 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.
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 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 enquires@selfishgenie.com 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.  One of the common questions seen in writers’ groups on social media is “How much do authors earn?” The question comes in a variety of forms, some trying to disguise the fact that the person asking the question is only interested in making a quick buck and thinks that being an author may be the way. But some people genuinely see being an author as being the road to making a decent living. Of course, for some authors, it is a way of making a decent living. Indeed, some authors become very rich through their writing. But for Joe (or Josephine) Average, the average author, is it a realistic way to make a living? We would say it probably isn’t. I’m afraid we have the data to back that up as there has been a lot of research into this over the years.  Let’s start with some basic facts. 70% of all the authors who publish or are published, never sell more than 100 copies of their books. Some of that is to do with marketing, of course. If no one knows about the book they can’t buy it. Some of it is because the books are about subjects that don’t have a wide audience appeal. They are either on very niche subjects or they are memoirs about lives that just aren’t that fascinating, but the author thought they were. Finally, they just aren’t very good books, certainly not as good as the author thought they were, and can’t garner enough good reviews to encourage people to buy them. Of the remaining 30% of books published, 70% of those won’t sell more than 1,000 copies. That’s about 21% of the total number of books published (so we’re now up to 91% of the published total). Again, the reasons are varied, and marketing once again takes centre stage, but the fact that the book has sold between 100 and 999 copies suggests it isn’t a bad book, per se. But that leaves just 9% of books published selling more than 1000 copies. However, you need to sell about 30,000 copies to make a living wage. That is to say, a wage good enough not to have to do any other work. Even then that will depend on other factors in your life such as the size of your mortgage (or amount of rent you pay), the size of your family and your lifestyle. One person’s living wage is another person’s poverty – or wealth. Less than 1% of authors make what we might regard as “decent” money and only 0.1% ever become rich from their writing. And even then, most of their wealth doesn’t come from their books, it comes from the TV and film rights for their books. So, if you haven’t written the first word of your novel, how do you know if you are going to be in the 99% or the 1%? You don’t.  If you get as far as completing a good draft you start to get some indication of your likely success from the reaction to your work from agents, though it takes some time to gather enough data. One rejection doesn’t mean much. It just means that the agent may be too busy or doesn’t really like your genre, or just didn’t get your “message”. Ten rejections should start the author thinking a bit, but it still isn’t conclusive evidence. According to publishing legend, J K Rowling received at least 10 rejections for her first Harry Potter book. But once you get to around 20 rejections the message should be becoming clear. Even then, the message only applies to that book. Some authors query three or four books before they get one accepted by an agent. What made that book different from the first three? The author will probably say there was nothing different about it. But the agent thought it was different enough to take a chance on it, so there must have been something.  But even then the story isn’t finished, because there is a growing body of self-published authors that are making 6 digit and even 7 digit royalties. So, the agents obviously don’t know everything when it comes to what makes a best-seller. But what makes those 6 digit self-published authors different isn’t necessarily their writing. I have read some of their books. They are OK, but I wouldn’t call them remarkable. In fact, some could be described as mediocre – but they still sell. What is different is that their authors invest a lot of time, effort and (probably) money into marketing. They have become expert at it, which is how they are able to sell so many books. As a small publisher, we have seen this for ourselves. When we market a book, we sell copies. When we stop marketing it, sales dry up very quickly. Authors think that what they are paying us for is editing, cover design, proof reading, formatting etc. Sure, we do those things, but the authors could pay anyone to do those things for them. No, what we are really being paid for, and the way we make our money, is book marketing. Yes, we do the other stuff, but until the book sells we don’t make a penny and neither does the author. Marketing pays for everything. And, while trad publishers may tell you otherwise, it is in the marketing of books that they also make their money. Everything else they do costs them money. Editors, cover designers, proof readers and the rest of the publishing team, all have to be paid before the books have sold a single copy. So, if you want to make money out of being an author, you must first learn how to be a marketer. Once you know how to do that, then start writing your book. Doing it the other way around only leads to disappointment, because it takes longer to learn to be a successful marketer than it does to write a book.  And if you do that, you might just make a decent living out of writing.
Even if you are certain your book is going to find an agent and be trad published, you can’t be certain that will happen. So if/when the horrible truth hits you, it is already too late. It’s fine to have a dream that one day your writing may make you rich but keep yourself grounded with the knowledge that it may not happen. And even if it does happen, it may take some time before it does. To quote Kipling “If you can dream and not make dreams your master;” If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Is the game up for traditional publishers? I’m not talking about today or tomorrow. What I’m talking about may take years to come to fruition, but the publishing world is changing, and the trad publishers don’t seem to have cottoned on to the fact yet. Between themselves and agents, they have made it almost impossible to access mainstream publishing. The gate keepers are no longer just keeping the gate, they are building high walls and digging moats so deep in front of the gate that no one can get in.  Which is why not only is the publishing model changing shape, it has no choice but to change shape. But the trad publishers are sticking their fingers in their ears and singing “la, la, la”. With so many authors now taking the self-publishing route, it is becoming the norm rather than the exception. According to this article, 300 million self-published books are sold each year. That’s 30-35% of the publishing market. While the global publishing market is expected to grow by 1% per year, the self-publishing market is expected to grow by 17% per year.  Prior to 1998, the only way to self-publish was to pay a printer to print your books, then hawk them around local book shops trying to find one to stock it for you. But in 1998 Chip Wilson, a millionaire entrepreneur, created a self-publishing website called Lulu and that all changed. Now anyone could publish their book on-line and sell it through the platform. Imitators followed and, of course, the retail giant Amazon established their own platform, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which now dominates the self-publishing market. So, from almost nowhere in 1998, self-publishing now holds approximately 34% of the market – and growing. I’m not going to say that the quality of the books is 100% great, but there are plenty of good self-published authors and many make a respectable living from their writing. In fact, some make a better living than authors who are trad published. There are at least 7 self-published authors achieving 7 digit income levels and many more making 6 digit levels.  Which is one of the reasons I think there will be further shifts in the industry. A trad published author receives about 10% of the sale price of their book in royalties. From that they then have to pay their agent (actually the agent usually gets the royalty cheque, deducts their commission and then passes the rest to the author). Richard Osman’s latest best-seller is priced at £11.99 for the Kindle edition and £9.99 for the paperback at the time of writing this blog. Don’t ask me why the paperback is cheaper because I don’t know, but it probably started out being more expensive. Based on current publishing practice Richard will receive around £1.19 in royalties for the Kindle edition and around 99p for each paperback sale. If he were to self-publish and sell his book at the same price, he would make either £3.60 or £8.39 per copy, depending on whether he took the 30% or 70% royalty option. If I were Richard, I’d be starting to wonder about the wisdom of sticking with trad publishing.  As a big name author, he would have no problem setting up distribution deals with all the major retailers, without having to rely on his publisher to do that for him. The rest is down to editing, cover design and marketing and he could hire people to do that for him. I think he’d still end up with more money in his pocket than he does now. For a start, he wouldn’t have to give between 10% and 20% of his royalties to an agent. I suspect that a lot of trad published authors will do these sort of sums in future and when their existing publishing deals come to an end, they’ll self-publish the next book they write.  It is noticeable that publishers are now trying to tie authors into multi-book contracts in order to prevent that sort of desertion, though at the moment they are more worried about their authors being poached by other trad publishers than they are about their authors opting to self-publish. The more top quality authors who go down the self-publishing route, the better the reputation self-publishing will gain. I strongly suspect that the much of prejudice against self-published authors is being fuelled by trad publishers trying to protect their businesses.  Change sometimes happen at a glacial speed. But change can also function more like a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and bigger and going faster and faster.
I may not be around for long enough to see which metaphor is more accurate, but many of you will be. But I predict that one day, when a new author announces on social media that they are about to start querying their novel, the response from other writers won’t be “Good luck”, it will be “Why on Earth are you bothering with that?" If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Measurement is the poor relation of marketing. While Indie authors may come to realise that they have to market their books, they don’t always realise the essential role that measurement plays in their decision making. Not knowing how to use measurement in marketing is like walking blindfolded through a room barefoot, with the floor covered with Lego bricks. At some point you are going to say “Ouch, that hurt.” Now, you may think that there is only one measurement that is worth looking at, and that is sales. But you would be wrong. To tell you why, I’d like to present you with a hypothetical scenario.  Let’s say that an Indie author has spent £100 on advertising in a month. They split that 50:50 between Amazon Ads and Google Ads. They have made sales and made a profit on their advertising, so they want to re-invest some of that profit into more advertising.
With that 3rd bullet goes supplementary questions – should they keep the split 50:50 or should they spend more on one platform than the other? The only way to make a sensible decision is to analyse the data and see what it is telling them. What the author needs to know is how many clicks each ad got, how much each click cost them and how many clicks were converted to sales.  To give you a real life example, we recently ran a Google Ad for one of our titles. According to the data we got a lot of clicks on the ad, so you might think that it was a success. However, there was no change in sales volume for the book. If the clicks had been converted into sales, there should have been a corresponding rise in sales volume. Only by putting the two sets of data side-by-side could we see that. The next month we ran an Amazon Ad for the same book. We didn’t get nearly as many clicks as we got for the Google Ad, but we did get a rise in sales. Not only did Amazon Ads tell us how many clicks got converted to sales, we could see it in our KDP sales data as well, in terms of increased sales volumes compared to the previous month. So, going back to our hypothetical example and the 4 questions (plus supplementals) we asked, we might well decide to spend all our budget on Amazon Ads and none on Google Ads. The data was telling us that, so we have no reason to doubt our decision making.  But the story doesn’t end there. If we were getting so many clicks from Google Ads, why weren’t they getting any conversions into sales? Normally we would say that it has something to do with the book’s blurb, the reviews or the free sample. Maybe they weren’t enticing enough. But if that were the case it would apply to the Amazon Ads as well, which we know wasn’t the case. So, we have to look for different answers. When we drilled down into the data, we discovered that the majority of the clicks we were getting were from outside of the UK. The book is on sale everywhere, so that shouldn’t make a difference, but perhaps it was. The book is very UK centric in its story. Perhaps that put other nationalities off buying it. We can’t be certain of that, but it is borne out by our KDP sales data. 98% of our sales for that title are made in the UK and Ireland. Again, we were putting data side by side in order to interpret it.  Above, we mentioned the need to understand how much each click cost us. That is essential information, because if we don’t know that we can’t know if our ad generated a profit. Let’s say we got 100 clicks and made 10 sales (that’s a fairly typical conversion rate for a new author). That sounds good, doesn’t it? According to Amazon Ads those sales would be worth £59.90 gross if the book sells at £5.99. Cause for celebration, perhaps? Actually no. Those 10 sales may have been valued at £59.90 gross, but may only have yielded £30 in royalties. If those 100 clicks cost us £35 (again, a typical cost based on 35p per click) then our ad campaign didn’t make a profit, even though it made sales. It made a loss of £5. And don’t forget that £35 is the pre-tax cost. If you are in the UK you have to add 20% VAT to get the final cost. Maybe we would need to re-think whether or not to spend our advertising budget with Amazon Ads too! Again, we have to put data side by side to interpret it and the data may have to come from different sources, eg both Amazon Ads and KDP.  Now, I’m not saying advertising doesn’t work, because it does. What I am saying is that we have to use all the available data to measure the effectiveness of our advertising. If you are spending £100 (after tax) on advertising and you are making £101 in royalties, then whoopee. You are in profit. But you have to know that and that means measuring what you are doing. So far we have only talked about paid advertising. What about social media? Indie authors spend a lot of their time on social media promoting their books. It isn’t costing them anything except time, so no need to worry, is there? Actually, as the old saying goes, time is money (Benjamin Franklin). All the time you are on social media promoting your books, you aren’t writing new books which could make you more money. So, time has an associated cost. It is therefore necessary to work out if the time you spend promoting your books through social media is actually time well spent. Social media sites provide data on how many people have interacted with a post. That could mean a “like” or a reply, or it could be a click on a link. The more interactions there are, the more likely it is that they will convert into sales.  So, if your posts aren’t getting interactions, you need to know why, because to continue what you are doing is just going to waste your time. If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. This may mean asking other people what they think of your posts, so you can work out what is most likely to get an interaction. Also, you need to “benchmark” against posts that get a lot of interactions to see what it is about them that makes them so attractive.  Of course, we mean posts that promote books. Knowing that posting a video of a cute kitten playing with a ball is going to get lots of interactions, isn’t going to help you to sell any books. Lots of authors think that asking questions on social media and getting a gazillion answers is interacting. It isn't. yes, the post gets a lot of responses - but is it selling books? If it isn't selling books it is just wasting time. So, some of the data that has to be compared are interactions compared to books sales. Do they line up. If not, why not? But knowing that a video gets more interactions than a still image might also be useful to know.  But with measurement you must always ask the question “why”.
- Why aren’t my posts getting interactions?. - Why aren’t interactions on social media converting to sales? - Why aren't my video clips getting more interactions? Etc. I can’t answer those questions for you in a blog. I can’t even think up all the questions you might want to ask. But there will be answers. You just have to go looking for them. Social media sites provide all that data for free. All you have to do is use it. Measurement and data analysis isn’t very exciting stuff. But using it wisely can make your book sales very exciting. But, like all of book marketing, you have to invest time into it to get the best out of it. But it could help you avoid those Lego bricks. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. |
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