and they don’t always say what genre the book is. From the title “Catch-22” you wouldn’t guess that the book was a satire on the way the United States Army Air Corp operated during World War II. It is more likely to suggest a book about baseball or cricket. The real genre only becomes apparent when you read the book. I’m sure that you can all think of other book titles that don’t suggest the genre of the book. Sometimes it is possible to guess because you know what sort of books are written by a particular author, but that isn’t a hard and fast rule either, because some authors write in multiple genres. But if it is an author’s first book, the reader has no idea what genre they write in. So, if the book’s title doesn’t suggest the genre and the author’s name isn’t familiar, then the book’s cover has to do a lot of work for the author if they want to capture the attention of a reader. A lack of distinguishing features We went looking for other titles by the same author and, by accident, came across another problem. The book was the second in a series but the cover of the first book was so similar to that of the second that it is bound to create confusion for the reader. Our memories work far better with visual images than they do with text – and that is where the problem lay. With the exception of some minor differences in background colour, the cover of the second book was identical to the cover of the first book. The only major indication that the two books were different were the titles. Given what I have said about visual imagery taking precedence over text, readers are likely to recognise the cover image from the first book and think they have read the second book when they haven’t. If they have enjoyed the first book and would be prepared to buy the second book without knowing anything else about it, they might not buy for that reason. That’s a guaranteed sale that has been lost, because the cover caused confusion.  We can guess that the author was trying to establish a “brand identity” for the series and there is nothing wrong with that. Most authors (or publishers) of book series try to establish a brand identity for them. But readers must be able to identify individual books in a series at first glance, while also recognising the branding. The way the author (or their publisher) had done it in this case it wasn’t really possible to see that the two books were different. If a reader is asking themselves “Have I read this book before?” then they aren’t going to buy the book if they are in any doubt. They may not decide to read the book’s blurb to find out if they have read it, they may simply move on along the bookshelf or scroll through the search results and that is a lost sale.  It is possible to establish a "brand identity" for a book series. The above image of three covers from novels in Bernard Cornwell’s “Sharpe” series shows how a brand identity can be achieved, through a combination of layout, font selection and visual imagery.
I could go on about selecting the right fonts to suit the genre (the Sharpe covers provide a good example), but those sorts of refinements are secondary to the visual impact of the cover art. So, the two things we hope you will take away from this blog, if you are self-publishing your book: 1. Make sure your book cover makes it clear what genre the book is written in. 2. Make sure the reader can distinguish between successive books in a series. And if you are fortunate enough to have a publisher, make sure your publisher has addressed those two issues to your satisfaction before you sign off on the cover design. If in doubt, take some time to search through the listings of books, especially best-sellers, written in the same genre as yours to see what other authors/publishers have done with the covers. There is no shame in imitation (only in in direct copying). 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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