 As publishers we belong to several writing groups on social media (not always under the “Selfishgenie” branding). They help us to keep in touch with authors, see what sorts of issues are bothering writers and which we might also need to be bothered about (AI is a hot topic right now), and to offer advice to writers who are struggling to understand the complex world of writing and publishing and how the two connect up. We believe that by helping authors we also help ourselves because we get better quality books submitted. It also helps to improve the quality of work being produced by indie authors and small publishers, so we can all compete better with the big boys (or girls) with the fancy offices. So, everyone benefits, and nobody suffers, except maybe the big boys (or girls) in the fancy office blocks.  But there is an annoying habit some people have on social media, which is to ask a question and then argue with the answer. This is a generic thing on social media, of course, but when it happens in writing groups where people are supposed to be supporting each other, it is contrary to the spirit of providing support. Now, we’re not talking about arguing with facts. If facts are wrong then they have to be corrected because, otherwise, misinformation gets circulated around and that helps no one. No, we’re talking about arguing with opinions. Let’s start with the basics.  Social media does not exist to validate anyone. If you post something on social media expecting universal approval, you will be disappointed. If all you want or expect is validation, you are in the wrong place. Secondly, if you post a question on social media, you will get answers with which you agree and answers with which you disagree. The sorts of posts I’m talking about are cover images, extracts from stories, drafts of blurbs and synopses and perhaps the odd idea for a story and the author wants to know if it’s likely to find readers. But there are plenty of other sorts of questions, such as the viability of self-publishing, How and where to self publish, the best way to market books, author’s experiences of dealing with certain companies and so on. In fact, if you can think of a question even remotely related to writing or publishing, someone will have asked it or will ask it in the future. That’s all great. Social media is a great place to post stuff or ask questions if you want feedback, advice or information. BUT  Not all the feedback will be what you want to hear. Just because someone thinks that a story idea is brilliant and the greatest idea since Harry Potter, it doesn’t mean anybody else will think the same. To coin an old phrase, just because you think something is a good idea, it doesn’t mean it is. The “remainder bins” are full of books that authors (and some publishers) thought were good ideas and it turned out that readers didn’t agree with them. There are other aspects to this, which come down to good manners.  Firstly, someone has taken the time to read the question, study whatever it was that was posted, thought about their opinion and posted it. That, at least, deserves a thank you, not an argument. Secondly, it is an opinion. Nobody has to agree with it but, equally, arguing about it serves no purpose. They won’t change their mind. Yes, you may have slaved for hours drafting what you think is the perfect blurb and posted it on social media only for someone to say “No, mate. I wouldn’t buy your book based on that blurb.” Yes, that is very disappointing. Yes, it may be discouraging. But that opinion may be important.  If someone has said that, then others may be thinking it. And if people are thinking it, then the chances are that whoever made the statement is right and the blurb won’t sell any books (ditto covers, sample chapters etc). The correct response to that is not “You don’t know what you are talking about.” or words to that effect. The correct response is “Thank you for your input..” What I’m trying to say is, if you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question.  If you post your book cover and say “Here it is, the cover of my latest book.” Then you can disagree with people who say they don’t like it, because you haven’t actually invited their opinion. But if they’ve expressed an opinion they still won’t change their mind so there isn’t much point in arguing with them anyway. But if you post your latest book cover and say “What do you think of this?” then it’s open season for opinions. It’s possible that not everyone will think it’s as good as you think it is, and some people will tell you that (probably us), because you asked them what they thought of it. If you get defensive and challenge their view, you are alienating that person and they might be one of the people who would have bought your book – but they won’t now. Or, worse, they may buy it, review it and say what an awful cover it had. Yes, people really do that.  And, ultimately, they may actually be right, and it is better to find that out before you publish your book than afterwards. All input is valuable, especially from the people who actually read books. So, with this in mind, we have brainstormed a list of do’s and don’ts when posting about your books on social media (they are opinions, so feel free to disagree with them or to suggest others). 1. If you don’t want opinions, don’t ask a question. Better still, don’t post on social media. 2. If you haven’t asked a question, then by all means get into an argument, but bear in mind that it may damage your reputation and sales. 3. If you ask for opinions, bear in mind that some of the opinions you get may not be what you want to hear. That doesn't make them wrong. 4. If you disagree with an opinion, don’t argue with it, just ignore it. 5. You are not perfect, and you probably aren’t the world’s greatest author. But you could be if you listen to advice from other authors.  There is one question that you can ask with regard to someone’s opinion and that is “why?”. The reason they think the way they do could be important and could provide you with valuable information, which can inform any changes you may decide to make. However, you have to ask the question the right way. “What do you mean?” is very blunt and sounds defensive. It doesn’t encourage an answer. Or if it gets an answer it might be “I mean what I mean!” which isn’t very helpful. So, here’s a form of words which encourages people to elaborate on their opinion and provide the sort of information you might need (feel free to copy and paste into your social media). “Thanks. If you don’t mind me asking, what is it about (whatever) that makes you feel that way?” When (if) they reply, you may ask other questions to clarify, but make sure whatever you ask doesn’t challenge their view, even if you disagree with it. If you do disagree, you can still ignore the reply, or you can limit your response to “Thanks for your input”. In fact, you should say thank you regardless of what you think of the answer.  There is a subset of the issues I have explored above and that is when people who didn’t ask the question argue with people who have expressed opinions.
For some reason these people think they have to leap to the defence of the person who made the original post. They don't. To coin a phrase - not your circus, not your monkeys! Or perhaps they think their opinion is more valid than the one that has been expressed. I have news for them. Their opinion is not more valid, unless they can prove they are an expert on the subject under discussion. All of the above guidance applies to that too. You may not share their opinions, but that doesn’t make you right and them wrong. And vice-versa. If you want to get into an argument based purely on opinions, there is plenty of scope for that in the political groups. In writers’ groups we are supposed to be supportive, not divisive. Belonging to a writer’s group on social media can be highly beneficial to an author. There is plenty to be gained by sharing knowledge and information. But they are also places where it is easy to alienate potential customers, because writers are also readers. So being diplomatic in the use of language is extremely important. And for those of you (us) who give our opinions, whether invited or not, be diplomatic in the way you express yourselves because if you want to be treated with good manners, you must first practice good manners. If you don’t like something, give a well-constructed reason why because that will be more helpful than just saying “I don’t like it”. If possible, provide examples of good practice, or point people in the direction where they can get more help, 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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Traction and momentum are things that marketers talk about in terms of their campaigns. It relates to the amount of effort that needs to be put in to get results from a marketing campaign and how, once traction has been gained, momentum can be achieved. In terms of money spent, this usually means a lot of it is at the beginning of the campaign, but once traction has been achieved, a lot less has to be spent to maintain momentum.  Let me use an analogy. If you put your child on a swing (assuming you have a child – if you haven’t, you’re a writer, use your imagination) and do nothing, then the swing will just hang there and the child will get no enjoyment from being on the swing. So, you need to apply some effort to get the swing moving so that the child can enjoy the experience. Depending on the size of the child and your own strength, you may have to put in quite a lot of effort to get the swing moving. However, once the swing is moving, all you have to do is step in from time to time to give it another shove to keep it moving. That is what it is like marketing a book.  Newton's 1st Law of Motion - an object at rest will remain at rest. If you just upload your book to your distribution platform (I’ll use KDP and Amazon for the sake of ease) then it’s like putting the child on the swing. Nothing will happen unless you make it happen. Yes, Newton’s first law of motion applies even to book marketing – an object at rest will remain at rest. So, once your book has been published, you have to provide the outside force that acts on it to take it from a state of rest to a state of motion and get sales moving. If you are an unknown author publishing your first book, you will have to put in a lot of effort. If you are an established author with a loyal readership, you won’t have to do quite so much – but you still can’t do nothing. Even loyal readers need to know that you have a new book out. But the amount of effort you put in will eventually pay off. You will make sales. The sales will put your book higher up the sales ranks, so Amazon will help you by steering readers towards your book because that will make Amazon more money, and your readers will help you by leaving reviews of your book.  But you can’t back off entirely. Once your new readers have bought your book, they aren’t going to buy it again. This means that your book will start to slide down the sales rankings, the automated systems will pay it less attention and you won’t make so many sales. So, you have to step in and give your swing another push, just to get things moving again. Social media marketing has a part to play in this, but it is never going to provide you with the big push you need to get up the sales rankings. It will sell you the occasional copy, which is the equivalent of the swing just about moving back and forward. Let’s face it, that wouldn’t be very exciting for your child and, in terms of books sales, it isn’t going to be very exciting for you. So, you need to find some way to give the book a bigger push.  On the internet there is no shortage of people willing to make you lavish promises of results in exchange for your hard earned money. Some people do find success with those book promoters, but I think that it’s true to say that the majority don’t or, at least, they don't get the level of success they had hoped for and which will return a decent profit. Most of the internet companies are using social media to promote their customers’ books and are just doing what you could do for yourself, but on a larger scale, eg more Tweets (are they X’s now?), more Facebook posts, more Instagram posts etc. Again, they may get you a few sales, but they aren’t going to get you to the heights that will get you excited. But there is one tried and tested method to stimulate books sales and we have blogged a lot about it over recent weeks. Amazon Ads do produce results.  The problem with Amazon Ads, however, is that they take time to work. It seems to take an eternity to build traction and get your sales moving. Many Indie authors place an ad for a week or a fortnight, find the results disappointing and halt the ad. Instead, they look for the on-line book promoters who promise instant results, then get very disappointed when they find that they are spending larger sums of money but getting very indifferent outcomes. So, why does it take so long for Amazon Ads produce results?  I’ll return to my child on a swing analogy, but this time imagine you are on the one on the swing, with no one to push you. By moving your body the right way, you can get some motion, because you are putting energy in and that energy has to go somewhere. But you need to keep putting in energy to get you moving faster and higher. If you stop putting in energy, the swing will slow down and stop. To start with, you have buyer resistance. Advertisers maintain that an advertising message has to be seen 7 times before some buyers respond to it. This is why you will see the same ads on TV several times in a night and several more times over successive nights. The marketers are trying to get those 7 viewings in quickly, so the ad starts to pay back through increased sales.  Think about that for moment. Let’s say that Mr X, a reader, goes on Amazon to find a new book. He does a search for the sorts of books he likes to read, and he is presented with a list of results. If you have paid for an advert, then your book will be one of the ones he sees. It’s called an impression and you don’t have to pay for it. However, Mr X has never heard of you, so he scrolls down to the next result, which may be a book by an author he has heard of. He buys their book instead of yours. But Mr X has a limited amount of free time, so it takes him about a week to read the book before he goes back to Amazon to buy his next one. He sees your ad again, but again he scrolls by, looking for a more familiar name. This happens maybe four or five times over the space of four or five weeks, but Mr X then realises that he does know your name now, because it has become familiar through repeated impressions, so this time he might click on your ad. Now, if you pulled your ad after week 2, you could never get that click from Mr X at week 6 or 7.  The ad system analyses Mr X's clicks. So, this is the first time you have had to pay, and it is also the first time that Mr X is seriously considering buying your book. He may buy it this time, or he may not. A lot will depend on the blurb for the book and the sample he may read. But he will remember your name now, so every time he sees your ad, you have a chance of him buying the book. But, because Mr X has clicked on the ad for your book, the ad system now knows that he might be the sort of reader who will be interested in your book. So, the system analyses the ad clicks that Mr X has made in the past, looks to see who else has clicked on the same books and shows your ad to them, even though they may not have used the same search words as Mr X. You can see this system in action on Amazon, because they show you “People who viewed this item also viewed ….” And “People who bought item this also bought…”  Someone taking a risk on your book. This means more people are now going to see your ad and every time one of them clicks on it, the ad system learns a little bit more and directs your ad to more new people. More new potential readers means more potential clicks and more potential sales. But you still need that first sale, because if your book is low down the sales rankings, it discourages some readers. So, you need to find a reader who is prepared to take a chance on your book without looking at the sales rankings. And they do exist. We know they do exist, because that’s how our authors all sold the first copy of their book. We paid for the advertising, of course, but someone took a chance on them. And someone, somewhere, will take a chance on you – but only if they see the ad for your book often enough. The same applies to reviews. Some people will only buy books if they have reviews, so you need some of those to be posted, which needs sales too (please do not pay for reviews. Amazon is able to spot them and will remove them, so you will only be wasting your money.) So, the graphic below illustrates the process by which ad clicks get turned into sales, which creates traction and leads to more sales, which creates momentum.  But, as I said above, the system needs a shove from time to time to keep things moving, so you will need to keep advertising, if only at periodic intervals. You can tell by your sales figures when that should be. If you were making 5 sales a day consistently and that starts to drop to 4, then 3 then 2 etc, it’s probably times to liven things up again with another ad campaign.  Blog Reader: “But it takes so long, and I have to spend so much money.” Yes, but if you are using the system correctly you will get that money back when you gain traction. If you put nothing in, you get nothing out. Remember Newton – an object at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force is applied. You have to be the outside force! And at least you know where your money is going and you are in control, unlike with those on-line marketing companies that promise so much but deliver so little.  It took you weeks, months, maybe even years to write your book. It can hardly come as a surprise that it could take weeks or even months to get some sales, gain traction and build momentum.
And, if you haven’t made any sales after say, 3 months, then it might be worth considering why that may be. Because advertising can only sell a book that the reader wants to read, so if they don’t want to read your book, there has to be a reason and you know the fault can’t be in the advertising, so it has to be in the product. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  For those of you that have come here looking for a blog about Universal Book Links, aka UBLs, fear not. We’ll get to those in a moment. But first, we want to revisit a blog we posted in April 2023, about distributing some of our books through Draft2Digital (aka D2D). At that time, we said that we had sold a few books on that site without doing any marketing for them. People seemed to have found their way there by themselves, probably via the companion site to D2D which is Books2Read (aka B2R). We said then that we would let you know how things were going once we had some more data, which is why we are blogging about it now.  To save you having to read the blog again, we’ll just give you a little bit of background to explain why we decided to use D2D as well as Amazon. Basically, while we were selling a few copies of some books in ebook and paperback formats, they weren’t being downloaded on KindleUnlimited. (KU). Putting books on KU requires the author to make them exclusive to Amazon, so they can’t be sold through any other on-line retailer. So, we thought, if they aren’t being downloaded on KU, why are we keeping these books exclusive to Amazon? We may be missing out on sales through other sites. We uploaded the books to D2D which then distributed them through several other on-line retailers. I won’t list them all. Visit the D2D website for the full list.  And it seems to have worked well for us. We have sold more copies of the books through D2D in 4 months than we had in the previous year through Amazon. It told us something, though we weren’t sure what until we did some digging into the sales reports. Most of our sales, historically, have been to the UK. That isn’t surprising considering most of our authors are British and they write mainly for the British market. We do get the odd sale through Amazon to the USA, India, Australia and a couple of other countries but when we looked at our D2D sales data it was noticeable that we were getting a far greater geographic distribution. Almost none of our new sales were to the UK and our overseas sales were far more widely spread, taking in the European Union, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and New Zeeland.. None of our titles have been translated, by the way. All of these new sales are in English.  It was also noticeable that a lot of the sales were in paperback format, costing far more on D2D than they do on Amazon. The question we had to ask was “Why”? 1. Why were we reaching countries we had never sold to before and 2. Why were we selling so many expensive paperbacks? The conclusion we had to draw was that it was because we were using Universal Book Links (UBLs). See - I told you we would get there eventually.  A UBL takes the reader (a) to the retail site they prefer to buy from and (b) the retailer’s site which deals with the country in which they live. When it comes to paperback sales, this is very important. Some retailers who sell paperbacks either don’t print them in some countries or they don’t deliver books to some countries. So, our UBLs were taking buyers to the sites where they could buy paperbacks and get them delivered to their country. They also had the price displayed in the appropriate currency for their country, or one they were familiar using. That is a strong psychological factor for some people. If someone usually pays in $, ¥ or €, seeing the price displayed in £ can be off putting. When you upload a book to D2D it creates a UBL for it automatically if you also subscribe to B2R (it’s free), which you can then copy and paste into all your marketing materials, which we did.  OK, if you click on a link to Amazon and it doesn’t take you to your local Amazon site, they will offer to redirect you to your local site but that, also, is too much hassle for some readers. So, if getting better global distribution sells more books, how could we exploit that for the books that are still exclusive to Amazon? After all, we want to sell through all the Amazon sites across the world and we want to make the process as hassle free as possible for buyers. Well, it turns out that those nice people at B2R will also allow us to create UBLs for books that are sold on Amazon but not on D2D. How cools is that? So, using this link, we sat one of our team down in front of a PC and set her to work creating the UBLs (look in the top RH corner for the UBL maker) for all the books we sell exclusively through Amazon. It took about 30 seconds for each book title, but we kept her well refreshed with coffee and donuts while she did it. A couple of warnings. Firstly, if you use URL shorteners, such as bitly or tinyurl, they can’t be converted into UBLs. You have to copy the book’s URL direct from its Amazon sales page. You also need to use the link to the Kindle edition of the book, not the paperback. If there is a paperback version, the UBL will link to it, but the link creator doesn’t like links to paperbacks if you paste them into it.  The other things is that the system does seem to be a bit flaky and doesn’t always work first time. Our colleague kept getting a warning that the Amazon link she had pasted wasn’t recognised as a link to an ebook, even though it was. She found that if she kept clicking on the “Got it” button in the warning pop-up, the link was eventually created. A couple of times she had to re-paste the Amazon URL to get it to work, but a little bit of perseverance and patience got the job done. So, having done all that work, has it increased our overseas sales?  Well, it appears that it has. We now use UBLs in all our marketing and they seem to be delivering for us.
So, our main takeaways from this week’s blog: 1. Using D2D can increase your sales, because you reach a wider book buying market. 2. UBLs help you increase sales across the world. 3. You can create UBLs which will take Amazon users to their local Amazon website, wherever they are in the world. If you want to do some experimentation, it may be worth your while, but do remember to unsubscribe your book from KindleUnlimted before you upload it to D2D, or Amazon will get a bit touchy about it. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Finding the right keywords to include in an Amazon Ad can be a very time consuming activity. Gurus like Bryan Cohen, of Best Page Forward, recommend using 100 - 150 keywords in an ad, and also recommend creating 5 to 10 ads a week. So, that mean finding anywhere between 500 and 1,500 keywords A WEEK! That’s a lot of keywords and it could take a lot of time researching them all. If it takes 1 minutes to research one keyword, that could be as much as 2½ hours to generate enough keywords for a single ad. For 5 ads that could be 12½ hours a week. Who wants to spend that much time on a single marketing activity? Not us, that’s for sure.  So, we love it when we find a short-cut that will save us some time. To give you some idea of how long it took us to find 150 keywords and create an ad with them, the total was 25 minutes (if you exclude making cups of coffee and answering the telephone). It took us longer to write the first draft of this blog about it! I think most of us can squeeze 25 minutes out of our busy schedules if it means getting an increase in sales for our books. So, how is this magic worked? I’m going to take you through it step by step. The first few steps you may not need to do at all, or you may need to do them only once. The later steps are the ones you have to do every time to generate a list of 100-150 keywords.  If you have any questions after reading this and trying it out, ask them in the comments section and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. There are 36 steps to this procedure, which seems like a lot, but some of them describe just one mouse click or screen tap. Once you are familiar with it, the whole process takes a very short time, so don’t be put off by that number. You may want to do a “split screen” on this, so that you can read the instructions from the blog and then try them out as we go along. Or you may prefer to print this blog and follow the instructions that way. OK, let’s go!  1. If you don’t already have the Google Chrome browser installed on your PC or laptop, download and instal it. 2. Once you have Chrome installed, open it and instal “Kindletrends Also Bought downloader” It is free. It will instal into Chrome automatically, so you don’t have to do anything (you can also instal the extension into other browsers, but we don’t have a full list which is why we specify using Chrome). 3. Open Chrome and look at the top right hand corner of of the page and you will see 3 vertical dots. Click on those to access the Chrome settings menu. 4. Click on “Extensions” and then “Manage extensions”. 5. Locate the “Also Bought” downloader extension and click on “Details”. 6. Locate the line that says “Allow in incognito” and switch it on if it isn’t already switched on, then exit back to the Chrome home screen. That is the end of the steps that you will only have to do once. Now for the steps you have to do every time.  7. At the top right hand corner of Chrome, find the 3 vertical dots again and click on them. 8. Click on “New incognito window”. The reason you use incognito browsing is so that Amazon doesn’t identify you from your IP address and start to offer you the sort of books that you normally read. You want to find the sort of books that you write, which may be different. Now you are going to identify books like the ones you write. You may have some of these by other authors on your own bookshelves, which is a good place to start. If you haven’t, then you are going to have to take a more “trial and error” approach. We use Publisher Rocket to help us identify books and authors in the categories in which we are advertising, but if you don’t have that, don’t worry. I’ll assume you don’t have any relevant books to hand, and you don’t have Publisher Rocket. 9. In your incognito browser, go to the Amazon website for the country in which you wish to advertise. For example, you may live in UK but want to advertise in the USA, so you need to go to Amazon.com. Conversely you may be the USA but want to advertise in the UK, in which case you need to be on Amazon.co.uk. The site you choose will affect the results of your search, which you are going to do next.  Some authors have international popularity, but many don’t. There is no point in including keywords relating to an author who is popular in the USA but no one on the UK has ever heard of, and vice versa. 10. In Amazon’s search bar, type in a search term for the sort of books you write. For example, you could type in “historical romance” if that is what your write. But you may want to narrow that search down a bit by adding tropes from your book, such as “enemies to lovers” or “pirates” or whatever tropes you have used in your book. You can also search using an ASIN, a book title or the name of an author if they are in a category relevant to your book.. 11. From the search results, choose a book that you think is similar to yours and click through to its sales page. Make sure you are viewing the version you are going to be advertising, eg ebook, hardback or paperback.. 12. Read the blurb to check that it is like yours. You may even want to read a bit of what used to be called the “Look Inside” but now is just referred to as a sample. 13. If you are happy that the book is one that you might find on the same shelf as yours in a bookstore, go to step 14. If not, go back to step 11 and repeat. "You will see a whole jumble of data that doesn’t make much sense." 14. Now scroll down the page until you get to the carousels that are named either “What did customers buy after viewing this item?” or “Customers who viewed this item also viewed” (the words may vary a little depending on which country you live in). The former is the best but isn’t always displayed, so you may use the latter, but you can also use both if you wish. You will get some duplication in your results, but there is a simple step to remove them later. 15. Next to the text described in step 14, you will see a little icon that looks like a blue fairy cake with a red candle. This is the icon for the “Also Bought” plug-in. Click on this. The books displayed will start to scroll across the screen, which indicates that their details are being downloaded. When the scrolling stops, the download has finished. This could take up to a minute, depending on how many books there are in the carousel. 16. You may repeat steps 11 to 15 to gather more keywords, or you can go straight to step 17 and return later if you think you need more keywords. 17. Open “file manager”, locate the downloads folder and open it. 18. Open Excel (or whatever spreadsheet app you use) and open a new spreadsheet. 19. In the downloads folder, you will see the list of downloads that you created at step 15. There will be a .png version and a .txt version. The .png is an image of the book covers. You don’t need to use that. Double click on the .txt version to open it. You will see a whole jumble of data that doesn’t make much sense. DON’T PANIC!  20. In the text reader, go to “edit” and then “select all” to highlight the text, then copy it. 21. Paste it into the spreadsheet. It should now be nice and neatly displayed in columns, starting with the ASIN (Amazon’s catalogue number) on the left, then the title, series name, author name and then the other stuff. You can delete all the stuff to the right of the author’s name if you wish. 22. Repeat steps 17-21 for each of the .txt files you downloaded. 23. I don’t use ASINs in my keyword searches, but if you wish to you can. Everything I say from here on applies to them as well as to the other columns. 24. In an ordinary browser, Open “Keyword Cleaner”. This is a free webpage which will help you to clean up your keyword list (don’t forget to add it to your “favourites”, because you will use it a lot). 25. Copy the contents of one of the columns of your keywords from the spreadsheet. I always start with “title” and you will see why at step 34.  26. Paste that into the big box on Keyword Cleaner. 27. There are 6 buttons to the right of the big box and you will use at least 5 of them. 28. Click on the button marked “Separate”. This will remove any subtitles or series names that have been included with the title, providing they have been separated from the title by a semi-colon, colon, hyphen or brackets. They will re-appear in smaller boxes further down the page. 29. Click on the button marked “Format”. This will remove most of the special characters that Amazon Ads doesn’t like, if there are any in the list. 30. You can click on the box marked “Sort A-Z” but I don’t usually bother. Amazon Ads sorts keywords alphabetically after they have been entered anyway. 31. Click on “De-duplicate” This removes any duplicated entries. 32. Click on “Copy”. 33. Open a “Word” document (or similar) and paste the list of keywords into the document.  It may be necessary to clean up the list. 34. Keyword Cleaner isn’t smart, so it can’t always recognise subtitles and series titles and remove them, so it may be necessary to “clean-up” the list a little bit more at this point. This means removing anything from the title that shouldn’t be there. For example, if we got the result “Ten Years To Doomsday a gripping intergalactic action-packed science fiction novel”, everything after “Doomsday” should be removed because it isn’t part of the title. Similarly in the result “Battle Cruiser Elite A Military Sci-Fi Space Opera Adventure”, everything after “Elite” would be removed. 35. Use the 6th button, “Clear”, to make Keyword Cleaner ready for the next lot of data you are going to paste in. 36. Repeat steps 24 to 35 to do the same for the columns marked “ASIN”, “Series” and “Author” in your spreadsheet. They shouldn't need any additional cleaning. At the end of the process, you will have a list of keywords that is duplicate free and ready to be copied into Amazon Ads. You may want to check how many keywords you have and the quickest way to do that is to highlight the list, go to the “Review” menu on Word, click on “Word Count” and that will tell you how many lines of text you have, which is also the number of keywords in the list.
If you haven’t got enough, go back to step 10 and repeat from there. And that is that. Once you’ve done it a couple of times you will be generating keyword lists in 25 minutes or less each time. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Disclaimer: Selfishgenie Publishing has not received any payment or incentives from Best Page Forward or any of its affiliates for any of the content in this blog. This week’s blog is something of a revisit to earlier blog posts. The reason we’re revisiting it is because it has been so influential in increasing our sales over recent months that we are certain that it can do the same for you. The 5 Day Author Ad Challenge is a free programme of videos and Facebook interactions that can help authors to increase their sales. Let’s deal with the elephant in the room first. You don’t need to spend money to benefit from this challenge.  To get the best out of the challenge it is necessary to spend some money on advertising, but if you don’t have any money to spare, then the challenge does include some ideas for things you can do for free, to make sure your books show up in Amazon’s search results. Saving up some money so you can take part in future challenges could, in our opinion, be the best investment you ever make in yourself and your writing. But the challenge isn’t just about Amazon searches. If you use other platforms, such a Draft2Digital, you can improve the chances of your book being found if anyone enters the right keywords into any search engine. People who don’t have a Kindle often search Amazon for ideas for new books, then go elsewhere to buy them. So, making it easier for people to find your books on Amazon can help regardless of where you publish them.  So, the first thing you have to do is sign up for the challenge, and I’ll provide a link for that at the end of the blog (don’t skip ahead! Oh, you already have). They are run every three months or so. They are provided by a guy called Bryan Cohen who runs a business called Best Page Forward, which provides training for authors on a range of book marketing skills. The challenge is a “loss leader”, designed to entice you into buying one or more of their training packages or other services. They also publish books related to book marketing and, if you can spare a few pounds (or Dollars, Yen, Euros, Bitcoin or whatever) we would suggest you buy them if you don’t want to do the challenge – or even if you do. We’ve posted links to our reviews of the books at the end of the blog too. The principle behind the challenge is that using Amazon Ads to sell books WILL always result in increased sales of your book, but by using the techniques and guidelines described during the challenge it will also make your ads more profitable. Profit is defined as royalties minus advertising costs, NOT sales income minus advertising costs.  Here at Selfishgenie we are running a business and we aim to make a profit, so if we are able to make this pay then so can you. And we are making it pay. Now, to start with we aren’t talking about making telephone number sized incomes. If you spend £5 (or $, €, ¥ or whatever) it may return you £10. But if you then start to scale that up, £50 could make you £100, £500 could make you £1,000 and so on. So, you are able to start small to find out if it works for you. It will, so you can then start to invest some of your profits into more advertising and so scale it up over time. Bryan boasts of authors he has coached who are now on 6 digit earnings because of this challenge. We can’t verify that, but we can tell you that it has worked for us, and we are earning more profits from our ads than we ever have before, even if it isn’t a 6 digit profit. We have to be careful that we don’t infringe Bryan’s copyright in this blog, so we have to limit what we say to what is open access stuff that you can find on a number of websites. Because of that the best we can do is provide you with a taster.  Bryan starts off by talking about the metadata for your book. This is the stuff that you enter on the very first tab of KDP when you self-publish your book. It includes the title, author name and more. Getting the metadata right is crucial to your book being found by search tools, whether it is using Amazon, Google or any other search engine. Getting the metadata right is the stuff that the challenge covers that is entirely free for you to implement. If you get nothing else from the challenge, you will have given yourself a better chance of your books being found. Next Bryan goes through using the different types of ad that are available on Amazon. Amazon Ads provide their own tutorial videos for that, but it is important to recognise that the aims of Amazon and the aims of the challenge are different. Amazon teaches you to use Amazon so that you can spend money on advertising and make THEM a profit. The aim of the challenge is to teach you to use Amazon Ads more efficiently so that YOU can make a profit. The Amazon tutorials teach you to do things in a way that is best for Amazon, not for you. However, the tutorials are good for helping you to find your way around the ads system and we would recommend watching them.  There are basically 4 types of ad, but only 3 of those are available outside of the USA. If you live outside the USA and want to advertise to American readers you can use that 4th type on Amazon.com. The easiest type of ad to use is the “automated ad”. This has simple settings and draws on the keywords in your metadata to identify readers to whom it will show your book (which is one of the reasons why metadata is so crucial). We have used this type of ad in the past and it does sell books, but it isn’t as targeted as the other two types of ad. That means that you have to get more ad clicks in order to sell books, which reduces profits, because you pay for each click.  The second type of ad is the “category ad”. This is based on the categories you select when you set up your metadata on KDP. If you have selected “Romance>historical” then anyone who searches for that type of book will see your ad. They will also see that type of ad if they have ever bought that type of book. (We still see ads for Lego on our Amazon homepage because we once bought our grandson some Lego). Now, there are authors who like to call themselves “No 1 bestselling” and the way they do this without lying is to put their book into an obscure category that only requires one or two sales to get to the number 1 position in that category. For example, if an author puts their book in Kindle Store > Books > Home & Garden > Animal Care & Pets > Fish & Aquariums they can reach the number 1 spot with only 1 sale. KDP doesn’t read the book, so it will accept the entry even if the book is an historical romance. The author then gets their Mum to buy a copy and, hey presto, they are a No1 bestselling author. However, their vanity means that is the only book they will ever sell, because people who want to read historical romance will never see their book if they do a search for their favourite genre. The book will only be seen by people who are searching for books about keeping fish - and they are unlikely to buy it. So having your book in the right category is vital for sales and it is something that the challenge spends some time talking about. Vanity will be far better served by selling more books than by calling yourself a No 1 best-selling author.  The 3rd type of ad is the manually targeted keyword ad. This requires the author to generate between 100 and 150 keywords which might be used to search Amazon. By including those keywords in your ad your book will be seen by anyone who uses those words to do a search for their next book. A lot of those keywords are either the title of a book, its subtitle, the series title or the author’s name. That’s because if readers have enjoyed a book, they will use one of those things to find their next read. Some even enter the ASIN for the book they read, which is Amazon’s product identification number for it. Generating keywords is time consuming, so the challenge talks about using some public access (ie free) browser plug-ins and websites to help speed up the process.  The final type of ad, which is only available for ads on Amazon.com, is the “custom ad”. This uses up to 150 characters of customised text as the “hook” to get people to click on the ad link. Again, the challenge talks about what makes a good hook, so you aren’t working totally blind. That type of ad can be used in conjunction with either categories or keywords to improve results. One of the things that the challenge points out is that if you set a budget, Amazon often doesn’t spend it all. So, if you set a daily budget of £5 ($5) which is the level recommended by the challenge, it doesn’t mean you will spend £5 x 30 = £150 a month. Our experience backs that up, because we only spend a fraction of the budget we set each month. But if your ads are profitable, the actual budget you set doesn’t matter anyway, because you will always come out on top. If you have never done this before, then saving up £150 so you can give it a try is very worthwhile. And you have time to do that before the January challenge. The next challenge is actually October, but you may not have had time to save up before then, but if you are someone who has a bit of spare cash, then we would recommend doing the challenge sooner rather than later. After all, why wait until January to find out how to sell more books?  There is a word of warning we must give, however: patience isn’t just a virtue, it is an essential.
Results aren’t instantaneous. It can take 2 or 3 days just to get the first click on an ad, and it may need 10 or 20 clicks to make your first sale. But the system learns from those clicks and gets better at sending ads to the right people, so sales increase and the number of clicks needed to make a sale goes down. By “sale” we include KindleUnlimited downloads. A good result is 6-8 clicks per sale. We are getting a sale for every 4.8 clicks for one of our ads, which is excellent. As you can guess, we are very happy to recommend the challenge to you, our readers. Remember, it is free to undertake, and you don’t actually have to spend money on Amazon Ads if you don’t want to. But we think you will gain far more than you spend if you do. You can find out how to register for the next 5 Day Challenge by going onto the challenge's Facebook Page and following it. It is closed for posts and comments right now, but will re-open nearer the time. I would suggest checking it from about mid-September onwards. For our review of “Self Publishing With Amazon Ads” click here. (you will need to scroll down to find it) For our review of “Fiction Blurbs, The Best Page Forward Way” click here (again, you will need to scroll down). If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Bryan Cohen of "Selling For Authors". I watched a very interesting webinar recently, about using keywords to improve sales on Amazon (and other retailing websites). I can’t provide a link to it, because it expired on 2nd July, but it was created by Bryan Cohen, owner of the Selling For Authors website. Bryan provides training for authors who need help marketing their books and he has also published a number of books on the subject, some of which have been reviewed on this blog page. We’re big fans of Bryan because he has helped us to increase our sales. So, with the webinar no longer being available, we thought we would tell you about some of the things we learnt from it.  Basically, the webinar was about “Search Engine Optimisation”, aka SEO. But rather than being about using SEO techniques to help people find your website (you may not even have one), it is about helping readers to find your books on whichever websites you sell them. Although I will be talking almost exclusively about KDP and Amazon, the same techniques can be used for whichever websites you use to publish and sell your books. The secret is keywords. Those are the seven words you are able to input into the metadata for your book when you upload it onto KDP.  Metadata, if you are unfamiliar with the term, is the stuff you enter in the first part of the KDP process: Book title, author name, blurb, etc. That is all copied across to other versions of the book, such as paperbacks and some of it also appears on the Amazon sales page. But from the point of view of this blog, I’ll be talking about keywords and subtitles which are a very important part of the metadata.. Now, I’ve already said KDP allows you to enter 7 key words for your book. That is misleading, because you can actually enter whole phrases. If you enter 7 phrases of five words each, that’s 35 words you actually use. The critical thing is, the closer you can match those phrases to the ones people use when they search for books on-line, the higher your book will appear in the search results.  If you use a generic term in your keywords, such as Sci-fi, then it generates thousands of results, and your book will be hidden away in amongst all the others. But if you get an exact match on a longer phrase, the only books that will appear higher in the results are those which have been “sponsored” (paid for adverts) and other books with keywords that are an exact match for the same search term. A book that hasn’t sold a copy since Adam was a lad can appear on the first page of the search results if the right keywords have been used. And experience shows that a book that appears on the first page of search results has a far higher chance of being purchased than one that appears on the subsequent pages. Bryan advises us that there is a process for finding the right keyword phrases to use. Trying to short-cut that process is likely to give disappointing results, so you are advised to set some time aside for this activity. 2 to 3 hours should be enough for a single book.  If you can’t spare 3 hours out of your busy schedule to sell your books, then you will never sell any books. The first thing to do is to think what your book is actually about in the simplest terms. This is not about writing a synopsis or even a back cover blurb. This is about finding a few words that describe it in the most basic form. So, let’s say your book's genre is sci-fi.
Having decided what sort of book you have written, you now need to brainstorm some phrases that might be put into a search bar by someone who is looking for books like yours, eg Sci-fi set in space but including time travel. Why do you need more than one phrase? Because this isn’t an exact science. We don’t yet know which words are going to provide the best results, so we are indulging in trial and error. This is why you need to set time aside to do this.  The next step is to try the phrases out in Amazon’s search bar to see what sort of results they generate. Use “incognito browsing” for this, so Amazon doesn’t show you your own books, because you are looking to see what results are produced for successful books (I’ll define successful a bit better in a moment). Having entered your first phrase, take a look at the results. Ignore the ones that have been sponsored and also ignore any books that are being offered for free, because you don’t know if they are popular because readers like them or because the readers just want a free book. Click on the book that is highest in the results (after excluding sponsored and free) and read the blurb. Is it like yours in basic terms? If no, then the phrase you have used isn’t producing the correct results and you can discard it. If yes, you can now scroll down to the book’s details and look at the sales rankings. This is where you consider if the book is successful or not.  If the book’s overall sales ranking is better than 50,000 it is probably selling reasonably well. But also look at its rankings within its categories. If they are looking pretty good (better than 5,000), then that confirms your initial feelings. But are they the same categories that you have selected for your book? Because that is an important factor too. If they aren’t you can change your categories in KDP later, because if their book is selling well in those categories, yours have a good chance too if they are similar. Don’t bother with books that have a sales ranking worse than 500,000. They aren’t selling enough copies, which means that the keywords you used aren’t going to sell you many books because the results aren’t producing what the readers are looking for. Also don’t try to compete with the books that are at the top of the rankings. They are probably being written by well-known authors, which means you stand little chance of your book being selected as the one to buy. You are looking for the “mid-range” results that will sell you around 10 copies a day. If you get momentum from that you will climb the sales rankings naturally and you may end up competing with the bestselling authors that way, which is a happy place to be.  Repeat this process until you have 2 or 3 phrases that are producing the sorts of search results you were hoping for. Now go to KDP and enter those phrases into the keyword boxes, replacing any keywords that you feel probably aren’t working for you. If you use “Publisher Rocket” (we do) these will be easier to identify. Finally, the hardest part of all – be patient. If you have chosen the right keywords, sales will come, and they will be better than the sales you have had before. If you don’t have the success you expected after about a month, then repeat the process, generating new phrases to try. Don’t try to change all 7 keywords in one go. You won’t know which ones are working and which aren’t, and you may delete keywords that were selling you a few books before you tried this. If your sales are worse than they were before you started then not only are your new phrases not working for you, but you may have deleted useful keywords and you need to reinstate them.  Now, before we go on to talk about subtitles, just a word about the section of the metadata that asks you if the book contains “adult” content. Amazon isn’t too clear on what adult content is and what it isn’t. Accordingly, Bryan Cohen advises that you click on “no” for that question. If you write books that are erotic, contain a lot of extreme violence or lots of strong swear words, then maybe you should click the “yes” option. But otherwise, your books may end up in the adults only dungeon (Bryan’s words) and not be seen by a lot of potential readers. Ask yourself this: “Would I be happy with my 14 year old child reading this book?” If the answer is yes, then no harm will come from clicking the “no” button as children below that age tend not to buy books, their parents do the buying so let them make the decision. Now, subtitles.  We hadn’t thought about these too much in the past and hardly ever use them, but it turns out we should have. Using a subtitle allows you to have an 8th keyword phrase in your metadata that Amazon can find when people do searches. Naturally, as the subtitle appears on the book’s sales page it needs to be grammatically correct, but it can be used to provide guidance to the reader about the book’s content, which may not be apparent from the title. For example, one of our sci-fi titles is called “The Magi”. For some readers that could be interpreted (despite the cover showing an image of a spaceship) as being a book about the Three Wise Men who visited Jesus in Bethlehem. But by adding a subtitle that says “A sci-fi action adventure” we are describing the book in a way that can’t be misinterpreted. Subtitles like that can be used for any book written in any genre. Again, using trial and error, generate some potential subtitles and put them into Amazon’s search bar and see what results they produce. If they give you a list of books that use the same or similar subtitle, which the blurb tells you are the same sort of books that you write and which have reasonable sales rankings, then you are onto a winner. If your books have been organised into a series on KDP, as they should be if they are a series, then don’t use the series title in your subtitle. That will appear in search results if a reader uses the series title as a search term. The series title appears on the sales page anyway so you will be duplicating the wording and that looks amateurish. You don’t have to include your subtitle on your book cover. If you use KDP’s cover creator, it will pull the subtitle through from the metadata if there has been no previous cover created, but you can delete it from the cover if you want to. If you designed your own cover, you don’t have to change it to include the subtitle. Just a note about paperbacks (and hardbacks). Once these have been published you can’t go back later and add a subtitle. However, if a search throws up your ebook, then the other buying options will also be shown on the sales page so readers will see that there is a hard copy option if they want it.  I have tried to cram into less than 10 minutes of reading what Bryan took an hour to say in his webinar, but of course he went into a lot more detail. So, if you want to know more, I suggest you contact Bryan through his website.
As well as selling training he also runs regular “author challenges” where he provides coaching for free, so you may care to sign up for one of those in order to expand on what we have discussed here. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.
The views expressed in this review are those of the review's author and not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing.
Neither Selfishgenie Publishing nor the author of this review have been provided with a free copy of the book being reviewed, nor has any payment or other inducement been offered for the review. 
One thing I like about some authors is their reliability; picking up their book and knowing that I’m going to be in safe hands when it comes to the story telling. It doesn’t matter what the genre, the author’s name is their guarantee that I’m going to enjoy the book, no matter what.
And so it is with Graham Norton and this, his third novel, “Forever Home”. I won’t spend a lot of time discussing writing style and story telling competence, because that has already been covered in my reviews of Norton’s previous books. Please take it as read that he is a competent writer and an excellent story teller. What I will talk about, however, is his affinity for location and characters. Graham Norton’s books are set in County Cork in the south of the Republic of Ireland, which is where he grew up and still lives for part of the year. His understanding of the ruggedness of the countryside and the sort of people it breeds is critical to the story in so many ways. When Graham Norton describes a character, you get the feeling that he is intimately acquainted with them. No detail about them is too small to escape his notice. But mainly he writes about these people with great affection. Even the characters you aren’t supposed to like come across mainly as being flawed, rather than being bad. The start of this book makes you think that the story is a cosy domestic drama. A relationship is coming to an end, not because anyone wants it to, but because it has to. What follows, you are led to believe, is the characters dealing with the fall-out from that ending. But then the story takes an unexpected dark twist and you realise that the story you thought you were reading isn’t the story at all. So, what did I think I was reading to begin with? Teacher Carol Crottie, previously married and with a grown up son she hardly ever sees, falls in love with the parent of one of her pupils. After a while she moves in with him and everything seems to be going well. But it isn’t. Carol’s new love, Declan Barry, is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Carol gives up work to look after him him, but an accident leaves her with a broken leg and unable to care for Declan. He is moved into a care home while Carol’s leg mends. And then Declan’s children intervene. Declan has two children of his own. Abandoned by their mother, Joan, Sally and Killian were in their teens when Carol met Declan. The relationship between Carol and the siblings was never good and now they use an enduring power of attorney, set up by Declan without Carol’s knowledge, to put Declan into permanent care. Not only that, they put Declan's house on the market, selling the roof from over her head. While that is bad news for Carol in terms of losing her home, she also knows that Declan never wanted the house to be sold. He had made that wish quite clear to everyone, including his children. But Carol hasn’t got a leg to stand on legally so, in middle age, she is forced to move back into her parents’ home; a move that is far from welcome by anyone. But Carol’s father, Dave, is a successful businessman and hatches a plan to purchase Declan's house so that she can move back into it. Knowing the siblings would never sell to carol, he plans to do it through one of his companies. Carol doesn’t like the idea, but by the time she can object the deposit has been paid and her parents are unwilling to throw that money down the drain. So, the house purchase goes ahead. And that is the point at which things start to get very dark, and I realised that the story I was reading wasn’t the real story. I won’t spoil the book for you by telling you any more of the plot. But even after Norton introduced that twist I still wasn’t reading the story I thought I was, because no sooner had I thought I’d worked out what was going on, than there was another twist and I found I didn’t really have a clue. So, this is a story that keeps you guessing throughout. Despite its darkness and the misery of Carol's situation there is some humour in this book, most of which comes from Carol’s mother Moira. I strongly suspect Moira is based on a real person. Ok, if the book is that good, why only 4 Stars? This is a personal thing, but I don’t like it when characters who have a big impact on a story are sprung on you late in the book. To prevent a spoiler, I can’t tell you who they are or what they have to do with the story, but I would have liked to have been able to take them into consideration while I was trying to work out what was going on. Just a casual mention of them, with a couple of vague clues that they may have more than a walk-on part to play, was all that was needed. But, as I said, that’s a personal thing and other readers may not be bothered by it. But I do wholeheartedly recommend this book if you like cosy family dramas with a dark edge to them, because that is exactly what you will get here. To find out more about “Forever Home” by Graham Norton, click the link below.
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 The laws of copyright and plagiarism don’t bother most authors very much. They know the laws exist but, because they aren’t copying the work of others, they don’t give them a second thought. However, there are two circumstances when we do have to think about that little c inside a circle, or at least the consequences of it. The first is inadvertent, or accidental plagiarism and the second is when our own work is plagiarised, or our work is stolen. Our brains retain a lot of what they take in, even when we don’t realise it. I’m sure we have all experienced the moment when we think we have met someone before, because their face seems familiar.  We are probably right, because their features have lodged themselves in our memory without us even being aware of it, however fleeting the original encounter. So it is with what we read. We may have read a book forty years ago (if we are old enough) but bits of it may appear in our conscious mind unbidden, without us knowing where they have appeared from. What may appear to be an original thought is actually something remembered from the book we read all that time ago. So, by including that thought in our book, we are inadvertently plagiarising the work of someone else. The second instance is more likely, and more serious, for most authors.  If parts of our book appear in someone else’s work, we have a right to feel aggrieved. Worse, if someone steals our whole book and publishes it under their name (or, more likely, a pseudonym), we have the right to feel very, very aggrieved. So, what do the laws of copyright say? They vary from country to country, so I can only generalise here. But all copyright laws are designed to protect the work of the originator while they are alive and for some period after their death as part of their estate. At the moment Britain is still working under EU copyright law, which protects the work of the author for 70 years after their death, or for 70 years after the death of the last surviving author of a co-authored work. So, if you co-author a book, it is protected for 70 years after the death of whichever author dies last.  Under American copyright law for work created after 1st January 1978, the work is also protected for 70 years after the death of the author or last surviving co-author. Work created prior to that date is subject to different periods of protection, depending on the law at the time the work was created. The majority of countries agree to uphold the copyright laws of other countries.. That means a British author can be sued in the UK for a breach of copyright that occurs in the USA, and vice versa, so don’t be fooled into thinking you are safe just because you break the laws in a country in which you don’t live. While that looks good on paper, not all countries agree to co-operate or turn their agreement into action  Once the copyright period has expired, the work becomes “public domain”. This doesn’t mean anyone can just claim the work as their own, because that would still be plagiarism. But it does mean that anyone can publish the work under the original author’s name and not have to pay anything to the deceased’s estate. Authors often use photographs or artwork to illustrate their books, or their book covers, and those images may be (probably are) subject to copyright. If you didn’t create the art or take the photograph, then you haven’t got permission to use it. You must obtain the permission of the originator or purchase a licence to use it. Companies like Shutterstock and Depositphotos sell licenses to use the work of the people who created the images that are displayed on their websites. If you get your images from some other sources you may have to dig around to find out how to obtain permission to use them or to buy a licence. Incidentally, licences to use images are usually limited to a maximum number of hard copies, so make sure you know what the limit is so that you don’t accidently exceed it. Renewing the licence for more copies is usually cheaper than the original cost.  It is very easy to breach the copyright for images without realising you are doing it. Let me illustrate (bad pun) by using an example. Let’s imagine that I want to illustrate this blog with an image of the Mona Lisa. Now, Leonardo da Vinci has been dead for several centuries, so his best known work is clearly public domain. However, any photograph of the Mona Lisa may be subject to copyright. Given the “70 years after death” rule, it could mean a photo taken as early as 1923 (possibly even earlier) is still under copyright, if the photographer died after 1953. Photos held in archives or printed in newspapers and magazines are always subject copyright and companies like Getty Images buy the copyright for photographs in private collections and make money by selling licences to use them. Many a blogger and/or author has fallen foul of the law because they didn’t realise any of that.  So, what happens if you commit an inadvertent act of plagiarism? Well, once you have read the work you are alleged to have plagiarised and confirmed that your story is so similar to it that it isn’t really your story, then a profuse and sincere apology and the withdrawal of the book from sale is usually enough to satisfy the original author. That doesn’t prevent the original author from taking legal action, but the fuss and cost involved usually means that they won’t involve the courts. However, in the UK if you deny that your work is based on theirs, they can take you to a Copyright Tribunal (see more below), which costs only £50. Dan Brown has been sued three times over accusations of plagiarism in his Robert Langdon novels, though none of the suits against him have been won. But some American lawyers are getting very rich from these lawsuits. If you were to lose a lawsuit, it could cost you everything you have – and I do mean everything.  However, even if you admit your mistake and avoid a lawsuit, your publisher will have suffered a financial loss as a result, so they may (probably will) reclaim any advance of royalties that was paid and also claim back any costs they incurred in publishing your book. You may end up severely financially damaged anyway even if you admit your error. So, when you have that great thought for your book, do make sure that it is an original thought and not a memory of someone else’s work, resurrected from the deepest recesses of your brain. What to do about someone plagiarising or actually stealing your work is more complex. Let’s take plagiarism to start with. Most authors can’t afford to take legal action, so they need to take a diplomatic approach first.  The first step is to “compare and contrast” the two books. Ideas can’t be copyrighted, so the fact that you had the idea to locate your story on a planet a thousand light years from Earth, which is populated by Green Pixies, and the other author did the same, is not proof of plagiarism. You have to be able to prove that the story is substantially the same as yours throughout. That means going chapter by chapter and identifying the similarities – and the differences. The greater the ratio of similarities to differences, the stronger your case, and vice versa. You also have to be able to prove that your book was copyrighted and published before the other version, which is why having a copyright date included in your book is so important. If the book has been published by more than one publisher, which sometimes happens, then it is the first publication date that is the important one, not the latest date. Because of the time it takes to write and then publish a book, the publication date could be years after the copyright date.. The next thing to do is to try to contact the author, point out the similarities with your work and ask them, politely, to withdraw the book. You shouldn’t accuse them of plagiarism, because that could provoke a counteraccusation of slander.  In the UK the Copyright Tribunal will examine cases of copyright theft and plagiarism. Contact them before you do anything more. Present them with all your evidence. Their email address is c[email protected] Other countries may operate similar forms of copyright dispute resolution, so check your own government’s websites. We’ll assume that the tribunal has found in your favour, so if the other author denies the similarities or refuses to remove the book despite the tribunal’s ruling, then a solicitor’s (lawyer’s) letter will usually do the trick. The threat of legal action, backed by the tribunal’s findings and with the accompanying financial consequences, is usually enough to make the other party see sense. A solicitor’s letter can cost anything from £30 (plus VAT) upwards, depending on how much time the solicitor has to spend on it. Ask the solicitor how much they expect the cost to be before you commit yourself.  However, if the letter fails to achieve the desired result, don’t go to court just yet. Instead, contact the retailers (this could be quite a few businesses) and ask for the book to be removed from sale. If the Copyright Tribunal has found in your favour you will have a strong case. If they didn’t, the retailers may decide to do their own investigations before removing the title from sale. If the retailers don’t agree with you, you have a choice: take the risk of legal action or just suck it up and let it go. If you have deep pockets you may decide to stand on your principles and go to court, but for most authors the consequences of losing are too high.  What about the direct theft of your work by someone who has published it under another name? Well, it is unlikely that you will ever be able to track the thief down. They know they have broken the law, so they will have done their best to conceal their identity. Copyright theft is a “civil” offence, not a criminal one, so the police won’t get involved. Tracking the thief down yourself isn’t really an option. You simply don’t have the resources necessary. Even if you make progress, the trail will probably end in a country that isn’t very good at co-operating on international law and you are entering the lottery of a legal system with which you are unfamiliar, and which may be unsympathetic to your case. If you have used the Copyright Tribunal, mentioned earlier in the blog, their adjudication can be used to require retailers to remove the offending books. The publisher (if you have one) or retailer(s) may decide to pursue the thief because of their financial losses, but that is unlikely.  There is one more word of caution I must offer. It is quite common to quote the work of other people in your otherwise original work. There are circumstances when you may do that, providing it is properly credited, but these mainly relate to non-fiction and academic works. You may also do that if you are critiquing the work, reviewing it or using it for the purposes of parody or sarcasm. The relevant clauses in the law are known as “fair use” or “fair dealing”. The rule is to keep the quotes as short as is necessary to get the message across and to make sure you credit the originator. Just naming the originator may not be enough, you may have to provide a full reference to the publication, date of publication, publisher etc. This website provides guidance on how to cite your sources.  It is quite common to see quotes of the lyrics of songs or lines of poetry at the start of a book or at the beginning of chapters, as they usually convey some message that is relevant to the story.
You must obtain the consent of the originator of the words if you wish to use them in that way. Some poets, authors and songwriters will give that freely, but many require payment. The music industry is particularly litigious when it comes to the use of song lyrics without permission. If you plan to use quotes like that and don’t ask permission, you do so at considerable financial risk. At the very least you will probably have to delete the offending words from the book and re-publish it without them. So, that brings us to the end of our quick gallop through the world of plagiarism and copyright law. We hope you found it interesting and now have a better idea of what you can and can’t do. However, I include links to more authoritative sources if you want to know (yawn) more. For the UK: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/contents For the USA: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/ If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Why aren’t my books selling? It’s a question that we hear many authors asking, especially on Twitter (Good old Twitter – we’d be stuck for blog ideas without it it). Well, first some expectation management. There are a thousand reasons why a book might not be selling, so it is impossible to answer that question for any individual book in a simple blog. All we can do is look at some generalities and let you compare and contrast those with your book and your marketing to see what conclusions you can draw. But those generalities are important, as they may point you towards the single reason your book may not be selling. You will have to identify and address the precise issue, but at least you will be closer to the right answer than you would be if you hadn’t read this blog.  We are going to start with two assumptions. We will be discussing marketing later in the blog, but our starting point assumes that you have done some marketing, which has led to a potential reader finding their way to the Amazon page for your book. If you don’t sell through Amazon (Why not? They account for 80% of ebook sales!) then the same basic messages apply to other on-line book selling sites. The second assumption (and it is the big one) is that your book is actually up to the required quality. Your Beta readers will have told you that. Sadly, your family and friends probably won’t tell you if it wasn’t, because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. If you haven’t used Beta readers, or you haven’t acted on Beta reader feedback, you are entering a lottery and nothing we can say will change that. You may find it helpful to have your Amazon (or whatever) sales page open in another tab, so you can flip between it and this blog to see what we are talking about. So, what is the first thing a potential reader will see when they click on a link to take them to your book’s sales page? Cover image  We blogged about cover design just a couple of weeks ago, so we aren’t going to go over that ground again. I think it is safe to say that if your book showed up in someone’s search results, they must have found the cover appealing enough to click on the link or they wouldn't be looking at the book's sales page. But what if they didn’t click on the link? If you have been running an advert for your book, you will have data from the results to tell you how many clicks you got (a 10% conversions rate is good). If you aren’t getting enough clicks, your cover design may be part of the problem. But if you haven’t run any ads, you won’t know. You may want to scroll down and read that blog about cover designs, just in case.  Title A lot has been written about titles, with many gurus suggesting titles should be short. All we can say is that “Dune” was a best seller and so was “The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Nighttime”. You can draw your own conclusions with regard to the impact of title length on sales. We don’t think it is a critical factor unless you have used words that might alientate the reader. Price I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, if you aren’t J K Rowling, you can’t charge J K Rowling prices for your books. The ability to set their own price is one of the few competitive advantages that the Indie author has, so they need to use it. “I’m not going to under-sell my talent.” is an objection that is often raised when I say that.  OK, here are the facts. A mainstream published author only gets about 10% of the royalties from each sale. So, for a 9.99 ebook (forgive the lack of currency, it just saves me having to provide $, £ and other conversions), the author will only get about 1. But for a 5.99 ebook an Indie author will get between 1.75 and 3.50 (approx) depending on whether they took the 35% or the 70% royalty option. So, who is underselling their talent? The mainstream published author makes their money not from individual sales, but from total volume of sales. That is as much about having a big marketing budget as it is about having talent. Even some pretty bad writers (naming no names) can sell a lot of books if they have a big enough marketing budget behind them. You, on the other hand, aren’t making any sales, so no one knows about your talent and, if you insist on charging 9.99 for your books, they may never know about it. I’m actually surprised that more mainstream authors don’t opt for self-publishing once they have established their name – they would make far more money. Blurb  After price, this is the next crucial part of the sales page. If the reader is intrigued by the book’s blurb, they will either buy the book, or take the next step towards buying the book, which is to read the “Look Inside” portion. There are many blogs about blurb writing available, including some of our own and they all say pretty much the same thing. There are even books the subject (try Bryan Cohen’s). Google “How to write a good book blurb”, read what the blogs have to say and then make sure your own blurb is doing its job. If it isn’t, change it. “Look Inside” feature. If you have got the reader as far as looking inside the book, you are 90% of the way to making the sale. But it’s that final 10% that is the killer. If the “Look Inside” sample captures the reader’s interest, the sale is guaranteed. If it doesn’t then the reader will go and look somewhere else for their next book.  Once upon a time authors were permitted to take their time telling their story, using the opening chapters to create atmosphere and develop characters, before having to think about “inciting incidents”. Films, TV and computer games have changed all that. Nowadays you have to capture the reader’s interest within the opening few pages of the book and the “Look Inside” portion aids and abets that approach. If you fail to capture the reader’s interest, that 90% is all for nothing and you don’t make the sale. So, ask a few people, who you trust to give you an honest opinion, to read that “Look Inside” portion and then get them to tell you if they would buy the book if they didn’t know it was by you. It may still not provide a definitive answer, because they may not want to hurt your feelings, but if they are really good friends and really trustworthy, they will be honest. Reviews If the “Look Inside” portion of your book has done its job, readers may never look at the reviews it has been given. I almost never look at reviews myself, having made my decision based on the above factors. But some people do look at reviews, which is a problem if you don’t have any. You can pay for reviews. I’m not recommending it, but it’s your money. If you want to pay, that’s your call. But the real problem is bad reviews. There are two things to be done if you have a lot of bad reviews. A good reviewer will be helpful and provide reasons why they didn’t like your book, so learn from that. The first thing to look at, therefore, is what the reviewer said and then fix the problems. But that won’t get rid of the bad reviews, so there is a second thing you may need to consider. You may wish to “unpublish” the book from Amazon and re-launch it on another self-publishing site, such as D2D. The reviews on Amazon will no longer be seen and the book will start off on the new site with a clean slate. If you are already on multiple self-publishing sites, you really are stuck. Also, if you have bad reviews on Goodreads and other review sites, there is nothing that can be done about those. You may have to unpublish the book entirely and start anew by writing a brand new book. But use those reviews to learn from your mistakes, so the new book doesn’t suffer the same fate. An author who refuses to learn from their mistakes (or even admit they made any) will never sell books. Marketing  We said at the top of the blog that we would be discussing marketing, so here we are. However, this is too vast a subject to cover in one blog. We have written more blogs on this subject than on any other and we are still only scratching the surface in many aspects of the craft. The best thing we can advise is that you undertake some free training in marketing to help you market your books effectively. Effective marketing comes from knowledge, not luck. What we can do is summarise some of the key messages we have put out about this subject in the past. 1. No one is going to stumble on your book by accident. Marketing is not a choice – it is an essential. 2. Did you put the right “keywords” in into your book’s details on KDP? The most common way for people to find new authors on Amazon (or any site) is through searches using keywords. 3. Social media was a better marketing tool in the early days but is now largely past its “sell by” date.  4. Blasting out Tweets to try to sell your book doesn’t work, so don’t pay people to do it. Social media users just scroll past those Tweets nowadays – or they block the username.
5. Social media is still a useful tool if you remember to use the "social" part correctly. 6. Paying for marketing services is an option – but only if you know which service is going to work for your book. You can’t cure a broken leg by taking an aspirin, so you have to know what is wrong with your marketing strategy before you pay someone to fix it, otherwise you risk trying to fix the wrong thing and throwing your money down the toilet.. 7. We’re sorry to have to be the bearers of bad news, but if you really want to sell books you are probably going to have to pay to advertise. We have found Amazon Ads and Facebook Ads to be the most cost effective. If you want to read any of those myriad blogs we have written on the subject of book marketing, you can find them in our archive. So, have you some inkling now about why your books aren’t selling? Maybe you haven’t found the final answer yet, but I hope we have shone a torch into the dark corners where you might find the final answer. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  Why do bookstore chains have big displays of book just inside their doors, showing the covers of the books that they are trying to sell that week? Firstly, the publishers are probably paying for the space that the display is taking up. But, more importantly, it is about the only place in a bookstore where it is possible to display the books so that the cover can be shown off. In the bookshelves themselves only the spines can be seen, with the odd book being turned “face outward” to show the front cover. Again, the publisher is probably paying to use that extra space.  There is an old saying amongst chefs that the first taste of a dish is with the eyes. Which is why chefs take so much care over the presentation of the food. It is sometimes a work of art in itself. "It LOOKS delicious." is something most of us have said in our time. And exactly the same rule applies to books. The first taste is with the eyes and the taster is the cover of the book. But instead of saying "It looks delicious" we say "It looks interesting". Cover design is something we have blogged about in the past, but we came across a book recently that reminded us of the importance of getting the cover right. Let me say up front that the book itself was excellent. It wasn’t published by us (more’s the pity), but we are happy to compliment the author on a job well done. One of our authors had been sent the book to review it, which is why he knew what it was about. We only became involved when the reviewer asked our opinion on the cover – which gave rise to this blog.  Just because a cover is artistic, it doesn't make it a good cover. here was nothing wrong with the cover in artistic terms. The problem was that it didn’t say anything about the book. From the imagery it used, it wasn’t possible to know what genre the book was written in. The title didn’t tell us either. In a recent Tweet an author showed three potential covers for her latest book and asked followers which they preferred. I thought they all had a very dated, 1950s/60s, look about them and none of them excited my interest, despite the book being in a genre I read. I Tweeted back to say as much. She probably didn’t like the feedback, but better for the author to get it now than in several weeks’ time after the book has been published. The cover is the first thing a reader sees, regardless of whether it is a bookstore or on-line. The only place a cover isn’t required to make an impact is in a library, where all the books are displayed spine outwards, so only the title and the author’s name are visible.  "Don't judge a book by its spine." The quote from George Eliot (1819-1880), “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is actually a misquote. What she actually said was “Don’t judge a book by its spine”. There are pretty obvious reasons why that version is true. But readers constantly judge books by their covers. It is why publishers spend so much money on cover designs. So, the cover and the title combined must tell the reader everything they need to know about genre, so the reader knows that it is the sort of book they like to read. If that is the case, they will then read the blurb, or the “look inside” portion, or both, and the reader is well on the way to buying the book. If that initial impact isn’t made, the reader will move on to the next book on the shelf, or they will scroll on by to the next book in the search results.  Joseph Heller's classic was already well known by the time this cover was used. Authors choose their book titles for many reasons, and they don’t always say what genre the book is. From the title “Catch-22” you wouldn’t guess that the book was a satire on the way the United States Army Air Corp operated during World War II. It is more likely to suggest a book about baseball or cricket. The real genre only becomes apparent when you read the book. I’m sure that you can all think of other book titles that don’t suggest the genre of the book. Sometimes it is possible to guess because you know what sort of books are written by a particular author, but that isn’t a hard and fast rule either, because some authors write in multiple genres. But if it is an author’s first book, the reader has no idea what genre they write in. So, if the book’s title doesn’t suggest the genre and the author’s name isn’t familiar, then the book’s cover has to do a lot of work for the author if they want to capture the attention of a reader. A lack of distinguishing features We went looking for other titles by the same author and, by accident, came across another problem. The book was the second in a series but the cover of the first book was so similar to that of the second that it is bound to create confusion for the reader. Our memories work far better with visual images than they do with text – and that is where the problem lay. With the exception of some minor differences in background colour, the cover of the second book was identical to the cover of the first book. The only major indication that the two books were different were the titles. Given what I have said about visual imagery taking precedence over text, readers are likely to recognise the cover image from the first book and think they have read the second book when they haven’t. If they have enjoyed the first book and would be prepared to buy the second book without knowing anything else about it, they might not buy for that reason. That’s a guaranteed sale that has been lost, because the cover caused confusion.  We can guess that the author was trying to establish a “brand identity” for the series and there is nothing wrong with that. Most authors (or publishers) of book series try to establish a brand identity for them. But readers must be able to identify individual books in a series at first glance, while also recognising the branding. The way the author (or their publisher) had done it in this case it wasn’t really possible to see that the two books were different. If a reader is asking themselves “Have I read this book before?” then they aren’t going to buy the book if they are in any doubt. They may not decide to read the book’s blurb to find out if they have read it, they may simply move on along the bookshelf or scroll through the search results and that is a lost sale.  It is possible to establish a "brand identity" for a book series. The above image of three covers from novels in Bernard Cornwell’s “Sharpe” series shows how a brand identity can be achieved, through a combination of layout, font selection and visual imagery.
I could go on about selecting the right fonts to suit the genre (the Sharpe covers provide a good example), but those sorts of refinements are secondary to the visual impact of the cover art. So, the two things we hope you will take away from this blog, if you are self-publishing your book: 1. Make sure your book cover makes it clear what genre the book is written in. 2. Make sure the reader can distinguish between successive books in a series. And if you are fortunate enough to have a publisher, make sure your publisher has addressed those two issues to your satisfaction before you sign off on the cover design. If in doubt, take some time to search through the listings of books, especially best-sellers, written in the same genre as yours to see what other authors/publishers have done with the covers. There is no shame in imitation (only in in direct copying). If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. |
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