 A recent post in a writers’ group on Facebook asked for “tips on marketing” and I wept. The person making the post might as well have asked for tips on building a space rocket. Yes, they would get a few tips from people with some knowledge of building space rockets, but they would not provide sufficient depth of information to allow the questioner to build an actual working space rocket. Marketing is something you have to learn from the ground up. If you don’t understand the basics you are probably doomed to waste a lot of time (and possibly money) doing the wrong things, before you eventually discover the right thing to do.  I’m not going to try to write a blog about the whole subject of book marketing. It would require a whole series of blogs to discuss that, and we have written them before (see our blog archives). No, this blog is about one small, but very important, part of book marketing. One of the things that I have never seen anyone say in Facebook writers’ groups, when discussing book marketing, is that the very first marketing decision that has to be made is actually made before a word of the book has been written. It may not seem like a conscious decision, but it is one that is being made anyway. Each author decides whether they are going to (a) write to market or (b) write something truly original.  This is a crucial decision when it comes to marketing a book. A book written to market has a far higher chance of finding an agent and, if self-published, of selling a lot of copies. Writing to market is about riding the current trends in books. For example, according to this article, a rising trend in 2024 was romantacy. This is a mix of fantasy and romance. So, if you like writing fantasy or you like writing romance, then conflating the two stands a good chance of success right now. The author of the article talks about it as though it is a genre, but it isn’t. Romance is a genre, fantasy is a genre, but romantacy is a subgenre of the two. It will generally be listed under the fantasy heading. But that is a technicality. If you want to make a quick buck out of writing, then that is one of the subgenres to head for.  However, the book will only do well so long as it adheres to the norms for the subgenre. It must contain the sorts of tropes that the readers expect to see in a romantacy novel, or the readers are likely to post unfavourable reviews and that will kill the book. Some people (not us) would describe that as “formulaic” and turn their noses up at the very idea of writing to market. Many authors choose not to write to market. They don’t like their creativity being curtailed in that way. They want to be free to write their story their way. So, many authors eschew writing to market and concentrate on trying to find something original to write about. And there is a market for originality too. There always has been and always will be. But it isn’t quite as attractive to agents who want something they can take to publishers which the publishers are actively seeking.  To use a metaphor, it’s difficult to sell fish to someone who wants to eat fowl. And it is even harder to sell a species of fish that no one has ever seen before, even to people who like eating fish. But all trends start somewhere. No one had ever heard of romantacy until quite recently. The earliest articles discussing it that I have been able to find were in early 2024, it is that new. So, your new original novel may be the big “write to market” subgenre for next year. But in marketing terms, the two approaches to writing are very different, so they require different marketing strategies. Yet no one is mentioning that in social media posts about marketing. Which means the Indie author can spend a lot of time using an unsuitable marketing strategy to sell their books. We are not advocating either approach to writing. If someone were to submit a written-to-market romantacy to us we would give it due consideration because we are a business and we like to make money.  But part of our mission is also to discover new creativity, so we would also consider something that isn’t written to market and to give the author a start in the business.
But we would use different strategies to market the two different books. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.
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 Most Indie authors know that selling books in a series is more profitable than selling stand-alone books. But it isn’t all plain sailing, and we’ve just come across a couple of things you should know about how Amazon handles series. If you publish your series using KDP then you can create a series page on Amazon. There are a couple of advantages to this. First of all, the series page doesn’t have any advertising on it, so when people click a link to it, they will only see books in your series, not ads for other people’s books. Secondly, at the top right of the page there is a button that allows the reader to buy the whole series with a single click - and some readers do that. So, instead of selling one book at a time, you sell the whole series in one go. That means that all the books in the series move up the sales ranking in lock step. It also means that all the titles appear in the “also bought” lists that Amazon shows readers.  The “1 click” button is also “smart”. That means if the reader has already bought books 1 and 2, they won’t be included in the purchase. Also, the price for the rest of the series is adjusted accordingly, making the rest of the series appear cheaper. In addition, if any of the books in the series is reduced, maybe because of a Kindle Countdown Deal, the overall series price will be adjusted accordingly. So far, so good.  But there are a couple of things you should know about. The most significant one is that if you don’t publish through KDP, you can’t have a series page on Amazon. Using publishing sites like Draft2Digital (D2D) allows you to set the books up as a series, just like on KDP. D2D will also sell your books on Amazon, if you include them in your selection of distribution channels. This also applies to some other self publishing sites. BUT Even if you have set the book up as a series on D2D, it won’t create a series page on Amazon. So, you lose those advantages listed earlier in the blog. Yet another reason for using KDP! But some people have an aversion to using them, but that’s their business.  The second significant issue affects authors that do publish using KDP. When you create a series, Amazon assigns an ASIN to it, just the way it assigns an ASIN to the individual books. If you use the link to the series page in your marketing and end matter (which you should for all the reasons given above) then the link will include the series ASIN. So far, so good (again). The problems arise when you add a new book to the series. Amazon deletes the old series ASIN and assigns a new one, because it identifies the extended series as a new product. That means that all the old links you have been using are now invalid and if readers use them, they’ll get a “page unavailable” notice.  That means that when you publish a new book in the series, you must change all the links in all your marketing and end matter.
The new ASIN won’t go live until the book goes live and there’s no way of knowing in advance the precise moment when the series ASIN will change, but it will probably be within 72 hours of publication of the new book. It would be unethical of us to claim credit for telling you all of the above, so here’s a link to the YouTube video where we made the discovery. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. This week we have a guest blog from Gene Ramsey. Gene , a seasoned marketing professional, is sharing his downsizing adventure. After his youngest son, Jacob, recently got married and left home, Gene and his wife found themselves in an empty nest. Recognizing the marketing principles of consumer behaviour and market segmentation, Gene and his wife embarked on a strategic downsizing journey. With "Downsizing Dad", Gene shares the ups and downs of their experience, offering valuable insights for others considering a similar lifestyle change. He demonstrates how his marketing background informed their decision-making process, from identifying their needs and preferences to effectively navigating the complexities of the downsizing market. In this blog Gene adapts his approach to strategic decision making to show how it can be used by the Indie book publisher. All images courtesy of Pexels.  In today’s vibrant digital landscape, creatives such as artists, fashion designers, and writers have unprecedented opportunities to showcase their work and carve out a unique space. However, the vast sea of talent also poses a challenge: standing out. This article from delves into robust strategies to not only capture attention but also sustain a growing audience in your creative endeavours. Harness the Power of Social Media  You must consider social media platforms as your digital stage. Platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok cater specifically to visual and creative content, making them ideal for displaying your work. Build a following by consistently posting high-quality images, engaging videos, and insightful stories about your creative process. Engage actively with your followers by responding to comments and messages. This interaction fosters a community around your work, enhancing your visibility and appeal. Seek Wisdom Through Mentorship  Navigating the creative industry can be daunting without guidance. Seek out mentors who have successfully carved a niche in your field. These relationships provide you with a wealth of knowledge on navigating market trends, pricing, and consumer behaviour. Mentors can also introduce you to networks and opportunities that were previously out of reach, accelerating your growth and helping you avoid common pitfalls. Kickstart with Crowdfunding  Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo offer more than just funding—they provide a platform to validate your ideas in the real market. Launch a campaign for a new project or collection, and you’ll gather not only funds but also a base of supporters who believe in your vision. This initial validation is crucial and can serve as a springboard for future endeavours. Craft a Comprehensive Business Plan  To ensure your creative talent flourishes, anchor it with a robust business strategy. Your business plan should detail your vision, analyze the market landscape, define your marketing approaches, and project financial outcomes, serving as a comprehensive roadmap for success. This pivotal document not only steers your creative projects but also attracts the investors or partners necessary to expand your reach and impact. Personalize with Email Marketing  Through email marketing, you can forge a direct and intimate link with your audience, turning casual viewers into dedicated followers. By sending out newsletters filled with exclusive content, sneak peeks, and early access to new releases, you invite your subscribers into the inner circle of your creative process. This approach not only deepens customer loyalty but also continuously re-engages your audience, keeping their enthusiasm for your work alive and vibrant. Market Your Masterpiece  For writers, understanding how to market your books effectively is essential. Develop a marketing plan that includes book signings, readings, online promotions, and collaborations with other artists. Utilizing platforms like Goodreads for writers or Etsy for crafters can also help you reach audiences looking for your specific creative niche. Optimize for Visibility  As a creative, using SEO techniques to sprinkle relevant keywords throughout your online content can significantly boost your visibility. By optimizing your portfolio, blog, or online store, you ensure your work ranks higher in search results, capturing the attention of more potential fans and customers. This strategic visibility not only draws increased traffic but also connects your art with audiences that are actively seeking your unique expressions. Educate Through Workshops  Conducting workshops or online courses elevates your status as an expert while drawing in an audience eager to learn from your expertise. As you share your skills, you simultaneously open a new revenue stream that benefits both you and your participants. These learners often become advocates for your work, spreading the word through their own social channels and broadening your influence. This ripple effect not only increases your exposure but also solidifies your position as a leader in your creative domain.
Achieving prominence in your creative career goes beyond mere talent; it calls for an active engagement with both digital tools and traditional tactics. Each piece of content you create and every interaction you have are integral to constructing your legacy in the arts. By embracing these tools today, you can forge a path that will lead audiences worldwide to recognize and celebrate your work. Engage relentlessly, innovate consistently, and watch as your efforts transform into a celebrated artistic journey. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Do you know your book marketing strategy from your book marketing tactics? The difference is quite important. Think about it in terms of what you intend to achieve (strategy) and how you are going to achieve it (tactics). Tactics are shorter term and you may need to change them if they aren’t working. But strategy is a longer term thing. If you keep changing strategy every five minutes, you are unlikely to achieve anything. But you can’t decide on your strategy until you have first defined your goals. The connectivity between goals, strategy and tactics is often described in business speak as “getting your ducks in a row”.  What follows is used for illustration purposes only. We are not advocating any particular marketing strategy. That is for you to decide, based on your own goals. As an Indie author you probably know your major goal. It will be to sell as many books as possible (that may not actually be the goal for some authors. They may just want to write books and aren’t concerned with sales. But because you are reading a nook marketing blog, we’ll assume you want to sell books). That probably won’t be your only goal. We’ll stick a pin in the “Sell as many books as possible” goal, because we know that’s always going to be there. So, what other goals might you have?  Well, you may not want to spend a lot of money on marketing in order to sell your books, so there may be a goal related to achieving the major goal as cheaply as possible. You may also have a goal to build a loyal fanbase in order to make sure that you are able to make sales of future books, without having to start from scratch every time you launch one. You may have other ideas about your publishing goals. By all means add those to your personal list of goals.  “Selling lots of books” and “Not spending any money on marketing “ may be conflicting goals and your strategy may be unable to deliver both, so you may have to re-think which goal you want to achieve and remove the competitor so as not to get into any strategic conflicts. Having decided on your goals, you can now consider what strategy you must use to achieve those goals. Note the use of the singular version of the word. You may have several goals, but you only ever have one strategy. And if that strategy can’t deliver all your goals, you’ll have to reconsider your goals and perhaps prioritise them. Why only one strategy?  Because if you have more than one you will have difficulty focusing your efforts and resources on achieving your goals. If you divide your resources between strategies then it is likely that you won’t have enough resources to achieve all your goals. The two strategies may even be pulling in different directions, You create competition for yourself about what you consider to be most important. That is why I said that you have to consider your goals carefully, so that you focus on what is most important, rather than trying to achieve everything and ending up achieving nothing. Goals and strategy have to be aligned. For example, if your goal is to spend as little as possible on marketing your book, having a strategy based on paid advertising is contrary to your goal. Instead of achieving your goal, you will fail to achieve it – spectacularly.  So, let’s pick out one of the goals I suggested above: to spend as little as possible on the marketing of your books. One possible strategy for that is to use social media for your marketing, as that is free. So, your strategy is now aligned to your goal. Now you can think about your tactics. You might have several of these all directed by the same strategy. Tactic 1 might be to build up a following of readers on X (formerly Twitter) who will see your marketing messages and buy your books.  Tactic 2 might be to create great videos which you can use to market your books for free using TikTok and Instagram. Maybe even Facebook and X too. Tactic 3 might be to create “reader magnets” so you can build an email list, so you have a fanbase who have bought your current book and who are ready and waiting for news about your next book. Are those tactics aligned to your strategy? Yes, because 1. They all use social media (except the email list). 2. They are all free (except the email list). 3. They are proven ways of selling books.  What about that email list? To do this effectively you will normally have to subscribe to a suitable email management app, such as Mail Chimp or Mailerlite. Those subscriptions aren’t too expensive (certainly not as expensive as advertising) so they do align to spending as little money as possible. They only fail to align if the goal was “spend no money at all”. All you have to do now is implement those tactics and see if they are going to achieve your other goal of selling books.  What happens if they don’t achieve that over-arching goal of book sales? Well, in the first instance, you don’t change your strategy (at least, not yet). You have to identify why those tactics aren’t achieving your goals, and that means analysing your results. All your results. For tactic 1, for example you would have to dive into your X engagement data to find out how many people are reacting to your posts. Not just in terms of clicks to your book’s sales page, but in terms of likes and shares.  But you also have to identify how many of your followers are engaging in conversations with you, because it is engaged followers who are most likely to respond to your promotional posts, not those who just scroll past while looking for something more interesting. (Follower count is vanity. Engaged followers are sanity) I’m only using that as an example, of course. Once you have identified the problems with your tactics, you can then modify them or even scrap them and introduce new tactics. But the strategy of using social media remains unchanged.  Remember your goal was to spend as little money as possible on promoting your books. So perhaps you need to drill down into that a little bit and decide what “as little as possible” actually means. Maybe you need to set a budget that you are prepared to spend. With that budget you can then modify your tactics to spend a bit of money on creating better “content”, such as more exciting images or videos. That still sits within your strategy, while still meeting your goal. All you have done is to define your goal more tightly to identify what “as little as possible” actually means and then modifying your tactics accordingly. It is only when you have run out of suitable tactics that you consider changing your strategy. So, if you have been using social media for a year and you’ve changed your tactics to the point where you can no longer look at your goal of “as cheaply as possible” and not start crying, then you have to consider whether using social media for marketing is the right strategy. Or at least if using it as cheaply as possible is the right goal.  But by that time you will have built up a mass of evidence in the form of data that will be able to advise you on that. You won’t just be guessing. This is where the problem of “shiny objects” comes in. If you follow writing groups on social media you will often see someone raving about the latest shiny object they have used to sell their books. The temptation is to chase that same shiny object and try it out, which is where things start to go wrong. Because you have no idea what strategy that person was using. That is if they have a strategy at all and aren’t just jumping from one shiny object to the next - which isn't a strategy, it is just chaos. Remember your goal was “as cheaply as possible”, whereas their goal might be “make sales at any cost”. The shiny object could therefore fit in with their strategy – but it would undermine yours. Shiny objects are often short term in nature, a tactic at best, and, as we suggested above, strategy is a long term thing. So, our takeaways from this blog are illustrated in the graphic below.  Put simply they are:
1. Strategy has to be aligned with goals 2. Strategy dictates which tactics are selected. 3. Measurement of the effectiveness of tactics drives review. 4. Review results in tactical changes. 5. Review can also result in the modification of goals. 6. It is only the modification of goals that changes strategy. If you try to miss out any of those steps, or to do them in the wrong order, it is likely that you will fail to achieve your goals. It may even cost you money in the form of lost sales, increased expenditure, or both. So it is really important to get your book marketing ducks in a row. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  The pros and cons of enrolling books in Kindle Select, the Amazon programme behind KindleUnlimited (KU), are many. It is a constant subject of social media debate amongst Indie authors as to whether it is worth doing or not. But most Indie authors don’t know about the hidden secret behind KU which makes it a much more attractive proposition than you might think. But we’ll circle back to that later in the blog. We know that the amount paid by Amazon for Kindle Enrolled Normalised Pages (KENP) read is quite low. Depending on what price you sell your ebooks for, it could be as low as 10% of the royalties you receive for the sale of an ebook. Conversely it could be as high as 90%. It’s a difficult comparison to make because Indie authors sell their books for a far wider range of prices than trad publishers – anything from 99p to £9.99 or more (99c - $9.99).  Our standard price point means that for a complete read of a book enrolled in Kindle Select we get about 50% of the amount we would if the book was purchased as an ebook. Compared to our paperbacks, KU downloads provide a slightly better return, as we have to keep our paperback prices low so we can be more competitive compared to trad publishers and therefore we receive lower royalties for paperbacks. One of the arguments against enrolment is that, under Amazon’s T&Cs for Kindle Select, you can’t “go wide”.  That is to say, you can’t distribute your books through other on-line retailers, such as Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords et al. Here we have a bit of a paradox, because Amazon’s market share for ebooks is around 67% (USA market). So, if you distribute through other channels you only get access to an additional 33% of the total US market. In the UK Amazon’s market share of the ebook market is 79%, which means “going wide” has the potential to reach only an additional 21%. So, what do you gain by “going wide?” Well, obviously you gain access to that wider ebook market. But access is not the same as sales.  To get those sales, you have to market to people who won’t see Amazon ads. Even if you market using universal book links which can direct readers to both Amazon and those wider markets, there is no guarantee that the reader will choose the wider market in preference to Amazon. Given that marketing on platforms other than Amazon is usually more expensive, you could be paying more for sales you would have got with Amazon Ads anyway. And of course we have to take paperback prices into account as well. Amazon’s economies of scale make them the most economic Print on Demand (POD) seller of paperbacks through the internet. None of the other on-line POD providers can get anywhere close to Amazon’s price structures. Whereas the printing costs from most other POD providers means setting a price much closer to that for physical bookshops, which loses you the competitive edge of selling online at a lower price. So, for readers who want to buy paperbacks on-line, Amazon is the first choice seller. At least, it is if they want buy their paperbacks for the lowest prices.  There are other business models of course. If you buy your own ISBN you can use distributors such as Ingram Spark to print and distribute your books, which means it is possible to get books into physical bookshops, which is an ambition for many authors. We have lost the chance to sign up some new authors because our business model doesn’t include distribution through physical book shops. You can even sell your books direct to the public yourself through sites such as Etsy, but they still require marketing if you want to direct readers to your Etsy store.. By going wide you can put your book out for free all the time through platforms such as Smashwords (permafree as it is known) which can sell you the other books in a series. Amazon doesn’t allow you to do that. But a permafree book doesn’t, itself, make you any money. So, there are solid arguments for not enrolling a book in Kindle Select – providing you can convert potential sales into actual sales.  We take a different view. We know that if a book is selling well as an ebook it will also be downloaded through KU. For the current month (July 2024) KU downloads are accounting for 46% of our total income. Based on an average number of KENP per book, the equivalent number of downloads for our books on KU exceeds the number of actual sales we make of those same books. OK, we don’t make so much money from those downloads, but we do make money. And our authors’ names are better known because their books are being read more widely. At the time of writing, we get the equivalent of 1.7 complete KU book downloads for every book we sell in ebook and paperback format combined. To put that in simple numbers, for every 100 ebooks/paperbacks we sell, we get 170 KU complete reads. Now, we have to ask ourselves – and you – how much more marketing would we have to do to sell 170 more books if we wanted to go wide and therefore didn’t enrol those books in Kindle Select? And, of course, marketing costs time and/or money.  Every click we get for an Amazon ad gives readers three buying options: ebook, paperback or KU. If we don’t enrol the books in Kindle Select and go wide instead, readers would only have two buying options: ebook or paperback. Even if our marketing is successful, with the market shares we have quoted above, for every hundred books we sell through Amazon it is unlikely that we would sell enough books through those other retailers, at a high enough price, to make up for the loss of the 170 equivalent book downloads we get through KU. OK, some of those wider channels also offer subscription library services similar to KU, but they are nowhere near as well subscribed as KU and they don’t pay any better.  And now to that secret we mentioned at the top of the blog. If your books are popular as ebooks, Amazon will actually recommend them to their KU subscribers. And the more ebooks you sell or are downloaded on KU, the more Amazon recommends your books, creating a virtuous circle. Basically, you are getting FREE advertising from Amazon – and let’s face it, they don’t give much away for free. KU subscribers get regular email recommendations and, of course, the books appear in the “recommended for you” listings specifically targeted at them. Yes, KU subscribers get their own recommendations listings because not all ebooks are enrolled in Kindle Select, so the standard "recommended for you" listings aren't suitable for KU readers because not all the recommendations will be available to them - and yours will be one of them if it isn't enrolled in Kindle Select. There are reasons why Amazon pushes KU subscribers towards the more popular books, which we won’t go into here. But one thing is for sure – if you aren’t enrolled in Kindle Select, you can’t benefit.  “But”, I hear you say, “To use KU the reader has to have a Kindle.”
“To start with,” we reply. “Kindle is the most popular ereader in the world by a wide margin. But Amazon has thought of that, and the Kindle app allows readers to download books on any phone or tablet, turning them into Kindles as well. It’s been available for years!” Now, we aren’t being paid by Amazon to promote Kindle Select. We are just telling you what we have found and what we have calculated to be the better choice of sales channels for us based on real life data. We do “go wide” with some titles, but they are the ones we have found aren’t downloaded very often through KU, so there is no reason to keep those titles exclusive to Amazon. We don’t know why those books don’t appeal to KU subscribers. We do know that some genres do better on KU than others and that may be one of the reasons. Perhaps we need to do some research into that. But, until then, we lose nothing by going wide with those books. But for all the rest, we enrol our books in Kindle Select so that we can maximise the exposure we get for our authors, which also maximises the income that both we and our authors earn. For us, being enrolled in Kindle Select is a “no brainer”. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  When it comes to book marketing, it is never possible to do too much - but it is very easy to do too little. I was reminded of this on a couple of occasions recently, for different reasons. The first was when I attended a local writers’ group for the first time. I had wanted to join them for some time, but the meeting day always clashed with something else I do on the same evening. However, that week my normal activity was cancelled, so I went along. It was the sort of thing I had expected, with the writers reading out bits of their work and being given constructive feedback. All very pleasant and friendly. It was at the end of the evening when I found that nobody there was really thinking about basic marketing. I was asked for my contact details, so that I could be added to the email group. Everyone seemed surprised when I produced a business card with the Selfishgenie Publishing contact details printed on it. I expected to be handed cards in return but wasn’t. None of the dozen or so people present had that most basic marketing tool to hand. Not even the organiser! I commented on it and the attendees seemed bemused by the possibility that anyone outside the group would want to make contact.  “What do you do when people ask about your books?” I asked. “How will they know what name to search for on Amazon or wherever?” I could see from the puzzled faces that they didn’t get it. “Well, I tell them my name and my book title, and they remember, I suppose.” Someone replied. I wanted to say “But 30 seconds after you part, they will have forgotten both. But if they find your business card in their pocket, or purse, they will be reminded of you and may look you up then.” But I didn’t say that. I let the matter drop. I just hope that the expression on my face said enough to make the people think about investing a few pounds in the purchase of some business cards for future use. I have found that in the past many people have introduced themselves as “I’m a nurse/plumber/whatever” first and author or writer only as an afterthought.  But if you want to be taken seriously as an author you must first take yourself seriously. You are an author first and whatever else you do second. You are only doing that to pay the bills until you can give up being a plumber/nurse/whatever and write full time. And that means having a business card that says “author”, with the relevant contact details on it so that people remember who you are and look up you and your books, OK, not everybody will do that. Hand out 50 business cards and maybe only 4 or 5 of the recipients will actually look you and your books up. But that is 4 or 5 that wouldn’t have looked you up if they have forgotten your name 30 seconds after you have parted.  The second incident (two actually) was almost as bad, but this time the offender wasn’t standing in front of me at the time. I had just finished reading a book by an author I hadn’t read before. It was by an Indie author, as most of my reading is these days as I try to support Indie authors as much as possible and the best way to do that is to buy their books. The book was pretty good, and I was sorry it had finished. I knew the book was part of a series and I was keen to buy the next title. I was even more keen after I had read the preview chapter the author had inserted at the back of the book.  But when I went to click on the link to take me straight to the book’s page on Amazon …. it wasn’t there. Another simple marketing tool overlooked. The best time to sell one of your books to a reader is when they have just finished reading one of your books. There are a lot of psychological factors at work at that moment and it is important that the author makes them work in their favour. When a reader finishes a book that they have enjoyed they feel a sense of loss. It isn’t as severe as grief, but it is from the same source. They want to ease that feeling of loss and you, the author, can make that happen. It’s why we put sample chapters of our other books after the end of the story.  Strike while the iron is hot – get the reader when they are wanting more. But if you don’t include a link to where they can buy the next book, they’ll just say “I’ll look it up tomorrow.” The problem is that by tomorrow the feeling of loss has gone and they may already have started to read the next book in their TBR list, whether it is a paperback or an ebook. The moment has passed, and the sale may have been lost forever. Obviously, you can’t put a link in a paperback (but you can include the URL as ordinary text), but there is no excuse for not putting one in the ebook version. OK, if the next book hasn’t yet been published and isn’t even on pre-order, then you can’t put a link in. But you can go back and put the link in the moment the book does go on pre-order or is published. If you don’t write series, that’s OK. You just insert the link for the next book you published. Finally, there was the second sin that the same author committed.  There was no request for a review. We all know how important reviews are for authors when it comes to selling books. Some people always post them, some people never post them, but some people will post them if you give them a nudge in the right direction. Just a simple request along the lines of “Reviews are important to authors, so if you have enjoyed this book please post a review wherever you normally review the books you read”. You can even post a link to the sales page on Amazon (if that’s where you sell your books) just to be helpful. That’s all it takes.  We use a publication and marketing checklist when we prepare books for launch, just to make sure that we don’t overlook such simple things. We would recommend that you develop your own checklist so that you don’t forget the same little things.
My takeaways from this blog are: 1. Everybody you meet is a potential new reader of your book(s). 2. Everybody you meet needs a way of remembering who you are, what your book is called and how to find out about your books, and 3. If someone has read your book, that is the time to persuade them to review it and to buy another of your books, so make it easy for them. And if you have forgotten, it isn’t too late to do it now. You may have lost sales in the past but that is no excuse to lose more in the future. As a well-known supermarket used to say in its adverts “Every little helps”. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  We blogged about Publisher Rocket a couple of years ago, but Dave Chesson, the man behind the product, has just released a brand new version and it is even more powerful for Indie authors than ever before. For that reason, we are bringing you this update. Unfortunately, along with its new features has also gone a price hike. It now costs $199 (special offer price, correct at time of writing) for a lifetime subscription (that’s about £155 for us Brits). Naturally, you have to sell more books to repay that investment. What must be borne in mind, however, is that the tools Publisher Rocket provides actually help you to sell your books, whether you advertise or not.  The key thing about publisher rocket is its ability to provide you with genre, competitor and keyword information that makes sure that your book not only appears in searches on Amazon, but it appears higher up the results list, so that it is more likely to be seen. It also makes advertising on Amazon a whole lot easier by providing you with keywords appropriate for your book, so your ads are seen by the right people – people who read books like the ones you write. It is able to do this because it makes use of Amazon’s search history data. That data is gold dust when it comes to both publishing and advertising books and we, as Indie authors and publishers, have no way to access it by ourselves.  Amazon has become very concerned about what is known as “customer experience”. Basically, how easy shoppers find it to use Amazon. Part of that experience is the customer’s reactions to seeing irrelevant products in search results. Seeing a dark fantasy novel appearing in a search for high fantasy is probably not something that most shoppers would worry about. But seeing a Regency romance novel appear in a search for high fantasy is likely to irritate customers. If it happens a lot, it will irritate them a lot. And that is why Amazon have introduced a major change into their advertising process. The relevance of keywords has never been more important. Having irrelevant keywords in your ads can cost you more money and they may result in you selling fewer books. This is the exact opposite of what many Amazon Ad gurus used to advise, which was basically to load up your ad with as many keywords as possible, even if they were only remotely connected to the genre of your book.  I’ll run through this briefly, but it is important. When you set up a “sponsored product” ad with Amazon, using your own list of keywords, Amazon now scans your book’s meta data* and gives the keywords a “relevancy score”. The better that score, the higher up the pecking order your ads will be placed when it comes to the bidding process that decides which ads are shown to the customer in response to a search.. When the bidding process is carried out, the higher the relevancy score, the more likely it is that your ad will be the one chosen. If Ad A and Ad B both have a maximum bid of 50c set, then the ad with the higher relevancy score will be the one that is shown to the customer. This helps Amazon to prevent irrelevant ads being shown to the customer, which annoys them. What this could mean is that ads with lower relevancy scores have to spend more money to win the bidding process. Depending on their maximum bid setting they may never be seen at all. And an ad that isn’t seen can’t sell your book.  As publishers we use Publisher Rocket a lot to help us find the right category listings for the books we publish, to find the right 7 keywords to put into the book’s meta data and to find the right keywords to use in our Amazon Ads. To indicate how useful this tool is, we’ll tell you what happened the first time we used one of the new features. Like a lot of authors, we have always struggled to find the right 7 keywords to put into the meta data for the books we sell. This is why we have found Publisher Rocket so useful, because it helps to take the hard work out of finding keywords. One of the new features allows us to do a “reverse search” to find books like our own, and then find the keywords that are helping those books to sell, so that we can use them too.  So, we pasted the ASIN for our book into the box in Publisher Rocket, then pasted in the 7 keywords that we had used in the meta data for the book when it was last uploaded. The app then provided us with a list of books that Publisher Rocket, using Amazon’s search data, thinks are similar to ours. We were very, very surprised to find that all the books that were provided for comparison were non-fiction. The reason that we were so surprised is because our book is fiction. Now, things aren’t as bad as they might seem, because the book has actually been selling as a result of the searches that it showed up in. But it could obviously have been doing better if it had shown up in searches for fiction rather than non-fiction. The next bit of the process was a bit more time consuming, but necessary.  To find comparable fiction books we had to go onto Amazon (using incognito browsing) and do searches of our own to find our direct competitors. Once we had found the right sort of book, we pasted its ASIN into Publisher Rocket so that it could do its magic. We needed to provide 3 ASINs from books by different authors, to give Publisher Rocket enough data to work with. We then got back a lengthy list of search terms that had been used to find the three books we had identified. After that it was just a case of picking the seven most relevant terms for our book and entering them into the meta data and re-publishing it. So, if those same search terms are now used again by readers, our book will show up alongside those competitor books. But we didn’t stop there.  We run Amazon Ads for the same book and none of those keywords were included in the list of keywords for the ads. But now we were no longer limited to just seven selections, we could use more, which we did. So, in the space of about 20 minutes we were able to make both our meta data and our Amazon Ads more relevant and therefore more likely to be seen by the right readers - the readers that will actually buy the book. The most noticeable thing to be seen was that almost immediately we started to get more clicks on our ads. Quite clearly our book was now more relevant to the searches readers were doing. But more importantly, because the book was more relevant to the readers, more clicks were being converted to sales. Obviously, we can’t guarantee that you will experience similar results, but when marketing a book every little thing you do makes a difference and the most important thing to do when you launch a new book is to make sure that it is in the right categories and has the right meta data. If nothing else, Publisher Rocket will put you on the right path to success.  While we’re at it, we’ve discovered a way of getting 14 keywords into your meta data and it’s so simple we feel a bit stupid for not spotting it before. Most people set up their ebook before their paperback because it is less complicated and because an ebook can go on pre-order. The meta data for the ebook is then copied across to the paperback version’s meta data automatically when it is set up. Which means the same 7 keywords are copied across. But those keywords can be changed! Which means that you can use Publisher Rocket’s capabilities to use 7 different keywords for the paperback. Double the number of relevant keywords means double the chances of your books showing up in appropriate search results. The key messages for this blog are therefore: 1. The relevancy of the keywords in your meta data has never before been so important, 2. If you use Amazon ads, your ads may be more expensive and might not even be seen if your keywords aren’t relevant. 3. Finding more relevant keywords for your books is now much easier using the latest version of Publisher Rocket. To find out more about Publisher Rocket, click here On the website you can also gain access to a free course on using Amazon Advertising more effectively. You don’t have to buy Publisher Rocket, but you do have to subscribe (free) to the website.  And here’s a one time special offer for you as readers of this blog.
If you don’t have Publisher Rocket, but would like to check the relevancy of you book’s keywords, we’ll run a free check for you. Just sign up for our newsletter (button below), then email us at [email protected] to claim your free relevancy check. You’ll get an email back from us asking you to provide some basic information about your book, so please check your spam folder to make sure you don’t miss it. You’ll also get the free ebook that we always give to new subscribers. * For those of you not sure what we mean by meta data, it is all the information you provide on the first page of KDP when you start to upload your book: Title, subtitle, blurb, categories and, of course, 7 keywords/phrases. FYI, a “keyword” can be up to 50 characters long.  There are so many new fads and trends in book marketing that we don’t always try them out when we come across them. We take a look at them, ask ourselves if they are really going to sell us more books and then decide if we are going to invest time on them or leave them until we have nothing more important to do. That was what happened when we received the email about the introduction of A+ content to Amazon sales pages way back in 2016 (was it really 8 years ago?). But we saw a video recently that made us go back and explore A+ content a little bit more to see what it might do for us.  Now, I’m not going to pretend that A+ content is going to propel your book sales into the stratosphere. But it may make a contribution towards moving some readers a little closer to buying your books. Its main advantages are that it is relatively quick and easy to use and, more importantly, it is free to use. First of all, what is A+ content? It is additional images and text that you can put onto the sales page of your book to either catch the reader’s eye or to provide additional information about the book. Why should you use it? It provides an opportunity to customise your sales page with additional images which can be used to fire up the reader’s imagination. Something got the reader to click through to the sales page, now you can present something even more exciting for them to look at. The images we have used below are for our Magi Box Set.    How do you add A+ content on KDP? On your KDP bookshelf for the book, go to the actions button on the right hand side and click on the 3 dots (…) to get the drop down menu, then select “promote and advertise”. On the promotions page you will find the A+ content section lower down the page, beneath the advertising and Kindle countdown deals sections. Select the marketplace where you want the content to be displayed (for us that’s usually Amazon.co.uk) and then click on “Manage A+ Content” Amazon offers a lot of different layout options for the content, from product comparison displays or technical specifications to different layouts for images and text options. The most popular for books seems to be the type we have displayed above.  We use Bookbrush to create a lot of our images and they have a template that will produce the three sections from a single image. However, if you use other graphics packages they may also have suitable templates. If not, you may have to resort to cropping your images into separate portions. A+ content is uploaded into “modules” and the module we use is the ones titled “Standard Image & Dark Text Overlay”. Each of the 3 sections of the image is uploaded separately. This module offers the opportunity to include a headline and other text below the segment but, as you can see, we have incorporated our text into the images, so we just left the text boxes blank. You can use them or not. It’s entirely up to you.  After that it is just a matter of assigning your content to the right book by pasting the ASIN into the relevant place, and then submitting the content for approval. Amazon suggests approval can take up to 7 days, but we have found that the A+ content is usually displayed on the sales page within 24 hours. Creating the images took us 10 minutes (using an existing image as our starting point) and creating the A+ content on KDP took us another 5 minutes, so this really is a quick and easy way of improving your sales page.  Aside: We used AI to create the image we have shown, and we make no apologies for that. It is the one place where we think AI can be of help to an author, by allowing them to create exciting imagery. Graphic designers may disagree with us, but we have to stick to tight budgets and AI allows us to do that.. As you apply the content to the sales page for a single market, it means you can use different content for different markets. For example, for Amazon.com you might want to use American spellings. For markets where English isn’t spoken, you can use images that use the appropriate language for the country – even if your book is only available in English. You can also use different images for different markets if you think that might affect sales. Images of scantily clad women or women with uncovered hair, for example, may not go down too well in some parts of the world. Amazon review quotes are great when included with A+ content, as shown in the image below.  Firstly, the reader only has to scroll down the page a little bit to find the review from which the quote was taken. That makes the quote more trustworthy. Secondly, readers read what other readers recommend and you can't get better than a 5 star recommendation  Did using A+ content make a difference to sales?
That’s hard to say. For the books where we added A+ content, we were already running advertising campaigns, so we don’t know what effect having the additional content had on sales. If the reader was responding to an ad, the A+ content may have helped to make the sale, or it may have made no difference. As we can’t get inside the mind of the readers we’ll never know. What we can say was that we started to use A+ content in June 2024 and we had our best sales ever that month. We aren’t going to try to claim a cause-effect relationship, but at the same time we don’t believe in coincidences. Maybe we got one extra sale thanks to A+ content, or maybe we got 100. Or maybe we didn’t get any additional sales and it was all down to the advertising campaigns we were running at the time. However, Amazon claims that having A+ content on a sales page can add between 3% and 10% to average sales volumes. As they are providing this facility for free, they must be making money from the use of A+ content from the extra sales or they wouldn’t be so generous. What we can say is that our A+ content added visual impact to our Amazon sales pages, and we think that is a good thing. We certainly think it is good enough to invest a few more blocks of 15 minutes’ worth of effort into the sales pages of our other books. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  We launched a new book, “Operation Chariot”, at the beginning of June this year. Given the popularity of our “Carter’s Commandos” series of books, we expected this new title to fly off the shelf, as fans of the earlier series came back to read this new offering. We were disappointed, The new book did sell, but not in the volumes we had expected. This puzzled us because we had put a lot of time and effort into marketing the book in advance of its launch. We were sure that the thousands of readers who had enjoyed Carter’s Commandos would be thrilled by this new book. So why wasn’t it selling as well as the Carter’s Commandos series, which is continuing to do well?  We checked the data from our marketing campaign and found that we were getting plenty of link clicks to the sales page. But the clicks weren’t converting to sales. Well, not as many sales as the number of clicks suggested we should be getting. If you are familiar with our previous blogs on marketing, you will know that we have always said that if you are getting link clicks but not getting sales, it means that there is something wrong with your book’s sales page. It might be your cover, it might be your blurb, it might be the reviews, or it might be the “free sample” as Amazon now call their “look inside” feature.  We analysed each of those four things in turn to see what might be putting readers off. We quickly ruled out a problem with the cover. The cover image has been used in all our marketing, so people have seen it already and clicked on the link. That is “social proof” (as it is known) that readers aren’t being put off by the cover, so seeing it again on the sales page is hardly going to put them off buying. This applies to the blurb too. The blurb is the primary text we use in our advertising, so if people have seen the cover image, read the blurb and then clicked the link, it means that the two things have encouraged the link click, not discouraged it. Reviews are a tricky one. This is a new book. It hadn’t been read before, so it doesn’t have any reviews. We’ll have to wait for the jury to return on that but at the time of writing this blog the book has garnered 5 "ratings", all of which are 4 or 5 star. So that just left the free sample.  We clicked on it and saw immediately what the problem was. The free sample opened up on the book’s “foreword”. This was a few paragraphs intended to introduce the reader to the new series, why it had been written and the differences in writing style that might be seen by readers of the “Carter’s Commandos” series. What it didn’t do, however, was get the reader engaged with the story. To get to that the reader had to scroll through the whole thing before they got to the proper opening of the book. Why was the free sample opening on the foreword and not on the first chapter? Because KDP and Amazon’s formatting engine interpreted the foreword as a chapter. So as far as Amazon was concerned, it was displaying the start of the story. Readers, however, could see that it wasn’t the start of the story and some of them were deciding not to scroll through to find the actual start. They just went back to scrolling through whatever platform they had been on before they clicked the link.  We had lost a potential sale. Worse than that, we had paid for a link click before we lost the sale! So, what could we do about that? The answer was simple, if a little unconventional. We moved the foreword from the start of the book to after the end. We even added a short explanation to it, to say why it was at the end and not the beginning. This only affects the Kindle version, of course. The paperback version still has the foreword at the beginning where it should be. But by the time the reader has discovered that, the book is in their hands, and they can flick past it if they don’t want to read it. But the free sample is always taken from the ebook version, so paperback readers will also be taken straight into the story when they read that.  Did it change anything?
Yes it did. The sales graph for the book, which had been consistent but low, suddenly took a step upwards. More copies were sold each day from that point onwards. And it cost us nothing but a little bit of time and effort to find the reasons for the disappointingly low sales and to make the changes to the manuscript. So, if your sales aren’t doing as well as the link clicks from your marketing say they should be doing, why not take a look at the book’s free sample to see if the reader is being excited by what they see on the first page, or being bored by the non-essentials that are put into the opening pages of books. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Writer’s groups on social media are very popular, and quite rightly so. Writing is, by its nature, a solitary life so it is nice to know that you aren’t alone. A real life writer’s group is better, but if you don’t have regular access to one of those, social media provides a useful alternative. People use writer’s groups to seek advice on a wide range of topics: writing techniques, gaining feedback on their work and, the reason behind this blog, they seek advice on book marketing.  The problem with seeking advice on marketing on social media is that it as an extremely wide ranging subject and few writers have the knowledge and experience to more than scratch the surface. That means that the person seeking advice tries out a few approaches, many of them the same ones as everyone else is using, and some of the most basic techniques are by-passed because the people using social media don’t know enough about the subject.  As with any subject, you have to understand the basics if you want to understand how to apply the techniques. To use a metaphor, if you don’t know how the internal combustion engine works, you will never get as far as diagnosing a blocked carburettor as being the reason why your car won’t start. The same applies to book marketing. If you don’t understand the basics, you’ll never understand why all the things you are doing to promote your books aren’t working or, at least, not working as well as they might. As an example, some authors never get as far as understanding that using social media as a marketing channel isn't about plugging your book all the time. It's about building relationships with readers so that they want to know about your books.  As professional book marketers (that’s what publisher are, really) we contribute to those social media groups when we think we can offer good advice and we stay quiet if we aren’t so sure. One of the bits of advice we offer on a regular basis is to study marketing properly. Marketing of any product needs a wide range of skills and knowledge. Within marketing itself the professionals tend to specialise in certain areas and hardly scratch the surface in others. If they need a specialist in an area they aren’t so well versed in, they seek one out. So, for amateurs, it is even harder to know where to concentrate their efforts.  Marketing is a subject that continues to evolve. The “marketing mix” as it is known (aka the 5Ps, 6 Ps, 7Ps or even more Ps depending on who you listen to), first started to be discussed in the 1940s, long before Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea for the internet, so marketing has had to adjust to cope with new technology while at the same time having to continue to deal with physical marketplaces such as bookshops. Take the P for People heading. This used to mean the people who sold the product – their recruitment, training, personalities, product knowledge and sales skills. But so much of our modern marketplace is now on-line, where people play almost no part in the sales. We have to hope that the website designers know what they are doing as they are now the people who influence the direct sales. The real salesperson is now the author or publisher, as they decide what words and images to use on the product page. Never before has cover design, for example, been so important in selling a book (that's covered by another of the Ps: Product). The P for People topic is now more about who reads the books – the demographics of particular genres, or “who reads what”.  If you are putting a book on the shelves of bookshops then you don’t have to worry about that so much. Books sellers have their stores laid out in subject order and people of the appropriate age, gender and interests know where to find the books they like. But if you are trying to promote a book on social media you have to know where on social media your target audience is likely to hang out. That’s the opposite of the bookshop. Which is why asking for marketing advice on social media isn’t really going to help an Indie author. Let’s face it, if you are asking a question on Facebook and it is being answered on Facebook, then the chances are that the person answering the question probably knows quite a lot about Facebook, but probably doesn’t know much about how to market on TikTok or Instagram. For the modern marketplace, the Indie author has to be almost as knowledgeable about marketing as his counterpart in one of the Big 5 publishing houses. And to become that knowledgeable requires proper study, not asking a few random questions on social media.  I’m not talking about a full 3 year course of study at a university (though it would be great if you can afford the time and money to do it), but I am talking about study of some sort (don’t worry, I’m not going to try to sell you a marketing course, because we don’t sell one). One of the owners of Selfishgenie Publishing has a Masters Degree in business management. He knows quite a bit about marketing. But when he decided to set up the company he didn’t realise how much more he was going to have to learn. In the few years that elapsed between him picking up his MBA certificate and setting up the business, the whole world of marketing had moved on. The internet was now King (or Queen if you prefer, or even President). What worked for business in the early years of the new millennium was no longer working. That meant he had a lot of catching up to do, so he did what any sensible person would do and went back to school. Not full time residential school, but part time online learning. And if you need to learn about marketing, that is what you have to do too.  Some people are reluctant to go back to school, however. We can’t understand why. You are not a failure just because you don’t know something. In fact, it is a mark of maturity to be able to admit that you don’t know some things, especially if they're in an area that you have never studied. Besides, only you know that you are studying, unless you choose to tell the world. Yes, it can cost money – but it doesn’t have to. There are organisations that provide free training and at the end of this blog we will provide a link to one of them. And you can sign up from anywhere in the world. OK, you can ask questions on social media and the answers may sell you a few books, but they will never sell you as many books as a fully developed marketing strategy, backed up by a plan and the knowledge and resources to deliver it.  That can only come from in depth knowledge of the subject.
So, if you want to climb the ladder of success to become a bestselling author, we advise going back to school. For information on free online training courses in marketing, click here. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. |
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