|
This week, Selfishgenie Publishing hands over its blog to Robert Cubitt, one of our authors, who returns to tell us about his experiences in publishing an audiobook. All Views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Selfishgenie Publishing.  Back in December 2022 I wrote a blog about dipping my toe into the audiobook market and whether it was right for Indie authors, given the expense of employing a professional narrator (starting prices are around £1,500 ($1,600)). You can find the original blog in the December 2022 archive. At that time, I promised to get back to you to talk about the outcomes, so here I am. I’d like to be able to report that I had a great response to the audiobook and sales were phenomenal, but I would be lying. I have made some sales, but they aren’t anywhere near as many as I hoped, or as they needed to be to recoup my investment.  I put the blame squarely on ACX.com, the platform that the books are distributed through. They are a subsidiary of retailing giant Amazon. They offer no assistance with marketing. This is remarkable, considering that ACX.com can only make money if authors are able to sell their audiobooks. Users of KDP will be familiar with the range of marketing tools that the site offers, including access to Amazon Ads. But there are no equivalents on ACX.com. Amazon Ads are available for audiobooks in the USA, but I don’t live in the USA and my audiobook isn’t aimed at the American market (but American and Canadian readers are welcome to listen to it - see below for more information). So, not much help here in the UK. But even if I wanted to sell my audiobook in the USA, that marketing channel isn’t accessible through ACX.com. There is no link from one to the other. BTW Chirp, the audiobook channel of the book marketing site BookBub, also operates only in the USA and Canada. So, not much use to us 400 million Europeans then.  The little bit of advice that is offered by ACX.com is in their blogs. I can sum it all up in three bullet points: - Find some reviewers, - Use social media (including paid advertising). - Pay audiobook promotion sites (but none are recommended so you pay your money and take your own chances). The only practical help they provide is a batch of promo codes for free giveaways of your audiobook, presumably to give to those reviewers that are queuing up to offer their services for free (sarcasm), but they offer no channel through which to distribute those, so once again the author is left high and dry.  The whole point of using Amazon Ads to sell a book is that the ads are targeted directly at people who are already looking for books to buy. The problem with advertising using social media is that people seeing an ad on the social media feed (a) might not be looking for a book to buy and (b) they have to leave their social media browsing in order to buy the book even if they are interested. Getting people to leave their social media browsing acts as a barrier to sales. If I, a humble amateur marketeer, know that you would expect the professional marketing people at ACX.com and Audible to know that too, and to follow the lead of Amazon to remove that "advertising by proxy" barrier to sales. But they don't. Or, if they do know it, they don't consider it worth the bother to do anything about it. I have to say I find this quite remarkable. After all, if the author can’t market their book, ACX.com doesn’t make any money from the book either. You would think they would be moving heaven and earth to help authors to market their books. Not only that, but the marketing activity itself can be monetised to produce revenue for them.  The faceless corporation. I don’t know who actually runs ACX.com and Audible, but they aren’t very business-like if they are finding ways of NOT making money. In addition, I have found their customer service to be less than professional. Their stock answer to every question or problem seems to be “try asking someone else”. Again, they seem intent on not helping their company to make money. I’ll give you an idea of just how unhelpful ACX.com is. After doing a Google search, I found this blog article (I couldn’t find it on ACX.com itself) about creating an Audible author page. Good idea, I thought. I’ll click the link and do that. The trouble was, there is no link. And I can’t find out how to do it through the Audible website because that is aimed at listeners, not authors.  So, unless you are very good at marketing your books, you will probably struggle just as much as I have with trying to find any listeners for your audiobooks if you distribute through ACX.com. Now, you may be questioning the quality of my book at this point. After all, nobody can sell a bad book, even in audio format.. A fair observation and if the ebook and paperback versions were selling equally badly, I would agree with you. However, that isn’t the case. Operation Absolom is my biggest revenue earner, and it is so successful that the royalties from it are what paid for the production of the audiobook in the first place. Given the level of investment required, you can work out for yourself how successful the book has had to be in order for me to make the decision to produce the audiobook.  There is a slightly cheaper option. Alternative self publishing book distribution site Draft2Digital (D2D) have their own panel of narrators who offer prices from around $135 (£120) per narrating hour, giving an overall cost of approximately $1,400 (£1,300) for a 300 page book. I haven’t used them for audiobooks (I have for ebooks and paperbacks) and if you do then you can’t receive the higher (40%) royalty rate from ACX.com if you also distribute through D2D. However, it does provide a wide distribution channel, so it may be something you wish to consider. If you already distribute an audiobook through ACX.com you can also put it on D2D (using the same audio files), but you will have to reduce your royalty option on ACX.com to the 20% level. But there are no marketing tools provided by D2D either, so you will encounter the same problems when it comes to helping listeners to find your books  So, am I advising Indie authors not to venture into audiobooks?
No, I am not. This is a growing market and Indie authors can gain an advantage by getting their books into audio before it gets too big and swamps us all. But I am advising Indie authors to consider how they are going to market their audiobooks before spending all that money, because you will get precious little help from ACX.com and D2D. If you can’t crack the marketing nut before you invest heavily in your audiobook, then it is probably advisable to proceed with caution. What about me? Am I giving up on audiobooks? No, I’m not. In fact, I’m doubling down. Book 2 to of the Carter’s Commandos series, “Operation Tightrope” is already live on Amazon, Audible and iTunes. . Again, I’m invested my royalties from my ebooks and paperbacks to cover the narration costs (more proof of their continuing success). Now I’m going to crack that marketing nut if it kills me. If I succeed, I’ll be sure to come back and let you know, so you can do it too. If you do decide that you want to get into the audiobook market, then I wish you every success. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.
0 Comments
 It is the dream of all Indie authors: to snag an agent or a publisher and get that elusive publishing deal. Yet so few Indie authors are able to fulfil that dream. But it is achievable, and it is probably easier than you think. However, it is also somewhat counterintuitive to do what is necessary to fulfil the dream. It may also require the author to make a few compromises. OK, if it’s that easy, tell us the secret, oh Selfishgenie. OK, we will.  The first thing you have to do is recognise that publishers hate taking risks with new authors. Risk threatens to reduce profits and there are stories in the industry of publishers being left with warehouses full of books because they took a gamble on a new author that didn’t pay off. These stories are probably apocryphal, but they are enough to give publishers nightmares. In that case how do new authors ever get signed? The answer to that is that it isn’t always the author themselves that represents the risk. It’s the type of book they are writing. The author may be the next Ernest Hemingway or Hilary Mantel in terms of the quality of their writing, but if they aren’t writing the sort of books that readers want to read, then they will never become bestselling authors. It is quite possible that in today’s market, Hemingway would also be unable to find a publisher because his type of books aren’t selling these days (my speculation, of course) Which is why new those authors represent a risk. This is where things become counterintuitive.  You may think that to get that elusive publishing deal your book has to be different from what is already out there in the bookstores. You would be wrong. It's the exact opposite. Your book has to be the same (or at least similar) to what is already out there. To de-risk their industry, publishers follow the reading fashions. If J R R Martin’s books are selling, then publishers are hungry for books just like his. If Lee Childs’ books are selling, then publishers will also be hungry for books like his. So, if you want to snag that elusive publishing deal, your books have to follow the fashion. By publishing books that are what the public is reading at that moment, publishers are able to de-risk their products Give the public what they want and they’ll come flocking to your door.  We already see this in cinema, of course. In the last decade, 5 of the top 10 box office hits were superhero movies, four of which were from the Avengers franchise and the 5th was Black Panther. Of the remaining 5 one was from the Star Wars franchise, another was from the Jurassic Park franchise and two more were Disney films, which are always popular. If that’s what the public wants, is it any surprise that we get so many superhero films, Star Wars films, Disney films et al? And the same applies to books. This desire to follow the fashion then feeds back to agents. If publishers want a particular type of book, then agents will want to find authors who are writing that type of book. Because it is easier, and more lucrative, to sign authors who are writing the sorts of books that publishers are looking for. So, sending an agent something different is not going to get you signed. Of course, going to Bloomsbury or Scholastic Press and offering them a Harry Potter clone isn’t going to help the Indie author. After all, those two publishers already have the original Harry Potter. No, you need to approach a publisher/agent that hasn’t got Harry Potter and offer them your clone.  At the same time as responding to fashion, publishers also create reading fashions. After all, if all the publishers are producing Harry Potter clones, then that limits the choice for readers, so they buy them even if they would actually welcome a change. We see this each year with clothing fashions. If manufacturers decide that green baseball caps are going to be “in” this year that is what they will produce, and they will pay “influencers” to get the public to wear them. Pretty soon all you will see will be green baseball caps! Then, next year, because everyone already has a green baseball cap, they’ll switch the colour and repeat the trick so they can sell more product. And we fall for it, so we only have ourselves to blame. Exactly the same methods apply with books. But you don’t want to write Harry Potter clones or Jack Reacher clones, do you?  You have your own story ideas and those are the ones you want to work on. You have “artistic integrity” and you won’t be dictated to with regard to your plots, your characters or your writing style. OK, I respect that. But artistic integrity doesn’t put food on the table. When you are a big name writer you have a bit of power that you can exert. Your name alone will sell books. That means your publisher is likely to be more flexible about what they will buy from you. And if they aren’t flexible, your name is big enough to open doors to other publishers who might allow you to write what you want, because you no longer represent a risk. You are “box office”, as they say in the movie making world.  It’s the reason why celebrities who can barely write their own names are able to get publishing deals. It’s not the quality of the book that sells it, it’s the name on the cover,. But you have to be a “name” first and that may mean compromise. Write what the publishers want now, so you are granted the freedom to write what you want to write in the future. So, what should you be writing right now in order to snag that contract? The answer to that is likely to change from month to month and year to year, which isn’t helpful. The best sellers list on Amazon will tell you what is fashionable right now as will the Sunday Times (or New York Times in the USA) best sellers list, but that won’t tell you what will be fashionable in 6 months’ time when your book is ready for querying. Fortunately, fashions in reading change quite slowly, certainly slower than they do in clothing, so you probably have time to get on the bandwagon with your next book. The top three genres (UK) to write in are Crime and Thrillers (33% of the market) , Fantasy Fiction (22%) and Action & Adventure (20%). There are, however, subdivisions below those headline genres and not all of them are as popular as others. But what you will probably notice is that the most popular books right now are character led, not plot led. Less popular at the moment are Modern Classics (No idea, but they are only 11% of the market), Horror (11%) and Short Stories (14%)* Some genres are so unpopular that their market share doesn’t even register on the graphs.  Some publishers do allow themselves to take a few risks. They look for good new writers and offer them publishing deals. However, they won’t throw a lot of money into marketing their book. At least, not the first one.
The first print run of the hardback version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was only 500 books, most of which went to libraries. That’s how much faith Bloomsbury had in J K Rowling for her first book. Fortunately it was the American market that saw its potential and made her the best-seller she is, while the UK market caught up later. So, yes, you might find an agent and a publisher willing to take a risk on you even if you aren’t writing whatever is fashionable. But it is probably going to be a harder furrow to plough. * Figures for 2020, the most recent we could find from a reliable source. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Never judge a book by it's cover. Every picture tells a story. Which of those two old sayings resonates most with you? For us it's the second, because book covers are supposed to tell a story and there is no doubt that readers make judgements about them. So what story is your book covers telling? When readers do searches for books, or even when they are just browsing through the listings, what is the first thing they see? It is one of two things – either a book’s title or its cover. Sometimes it’s both because the title is on the cover anyway. I’m not going to talk about titles. There are too many theories about what makes a good title and, so far as we can tell, one theory is as good as another. Here’s one we found, but there are hundreds more. But the same can’t be said for covers. They have to convey so much information in a simple image and, sometimes, it’s easy for them to convey the wrong information.  Take the book on the right which was, until recently, the cover for the first book in our Magi series. We had thought it was quite a good cover, which is why we stuck with it when we signed the author. That was until we got a bit of feedback that told us we were way off track with it. Someone had emailed us asking if we would be prepared to provide a few paperback copies of one of our books for discussion by their book club. They were raising money for charity through a small attendance fee and income from tea and cake sales and, once the books had been read, they would be sold second hand, also to raise money for charity.  Happy to make our contribution, we happened to have a few spare copies of The Magi lying around the office, so I emailed her a synopsis and the cover image. We were quite taken aback when the lady replied “We are a church group and aren’t in the least bit interested in a book about BDSM. Thanks for the offer but we’ll go elsewhere.” (If you are an innocent type who is unfamiliar with the term BDSM, we don’t suggest you Google it). We were puzzled by this response, so we emailed back asking what she meant, to which she replied that with the leather clad lady on the cover, it was clearly a book of an erotic nature and that BDSM was implied.  We emailed back to assure her that the book had no erotic content at all (sorry if you are disappointed by that) and peace was restored, but the book still wasn’t accepted because, with that cover, they didn’t want to sell it on their second-hand book stall. But we had learnt a valuable lesson. The cover was designed by a previous publisher, with whom we are acquainted, and I feel certain that he had no intention of implying that the book had anything to do with BDSM. But, looking at it in light of that response from the book club, I could now see what the lady was getting at. And the image of the leather clad woman appeared on the cover of all 9 books in the series, and on the box set. It was part of the “branding” of the series.  Then there are the other two elements used on the covers. The inclusion of the image of a distant galaxy is appropriate as it’s a sci-fi book. That was also part of the series branding. The third element, however, in this case an “electronic egg” changed with each book in the series, to tie in with the plot of the book. With doubt now weighing us down, we started to wonder about that suitability of that egg image, too. What did it suggest to the readers?  So, we asked a few of our readers for their opinions. The general consensus was that it was confusing. How could you have an electronic egg? What would an electronic egg do? Why was the egg floating in space? Was it some sort of spaceship? What had the egg to do with the woman? Was that the way babies were born in the book? Well, if the cover was causing as many questions as that, it clearly wasn’t doing its job of selling the book. As it happens, the answers to the questions are contained within the book but, of course, no one was going to buy the book to find that out if they were confused about it in the first place. One thing we know is that readers don’t like to be confused before they even read the first page. In fact, it’s only the readers of crime fiction (and not all of them) that are willing to be confused by their books.  So, we decided that (a) the book’s image sent out the wrong message to some people and (b) it confused other people. Which was, perhaps, why the book and the series hadn't been doing as well as it deserved. It is rather good, as many sci-fi readers have discovered (but you would expect us to say that). So, we set out to create 9 new book covers that presented a less confusing message. In fact, all we wanted the images to say was “this is a sci-fi book”. One or two of them do hint at the content, the ones for “Cloning Around” (Book 4) and “Timeslip” (Book 5 – image to the left), but the others are a little bit more generic.  If they say anything it’s “This is sci-fi and weird stuff will happen”.
(BTW, you can find out more about the books shown on our "Books" page or by clicking on the images) So, what does your cover say about your book? Does it give out an unintentional message, the way ours sent out a BDSM message? Does it confuse the reader? Is it different enough to make it stand out from the crowd? Because that third question is also important. When readers do a search by genre, they get presented with list after list of books, which they then scroll through. The cover of your book has to stand out from the crowd if you want the reader to click on it and find out more. If the cover looks too similar to the ones above and below it, the reader’s eyes are going to slide right past. Yes, do be bold, be different; but make sure that the key message about your book is plainly understood from its cover image. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Disclaimer: We are not connected with Kindlepreneur in any way and have no financial interest in the product reviewed in this blog. This review has not been paid for by Kindlepreneur, Dave Chesson, or anyone else.  Not the real product's logo! Let me make it clear up front, if you only have one book published and never intend publishing another, you aren’t doing much marketing and you don’t intend paying for marketing, this product may not be of much use to you. But if you intend having a lengthy career as a self-published author, if you are planning to publish a series, or if you are a small, independent publishing house like us, then there is probably something here to interest you. Warning: This is a lengthy blog because for authors and publishers to understand the value of the product we are reviewing, they also have to understand the need for it. What need do you have that this product satisfies? You may not even know you have that need until you read this blog. Publisher Rocket is an aid to marketing and an aid to advertising using Amazon Ads and other advertising platforms. One of the things every publisher (I include self-published authors in that) has to know is which keywords to include in their book’s description in order for it to attract the attention of readers when they are looking for something new to read.  If you have ever uploaded a book onto KDP, you will know that you are allowed to enter 7 “keywords” into your book’s details. Actually, you can use more than 7 words, because you can enter “strings” of words. For example, you don’t have to limit yourself to “romance” as a keyword, you can enter “modern romance” instead and it will still only count as one keyword. When readers are searching for books to read they may use Google, other search engines, or the search bars of retail sites such as Amazon. Very often they don’t know exactly what they are looking for, so they can’t enter a title or an author’s name. Instead, they enter a word or string of words that describes (for them) the type of book they want. For example, as a fan of historical fiction, I may do a search using those two words. Or I might add “military” to the description because I like historical fiction set around military themes. Or I might use “World War II” as my search term. "they are wasting one of the 7 keywords that KDP allows them." If the author knows what search words the readers are using, they can make sure those words are included in their 7 keywords for their book’s description on KDP, so they are guaranteed to be found when a search is done, and the book will appear in the search results - though not necessarily near the top of the list. But authors also need to know which words not to include; the words that readers rarely use for searches. If the author uses them, then they are wasting one of the 7 keywords that KDP allows them.  The problem is, identifying which words the readers are using. It may not be the ones we think they are. You may think I’m talking about “Search Engine Optimisation” (SEO) and you are dead right – I am. Only we don’t need to use a fancy term like that, and we certainly don’t need to pay someone to do that for us. Manual targeting on Amazon Ads is the most cost efficient way of using that advertising platform. But it relies heavily on the advertiser (you) knowing how to get the best out it.  So many genres - but which one is the best fit for your book? The first type of manual targeting uses your book’s genre. Anyone who buys books in the same genre will have your book in their “recommendations”. Amazon Ads suggests the genres and you can delete any that you don’t think really apply. For example, Amazon Ads may suggest both modern and historical romance for your book, but your book can’t be both, so you can delete the one that doesn’t apply. But you can also insert your own genres. For example, if yours is a fantasy book with a strong romantic sub-plot, you don’t have to limit your advertising to the fantasy genre. You can add romance genres too. Do you know which genre listing on Amazon is going to be the best for your book? Some are better than others for getting your book seen and, according to Publishing Rocket’s publicity video, there are “hidden” genres too. For some genres you can even get to the number 1 bestseller spot by selling only a handful of copies. That is useful stuff to know – but how do you find out which genre(s) you should be advertising to? Read on to find out. By the way, did you know that you aren’t limited to just 2 genres on KDP? That only applies when you first upload your book. Once it is published, you can select up to 7. You need an account on Author Central and then you need to go to Help>Contact>Amazon Store & Detail Page>Contact us>Amazon Book Page>Update Amazon Categories.  The second type of manual targeting uses keywords. Amazon Ads tutorials suggest using between 100 and 150 keywords (or keywords strings) in an ad such as this. If you struggled to come up with 7 keywords for your book, how are you going to come up with 100-150? Well, using author names and the titles of similar books is one way. But whose books and which titles? Which is where Publisher Rocket comes in. OK, it took a long time to get here, but if you don’t understand the basics of Amazon (or other platform) advertising, you aren’t going to understand the value of this product. What Publisher Rocket does is gather together the search terms that are used on Amazon and presents them to you for your consideration. But it also does much more than that. It also provides data which tells you which of those terms is best at turning advert “clicks” into sales. "Publisher Rocket helps to sort the wheat from the chaff"  Not all search words are equal, you see. Sometimes the reader enters fairly random words into the search bar and therefore the results they get back don’t provide them with what they are looking for, so they have to have another go. But if the reader clicks on a book out of curiosity, those random search words still appear as results, so it is essential to know that they aren’t that useful, so as to exclude them. Publisher Rocket helps to sort the wheat from the chaff by providing the user with a wide range of data that they can download into a spreadsheet to filter and sort to their heart’s content to answer the vital keyword questions they may have. The one thing they don’t want to do is pay for clicks on their ad which won’t be converted into sales. Just because they and Isaac Asimov both write sci-fi, it doesn’t mean that their readers and Isaac Asimov’s readers like the same sort of books. They may want to exclude that name as a keyword for that reason, so that they don’t pay for clicks from curious Isaac Asimov readers who aren’t going to buy their books.  OK, if that sounds complicated, that may be something for just the real data nerds to get into. For the rest of us, Publisher Rocket provides us with some simpler tools to use to find words that are good to use for our books, by genre, and what aren’t so good. Using the app is easy enough, but Publisher Rocket’s owners make it even easier by providing “how to” webinars to guide you through the various functions and offer advice on how to get the best results. The owner of Publisher Rocket is a company called Kindlepreneur, a company created by self-made Kindle millionaire Dave Chesson. This isn’t their only product, but it is the one we have found to be most useful in helping us to increase the efficiency of our advertising campaigns. If you saw our blog last week (see below the end of this blog), you will know that this is something we have been focusing on in recent months and it has paid off for us. Publisher Rocket costs $97 (around £85) for a lifetime subscription, which is why it may not be suitable for people who only ever plan to publish one book and who don’t intend getting into marketing. In other words, it isn’t any use to an author who doesn’t want their book to be read. Those that do want their books to be read may find it more useful. "As a publisher this was a no brainer for us" But even if you only have one book, the purchase price could be paid back quite quickly (it is the equivalent to approximately 50 extra sales) if you use the results to improve your advertising efficiency. As a publisher this was a no brainer for us. We bought Publisher Rocket in November last year and it had paid for itself by Christmas. We don’t use it every day, but when we do use it we know we are going to get the most bangs for our buck out of our advertising. So, if you need some help with your Amazon Ads, this product may be just the thing and we are happy to recommend it. If you want to know more about the product, 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. Disclaimer: We are not connected with Bryan Cohen in any way and have no financial interest in his book. This review has not been paid for by Bryan Cohen or anyone else.   This book probably represents the best £3.99 I have ever spent since I started publishing. That is because it’s a book that actually paid for itself several times over. I would go so far as to say I wish I had read it 5 years ago, as it would have saved me a lot of time and money. That isn’t actually possible, as the book was only published this year, but you know what I mean. This article will be half book review and half blog. The blog part tells you what happened when we tried to apply the ideas and methods that Bryan Cohen recommends in “Self-Publishing With Amazon Ads”. Some of you may just want to know how that worked out, so that bit is at the end of the article. "You’ll have to find out the hard way that there is no such thing as “instant gratification” when it comes to marketing a book." If you are still reading this now, and haven’t scrolled down to find out what happened, you have one of the key qualities that Bryan Cohen talks about in the book: patience. Cohen doesn’t promise instant results. One of the first things you will learn from this book is that generating consistent results from Amazon advertising is a marathon not a sprint, and if you aren’t prepared to be patient then this may not be the book for you. You’ll have to find out the hard way that there is no such thing as “instant gratification” when it comes to marketing a book. If you have never used Amazon Ads, or you have only just dipped your toe in the water, then you will be at a bit of a disadvantage, as Cohen assumes some prior knowledge. But don’t worry. That prior knowledge is available. Amazon Ads provides webinars for its new users here. "helping authors to reduce the amount of money they spend while also getting better results" A word of caution about the webinar. It is aimed at encouraging you to spend money with Amazon Ads. After all, Amazon Ads is a business and it makes its profits from its users, so the more money users spend with them, the more profit Amazon makes. Bryan Cohen’s book, however, is aimed at helping authors to reduce the amount of money they spend while also getting better results. This means that some of Cohen’s advice on bidding strategies contradicts that of the webinar. And if you are wondering what a bidding strategy is, it means that you need to do the webinar before you dive into this book. Just a quick word about the author. He is a self-published author himself and he also provides self-publishing training and other services for authors through his website Best Page Forward. But not all the training he provides has to be paid for. Each quarter he hosts the 5 Day Amazon Ads Profit Challenge, which is free to join and which has provided coaching for over 25,000 authors. "She challenges Cohen at every turn" Each chapter in the book takes the reader through a different phase of a process that starts with poorly performing ads and progresses to turning those ads into high performing ones. Each chapter therefore introduces a new idea or method, so if you try to skip ahead to the “good bit”, where you are making millions, you are likely to miss out on a vital step which means your objective won’t be realised. See, once again you have to be patient. Just something to note. Early in the book Cohen talks about creating 5-10 ads a week. This is for the benefit of American readers, because Amazon.com allows readers to create customised ads and advertisers are encouraged to create several different customised ads a week to appeal to different segments of the market. That facility doesn’t exist for users of other Amazon markets (yet). For us, the Amazon page for our book is our ad. That is actually a timesaver for us, because one ad can run forever. However, the rest of what Bryan talks about is completely valid and if we ever get access to the customisation function, we'll be ready for it because we've read this book. Each chapter is broken down into two parts. One part is a “fly-on-the-wall” view of an on-line coaching session with one of Bryan’s clients, a woman called Erin. The other part is Bryan speaking directly to the reader to explain what he is teaching Erin. I don’t know if Erin is a real person or a composite character created for the reader’s benefit, but she is the person who asks the questions that the reader might want to ask. She comes to the course as a sceptic and has to be shown that the process works by actually implementing the methods herself so that she can see the profits from her ads increasing over time. And Erin isn’t a passive student. She challenges Cohen at every turn, especially on the issue of how long it will take to see returns and how she is going to fit in the time to do what he recommends. Because, as with all things, time is one of the most valuable resources we have and, as writers, we’d rather be spending our time writing than marketing. But Cohen is ahead of Erin here as well and there are specific sections on time management. "only a handful of people will ever achieve 6 digit profits" One of the things I liked about the book is that it is grounded in realism. When Cohen talks about increasing royalties and profits (not the same thing, as you will find out if you buy the book), he doesn’t promise telephone number sized amounts of money. He talks about investing $50 dollar a month to make $100 profit, which gives a feeling of being achievable. He then talks about increasing that profit to $200, $500 and maybe $1,000. He does refer to people who have made considerably more, but he tempers that with the realism that maybe only a handful of people will ever achieve 6 digit profits – but you get a warm feeling from knowing that, by doing a bit of work, you could be in that handful. Cohen is just as realistic about how much time we have available to do the work. He knows we have day jobs, families to look after and writing careers to pursue, so he tries to optimise the amount of work we may have to do in order to make best use of the time we have available. Time management is a key message. Readers of this blog will notice that I have only given the book 4 stars and therefore I had some reservations about it. That is true, but the reservations aren’t about the lessons that Cohen teaches, they are more about the way they are presented. For a start, Cohen refers to some calculations you may want to do in order to produce some performance data. Some worked examples would be very helpful to understand what he is talking about, but they are lacking. "bombarded with a whole lot of data" There are no handy graphics, such as screen shots of Amazon Ads pages, where things can be pointed out. While I am quite good with the internet, there are features I miss on web pages and some key features aren’t always the most prominently displayed. A graphic pointing out “This is the button you need to click” and “This is where you have to alter x” would be really helpful. The other thing I had a problem with is the additional applications that you might want to use, especially those relating to generating lists of keywords (If you don’t know what a keyword is, then see above regarding the Amazon Ads webinar). One of the applications has to be purchased (about £100) and comes with its own training videos, so that’s OK (it isn’t essential and you don’t have to buy it, but it is a useful tool and we will review it next week). But the other two are plug ins for Google Chrome, which are free and come with neither a user guide nor helpful training videos. I tried using them and was bombarded with a whole lot of data which I struggled to interpret. Some guidance on how to interpret the data produced by those plug-ins (with accompanying graphics), so that I could use it in ads, would have been really useful. But don’t let those three things put you off buying this book. Firstly, with a bit of patience (again) I found the buttons I needed to click and the things I needed to adjust. And, with some trial and error, I did work out how to interpret the data produced by the plug-ins. But it took time that I hadn’t factored in and which I had to divert from other activities. "while we were doing a lot of things right, we were also doing quite a few things wrong" So, how did we get on? The first thing you need to know is that here at Selfishgenie we aren’t complete novices. We have been running Amazon Ads for many years, with mixed results. From articles I had read on various websites I found out that advertising with Amazon wasn’t a quick fix. We would need to spend more money than we had in the past and let our ads run for longer if we wanted them to be successful. So, around April 2022 (before we bought this book) we decided to commit some of our sales revenue to improving our advertising, as an investment to make more revenue in the future. And it worked. We launched an ad campaign for our Carter’s Commandos series and saw our monthly royalties increase from the low three digit level per month to a four digit level by October, which we were able to maintain. But the amount of money we were spending to get that revenue seemed to be higher than it needed to be. In terms of profit on the campaign (the net amount we made from each sale compared to the gross amount we spent), we felt sure we should be doing better. That was when I stumbled across Bryan Cohen’s book. Actually, I did a search looking for blogs about using Amazon Ads and it appeared in the search results. It didn’t take long to discover that while we were doing a lot of things right, we were also doing quite a few things wrong. In particular, our bidding strategy was wrong. We thought we could buy sales by spending more money. In fact, all we were doing was giving Amazon more money than we needed to, which was reducing the profit from the sales we did make. "give away Bryan’s secrets for free" The way Amazon’s advertising algorithms work mean that bid price is only one factor in getting our ads seen. I won’t steal Bryan Cohen’s thunder (or reduce his books sales) by telling you what the other variables in the algorithms are. (I know, but it wouldn’t be fair to give away Bryan’s secrets for free). I won’t bore you with all the details of what we did. Suffice to say that we learnt the lessons that Bryan Cohen was trying to teach us.  But what we did do was to run a trial to see how his methods compared to our own. We continued to advertise our Carter’s Commandos series the way we always had. But our Magi sci-fi series had been bumping along the bottom, making very few sales per month. So, we started a brand new ad campaign for the first book in that series and applied the newly learnt lessons to that series to see what happened. NB. When I refer to "sales" below I also mean KindleUnlimited (KENP) pages read. 1st 30 Days The good news is that we got clicks on our ads from Day 1 and we made more sales than in the previous 3 months, but they weren’t Earth shatteringly good. The campaign wasn’t profitable, meaning we spent more than we received in Royalties. We tweaked the book’s blurb (see last week’s review of “Fiction Blurbs: The Best Page Forward Way”), but there wasn’t much else we could do to stimulate more sales during that period. 2nd 30 Days Here we started to reap the benefit of “delayed results”. It is said that buyers have to see an ad an average of 7 times before they respond. This seemed to be the case as the number of clicks on our ads increased the longer the ad ran and we started to see more sales. But we also started to see sales for books we hadn’t advertised. The Magi is a 9 book series, and we were only advertising Book 1. But we started to get sales for books 2 – 9, which we hadn’t advertised. Our original ad was instrumental in developing a “fan base” for the series. These additional sales meant we were now in profit. Final 30 days I’d be lying if I told you that sales really started to take off. But they did continue even if they were unspectacular. There seems to be some sales resistance to The Magi series which we aren’t getting for other series, and we need to dig into that to see if we can work out what is causing it. The final 30 days of the trial was also during January, when money is traditionally tight for people - even avid readers of sci-fi. However, we have sold more copies of titles in The Magi series in the last 90 days than we did in the previous 9 months and the campaign is showing a profit, so overall we count it as a success. "highly recommended" So, what are the main take-aways we have from the book? 1. This isn’t a quick fix. We required patience and strong nerves to spend money without seeing a profit for several weeks. 2. If we are doing a “category ad” (advertising by genre), we needed to keep the band narrow so as not to waste money on genres that aren’t relevant and where our ad may generate a click (which we pay for) but won’t get converted into a sale. 3. We needed to use more keywords in our ads and we had to make them relevant to the genre of books we were selling. The Magi series is “space opera”, so there is no point in using keywords that relate to dystopian sci-fi. Again, they may generate clicks, but they won’t get converted into sales. 4. We needed to use the data from the ad campaigns to help reduce our costs. For example, we were getting hundreds of clicks for one keyword, generating cost, but the clicks didn’t convert to sales. Conclusion: readers who use that keyword aren’t interested in our book. So, we deleted the keyword from the list. 5. It works!  Having learnt from this experience, we have now tweaked our ad for Carter's Commandos, to take into account what we now know we can do better, which hasn't increased our sales but has reduced our costs, so we are actually keeping more of our money, which is a win, which makes us happy.
If you are an Indie author or a small publisher (like us) then “Self-Publishing With Amazon Ads” by Bryan Cohen is highly recommended. To find out more about the book, just click or tap on the cover image at the top of the blog. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Disclaimer: We are not connected with Bryan Cohen in any way and have no financial interest in his book. This review has not been paid for by Bryan Cohen or anyone else.   This is a review of one of two books by Bryan Cohen that we think should be read in the right order. This first one, “Fiction Blurbs: The Best Page Forward Way” is about improving your blurb writing technique so that readers feel more compelled to buy your book. The second book, “Self-Publishing With Amazon Ads” teaches you about increasing the profitability of your advertising campaigns. What links the two? One of the “tweaks” that the second book suggests to increase sales is to improve your book’s blurb. So, if that is a tip for increasing sales it seems sensible to us to try to improve our blurbs before we started spending money on advertising, so that we don’t spend money on advertising only to find out that our blurbs might need improving.  Still not quite right! It is putting the metaphorical horse in front of the cart rather than behind it. But don’t worry, we’ll be reviewing “Self-Publishing With Amazon Ads” next week, so that you can get the whole picture. Having said this book is by Bryan Cohen I must now correct myself and tell you that it is actually written by Phoebe J Ravencraft, an associate of Bryan Cohen, who works for his company, Best Page Forward. But they get joint author credits. First of all, what about the authors’ credentials for writing a book such as this? Best Page Forward has written over 5,000 book blurbs for self-published authors. Phoebe herself has written or overseen the writing of around 3,000 of those. She comes from an advertising copywriting background. They have gathered plaudits from satisfied customers and the blurbs they have created have stood the test of time to sell books. I think we can safely say that they know what they are talking about.  In one of our marketing blogs, repeated last autumn, we advised selling the sizzle, not the sausage. In other words, we recommended not trying to describe your book to the reader but trying to excite their imagination about how dramatic/entertaining/insightful/hilarious (insert other adjectives of your choice) your book is going to be. That is exactly what this book strives to do. That was good enough to convince me to buy the book. If it does that for us, the money spent on it will be repaid just by selling two extra copies of one of our books. As both an author and a publisher I have written dozens of book blurbs, so I thought I knew what I was doing. We had done plenty of research to try to find out what made a good blurb and we followed the lessons we had learnt, but there was still a nagging doubt in our minds that we might not be getting it right. Our sales suggested that there was something amiss. We were getting lots of clicks on our adverts, but they weren’t converting into as many sales as they should.  So, when I started to read this book, pennies started to drop to tell me that doing what other people were doing was the problem. What we needed to do was to be different, to make our blurbs stand out from the crowd. Readers are too easily distracted by metaphorical shiny things, so the solution to that is for our book blurbs to be the shiny thing that distracts them from other books. Chapter by chapter, Phoebe (if she’ll permit me the liberty of addressing her by her first name) lays out the elements that go into writing the “killer” book blurb that we wanted, and then how to structure the different elements to get the most out of them. It wasn’t that the blurbs we wrote were actually bad. After all, we're conforming to what we understood to be “best practice”. It was more that they could have been so much better. For the most part, they were selling the sausage, not the sizzle. They described the book, but they didn’t describe the emotional ride that was contained within the book. Emotions, it turns out, are the sizzle that sells the sausage.  I sort of knew that already, because I have always believed that books should be character led, not plot led. Readers engage with the characters at an emotional level and come to care about them and that is what keeps them turning the page, not the plot itself. And that emotional engagement, it turns out, is what has to be at the heart of the book’s blurb. There is a lot more to it than that of course. Conflict, jeopardy, structure and vocabulary all play a massive part, but without the emotion the book still won’t sell. I’m not going to ruin the book’s sales by telling you what tools and techniques are taught within its covers. You’re going to have to pay to find out, just as we did. Suffice to say that every page provides something new to learn. Even if your blurbs are already good I feel quite confident saying that you will learn something new from this book. Readers will note that I have given the book only 4 stars where, from what I have said, you might expect that it should be worth five stars. That isn’t because of the lessons that the book teaches. It is only because of the style in which those lessons are taught. "As an author and as a publisher I have limited time available" The author uses well known books and films to illustrate the lessons and there is nothing wrong with that. Many of those books and films are her personal favourites. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that. However, at times I found that the point being made was laboured and that the author was getting rather carried away with her own passions. While such enthusiasm is to be admired, it can be a little too much when the reader has already grasped the key message and only wants to move on to the next lesson. As an author and as a publisher I have limited time available, and this book took a little more time to read than was essential. Perhaps it was designed to pad the word count, so the reader thinks they’re getting value for money, but the real value isn’t in the number of words, it’s in the messages. But that is a minor criticism and I feel secure in saying that anyone buying this book will have their money repaid quite swiftly if they learn the lessons and apply them to their blurb writing.  So, what are my main takeaways from this book? The first one I sort of already knew but being reminded of it didn’t hurt. The purpose of the blurb is not to describe the book; it is to sell the book, which is an entirely different technique. According to Phoebe, you don’t even have to read the book to be able to write its blurb. Secondly, creating a good blurb isn’t easy and it requires practice and hard work. I soon discovered that when I tried to re-write the blurbs for the books we publish. What I thought would be about ten minutes work per book turned out to take considerably longer and they still aren’t perfect (though they are better). Finally, a good blurb taps into your emotions and raises the “risk” level for the protagonist so high that the reader has no choice but to buy the book to find out what happens. Get that right and the book will sell. But I’m sure you want to know if re-writing the blurbs for our books made any difference to our sales.  First of all, judge for yourself. If you go to our “Books” page we have re-written most of our blurbs.
I’m not suggesting they are perfect. In fact, I’m sure that Phoebe J Ravencraft would suggest some improvements if she were to read them. But they are different to our previous style. Just ask yourself one simple question – having read any of those, do you feel tempted to buy the book? More importantly, has our conversion rate for sales improved? We actually got an instant return for one book. The day we changed the blurb it got its first sale in months. Coincidence? Possibly, but we think it may have been the new blurb. Then a second book got its first sale in months, followed by a third. Too many for coincidence; this was a trend. I’m not going to pretend any of those books went from non-seller to best-seller overnight as a result of the tweaks we made - but “Fiction Blurbs: The Best Book Forward Way” paid for itself within a week and is still paying for itself in terms of sales. I highly recommend “Fiction Blurbs The Best Book Forward Way” by Bryan Cohen and Phoebe J Ravencraft. To find out more about the book, click here. Next week we’ll be reviewing another book which could help you to sell a lot more of your own books, so be sure not to miss our blog. In fact, why not sign up to our newsletter to make sure you don’t miss it. We’ll even send you a free ebook if you do. Just click the button below. Disclaimer: We are not connected to Book Brush in any way other than as users of the product that has been reviewed. This review has not been paid for by Book Brush or by any other person or organisation.  This article is a review of the Book Brush app which allows authors to design their own book covers, rather than having to pay someone else a lot of money to do that for them. I have to say up front that some of the things that Book Brush allows you to do can be done just as easily in PowerPoint (if you are good at using PowerPoint) but, equally, some of the features are unique. And what is most unique as that it draws together everything you may need to be able to do under one URL. The service is provided on an annual subscription basis, charging at 3 levels: silver, gold and platinum. We paid for the silver level ($99, about £85) as that provided the things we needed right there and then (we knew we could upgrade later if we wanted to). Looking at the other two packages, it is hard to see them offering that much more – but on the other hand if it is something you want to do repetitively and you have no other way of doing it, you may regard the extra money as being well spent. I’ll cover the differences in the subscription levels a little later in this blog. "doing it myself was a no-brainer" The first thing I found useful was the introduction video that showed me how to use the app. I was able to watch it before I had even subscribed, and it persuaded me that what was on offer was going to save me money. Typically, we pay a designer on fiverr.com around $100 to provide us with an ebook and paperback cover package (with us providing the images to be used) and, as publishers, we may need a dozen of those each year, costing around $1,200. So, paying $99 a year and getting one of our team to do it was a no-brainer, providing we can create the sorts of designs that we want. How long does it take to design a cover?  Having watched the video and learnt the basics, and combining it with some use of PowerPoint (I’ll tell you why later) I was able to create a cover for the next Carter’s Commandos book in around 15 minutes. OK, the design isn’t complicated, but using the sorts of templates that are available within Book Brush, it wouldn’t have taken much longer to produce something more elaborate. I was able to do that after watching just one video and spending about an hour playing around with the various features. What’s more, I rather enjoyed doing it because the results are so easy and quick to see and it’s fun to be able to experiment with different designs. Warning to procrastinators: It is very easy to spend a lot of time playing with Book Brush while convincing yourself you are doing something productive. So keep an eye out and don't fall into that trap when you should really be writing. At the end of the process we know that by using Book Brush templates, our finished cover is going to be fully compatible with the technical requirements for KDP and other book publishing sites. But the biggest advantage is the range of templates that are available and how you can manipulate them to create a design that is unique to your book. The templates and other images are conveniently organised into genre specific groups.  KDP cover creator offers you about a dozen templates and they are pretty much fixed. You can add your own images, of course, but trimming them is difficult and it is inevitable that your book cover is going to look like hundreds of others, which is where Book Brush offers one of its great advantages. Not only that, but you have an almost unlimited ability to change colours and fonts. The platinum subscription for Book Brush offers the flexibility to remove backgrounds from images, but you may not want to pay for that. Removing background allows several images to be combined to create unique covers. Which is where PowerPoint comes in. If you know how to do it, you can remove backgrounds from images in PowerPoint, save the combined image as a .jpg and then import it into Book Brush ready to use. I’m not going to go into detail about how to do that in this blog. We searched YouTube and found this “how to” video for people who don’t already know. Along with all the templates Book Brush also has access to hundreds of thousands of free to use images which you can apply to your covers but, of course, you can also create or buy your own. They have a wide range of fonts and all the special affects you would expect to see for applying shadow, changing transparency etc. If you want to use a particular font and it isn't available in Book brush, you can import it.  There are also some blogs on the site that could be helpful to you, such as the one we read to discover what fonts work best for which genres and which should be paired together to differentiate between titles, sub-titles and author names. So, what more do you get if you upgrade? With the gold package you get templates into which you can insert your finished covers in suitable formats to use for your social media marketing, cover reveals etc, such as showing the cover in a Kindle frame with accompanying promotional text. That was about all I saw there that was different and not something that I considered to be worth paying for. With platinum you get the ability to create video trailers for your books, by combining either your own video images or using their collection of stock video. To that you can add music or a narration. The package is quite easy to use, can create videos compatible with the different social media platforms and the results look very professional. But it isn’t something we would use a lot so, in our opinion, it didn’t justify the additional $147 subscription fee.  If they offered the opportunity to buy a one-off video package for $10 - $15, we’d certainly use it, but I don’t think the subscription offers value for money unless you’re going to be creating a lot of video trailers.
Where Book Brush really comes into its own is in creating paperback and hardback covers. With the wide range of trim sizes on offer through KDP and the wide variation of page counts between books, coming up with a PowerPoint template that works for every book is impossible, so it’s all down to trial and error, which can take hours of work to get right. But Book Brush just asks you how many pages your book has and then creates a custom template for you which is guaranteed to pass KDP’s quality standards. All you have to do is overlay the different content you want to use for your design and, again, you can use their designs and images or create your own. So, overall we are quite happy with Book Brush. It’s easy and quick to learn and you can start producing professional looking book covers within an hour of paying your subscription. We certainly recommend the silver package. Whether you want to pay more for the extra buzzers and bells is down to you. If you would like to know more about Book Brush, click/tap here. If you have enjoyed this blog or found it informative, be sure not miss future editions by signing up for our newsletter. We’ll even give you a free ebook for doing it. Just click the button below. This week we hand over our blog to one of our authors, Robert Cubitt, who has been dabbling in the world of audiobooks. All views expressed by the blog's author are his own and are not necessarily shared by Selfishgenie Publishing  As an Indie author, have you ever wondered if you should turn your masterpiece into an audiobook? I did wonder, so I did some research to see if it was the right thing for me (spoiler alert – it was). First of all, the market for audiobooks in the UK in 2021 was £151 million, up from £133 million in 2020. In the USA the market was worth $4.2 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow to $33 billion by 2030. Just a microscopic slice of either of those pies is a significant amount of money. So, why are more Indie authors not pursuing this avenue for selling their books?  Aside from snobbery (some authors don’t believe that audiobooks are really books) the answer is cost. First of all, audiobooks cost far more to buy than either an ebook or a paperback. In the US an audiobook will cost between $20 and $30 and prices are comparable in the UK. For this reason, many audiobook retailers work on a subscription basis, allowing listeners to download multiple titles each month for around $15 (and the equivalent in pounds).  If you subscribe to Spotify or iTunes, you will already be familiar with this and Audible provides a typical subscription model for audiobooks. In essence it is no different from what KindleUnlimited does for ebooks. The reason behind this cost is that an audiobook requires a narrator, and they don’t come cheap. If you want a well-known actor to narrate your book you can think of a starting price in excess of £3,000 ($3,500) and some audio books use more than one actor: an overall narrator, a male character lead and a female character lead, which further increases the cost. The cost of those voices has to be recovered before either the author or the publisher makes a penny in profit.  But I wasn’t going to be deterred by this, so I went looking for cheaper options – and found them. I’ll be talking about acx.com a lot, as they are the largest distributor for audiobooks. They sell audiobooks through Audible, Amazon and iTunes, which between them control around 80% of the audiobook market. If your audiobook isn’t on acx.com, it isn’t anywhere. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first thing you need if you want to publish an audiobook is a narrator. So how do you find one of those? And, more importantly, how do you find one that won’t charge an arm and a leg to work with you?  My starting point is the same as for any job I want doing in relation to publishing: fiverr.com. A search for “audiobook narrators” provided me with an extensive list of potential candidates. Each one has posted an audio clip of their voice, so you know what you are getting before you even approach them. If your book is British based you will want a British accent (unless you are Lee Childs, who sets his books in the USA), likewise if you are an American author you will probably want an American accent. You may want to choose between a male and a female narrator. Whatever you want, you will probably find someone to offer it. There’s even one that offers to read a French translation of your book for the French market.  Rates for narrators vary and they quote their prices by 100, 200, 250 words etc so do check carefully what they are quoting so that you can compare prices properly. The narrator I picked out suggested a starting price of £4.54 (around $5.25 at current exchange rates) for 250 words, which is very much at the economy end of the scale. (I will provide his details at the end of the blog.) But his voice sounded good, so I asked for a “custom quote” based on the length of my book. My narrator came back with a quote of $1,800 (about £1,560).  If that makes your eyes water, then I empathise because it made my eyes water too. However, you must remember that, unlike many services, you aren’t just paying for time, you are also paying for talent. But my books have been doing well recently and paying that amount from my recent royalties wasn’t out of the question. However, I wasn’t going to commit to that amount of money on the spot. I messaged back to the narrator to say I would think about it and get back to him. At which point the negotiations really started. My narrator told me he could do it for about half that amount, but with a royalty share option – 50:50. This is a facility that acx.com operates, so the author doesn’t even have to pay the royalties to the narrator; acx.com does that. If you think that is giving away a lot, please remember that 50% of something is always better than 100% of nothing.  So, we agreed $900, which would be paid through Fiverr.com and the rest would be paid in royalties through acx.com. So, just a quick conversion for my British readers, I paid about £780 upfront to my narrator, plus Fiverr.com’s charges. Please note that the royalties scheme has no limit to it. The author doesn’t stop sharing when a certain level of royalties have been reached. It goes on for as long as the audiobook remains on sale. That can mean my narrator receives a lot more than $1,800 if the book is a good seller, which is why some narrators like this way of doing business. But, if the book isn’t a good seller, my narrator (and me) may not make very much from it. That’s the gamble we are both taking.  Don’t be surprised if your narrator asks about your ebook and paperback sales figures before he or she agrees to a royalty share deal. And they may check out the book’s sales ranking on Amazon, so don’t try to fool them. Having never done this before, I decided to find some resources to tell me how it all works. In terms of the technical requirements for the book, I found this helpful check sheet. It gets a bit technical in parts, but it does provide the basics. Most of that is your narrator’s responsibility, but it does no harm for you to know about it too. I then found this video on YouTube which provides a practical demonstration. That is stuff that you as the author will need to know in order to upload your audiobook for distribution.  In terms of uploading your book, it is no more difficult than using any of the self-publishing websites with which self-published authors, like you, will already be familiar. However, there are two things which are very different:
Because I had already decided on my narrator, I didn’t need to get into the audition process. But basically, if you want to look for narrators who are already registered with acx.com (and the vast majority are) you can upload an extract of your book for prospective narrators to audition and bid for the work. You can apply filters for your narrators, such as nationality, language, gender, accent, and general tone of voice you want for your book (serious, dramatic, humorous etc). If you have already decided on your narrator, as I had, you can search for them by name in the appropriate section, and they will be linked to the project.  When you tell acx.com the wordcount for your book, they do a calculation on how long it should take for a narrator to read (a 90k book is about 9.5 hours). In the appropriate section of the site, you can then enter an hourly rate you are willing to pay. Multiply one by the other and you get an indicative cost for your audiobook. I would suggest a starting price of about $50 (£45) per hour. If you don’t get any bids to narrate your book by the cut-off date that you specify (typically 2 - 5 days) you can increase the hourly rate until you get a bid with which you are satisfied. The site pays royalties of 40% for exclusive distribution rights for your book or 25% for non-exclusive rights. I went for exclusive, which gives me 20% and my narrator 20% Having already chosen my narrator, and found him in acx.com’s directory, I filled in the details for the royalties share scheme. This section also asks if you agree to fund some or all of the narration costs. Don’t tick that box if you have agreed a “royalties only” scheme with your narrator, as I had; acx.com doesn’t need to know about the lump sum payment made using Fiverr.com Caution: once you have posted these details you can’t change them. You have to cancel the whole project and start again (as I discovered).  And that’s about it. Your chosen narrator will get to work and provide you with a 15 minute segment, so that you can verify they are narrating your book the way you expected. Once you have signed off on that they will carry on with the rest of the recording and they upload the files when they have finished. You listen to the files to make sure you are satisfied and after that it is no different from publishing an ebook or paperback. Publishing an audio book isn't a speedy business. Firstly you have to wait while your narrator actually narrates your book and it probably isn't their full time job, so they will be doing it in their spare time. Secondly, once it is uploaded there is a lengthy quality review process which acx.com says takes 10 business days to complete but which took longer in the case of my book, for some unexplained reason. Then comes the hard part, of course – marketing the audiobook. Because, just like any other publishing medium, no-one is going to stumble on your book by accident. You have to tell readers/listeners about it, and where to find it. But this is where you get a little bit of a bonus by being on a royalties share basis. Because your narrator has a vested interest in the book being successful and they will probably do some marketing on their own behalf. Can you narrate your own book?  If you think you have the voice for it, then of course you can. But beware, acx.com has very tight quality standards and you may not be able to reproduce these at home. Readers also want a “clean” listening experience, so they don’t want to hear the sound of your children squabbling in the background, or your dog barking at the neighbour’s cat (or both). See the technical checklist I linked to above. So, how successful has my audiobook been?  I have no idea because it has only just been launched. But I’ll be back after Christmas with an update, so be sure to check back.
And if you want to find out more about my audiobook version of Operation Absolom, you can download a free extract here. Or you can check it out on Amazon by clicking here. If you are an author who would like to use a male British narrator for your book, then I am pleased to recommend Michael Hajiantonis. You can find him on acx.com under that name or you can do what I did and find him on Fiverr.com using this link. If you would like to get a promo code for a free download of the Operation Absolom audiobook, just email us through our contact address. All we ask in return is for a review and a share on your social media. Good luck! If you have enjoyed this blog and want to make sure you don’t miss future editions, you can sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. Disclaimer: This blog talks a lot about Amazon, but we are not connected to them in any way other than they sell our books. We are definitely not being paid to mention their name and we are not recommending Amazon. We are just recounting our experiences in the hope of passing on some of the knowledge we have gained.  As an author who sells through Amazon, you will know all about “sales ranking”. If your book sells, the ranking improves and people are encouraged to buy your book because other people have bought it. And if your ranking is low, people think your book isn’t any good because other people aren’t buying it - but that is flawed logic. Just because a book isn’t selling it doesn’t mean it isn’t any good. It may just mean that nobody knows about it (we blogged about advertising last week, so we’re not going to go back over old ground). But you won’t convince some readers that a book is good if it isn’t selling and there’s not much we can do to change that mindset.  We have been fortunate over recent weeks that several of our books have sold well and their sales rankings have improved exponentially. Instead of being in the 7 digit ranking range they are into the lower end of the 5 digit range – and are still climbing. That’s for their overall, ranking of course, not the category ranking. In some obscure categories its possible to be the No 1 bestseller just by selling a single copy. So that isn’t a good comparison for the purposes of this blog. But we believe our books’ rankings should be higher still and we also believe that the way Amazon calculates their rankings doesn’t take into account a whole raft of “sales” through their own platform. I’m referring to Kindle Unlimited (KU) pages read. While they may not be direct sales, the way that a book is sold, the reader is still paying to read the book through their KU subscription and the author is still getting an income from those page reads.  So, it is our contention that those page reads should be included in the calculations of sales rankings, which are an indication of the popularity of the book. KU page reads account for about two thirds of all our sales income (more for some individual titles). It is the equivalent of a lot of books sold. But Amazon doesn’t count them and there is no valid reason, as far as we can see, why they shouldn’t. In fact, it might actually be to Amazon’s benefit to include KU pages read, because the more popular a book, the more copies it sells and the more money Amazon will make from those sales. They are, effectively, depriving themselves of potential income with their current policy. I’ll use just one of our titles as an example of what we mean. "Our guestimate is that it would put the book into the top 1,000" But before we go on, a quick bit of jargon busting, for those of you who might need it. KENP means Kindle Edition Normalised Pages. It is the number of pages that Kindle Direct Publishing uses to calculate an author’s royalties for KU downloads. The more pages read in a book, the more the author gets paid. It is used to factor in the different font sizes and line spacings that authors use, which makes direct comparisons between the number of pages in a book problematic. We’re not sure how the KENP for a book is arrived at, but we suspect it may be based on character or word counts Mansplanation over, back to the blog.  Operation Absolom is the first book in Robert Cubitt’s “Carter’s Commandos” series. In July 2022 it sold 11 copies. This elevated it to around 30,000 in the Amazon rankings at the time. Although Operation Absolom is 296 pages long in paperback, its KENP is 437 pages. During July 2022, 19,215 KENP pages were read using KU. Divide 19,215 by 437 and it works out at 34 complete books. So, if 11 books sold gives Operation Absolom an average sales ranking of about 30,000, what would another 17 books give it if they were included in the figures? (BTW it actually peaked at around 10,000 - 7/7/22) Our guestimate is that it would easily put the book into the top 1,000, which makes the book look very popular indeed – as it is in reality. OK, we’re not talking J K Rowling or Lee Childs popular, but it is a lot more popular than a million other books on Amazon. "Perhaps weight of numbers might encourage a shift in policy" We could quote similar figures for the rest of the Carter’s Commandos series, because once people have read the first book it is clear they are then reading the rest of the series. But you get the idea from the one title we have used as an illustration. But it doesn’t look like that on Amazon. So, what can we do about it? We have already emailed Amazon to ask them why they won’t change the way they calculate their sales rankings. After all, they have all the data to hand and doing a new calculation that includes KENP would hardly be rocket science. This was their reply: “Sales rank is determined by a number of different inputs and may change over time. Amazon is constantly working to improve the quality of information available to our readers and authors. Please note that Sales Rank fluctuates every hour in line with customer demand and in relation to the demand for other books, both of which may vary based on factors such as popularity of new releases, seasonality, etc. Rankings reflect recent and historical activity, with recent activity weighted more heavily. Rankings are relative, so your sales rank can change even when your book's level of activity stays the same. For example, even if your book's level of activity stays the same, your rank may improve if other books see a decrease in activity, or your rank may drop if other books see an increase in activity. When we calculate Best Sellers Rank, we consider the entire history of a book's activity. Monitoring your book's Amazon sales rank may be helpful in gaining general insight into the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and other initiatives to drive book activity, but it is not an accurate way to track your book's activity or compare its activity in relation to books in other categories. Thanks for taking time to share your thoughts about considering KENPC in sales ranking calculation. Customer feedback like yours is very important to helping us continue to improve our products and services. I appreciate your thoughts and will be sure to pass your suggestion along. Please refer to our Sales Ranking Help page for information regarding Sales Rank - https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A21KM4BNAD42EJ”  Amazon sales data - just the tip of the iceberg. We emailed back to them, saying that they were undermining their own reply. If tracking the effectiveness of marketing is an important use of sale rankings, then Amazon should surely be doing its best to maximise its utility by including KENP data, because that fluctuates in response to marketing activity as well
I also pointed out that by not including KENP, they were showing customers the tip of the iceberg, not the whole iceberg. They did reply once more, but only to provide platitudes. But if you are an author and your books are read using KU, then this is something that you should be concerned about as well. So why don’t you add your voice to ours and ask the same question? Perhaps weight of numbers might encourage a shift in policy Let’s face it, you have nothing to lose and your book’s sales ranking have everything to gain. But while we are on the subject of KU, would you like to help other Indie authors to maximise their income? I hope you said “yes” because it only takes a few seconds and will cost you nothing. When you get to the words “The End” in a book, there are often a few more pages left in it after that. They may be a preview of another book or an advert for other titles. It doesn’t matter. Just keep on swiping until you get to the actual end, so that the author gets paid for every last one of those KENPs. It may only be a few pennies (or cents) extra, but they add up. Even if the book wasn’t to your taste and you didn’t finish it, which is hardly the author’s fault, you can make sure they get full recompense for their work by swiping through to the end anyway. As I said, it costs you nothing but a few moments of your time. If you have enjoyed this blog or found it informative (both we hope), be sure not to miss future editions by signing up for our newsletter. We'll even send you a FREE ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. Disclaimer: This blog talks a lot about Amazon, but we are not connected to them in any way other than that we use their platform sell our books. We are definitely not being paid to mention their name and nor are we recommending their services. We are just recounting our experiences in the hope of passing on some of the knowledge we have gained.  Here at Selfishgenie Publishing we know that it pays for small publishers and Indie authors to advertise. Not only do we know this, but we have the data to support our arguments. What we have also found, however, is that we can’t rely on some of the data that is provided to tell us if our advertisements are paying for themselves. Over the past 6 months we have been experimenting with our advertising tactics to see which give us the best results. Recently we have been focused on Amazon as the advertising platform of choice. But the first thing we noticed was that the metrics (measurements) provided by Amazon on their platform weren’t matching up with our actual sales. According to the report for one campaign, we sold x number of books, but according to our actual sales data we had sold yx copies, which was a considerably larger number (sorry to be so vague with the numbers, but that data is privileged information). This is an important difference, because had we believed Amazon’s numbers, we would have concluded that our advertising budget had been wasted. That is because of the ACOS. For those of you unfamiliar with ACOS, it is a calculation that Amazon does to compare the cost of the advert with the income Amazon believes the advert generated It means “advertising cost of sales”. Based on their figures, our ACOS was 198% of what we would get back in royalties as a result of placing the advert. In other words, if we had spent £2 on advertising we would only be getting back about £1 in royalties.  .And that does make it look like we had wasted our money. However, a quick click over to the various websites where we sell our books revealed that we had sold far more books than Amazon knew about – and that included sales through Amazon itself (BTW, when we say “sales” we also include Kindle Unlimited pages read. They account for about two thirds of our total revenue). When we divided the ACOS by the revenue that was actually generated, we got a far lower number, which demonstrated that our advertising campaign was justified in terms of its cost. In fact, for every £1 we spent we got over £5 back. Even after splitting that 50:50 with the author, everyone was making money. OK, Amazon doesn’t know how many books we have sold through other websites and we don’t know how many people have seen our books promoted on Amazon and then gone elsewhere to actually buy them. “Ah,” you might say, “so how do you know those sales were the result of your advertisement?” A fair question. So, why the discrepancy in data? The answer is that we know because the sales were for the same books as we had advertised, or they are part of the same series and there had been a sharp “up tick” in sales coincidental to the dates when the advertising campaign had been run. So, why the discrepancy in data? The first reason is that Amazon does its calculations based on “impressions” and “clicks”. First of all, Amazon Ads measures how many customers had the advertisement placed in front of them (the basis of their charging), either as a result of a search or as a “recommendation”. Then they measure how many of those customers clicked on the link in the advert to take a closer look at the book, and then they count the number of clicks that were made to actually buy (or download) the book. The first number was very high, the second number was lower and the final number was, unsurprisingly, lower still. But what Amazon doesn’t take into account is the psychological effect of the advertising process.  Oh, here we go, he’s wandering off into some metaphysical introspection now. No – I’m not. Please bear with me. Firstly, there is an old adage in advertising that says people have to see an advertisement 7 times before they respond to it. As with all such rules, it is a generalisation. Some people will respond the first time they see an advert, because they have a need for the product and now they now know how they can satisfy that need. Some people, on the other hand, may never respond because they have no need for that product, or because they are very happy with a similar product supplied by a competitor.  But this generalisation around ad campaigns is important, because the author has to to allow time for those 7 exposures to the ad to take place. In all our ads we have noticed that response was lowest at the beginning of the campaign and then increased as time went on, usually from around day 4, until it reached a plateau. We also noticed that sales were highest at the weekend (including Friday evenings), which suggests people buy more books then. So, it seems to be a good idea to time the ad so some of the exposures occur towards the end of the week, for maximum impact. A second reason is that the advert is for a product the reader may have already purchased, but the target is reminded that the same supplier has other products and they go and look at those instead. Eg they see an advert for Heinz tomato ketchup, they already have enough ketchup, but it reminds them they need Heinz baked beans and they go and buy those instead. We know absolutely this was what was happening with our books. We were making sales of titles other than those we were advertising. People had already bought Book 1 in our Carter’s Commando series, the book we were advertising, but they were reminded of the author’s name and went looking for other work by him and bought those books instead. The final part of the conundrum is that sales continued after the advertising campaign had ended. Why was that?  Partly the same as the reason above, the readers went and looked for other titles by the same author after having bought the one we advertised.
But part of it was that either the author’s name or the book’s title had been subconsciously planted in the reader’s memory, so that when they saw it pop up in search results later in the month (which we hadn’t paid for) they responded and bought the book. So, what did we learn by running these recent advertising campaigns:
Here endeth the lesson, Go in peace to enjoy the rest of your day. But if you are struggling to make sales, you may need to think about paying for some advertising. We know it costs money, but if your book sells, it will be a worthwhile investment. And if your book still doesn’t sell, you have to ask yourself why readers aren’t responding to it. But that is a whole different blog. If you have enjoyed this blog or found it informative (Hopefully both), be sure not to miss future editions by signing up for our newsletter. We'll even send you a FREE ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. |
AuthorThis blog is compiled and curated by the Selfishgenie publishing team. Archives
November 2024
|
RSS Feed
Copyright Selfishgenie Publishing 2023
Web Hosting by iPage