 Once again I owe the inspiration for this blog to social media, which is ironic because it relates to the effectiveness of social media as a marketing tool. In this case, I read a Tweet from an author listing all the social media channels to which he subscribed, plus his blog, and bemoaning the fact that they weren’t generating much in the way of sales. I took a quick look at his Twitter feed and spotted at once what the problem was: a lack of engagement.  No, not that sort of engagement! He had made a few re-tweets and posted a few “fake engagement” type posts (I’ll be returning to that shortly), but there was nothing on his feed that would encourage me, as a reader, to check out his work. So, it was unsurprising that despite all the channels he was trying to use, he was getting little return. Many authors see social media as a way of plugging their books and no more. That is where they go wrong. Yes, you may generate a few sales by metaphorically saying “Buy my book”, but it is just as likely that readers will scroll past and read a Tweet that isn’t trying to sell them something.  Even if they are interested in the book, they have to click away from the social media channel to check it out, and that interrupts their social media experience, so the best that can be hoped for is that they check it out later. That rarely happens because, by that time, the post has been lost amongst the thousands of others that have since appeared on the timeline. But if social media is so poor when it comes to selling books, why do so many social media gurus still champion it? Because social media is a useful tool – but you have to use it the right way. All tools have to be used correctly if they are to provide you with the right results and social media is no different in that respect.  I’ll be using Twitter as my demonstration model, but the same problems apply with most social media channels. So, what do people do wrong? The most common mistake is “fake engagement”. This produces them lots of nice engagement data but doesn’t produce the desired results. In other words, it looks like it is working if you check the number of responses that a post got, but it doesn’t actually sell any books. So, what is “fake engagement”? Well, let’s start with what I mean by engagement. Engagement is supposed to be a conversation, which builds up a relationship, which then leads on to curiosity about the author’s work.  If the approach used generates responses but without that conversation emerging, then it is fake engagement, because it is one sided. It comes in many forms, but these are the most common: “Can anyone see my Tweets?” There are variations on that question, but the basic idea is that the viewer responds with a “yes, I can” answer, which appears in the Twitter analytics as engagement. But it is one sided engagement as no conversation emerges from it.  The “Writer’s boost” or “author boost”. This is the one I hate the most, because it uses the desperation of other authors to create the fake engagement. I don’t know of any author who has ever made a sale through responding to that sort of invitation (please comment below if you have). It comes in many forms, including posting links to books or blogs or posting cover images. A variation is asking authors to post the first line of their book or from a chapter, or to say something about a character. The inference is that the curiosity of readers will be excited and they will want to know more, but as the post is appealing to authors, not readers, there is little likelihood of that happening. (yes, I know authors are readers too, but in this instance they are responding as authors, not looking for their next new read). These types of post generate a lot of responses from authors, often several hundred but, again, it doesn’t create actual engagement. There are variations on this approach, such as asking people to recommend books. It usually starts with the poster suggesting they suddenly have some spare cash to spend and they want to spend it on books.  “Who/what is your favourite ….?” There is a natural impulse to respond to those sorts of Tweets, but I would advise against it. In its most harmless form, answering the question is just another form of fake engagement. However, it can also be a form of data gathering. Don’t be surprised if you see a sudden surge in advertising on your timeline related to products associated (however tangentially) with your answer. Some dialogues do emerge from those sorts of questions, but they tend to be between other responders, not with the person who asked the question in the first place. That data also appears in their engagement statistics. The questions take many forms. Another variation is “What goes on first, the peanut butter or the jelly?”, or “What goes with peanut butter (you can’t say jelly)?” The British version of that is “Jam or cream?” (Brits will know what that is about) but it’s still fake.  “I’m having a bad day.” Yes, I know that there are sometimes people on social media who are genuinely having a bad day. But that only makes this sort of fake engagement worse, because it is the very worst form of manipulation. They may look like they are saying “Feel sorry for me; sympathise with me; send me pictures of kittens or puppies”, but all of these are fake engagement. It boosts their engagement numbers and makes their feed look popular, but they don’t actually engage with anyone. And without that engagement, they will never sell any books. And they certainly won’t buy any of your books if you respond.  Surveys If you want to boost your engagement stats, post a survey. People love them. But they aren’t real engagement. I could keep adding to this list, but I’m sure you get the idea by now that fake engagement is about getting people to respond to a post, not about actually taking an interest in anything the responders have to say. So, what is real engagement and how do you use it to sell books?  Find the real readers. First of all, you have to search out and engage with readers, not with other authors. If you are an author, you are trying to attract new readers. That means talking to readers about books.. If you are a sci-fi author, you need to talk to sci-fi readers. If you are a romance author, you need to talk to romance readers, etc etc. How does that sell books? It doesn’t. At least, not directly. Social media isn’t a “direct” sales channel. You can’t draw a line between a post and a purchase.  Social media has to be used to excite people’s curiosity about you and the way you do that is the same as you would in real life. You don’t walk up to someone in the street and say “buy my book”. So why would you think you can do that on Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram? No, you engage people in conversation and the best form of conversation to engage them in is the thing they like to talk about the most – themselves. And, eventually, they feel obliged to ask “what about you?” At that point it is OK to mention your book – because they asked.  BTW, this is where a pinned post about your book is essential. Because they may not ask about you or your book, but they may go and take a closer look at your feed and that’s where they will see the post about your book, if you have pinned it. You still may not make a sale, but you may at least have captured their interest enough to take a look at your book. It is very much a “soft sell” approach, but it is more likely to be successful on social media than a hard sell. How do you identify readers?  It isn’t easy, unless they have it in their biography or they mention it in their posts, but if you assume that everyone is a reader, then you won’t go far wrong.
The worst that can happen is that you use social media for what it is meant to be used – for being sociable. Does that all sound like hard work? OK, who told you that it would be easy? Because if anyone did, they lied to you. As I have said in many previous blogs, there is nothing easy about marketing, and that includes social media marketing. Using social media as a tool to promote your work is hard and requires a lot of time and effort. But, done right, it can be effective. Done wrong and it gets you nothing, as the person who inspired this blog found out. 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 last week’s blog we focused on some of the positives of being an Indie author, so it is only fair that we now look at some of the negatives. But we here at Selfishgenie are positive sorts of people, so we really want to turn the negatives into positives too. It isn’t always possible, but we have racked our brains and we think we have found a few ways of doing that. We’re not going to go all “turn that frown upside down” cliché on you. But we do want you to know that there is nothing about the negatives of being an Indie author that you should ever feel you can’t do something about. So, here we go with the negatives of being an Indie author.  1. You have to edit your own work. Some people love editing, some people hate it. But it is an essential part of being an author. If you want your book to be the best version of itself that it can be, you are going to have to do some editing, because the first draft of any novel is never going to be perfect. The first step to editing your draft is to put it out to beta readers. Many Indie authors think this is the final step because they want approval for their finished product. It must therefore be quite demoralising when their beta readers tell them that the book still needs work. So, go to the beta readers first, get their feedback, fix what needs fixing, then go back to a different set of beta readers for a fresh perspective. The feedback should be less damning and more complimentary, but you can still expect some suggestions for improvement. Rinse and repeat until the beta readers have no more suggestions for improvement, or until you think the suggestions are no more than nit-picking. There is no point in putting a book out there and hoping it is good enough. This process provides a degree of certainty. If all else fails, you can find editors on-line and pay them to edit your book. Be very sure of what you are paying for, however. Particularly make sure you understand the difference between editing the text and editing the narrative.  2. You have to do your own formatting. True, but if you set up a template so that from the first word of your book it is already formatted correctly, you will save yourself a lot of time. You may want two formats, a draft version that’s double spaced for later editing, and a final version, but word processing packages allow for speedy conversion from one to the other. We encourage authors to compose in the final format, because we edit using word processors too, which means double spacing isn’t required. We even publish a formatting guide so that potential authors can impress us by showing that they have researched us and know what we are looking for from them. There really is no witchcraft to formatting:
These aren’t hard and fast rules but take a look at the books you love the most and see how they are formatted. Copy them and you won’t go far wrong.  3. You have to upload your books onto self-publishing sites yourself. This can be time consuming the first time you have to do it, but after that you can upload an ebook and a paperback in less than an hour. Some sites are more difficult to work with than others, but if you do anything they don’t like they will tell you why, so you can correct it before publication. If you get the formatting right in the first place, the problems will be reduced. Covers are most tricky, especially for paperbacks, because they have to take into account the thickness of the book when it has been printed. Investing in a package such as Book Brush and learning how to use it is well worth the money and the time.  4. You have to market the book yourself. There can be no doubt that this is the hardest part of self-publishing, and it is also the part that Indie authors spend the least time and money on. Sorry, but if you think people are going to stumble across your book by accident, you are fooling yourself. If you think that “word of mouth” will sell your book, you are fooling yourself. If you think that plugging your book on social media will sell your book, you are fooling yourself. Yes, both word of mouth and social media have a part to play in book marketing, but it isn’t as big a part as some people make out. Book marketing requires knowledge of how to do it if it is going to work. Unless you want to spend money getting other people to do it, it is far better to spend money on learning to do it for yourself. Actually, you don’t have to spend money on learning. There are free on-line courses on marketing that will teach you the basics. But you have to invest the time and the effort if you want it to work. Investment in yourself is an investment that always pays back – so do it. But at some point you will have to pay for marketing services, especially advertising. We have posted several blogs on this subject and you can find them all in our archive. But the golden rule is caveat emptor – buyer beware. There are lots of “businesses” out there that promise a lot but deliver little. Look for recommendations from other authors and check their sales rankings - because they don't lie. That’s one of the best ways you can use social media when it comes to marketing.  5. Readers don’t take self-published authors seriously. Unfortunately, there is little we can do about that sort of prejudice. Also unfortunately, there are a lot of poorly written self-published books that would seem to confirm this bias (though not yours, obvs). There are a couple of things you can do to try to change the minds of readers when you encounter this bias. The first thing to do is to challenge this view. There are a limited number of agents and an even more limited number of publishers, so author supply outstrips publisher demand. Just because an author can’t find a publisher it doesn’t mean their book isn’t worthy. It just means there is no space for them at the table right now. The other thing you can do is to point out the growing list of bestselling self-published authors. We gave some names in last week’s blog, so you can scroll down and see them. Saying something like “How do you account for the success of L J Ross, who is self-published and has sold over 7 million books?” will leave the prejudiced person looking for a way out of the conversation. If they reply with “they got lucky” then start reeling off a few more names and asking if they all “got lucky”. Or maybe they sell so many books because they are real authors who tell stories that people want to read. I can’t promise that you will change a lot of minds, but it is only by challenging prejudices that we eventually eradicate them. If all else fails, offer them a free copy of your book so they judge you on merit instead of pre-judging you.  6. You feel so isolated and/or you feel like an imposter.
Having a publisher comes with a support network that affirms your ability as a writer. And there is always someone available at the end of a telephone who understands what you are going through and is there with words or comfort. But just because you are self-published, it doesn’t mean you are alone. Join a writer’s group. Even if you live in an isolated community you can join virtually. Zoom has become a great boon when it comes to meeting other writers and discussing your problems with them – and being there for them to discuss their problems with you. Join on-line writers forums, for the same reason – but don’t try to use them to plug your books! I don’t recommend social media as your first port of call for support. While the vast majority of authors on it are supportive, it only needs one troll to start on you and it can ruin your day. Find the safe spaces and stick to them. But always remember – you are not alone. If the worst comes to the worst, you can always email us, even if you aren’t one of our authors. We support every Indie author, regardless. See our “contact” page for our email address. 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 this week’s blog I’d like to spend some time looking at the upsides of being an Indie author, of which there are far more than you may think. As Indies, we are all aware of the downsides. I may devote a blog to them in the future, but this week I’m trying to stay positive, so I won’t be mentioning them other than to acknowledge that they exist. But those negatives colour our thinking about who we are, what we are and what we are capable of achieving if we do a bit of research and are prepared to knuckle down and do the work. I’m not talking about the work of writing a novel. You have already done that, or you wouldn’t be thinking about publishing.  No, I’m talking about the work of being a self-publisher. It is a job in itself and it requires all the disciplines of any other type of job if you want to succeed. There is no nepotism in self-publishing, because there is no daddy (or mummy) figure to help you up the ladder. There is just you. If you aren’t prepared to put in the work, there is no point in reading blogs (or books) about self-publishing because you won’t make it. There is no such thing as “luck” when it comes to selling books (there is no such thing as luck anyway, IMHO). There is only hard work and dedication. Just like any other job, you either have to put in the hard yards, or you have to sleep with the boss, which is a bit difficult if you are the boss. So, what are these upsides?  1. You have complete editorial control. Any editor working for a publisher is expected to produce a sure fire winner at the end of the editorial process. That means that if they don’t like the way you tell your story, they will want you to change it. But think about that for a moment. Your book is like your child. Would you change your child if a complete stranger told you it was ugly? No, of course you wouldn’t. The same applies to your book. You don’t have to change it if you don’t want to. There is a caveat to that. If your beta readers (you do have beta readers, don’t you?) tell you your story is ugly, it is worth listening to them. But you are still in control of how your story is told.  2. You can get your book to market far quicker. There is no doubt that mainstream publishing is a slow process. From acceptance of a submission to launch date of the book can be as much as two years, depending on the publisher. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is all the boxes that have to be ticked on the Gantt chart to get it to publication day. But for the Indie, once they have decided that the latest draft is as good as the book is ever going to get, they can launch their book the same day, if they put their mind to it. Realistically I would suggest a two to three week timeline, especially if you need a cover to be designed, but the timeline is entirely in your hands.  3. The Indie can set their own price for the book. That means the Indie can get very competitive in their pricing. Not for them the £19.99 (or more) hard backs, followed by the £13.99 paperback and the £9.99 ebook.. Indies don’t have to have a hard copy version at all if they don’t want to – though there is still a large market for paperbacks. Competitive pricing allows a lot of Indie authors to establish a readership amongst people who don’t have much of a budget for books. That earns them reviews and that in turn stimulates more sales. And without all the overheads of a big publishing house, the Indie can actually earn larger royalties per book than many mainstream published authors. Some of our authors are now earning 4 digit royalties per month and that’s after we at Selfishgenie take our share. While we may not be true Indies, we operate on the same cost base as an Indie which means our authors’ earnings are comparable to those of any Indie author who does it all themselves.*  4. The Indie can control their own marketing. If book sales are flagging, the Indie can give them a boost by running promotions and advertising campaigns. Most mainstream publishers lose interest in a book after about 12 months, because they have moved on to new projects, leaving their authors languishing in the doldrums with ever decreasing sales. Mainstream Publishers will deny that, of course, but think about it for a moment. How often do you see “sponsored ads” on Amazon for a mainstream published book that is more than a year old? I’ll give you a clue – you won’t. Book stores have removed the book from the shelf to make room for new releases. The mainstream publishers rely on Amazon’s algorithms to keep their back catalogue in front of readers, based on reading preferences and previous purchases. But if the Indie’s books sell a few copies, they will appear in front of readers in exactly the same way, because the algorithms work for the Indie just the same way as they work for mainstream publishers. A mainstream published author can’t tell their publisher to do more marketing, but an Indie can do it for themselves.  5. You don’t have to pay an agent. Agents are only necessary to open the door to a mainstream publishing deal. But they want a big share of your royalties for doing that. It used to be around 10%. Now it is closer to 20% and can be higher for the most successful agents. And it comes from the author’s royalties. The publisher doesn’t pay the agent a penny. I’m not saying agents don’t earn their money, but I would prefer to see a ceiling placed on their earnings from a book, rather than it being a lifetime commitment. We’re talking about a business relationship here, not a marriage!  6. You get all the credit.
If your Indie book is a success, no one else can claim the credit. No agent can say “I discovered that author”. No editor can say “I made that book what it is”. No publisher can say “Without me, you would never have heard of this author”. And there are a lot of highly successful Indie authors who can make their claims for success. Here are a few names: L J Ross, Mark Dawson, Rapi Kaur, Rachel Abbott, Phillip Goodrich, Christopher Paolini, Maria E Cantu Alegre and Howard of Warwick (pen name), Between them those Indies have sold millions of copies of their books – for L J Ross alone it is 7 million. BTW, while researching that list I actually bought one of the author's books, because I read the genre in which the author writes and had never come across him before. I was already familiar with Mark Dawson, because I have read several of his books. I’m not going to pretend that being an Indie author is easy. If it was, that list of successful Indie authors would be a lot longer (actually, it is. I just stopped after 8 names because I had no more time for research). But my point is that if you are an Indie, it doesn’t mean you can’t become a big name. If you have the right book and you market it the right way, it will sell. So, all you Indies that have read this far, give yourself a big pat on the back and, the next time you are feeling frustrated about not being signed by a big publishing house, remember this list of upsides. Success really is within your reach. You just have to grasp it. I have only listed 6 positives, but that is because I don’t have time to write about more (I do have a business to run too). Please feel free to share your positives in our comments section below. * If you want to be part of this success story, you can find out how on our “Contacts” page. 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.  It’s a question a lot of Indie authors ask themselves, but isn’t easy to answer: “Should I do a free book giveaway?” If you only have one book out there, then the answer is “No” (but there are caveats to that – see later in this blog). The purpose of a free book promotion is to stimulate interest in your books, so that you sell more. But if you have given it away for free, who are you going to sell to? The people who have already had it for free aren’t now going to buy a copy, and if someone didn’t download it for free, they are hardly going to pay for it once the offer ends (again, see the caveats later). No, the idea of a free book promotion, or giveaway, is to showcase your writing, so that if readers like the free book, they will then buy your other books. For series writers this is a great incentive for doing a free giveaway. And for non-series writing authors with more than one title available, there is something in this for you as well.  "If it's free, I'll take 10, no 20, no 100 ...." OK, let’s deal with the elephant in the room. Yes, it is true that some people will download the free offer just because it is free and won’t then come back to buy any more of your books. But that is what I call “collateral damage”. It is unavoidable I’m afraid. But mixed in with the freeloaders will be readers who will try your book for free and then go on to buy more of your work if they like what they have read. I know this to be true because I have done it myself. I don’t think I’m unusual in this. At Selfishgenie we have also proved it with previous giveaways, which have resulted in an up-tick in sales of the other titles in the series after the promotion has ended. When we talk numbers later in this blog, they are based on actual results from previous promotions.  So, if you have more than one title available or you are a series writer, doing a free book giveaway can boost the sales of the rest of your books. You may have sensed a “but” at the end of that sentence. If you did, you have excellent intuition. But making a book free is no good unless you tell potential new readers about it, so that they can download it. There are free book listings on most etailing sites; Amazon certainly has one. However, a quick search we did for free books on Amazon returned 9,000 results. The chances of your book being on one of the early pages of the search results are pretty slim and if your book is anywhere more than five pages down the results, there isn’t much chance of it being found because people hardly ever go that far down search results..  I refined that search to “most downloaded free books” and the list was reduced to just 3 pages, but to get into that list your book must have already been download for free, so it won’t appear there on the day you start your promotion. It won’t appear there until someone, (actually several someones), has downloaded the book. Social media promotion will probably shift a few downloads for you, if you have a lot of followers. However, there is no guarantee that your posts about your free offer will be seen. If you only have a very small following on social media, then your reach is limited unless you get a lot of re-Tweets or shares. It may seem counter-intuitive, but you will probably need to spend some money to give your book away for free.  I don’t think Amazon or Google advertising are cost effective ways of doing that. You pay by the click, so it is difficult to control your spend because you probably need a lot of clicks to get enough downloads to start generating paid sales later, which means setting a high daily budget for your campaign. So, you need to look at other, cheaper ways to promote your free book. Ways that will generate lots of downloads. And you really want to know how much those downloads are going to cost you in the first place, so you can work out if you have any chance of getting your money back in paid sales. I’m talking about book promotion sites, which offer a fixed package for a fixed price.  Now, there are two types of book promotion sites. There are those that use social media to promote your book and those that use a wider range of approaches (which may include social media but may not). The most important of these other approaches is email lists, because they are bound to be seen by readers who are on the list. Please, don’t use sites that only offer social media promotion - you can do that for yourself for free. Ignore the fact that your book will be “featured” on the promoter’s website. This isn’t the best way for the promotion to be seen. If that were the case, then it being on Amazon should be enough – and it isn’t. There is usually no guarantee that the readers the sites reach are the right readers for your genre, however. You may be an author of fantasy books and some of the people on the email list may only read romance, or crime drama, or whatever. But at least the readers of fantasy will also see the promotion. Genre preferences are one of the reasons why a 1,000 clicks may only get 100 downloads.  We have recently run a trial using a book promotion website, for our title “The Magi” which produced some promising results. The site we selected boasts an email list of over 300,000 readers. The site promised a guaranteed 1,000 downloads for our free book but we actually only got just over 200 (I’ll return to that later, to explain how the guarantee works). We usually think in terms of 10% of downloads generating new readers for a series or, in this case, approximately 20 new readers. So, here’s the maths (or math if you are American). 1. The promotion cost us £67 ($75) after using a discount code found in this blog 2. The book sells for £4.99 on Amazon. 3. One sale generates about £3.50 in royalties. 3. There are 9 books in the series. 4. If a reader who downloads the first book for free then buys the other 8 books, then it generates 8 x £3.50 = £28. 5. Therefore 3 new readers returns a profit of (3 x £28) – £67 = £14 profit on the promotion. But we reckon 200 downloads should return 20 new readers, so the anticipated profit is about £490. Impressed? Ok, too early to place an order for a Ferrari, but profit is profit.  But we were guaranteed 1,000 downloads, so what happens now that we have fallen 80% short? The site owners promise us a pro-rata refund on the cost of the package. It is “site credit”, so we can’t take it in cash, but it does mean we can run another free book promotion in a few months’ time and it won’t cost us so much. It also means that our profit for this campaign will be higher because of the refund. As for why we didn't get the guaranteed 1,000 downloads, we'll return to that later. There is another aspect to the free downloads that we haven’t yet mentioned and that is the reviews that they generate. If you haven’t had many reviews for your book up to now, then this is a good way to get some more. I mentioned caveats earlier and this is one justification for an author with a single published title to run a free book promotion.  Remember, there were 200 downloads. That may generate a lot of reviews. Even freeloaders write reviews sometimes. And we all know how important reviews are for future sales. There is another time when an author with only one published title may consider doing a free book promotion. That is when they are about to publish a second title. Putting the first book out for free can stimulate demand for the second book. To make sure that this is capitalised upon, the author must put their new title on “pre-order” before running the free promo, and they must include a link to the pre-order at the end of the free book. That means uploading an amended manuscript that includes the link, but that is the work of moments.  Once the pre-order goes live, whatever sales have been made will catapult the book up the sales rankings, which makes the book look more attractive to other readers who may not have taken advantage of the free download. However, it does require the book launch to be properly planned and timed, so that everything happens at the right time and in the right order. The book promotions site told us that 92% of the promotions they run for free books reach the 1,000 download target, so why didn’t ours do so well? We think we have some answers. We ran our promotion from Thursday to Monday and the number of downloads we got over the weekend was very low compared to the other 3 days. This suggests a lot of the email addresses to which the promotion is sent are work related, so no response at the weekend. But there is another possible reason.  Author Robert Cubitt The author of the free book, Robert Cubitt, is British but around 80% of the readers on the promotion site’s email list are American.
Our actual downloads reflected that proportion, with about 20% coming from outside the USA (UK, Canada, Germany, France Netherlands and Australia to be precise) and 80% from within. Sad to say that many readers will only read books by authors who are the same nationality as them. I don’t know why this should be. I guess people like books that are either written by people like them or are about people like them. But The Magi is a sci-fi series and none of the characters are like the readers (unless there are aliens amongst us) so it shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter for the fantasy genre either. But it does seem to matter, so we Brits will have to suck it up and make do with the scraps from the table. But a potential £490 profit is quite a big scrap and is certainly better than no profit at all. This is NOT a recommendation, but the website we used for the promotion we have discussed here is Book Butterfly. If you missed out on our recent free book giveaway, don’t despair. You can still get a book for free just by signing up for our newsletter. Just click on the button below (excludes “The Magi Box Set).  Once again I’m indebted to the users of Twitter for the inspiration behind this week’s blog. The theme is how perceptions don’t necessarily match up to reality. The Tweet(s) in question relate to an author bemoaning the fact that someone had posted rude 1 star reviews about two of her books on Amazon and she feared this was impacting on her sales. They were also undermining her confidence and making her ask herself if she should continue working on her third book. I Tweeted back (sympathetically I hope) that reviews weren’t everything and, at the end of the day they are an opinion, and no author can please everyone. If they had valid criticisms, then it was a good idea to learn from them, but otherwise forget them. There are also people who delight in posting 1 star reviews, just because they can. (I know, we live in a truly troubling world)  In her reply the author posted a screenshot of her review data, the yellow bars Amazon uses to show the percentages of reviews for each star rating. And it was highly revealing, but not in the way she thought. Out of around 240 reviews, over 60% were 5 star and another 20% were 4 star. I pointed that out, suggesting the (approx) 10% of 1 star reviews weren’t something to worry about. The number of 4 and 5 star reviews would be far more influential than the 1 star ones when it came to decisions about purchasing. She didn’t agree with me, suggesting that her KENP reads had dropped since the 1 star reviews had been posted. I suggested that she would need a bit more evidence than that in order to draw such a conclusion. Perhaps her KENP reads had dropped because her marketing activity needed refreshing. I think I may have persuaded her, because she did say she would think about that. Or maybe she was just trying to shut me up, which is a real possibility.  But it is easy to take an isolated bit of data, such as reviews, and interpret them as something they aren’t. Looking at her numbers, I would be using the percentage of 4 and 5 star reviews to trumpet the success of our books, in order to encourage new readers to try them. That screenshot she posted tells a far different story to the one she was seeing, as far as I was concerned. Because 80% reviews at that 4 and 5 star level are a real sign of success, not failure. It is always dangerous to take two bits of data, put them side by side and assign cause and effect from them. In this case a couple of 1 star reviews put alongside a drop in KENP reads equals a cause and effect.  Cause and effect? A third bit of data is needed in order to see if that is a valid conclusion. In this case the third bit of data would be a measurement of marketing activity: social media posts, advertising spend etc. If there is a lot of marketing activity but a drop in KENP reads, then the author may be right in her original conclusion. But if there is a drop in marketing activity at the same time as a drop in KENP reads, then perhaps it isn’t the 1 star reviews that are the cause, perhaps it is the lack of marketing. It is very easy to let our perceptions and emotions get in the way of interpreting our data. In this case it is possible that the author is (a) underconfident and (b) sensitive to criticism. I can’t prove that because I haven’t got all the data available, but it seems to be a reasonable conclusion to draw on the basis of what she said in her Tweets.  That under confidence, combined with the sensitivity, led the author to draw a conclusion that supported her perceptions and, despite what Lee Atwater may have said, perception is not reality, it is only the perceiver’s reality. Perception may be reality, but it isn’t actuality (Bill Cowher) and you have to be able to tell the difference if you want to market your books effectively. In this case it was the perception that 1 star reviews were affecting KENP reads, when the actuality might be a lack of marketing or perhaps another, undiscovered, reason. As statisticians will tell you, correlation does not imply causation. More evidence is needed. So, if you want to diagnose problems such as drops in sales levels, what can you do?  The best thing is to use several different types of data alongside each other and see what, together, they are telling you. KDP provides you with a lot of information on sales and KENP, but it doesn’t tell you anything about your marketing activity. This means that you need to have some measurement of marketing activity that you can analyse. If you use paid advertising, there is a mountain of data that can be obtained in relation to the performance of your ads. The most important bits are conversion rates. Eg how many impressions (views) did your ads get and how many clicks on the links did that convert to. Then how many of those clicks were converted to sales. The experts suggest you should be expecting at least a 10% conversion rate of link clicks to sales to consider an advertising campaign to be successful. But if you don’t use paid for advertising, you only use social media, you have to look elsewhere for your data. But the same principles apply. How much engagement did you get for the social media posts that pitched your books? How many clicks on the links etc.  The lower the numbers are, the less likely it is that you made sales or KENP reads.
If you got high engagement levels but low sales, it means that readers looked at your book but chose not to buy it and there are many reasons why that may be. Reviews are one of them, of course, but they aren’t the only one. There is your cover, the blurb and the ‘look inside’ portion of the book as well. I would say that all three of those are a more likely reason for a reader not buying than having 10% 1 star reviews when 80% are 4 and 5 star. I’m not saying reviews aren’t important. Readers often send us important information tucked away in a poor review and that information can be used to improve writing. But, as I said before, a review is just an opinion and, in some cases, it isn’t even that. It may just be some poor soul being nasty because it makes them feel good. And that contaminates the data, just as an author getting their Mum to post 5 star review contaminates the data. But importantly, don’t let perception become your reality if you aren’t sure it is also the actuality. Correlation isn’t the same as causation (well, sometimes it is but that is a whole different blog). If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  I think it is fair to say we get a lot of our ideas for blogs from Twitter and other social media sites, especially those used by authors. Be careful what you post, because you might well get a mention here. Not by name, of course. We would never do that. So it is this week, with a Tweet we saw a few weeks ago from an author (we sometimes write our blogs several weeks in advance of their publication). The Tweet was actually in two parts. The first part related to the way an author’s book sales had fallen off over recent weeks. By ‘sales’ we also mean KENP read using KindleUnlimited etc. A blog we posted a couple of weeks ago covered some of the reasons why sales vary on a seasonal basis, so we won’t cover that ground again (scroll down a bit if you want to find out more). But, of course, it’s not just the season of the year that affects sales.  We like to think of book sales a little bit like the way we think about tending houseplants. If you give a houseplant just the right amount of attention at just the right time, it should flourish. Well, a healthy plant in a disease free environment should live a long and happy life if it is given the right care and attention. But if you don’t give the plant the right care, or enough attention, or you give it at the wrong time, it will die. The same applies to giving it too much attention. The phrase ‘killing with kindness’ may have been invented for houseplants (if it wasn’t, please don’t email to tell us – put it in a blog of your own).  So it is with marketing a book. Given the right attention at the right time, your books should still sell even if seasonal factors are against you. That’s providing they are readable, of course – it’s hard to sell a poor quality book, ie one that has a ‘disease’. If you don’t do enough marketing or you do it at the wrong time or in the wrong way, your books won’t sell. And you can do too much marketing, killing the book with kindness so to speak, because readers get fed up with seeing your marketing efforts. Our response to the Tweet we saw was to suggest the author think about taking a look at her marketing strategy to decide what might be needed to lift her sales. The second part of the Tweet was about the author’s fixation with checking her sales data on KDP. She seemed to be looking very five minutes (I may be exaggerating) but she knew it wasn’t healthy.  For Indie authors I can quite understand the need to constantly check sales data. Sales provide validation for the author that their book is ‘good enough’. An author who has an agent or a mainstream publisher doesn’t need that sort of validation. They have already had their fix by getting the agent and/or the publishing deal. But for Indies there is little other than sales data to tell them that readers like their books. Reviews are the other form of validation, of course, but they are opinion based and therefore subjective, whereas sales data is empirical. Numbers don’t have an opinion. To paraphrase an old business saying: reviews are vanity, sales are sanity.  You don't fatten a pig by weighing it. But you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it, as the saying goes (apologies to vegans, Jews and Muslims). Weighing your pig tells you if it’s gaining weight, but if you aren’t using that information to adjust your pig’s diet, then knowing its weight doesn’t achieve anything. OK, it’s a heavy handed metaphor (it was a heavy pig) but it makes the point. Knowing your sales data doesn’t sell more books. Knowing your sales data tells you whether or not your marketing strategy is working. If you aren’t making sales, or not as many sales as you think you should be making, then that is telling you to look at your marketing strategy so you can change it to make more sales. But if you make changes to your strategy, you have to give them time to work. Checking the figures every five minutes doesn’t help. It may just lead to frustration and, in extreme cases, it may actually be harmful to mental health.  By marketing strategy, we don’t just mean your advertising or social media posts.
Book covers and blurbs can both have an effect on sales and need to be quality checked to make sure they are doing their jobs. The “look inside” feature on Amazon is also part of your marketing. If you don’t capture the reader’s imagination in those few free pages, you may not make the sale. The way you word your social media posts, what sort of images you use and a whole raft of other considerations also play their parts. We blogged about all of that last autumn, so we won’t go into those again today. If you want to know more, check out our archives under the "marketing" heading. So, Indie Author who inspired this blog, we hope we have reassured you that checking your sales data is actually quite normal. But we hope we have also encouraged you to take the information provided by that data and make use of it, so that your sales will look after themselves and you don’t have to check them so often. 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.  Big news - we have recently put some of our titles onto Draft2Digital. We decided to do this because, by keeping them exclusive to Amazon, we were actually narrowing our sales channels when we should really be going wider. Not everyone uses Amazon to purchase their books, so we were losing quite a lot of opportunities to offer our titles to those people. There was one advantage to using Amazon. That was their KindleUnlimted (KU) programme. We get a lot of downloads through KU and they account for a significant proportion of our revenue. But if we put our ebook product onto other distribution platforms, we aren’t able to use KU, so we risk that income. And yes, Amazon do check the other retailers to make sure we aren’t cheating.*  So, we analysed our income by title and it didn’t take a lot of time to realise that many of our titles aren’t read using KU, though they are purchased in ebook or paperback format. For some reason those books don’t seem to attract KU readers. Five of the titles are non-fiction and that may have something to do with it. The remainder do get the occasional KU download, but not enough to justify us making them exclusive to Amazon. OK, back to basics; just who are Draft2Digital (hereafter referred to as D2D)? Basically, they are similar to KDP in that they allow Indie authors and small publishers like ourselves to upload their books to them, which they then distribute to retail channels. They also offer formatting services, cover creation (not cover design as such) and a few other whistles and bells. But their big selling point is that they distribute books through a wide range of on-line retailers.  How many? Here’s the complete list (at time of writing): Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Scribd, Smashwords, Tolino, Overdrive, bibliotecha, Baker & Taylor, BorrowBox, Hoopla, Vivlio and Palace Marketplace. They will also distribute via Amazon if your book isn’t already on there, so it really is a “one stop shop”. Several of the companies listed above are aimed at the book borrowing market rather than the retail market, so in that respect they are similar to KU. I’m not suggesting that is 100% of the on-line book market, but it is a lot more than Amazon by itself. If you are considering distributing your book as an audio title, they also offer audiobook services, including helping you to find a narrator. This service may be cheaper than ACX.com, but only marginally (see previous blogs on the subject of audiobooks).  So, what is D2D like to work with? First of all, using the files we had already uploaded to Amazon caused us problems. Any reference to Amazon in the MS caused it to be rejected, as did references to ebooks in paperback MS’s. As we often insert a preview for another book at the end of an MS, with a link to its Amazon sales page, this meant having to go back and remove those references and links. You may also have to remove contents pages if you want D2D to insert a contents page complete with hyperlinks. The same applies to copyright pages, dedications etc. however, you can opt to use the ones that are already embedded in your files.  If you already have a cover for your ebook then it will probably upload OK to D2D, but when we uploaded our paperback covers we had some rejected because the back cover blurb was “blurred”. We had used shadowing behind the text and D2D’s quality bots couldn’t handle that. They also reserve more space for an ISBN than Amazon, so if any text encroaches into that space it will result in the cover being rejected. Paperback covers also have to conform to the D2D standard trim size, which is 5.5 x 8.5 inches (14 cm x 21 cm). If your covers are bespoke, created for you by a designer, you may have to go back and get them to adjust the size. However, if you created your own cover using packages such as BookBrush, you can alter the size yourself (don’t forget to adjust the positions of the text). I guess that sort of thing is all part of the learning curve for a new app, but it was frustrating and continues to be so as we have to change our cover designs and edit our MS’s in order to overcome these issues.  What about royalties? As with Amazon, you can set your own price for your books, which means you have control over the amount of royalties you receive once D2D and its partners have taken their share of the sale price. Unlike Amazon, which has two options for royalty percentages, D2D has only one, which is the sale price minus distribution charges. You also have the capability to run price promotions for ebooks and you can price your book to make it free, but not on Amazon. The price for Amazon will automatically be set to a minimum of 99c (99p). What is worth noting is that the printing costs for paperbacks seem to be much higher on D2D, which makes them less competitive than Amazon. To reduce the price to what you may have set on Amazon, you would have to reduce the amount of royalties you earn. In some cases it may not be possible to price-match to Amazon and still earn any royalties at all. Conversely, you could increase your paperback prices on Amazon, but that may make them less competitive compared to works by other authors. If you aren’t as famous as J K Rowling, you can’t charge J K Rowling level prices.  In terms of marketing tools, D2D has a partner site called Books2Read (hereafter referred to as B2R). It's basically a resource for readers to use to find books they may like. When your book is published its details are automatically copied across to B2R along with a “universal book link” (UBL) that allows the reader to go direct to their preferred retailer in their preferred country to buy the book. One of the tools B2R offers to authors is “new release notifications”. These are automated emails sent to readers who are registered on the site and who are signed up to your profile, so once you have uploaded your book, this tool helps your readers to find it. This is something I think gives D2D a real edge over Amazon, because any marketing you do through them has to be paid for.  OK, it’s a one shot deal, but one shot is better than no shot at all. It’s also fully automated, so you don’t have to do anything except register your book for the notification system and D2D has a pop-up for that which appears when you press the "publish" button.. You’ll know when the email notification has been sent, because you’ll receive a copy. Other than B2R there are no real marketing tools for you to use. They don’t have an equivalent to Amazon Ads, which is a shame. Somehow I think D2D is missing a trick here and is also limiting the ability of authors to market the books they have so painstakingly uploaded onto their site. On the other hand, it does create a “level playing field” for all their authors, because you can’t “buy” success through advertising. Everyone has the same chance of being discovered if readers are looking for their genre of books. Of course, you still have the option to advertise your books using other channels, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. Make sure you include the UBL in your advert so that readers buy it through D2D rather than go looking on Amazon.  So, has this switch resulted in thousands of new sales?
Well, it’s early days yet. What I can tell you is that we had sales within days of uploading our first book to the site. Not many, I’ll admit, but sales are sales and we hadn’t done any marketing work for the book. Readers found them for themselves and that rarely happens on Amazon. We’ll let you know more when we start to get some results worth talking about. In the meantime, check out D2D for yourself and see what you think. It costs nothing to look. * We know Amazon (actually their bots) goes looking, because we got a “cease and desist” email from them for one of our books which was uploaded to Smashwords some years ago and we had forgotten to take it down when we enrolled the same title on KU. Amazon threatened to withdraw our earnings for the book if we didn’t unpublish it from Smashwords. They’d actually found the book on the Barnes & Noble website, who Smashwords were using as one of their distributers. 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.  Timing is everything in life, but even more so for Indie authors who are trying to promote their books on a limited (or even zero) budget. Here at Selfishgenie we track our sales on a day by day, week by week, month by month basis so that we can work out when is the best time to advertise our books. Some days we see more people buying books than on other days, so they are the days we want to advertise, so that we can catch the readers' attention on the days when they are buying. That doesn’t mean to say we don’t advertise books on other days. After all, people are all unique and each person has their own shopping habits. But we know that, in broad terms, there are days when more people buy books than other days. Those are the days when we may consider increasing our advertising spend. I’ll go into why those variations exist in a moment.  By tracking people’s book purchasing habits over a longer period of time we can also work out when to do promotions. Again, I’ll go into why that may be in a moment. But that same timing issue extends to when we should launch our books. There are some months of the year when it is better to launch a book than others. I’ll be talking about the UK here, but the same rules probably apply wherever you live. All you have to do is adjust to suit your calendar. June and early July are a good time to launch a book in the UK. Why?  Because the majority of people take their vacations in July and August and will be looking for something to read while they hang around in airports, sit in their aircraft seats for several hours and then lounge around the swimming pool at their destinations. For some people this may be the only time of the year when they actually have time to read a book. This is particularly relevant for the ebook market, because no one ever takes enough books with them on holiday, so they’ll be logging their Kindles into the hotel Wi-Fi to buy even more books for the second half of their holiday and for the return journey.  Children's books - yes for July, no for January. Children’s books are especially popular at that time of year, because parents are desperate to keep their children occupied while travelling and during the school holidays. The first quarter of the year, on the other hand, is very bad for children’s books because (a) they are back at school, (b) they still haven’t read all the books they received from loving relatives at Christmas and (c) money is tight during the first quarter (see more below). If your books are aimed at the older reader, you will probably want to launch your book in August, because all those grandparents who have been on child minding duty over the long summer holiday period are suddenly free to go on holiday themselves in September, when the kids go back to school. I know, because that’s when I go on holiday and the hotels I go to appear more like old folks’ homes than holiday resorts. There are very few people there who are under fifty and those that are there either have no children or have children who are still too young for school.  Here’s a tip for you, if you write books in a series. Take a paperback copy of Book 1 with you when you go on holiday and leave it in the hotel (most hotels have a shelf of books for people to borrow). You may snag a new reader for the rest of the series that way. Obviously the seasonal issues mentioned above are applicable to advertising spend as well as book launches. In November and right up to mid-December 2022 we promoted our golf book as a Christmas present for golfers and made quite a few sales that way – more than the whole of the rest of 2022 put together. If you want to know more about the best time to launch your books, broken down into genres, we found this helpful article. But there are others if you do a search. So, what is the best time to advertise?  Books are a popular Christmas present, so giving your advertising a seasonal boost may pay dividends and, of course, we’ve already mentioned the summer season. Think about advertising romance in the run up to Valentine’s Day and promote books as a gift for Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day But what about routine, week-in-week-out advertising activity? We found Friday to be the best day of the week to advertise, as that is when people go to look for their weekend reading. Weekdays are generally “early to bed days”, both for children and adults, but at the weekend a lot of people catch up on their reading and to do that they need books. Hence higher sales figures for books on a Friday.  You can even refine that down a little bit if you want. Come lunchtime everyone is thinking about finishing for the week, so they may start browsing the book listings from lunchtime onwards, so you don’t need to spend so much money in the morning. Sunday evening is also a good time, especially for paperbacks. Come Sunday evening a lot of people have either finished their books or are getting close to finishing. The “forward planners” will be thinking ahead and looking towards the following weekend. Paperback readers will be ordering on Sunday evening so that their books are with them by Friday. At the other end of the scale we have noticed we get far fewer sales on a Saturday and a Monday. Saturday is probably slow because people have a lot of family things going on as well as shopping, sport and general leisure activities. Monday probably because people are back at work and won’t have much time to think about reading.  Certain times of the year are better than others for promotions. January and February* are the months when the Christmas chickens come home to roost and those credit card bills for all the holiday spending land on the mat. Energy bills are also at their highest. This means people have less money to spend and one of the places they can cut back is on their book purchases. We have seen consistent reductions in income during the first two months of the year since we started our business. So, this is a great time to do a price reduction or free book promo – especially free! Everyone can afford to buy a book that is free! Again, I’m talking to the series writers mainly. Give the first book in the series away at a reduced price, or for free, and there’s a good chance that if the readers like it, they’ll come back for the rest of the series -at the normal price - when they have a bit of disposable income in their pockets once more.  This is where you have to manage your marketing activity very carefully. No one can download a free book unless they know it is available. So, you have to be prepared to do some marketing. Social media marketing is free of course, but evidence suggests it is becoming less and less effective as a marketing channel. Conversely, Amazon Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Ads etc are quite expensive, and you don’t want to spend a lot of money to give something away for free, even if you are going to get the money back later in sales for Book 2 onward. There is a happy medium and this is where book promotion sites come in. This year we used Book Reader Magazine and found them to be both cheap and effective. We are NOT recommending them and there are plenty of other, similar, sites who do the same job. You’ll find a list of some of them here. That site also offers some promo codes so you can reduce the cost. Book Reader Magazine cost us $15 (approx (£13) when we used a promo code and we got plenty of downloads as a result.  What was the outcome (because that is what is important)? During the first week of March we saw a massive surge in sales of the series we gave away. Some of that increase may have come about because people had a bit more cash available, but the majority of it is likely to be because they had downloaded Book 1 for free and wanted more of the same. It’s an 8 book series (so far) and we make a profit of about £3.50 per book. So, snagging one new reader that way not only repaid our investment, it gave us about an 80% profit.  I can assure you we snagged way more than one new reader. Regardless of the season you will need to continue with your advertising at other times if your books are listed on KindleUnlimited (KU). As it’s a subscription service, readers want to get value for money from it and you want the books they download to be your books, so you have to keep pitching to them. You can expect to see KENP page reads going up during January and February as readers opt not to buy books if they are already KU subscribers. Most mainstream publishers don’t use KU, so this is a great opportunity for Indie authors to get their books read instead. However, you may want to reduce your advertising spend a little to reflect the reductions you’re going to get in ebook and paperback sales during the same period.  At this point I have to add a “health warning”.
The results I’ve talked about above relate to the books we sell. You may want to analyse the sales data for your books to see if they conform to that pattern – or if they are different. We suspect that there will be similarities, but we can’t guarantee it. * Traditionally January and February were known by London taxi drivers as the “kipper season”. Kippers (a type of smoked herring) used to be a cheap food and taxi drivers ate a lot of them when their income was reduced during the first two months of the year. Presumably they would call it “pot noodle” season now. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. This week, Selfishgenie Publishing hands over its blog to Robert Cubitt, one of our authors, who returns to tell us about his experiences in publishing an audiobook. All Views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Selfishgenie Publishing.  Back in December 2022 I wrote a blog about dipping my toe into the audiobook market and whether it was right for Indie authors, given the expense of employing a professional narrator (starting prices are around £1,500 ($1,600)). You can find the original blog in the December 2022 archive. At that time, I promised to get back to you to talk about the outcomes, so here I am. I’d like to be able to report that I had a great response to the audiobook and sales were phenomenal, but I would be lying. I have made some sales, but they aren’t anywhere near as many as I hoped, or as they needed to be to recoup my investment.  I put the blame squarely on ACX.com, the platform that the books are distributed through. They are a subsidiary of retailing giant Amazon. They offer no assistance with marketing. This is remarkable, considering that ACX.com can only make money if authors are able to sell their audiobooks. Users of KDP will be familiar with the range of marketing tools that the site offers, including access to Amazon Ads. But there are no equivalents on ACX.com. Amazon Ads are available for audiobooks in the USA, but I don’t live in the USA and my audiobook isn’t aimed at the American market (but American and Canadian readers are welcome to listen to it - see below for more information). So, not much help here in the UK. But even if I wanted to sell my audiobook in the USA, that marketing channel isn’t accessible through ACX.com. There is no link from one to the other. BTW Chirp, the audiobook channel of the book marketing site BookBub, also operates only in the USA and Canada. So, not much use to us 400 million Europeans then.  The little bit of advice that is offered by ACX.com is in their blogs. I can sum it all up in three bullet points: - Find some reviewers, - Use social media (including paid advertising). - Pay audiobook promotion sites (but none are recommended so you pay your money and take your own chances). The only practical help they provide is a batch of promo codes for free giveaways of your audiobook, presumably to give to those reviewers that are queuing up to offer their services for free (sarcasm), but they offer no channel through which to distribute those, so once again the author is left high and dry.  The whole point of using Amazon Ads to sell a book is that the ads are targeted directly at people who are already looking for books to buy. The problem with advertising using social media is that people seeing an ad on the social media feed (a) might not be looking for a book to buy and (b) they have to leave their social media browsing in order to buy the book even if they are interested. Getting people to leave their social media browsing acts as a barrier to sales. If I, a humble amateur marketeer, know that you would expect the professional marketing people at ACX.com and Audible to know that too, and to follow the lead of Amazon to remove that "advertising by proxy" barrier to sales. But they don't. Or, if they do know it, they don't consider it worth the bother to do anything about it. I have to say I find this quite remarkable. After all, if the author can’t market their book, ACX.com doesn’t make any money from the book either. You would think they would be moving heaven and earth to help authors to market their books. Not only that, but the marketing activity itself can be monetised to produce revenue for them.  The faceless corporation. I don’t know who actually runs ACX.com and Audible, but they aren’t very business-like if they are finding ways of NOT making money. In addition, I have found their customer service to be less than professional. Their stock answer to every question or problem seems to be “try asking someone else”. Again, they seem intent on not helping their company to make money. I’ll give you an idea of just how unhelpful ACX.com is. After doing a Google search, I found this blog article (I couldn’t find it on ACX.com itself) about creating an Audible author page. Good idea, I thought. I’ll click the link and do that. The trouble was, there is no link. And I can’t find out how to do it through the Audible website because that is aimed at listeners, not authors.  So, unless you are very good at marketing your books, you will probably struggle just as much as I have with trying to find any listeners for your audiobooks if you distribute through ACX.com. Now, you may be questioning the quality of my book at this point. After all, nobody can sell a bad book, even in audio format.. A fair observation and if the ebook and paperback versions were selling equally badly, I would agree with you. However, that isn’t the case. Operation Absolom is my biggest revenue earner, and it is so successful that the royalties from it are what paid for the production of the audiobook in the first place. Given the level of investment required, you can work out for yourself how successful the book has had to be in order for me to make the decision to produce the audiobook.  There is a slightly cheaper option. Alternative self publishing book distribution site Draft2Digital (D2D) have their own panel of narrators who offer prices from around $135 (£120) per narrating hour, giving an overall cost of approximately $1,400 (£1,300) for a 300 page book. I haven’t used them for audiobooks (I have for ebooks and paperbacks) and if you do then you can’t receive the higher (40%) royalty rate from ACX.com if you also distribute through D2D. However, it does provide a wide distribution channel, so it may be something you wish to consider. If you already distribute an audiobook through ACX.com you can also put it on D2D (using the same audio files), but you will have to reduce your royalty option on ACX.com to the 20% level. But there are no marketing tools provided by D2D either, so you will encounter the same problems when it comes to helping listeners to find your books  So, am I advising Indie authors not to venture into audiobooks?
No, I am not. This is a growing market and Indie authors can gain an advantage by getting their books into audio before it gets too big and swamps us all. But I am advising Indie authors to consider how they are going to market their audiobooks before spending all that money, because you will get precious little help from ACX.com and D2D. If you can’t crack the marketing nut before you invest heavily in your audiobook, then it is probably advisable to proceed with caution. What about me? Am I giving up on audiobooks? No, I’m not. In fact, I’m doubling down. Book 2 to of the Carter’s Commandos series, “Operation Tightrope” is already live on Amazon, Audible and iTunes. . Again, I’m invested my royalties from my ebooks and paperbacks to cover the narration costs (more proof of their continuing success). Now I’m going to crack that marketing nut if it kills me. If I succeed, I’ll be sure to come back and let you know, so you can do it too. If you do decide that you want to get into the audiobook market, then I wish you every success. 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.  Never judge a book by it's cover. Every picture tells a story. Which of those two old sayings resonates most with you? For us it's the second, because book covers are supposed to tell a story and there is no doubt that readers make judgements about them. So what story is your book covers telling? When readers do searches for books, or even when they are just browsing through the listings, what is the first thing they see? It is one of two things – either a book’s title or its cover. Sometimes it’s both because the title is on the cover anyway. I’m not going to talk about titles. There are too many theories about what makes a good title and, so far as we can tell, one theory is as good as another. Here’s one we found, but there are hundreds more. But the same can’t be said for covers. They have to convey so much information in a simple image and, sometimes, it’s easy for them to convey the wrong information.  Take the book on the right which was, until recently, the cover for the first book in our Magi series. We had thought it was quite a good cover, which is why we stuck with it when we signed the author. That was until we got a bit of feedback that told us we were way off track with it. Someone had emailed us asking if we would be prepared to provide a few paperback copies of one of our books for discussion by their book club. They were raising money for charity through a small attendance fee and income from tea and cake sales and, once the books had been read, they would be sold second hand, also to raise money for charity. Happy to make our contribution, we happened to have a few spare copies of The Magi lying around the office, so I emailed her a synopsis and the cover image. We were quite taken aback when the lady replied “We are a church group and aren’t in the least bit interested in a book about BDSM. Thanks for the offer but we’ll go elsewhere.” (If you are an innocent type who is unfamiliar with the term BDSM, we don’t suggest you Google it). We were puzzled by this response, so we emailed back asking what she meant, to which she replied that with the leather clad lady on the cover, it was clearly a book of an erotic nature and that BDSM was implied.  We emailed back to assure her that the book had no erotic content at all (sorry if you are disappointed by that) and peace was restored, but the book still wasn’t accepted because, with that cover, they didn’t want to sell it on their second-hand book stall. But we had learnt a valuable lesson. The cover was designed by a previous publisher, with whom we are acquainted, and I feel certain that he had no intention of implying that the book had anything to do with BDSM. But, looking at it in light of that response from the book club, I could now see what the lady was getting at. And the image of the leather clad woman appeared on the cover of all 9 books in the series, and on the box set. It was part of the “branding” of the series.  Then there are the other two elements used on the covers. The inclusion of the image of a distant galaxy is appropriate as it’s a sci-fi book. That was also part of the series branding. The third element, however, in this case an “electronic egg” changed with each book in the series, to tie in with the plot of the book. With doubt now weighing us down, we started to wonder about that suitability of that egg image, too. What did it suggest to the readers?  So, we asked a few of our readers for their opinions. The general consensus was that it was confusing. How could you have an electronic egg? What would an electronic egg do? Why was the egg floating in space? Was it some sort of spaceship? What had the egg to do with the woman? Was that the way babies were born in the book? Well, if the cover was causing as many questions as that, it clearly wasn’t doing its job of selling the book. As it happens, the answers to the questions are contained within the book but, of course, no one was going to buy the book to find that out if they were confused about it in the first place. One thing we know is that readers don’t like to be confused before they even read the first page. In fact, it’s only the readers of crime fiction (and not all of them) that are willing to be confused by their books.  So, we decided that (a) the book’s image sent out the wrong message to some people and (b) it confused other people. Which was, perhaps, why the book and the series hadn't been doing as well as it deserved. It is rather good, as many sci-fi readers have discovered (but you would expect us to say that). So, we set out to create 9 new book covers that presented a less confusing message. In fact, all we wanted the images to say was “this is a sci-fi book”. One or two of them do hint at the content, the ones for “Cloning Around” (Book 4) and “Timeslip” (Book 5 – image to the left), but the others are a little bit more generic.  If they say anything it’s “This is sci-fi and weird stuff will happen”.
(BTW, you can find out more about the books shown on our "Books" page or by clicking on the images) So, what does your cover say about your book? Does it give out an unintentional message, the way ours sent out a BDSM message? Does it confuse the reader? Is it different enough to make it stand out from the crowd? Because that third question is also important. When readers do a search by genre, they get presented with list after list of books, which they then scroll through. The cover of your book has to stand out from the crowd if you want the reader to click on it and find out more. If the cover looks too similar to the ones above and below it, the reader’s eyes are going to slide right past. Yes, do be bold, be different; but make sure that the key message about your book is plainly understood from its cover image. 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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