 Disclaimer: The views expressed in this review are those of the reviewer and not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing. The reviewer was not paid or offered any inducement for this review but was provided with a free review copy.  Cooee Baby is a book that works on many levels. If you just want an adventure story, then great. Five stars all the way. It really works as adventure. But on the deeper level, as a story about a neuro-divergent young woman, there is a lot going on. I’ll cover some of the nuances later in this review. Athena Fernandez is the neuro-divergent young woman. Her real first name is Awhina, but she doesn’t like it because people don’t know how to pronounce it, so she changes it, and to everyone other than her parents she becomes Athena. Early in the story Athena is diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome*, which is one particular syndrome on the much broader autism scale. Not only is Athena neuro-divergent, however, she is also a brilliant scholar, with a particular talent for maths and sciences. This takes her to Cambridge University where we start to get a real insight into her personality. This is something I will again return to later in this review. After graduation with an honours degree, and starting to prepare her PhD proposal, Athena’s mother offers her the opportunity to go on a five-week cruise around the islands of Indonesia. This is not your normal “floating gin palace” type cruise but is on a much smaller ship where more time is allowed to experience the diverse cultures that will be encountered. I don’t want to give any away spoilers, but I can’t tell you about the key story point without revealing some of what happens, but I’ll try not to tell you too much. Athena is involved in a swimming accident that threatens her life. It also disfigures her. She is rescued and taken to Papua where she is treated by the shaman of a local tribe, the Walukek. She is then kidnapped by a neighbouring tribe, the Suamu, who are in a perpetual state of war with the Walukek.  The author, Charles Moberley There is always a risk in placing a European in a situation like this that they succumb to “white saviour” syndrome, trying to modernise the indigenous people for their “betterment”.
This was common in 19th and early 20th century literature as it reflected the colonial values of the day. Fortunately, author Charles Moberley doesn’t succumb to this in Cooee Baby and Athena does nothing that would change the culture of either of the tribes with which she lives. Indeed, the culture of the Suamu is central to the plot. So, having said at the start of this review that I would award 5 stars for this book as an adventure story, why have I only awarded 4 stars? The answer is in the development of Athena’s character within the story. Asperger’s Syndrome doesn’t make the person intrinsically unlikeable, but Athena’s character I found very hard to engage with. Her overbearing mother and emotionally absent father must, therefore, account for a lot of her behaviour, rather than her neuro-divergence. Because, despite all her bravado, Athena is also very vulnerable. Her outspoken and sometimes obnoxious behaviour is, in part, motivated by her feelings of vulnerability and this isn’t explored in any depth. It means that the picture we get of Athena seems to be incomplete. She behaves like a spoiled brat a lot of the time, but her neuro-divergence doesn’t account for that. While Athena may suffer from Asperger’s, she is also capable of analysing both her own behaviour and that of others, which means that beneath the surface she does understand emotions and their functions, but we are offered too few glimpses of that part of Athena’s personality, which means that she remains, largely, unlikeable. I didn’t expect some damascene conversion from Athena, in which she changed her behaviour significantly. That would not fit with her neuro-divergence. However, she is portrayed as a person in possession of complex analytical and reasoning skills, so I would have expected her to develop an understanding that the way people act towards her is a reflection of how she acts towards them. But that insight is lacking. There is also Athena's resilience. People on the autism scale are not known for dealing well with the external environment. They often try to shut out the world. But not Athena. She may be frightened, but she stares down her assailants with a bravery that Jack Reacher would nod his head towards. That too, I feel, speaks of something deeper in her character than can be accounted for by her neuro-divergence. It was this quality that finally won me over and kept me reading the book. But, if you can get past that characterisation, this book has a great deal going for it. As I said at the top of this review, it is great as an action adventure and if you can read it that way then you are likely to enjoy it immensely. To find out more about “Cooee Baby” by Charles Moberley, click here. * According to the charity Mencap, Asperger’s Syndrome is no longer a term used by the medical profession to describe Athena’s form of neuro-divergence. The person after whom the disorder was named (Hans Asperger) had strong connections to the Nazis, which is why the term has fallen out of favour. If you wish to be politically correct you would now describe the condition as an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) If you have enjoyed this book review, be sure not to miss out on future blogs by signing up for our newsletter. We’ll even give you a free ebook for doing so.
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 Most Indie authors know that selling books in a series is more profitable than selling stand-alone books. But it isn’t all plain sailing, and we’ve just come across a couple of things you should know about how Amazon handles series. If you publish your series using KDP then you can create a series page on Amazon. There are a couple of advantages to this. First of all, the series page doesn’t have any advertising on it, so when people click a link to it, they will only see books in your series, not ads for other people’s books. Secondly, at the top right of the page there is a button that allows the reader to buy the whole series with a single click - and some readers do that. So, instead of selling one book at a time, you sell the whole series in one go. That means that all the books in the series move up the sales ranking in lock step. It also means that all the titles appear in the “also bought” lists that Amazon shows readers.  The “1 click” button is also “smart”. That means if the reader has already bought books 1 and 2, they won’t be included in the purchase. Also, the price for the rest of the series is adjusted accordingly, making the rest of the series appear cheaper. In addition, if any of the books in the series is reduced, maybe because of a Kindle Countdown Deal, the overall series price will be adjusted accordingly. So far, so good.  But there are a couple of things you should know about. The most significant one is that if you don’t publish through KDP, you can’t have a series page on Amazon. Using publishing sites like Draft2Digital (D2D) allows you to set the books up as a series, just like on KDP. D2D will also sell your books on Amazon, if you include them in your selection of distribution channels. This also applies to some other self publishing sites. BUT Even if you have set the book up as a series on D2D, it won’t create a series page on Amazon. So, you lose those advantages listed earlier in the blog. Yet another reason for using KDP! But some people have an aversion to using them, but that’s their business.  The second significant issue affects authors that do publish using KDP. When you create a series, Amazon assigns an ASIN to it, just the way it assigns an ASIN to the individual books. If you use the link to the series page in your marketing and end matter (which you should for all the reasons given above) then the link will include the series ASIN. So far, so good (again). The problems arise when you add a new book to the series. Amazon deletes the old series ASIN and assigns a new one, because it identifies the extended series as a new product. That means that all the old links you have been using are now invalid and if readers use them, they’ll get a “page unavailable” notice.  That means that when you publish a new book in the series, you must change all the links in all your marketing and end matter.
The new ASIN won’t go live until the book goes live and there’s no way of knowing in advance the precise moment when the series ASIN will change, but it will probably be within 72 hours of publication of the new book. It would be unethical of us to claim credit for telling you all of the above, so here’s a link to the YouTube video where we made the discovery. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  The Amazon algorithm hates spikes in book sales. There, now you know. Authors used to use a technique called the “book bomb” to get their books selling, but no one talks about those anymore. A book bomb was a splurge of advertising and promotions on a single day to send a book zooming up the sales rankings, so it would get noticed. But Amazon decided it didn’t like those sorts of spikes, because they weren’t sustainable in terms of sales. If all the marketing was happening on a single day, sales soon started to drop off on subsequent days. Part of that is because of the way that Amazon calculates sales rankings. A sale is counted as a whole number on the day it’s made, but the next day it is only counted as ½ a sale. The day after that it is a ¼ of a sale and so on until the fraction becomes so small it is meaningless.  That is why you can be riding high in the sales rankings one day and you’re pondlife the next. So, Indie authors had to find a new way of getting the Amazon algorithms working for them that didn’t create a spike but created a trend instead. What they came up with was the stacked promo, or promo stacking if you want to express it the other way around. A well-planned stacked promo campaign can gather you a lot of sales over a longer time period, which creates a trend and gets the attention of the Amazon algorithms. They can also be used in conjunction with Facebook and Amazon ads  That’s because Amazon wants to sell books because selling books makes them money. And the easiest books for Amazon to sell are the ones that are already selling because the author is promoting them. So, if your sales are creating an upward trend, as they should be over the period of a stacked promotion for a discounted book, the Amazon algorithms will do two things. The first is that they will start to include them in their recommendations listings. You know the ones in the carousels that appear on the sales page for books and act as competition. That’s the “recommended for you” list and the “also bought” list.  That’s basically free advertising for your book, as a lot of people buy from those lists because it saves them having to do more searches. The second thing it does only applies if your book is subscribed to Kindle Select, the driver behind Kindle Unlimited. A lot of “wide” authors don’t know this, but if your book is in Kindle Select and its starts to sell as an ebook, then it will be recommended to Kindle Unlimited subscribers for them to download. This is because Amazon assumes that if people are buying your book, other people will download it for free on KU and that justifies the subscription price Amazon charges. That is more free advertising and the majority of 6 figure earning authors make most of their money this way, not through sales of the ebook.  But if you just go for a sales spike, none of that happens. Do stacked promos work? All I can say is that we have just run one for our book The Magi and yes, it worked. How much does it cost? The most expensive book promo site is BookBub and their Featured Deals start at around $100 (£80) and can run as high as $1,000 for the most popular genres. I think it is fair to say that you need to be selling quite a lot of books already if you want to book a slot with them. But many sites offer far cheaper packages than that and they also have a significant reach. They start from around $20 and I don’t think any charge more than $100, but check their prices for yourself.  Unsurprisingly the best sites are much in demand, so plan ahead. You need to be looking at least 30 days ahead if you want to secure a slot on a specific day or in a particular week, but for some genres you might have to look as far ahead as 60 days. There are so many book promo sites, how do you know which are good, which are bad, and which are scammers? I’ll provide a link at the end of the blog to another blog by book marketing guru David Gaughran, that lists sites he has used personally, and we have also used some of them. You can trust all those sites. But by all means check with other sources if you don’t trust us or David Gaughran. In fact, I recommend that you do. So, there you have it. Stacked promos are great for promoting your back catalogue on a tight budget, but they also work well as a promotion for a new book in a series, where you can list Book 1 at a heavy discount (99c or even free), Book 2 at a higher price and the latest book at full price. Basically, you are building a pricing ladder to encourage the reader to climb down deep into your series and you can do that for anything from a 3 book series to a 10 book (or more) series.  RESOURCES
For David Gaughran’s blog on stacked promotions, including the best sites to use, click here. For more information on making the Amazon algorithms work for you, we recommend David Gaughran’s book “Amazon Decoded”. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  When is a book not a book? When it is a Christmas Gift. This blog may be a little late for you to do anything with the content right now, but we hope that by passing on its message it gives you something to think about when marketing for the next year. If you already have a marketing plan, this is something that you can add in and if you haven’t – why not? Those books aren’t going to sell themselves! Fail to plan - plan to fail.  As regular readers will know, we are great advocates of advertising, both on Amazon and on Facebook, so we thought we’d like to share a bit of a success story with you. You could call this a “case study” but that makes it sound a bit fancier than it was. We have one book in our catalogue that makes it ideal for a certain type of person. We’ll get to the details in a moment, but we’ll start with the “back story” first. We noticed back in December 2023 that sales of the book picked up quite considerably and we sold more copies that month than we had during the previous 11. Being curious sorts of people, we wondered why.  We had almost no data that we could analyse, because the growth in sales was “organic”. We hadn’t advertised the book and we hadn’t even promoted it that much, so we had no idea who had bought it. But we did have one very important bit of data. All the copies sold were in paperback, not ebook format. That was what gave us our biggest clue. Asking a few contacts in the book marketing world brought us the suggestion that the copies were being sold not as books – but as Christmas gifts. Yes, of course they were books, but that wasn’t why they were being bought. They were being bought so that they could be wrapped up in nice Christmas paper, to be given to someone else. The buyer had no intention of reading the book themselves, which is very unusual in the book marketing world.  So, in our marketing plan for November and December 2024 we decided we would aim not at the book buying market, but at the gift giving market. Not all of it, of course. That market is huge and not everyone who buys gifts is going to buy a book as a gift. But there was still quite a large segment of the market that we could aim at. We estimated the market size to be in region of 2 million people. OK, so how did we arrive at that figure?  The book in question is aimed at golfers, of whom there is an estimated one million in the UK. But we weren’t going to be targeting the golfers, we were going to be targeting the people who would be buying Christmas gifts for golfers. That is likely to be a much larger figure, when you take into account spouses/partners, children, siblings and friends. In creating our ads, therefore, we didn’t use our normal approach of saying “This is a great book for all you golfers” We changed our approach entirely and said “This is the ideal gift for the golfer in your life”. That affected the way we targeted the book in our advertising. We are looking primarily at Facebook and Amazon ads here.  The crossover was in pricing. We reduced the book’s price to make it a little bit more attractive to gift givers who were on a tight budget. That would also make it more attractive for children to give to parents, uncles, aunties etc. In our Amazon keyword targeted ads we also used keywords related to Christmas gifts. Christmas and Xmas were included in all the keyword phrases we put into the ads. But on Facebook it meant we didn’t try to target golfers, as they weren’t the people we were trying to sell to. We left our targeting as wide as possible, so that anyone who was buying a gift for a golfer might consider it.  In terms of the graphics and the advertising text, we also focused on the gift giving opportunity. The image next to this para is one of the ones we used. As you can see, we magnified the gift giving potential of the book as well as pointing out the price reduction.* In the ad’s primary text, we also focused on the gift giving opportunity, making more of that than we did of the content of the book. Non golfers would hardly pay attention to the book’s content. They probably read little, if any, of it before they wrapped it up.  So, to the results of the advertising campaigns. Immediately after launching the ads at the beginning of December sales weren’t any better than they had been throughout the year, but they got better rapidly. As the month progressed and people started to run out of time to buy gifts for their loved ones, sales started to accelerate. In week 2 of the month sales doubled. In week 3 they quadrupled and hit their peak over the weekend of 20th/21st December, which was pretty much the latest date by which delivery could be guaranteed in time for Christmas. Part of the slow start to sales we experienced at the beginning of the month we think was down to the Facebook algorithm “learning” who it should show the ads to. After all, we hadn’t given it a target audience to work with. From its scan of the images and text we used it probably thought it should be showing the ad to golfers. But it would then have learnt that the audience was much wider, which was when we started to see the acceleration in sales.  So, the lessons we learnt:
While this blog has mainly been about marketing for Christmas, it also suggests opportunities for selling other genres of books at other times of the year. For example, selling romance books in the run up to Valentines Day, or selling books as birthday gifts at any time of the year. There are many different days throughout the year dedicated to particular causes or events (Hint: May The Fourth Be With You) and many of those offer opportunities for specially targeted sales campaigns. *Editor’s note: the book is no longer available at that price. 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.  In theory, anyone who can write their name can write a book. In theory. In practice it’s a very different story (pun intended). From the emails we get seeking advice and from the questions we see on social media, it’s clear that a lot of would-be authors get frustrated when they find out just how difficult it is to write a book. And then there are the emails and social media posts that ask how to get started as a writer and we weep in frustration at the sorts of replies we see from other authors. They are very often so encouraging without telling the questioner the truth, which is that writing is very hard work, publishing is harder and marketing a book is the hardest part of all. We have no problem with the idea of encouraging people to write, but we have to temper that advice with warnings about reality or we may do more harm than good.  All that encouragement gives these people a false sense of the reality of being a writer and I can’t help but feeling they end up asking “Why did no one tell me writing was this difficult?” And they usually say it just before they hit the “delete” key on their work and go and look for something easier to do. Which is a shame, because if they had been told the truth and been prepared for the journey from the start, they might have ended up being good writers. Now, the purpose of this blog is not to discourage anyone from becoming an author. It is a great life if you can do it, with a tremendous sense of achievement when your book starts to sell. If you think you can deal with everything that goes with it, then please do become an author. But this blog is a reality check for budding authors. If you think anything I say in the paragraphs that follow sounds too much like hard work for too little reward, then writing may not be for you.  Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens The problem started with author and journalist Christopher Hitchens (1949 – 1989) who said “Everyone has a book in them.” Why was this a problem? Because that isn’t actually what he said. What Hitchens actually said was ““Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where it should, I think, in most cases, remain.” He was having a conversation with friends, and he was being sarcastic, but somehow this quote escaped into the public awareness. So now everyone remembers the first bit of the quote and they don’t even know about the last bit. But, because of that misquote, whole generations of people think that they can write a book. Now, I’m not saying they can’t, but based on some of the submissions we get here at Selfishgenie Publishing, there is a chasm between wanting to write a book and having the talent and skills needed to actually do it.  The naturally talented Tiger Woods Yes, there is such a thing as raw (or natural) talent. But raw talent needs nurturing, which people forget. I’ll use the golfer Tiger Woods as an analogy. Tiger Woods didn’t go straight from hitting a golf ball at the age of 5, in his family’s back yard, to winning the US Masters at Augusta. He had raw talent, sure, but if he had just relied on that we would now be saying “Tiger who?” Between 1980, when Tiger was 5, and 1997, when he won his first Masters, was a 17 year journey of golf lessons, coaching, endless practicing and playing to upgrade his raw talent to a “Major” winning capability. And that is how it works with writing, too.  The fact you can write a half decent essay or report does not make you either a writer or an author. Creative writing, that which is necessary to write a novel, is a skill that has to be learnt. Universities know this, which is why they offer degrees in creative writing. I’m not saying that everyone who wants to be an author has to go to university (or college, if you prefer), but they do need to take their raw talent and develop it so that they can go from being someone who writes a good essay to someone who writes a best-selling novel. It is the same journey that Tiger Woods took, only without the necessity of carrying a bag of golf clubs around (Tiger Woods did go to college on a golfing scholarship, but that was a means to an end. There were other ways he could have completed his golfing education). So, Mr, Ms, Mrs or Miss wannabe author, are you willing to put some time into developing your talent?  Are you willing to take courses in creative writing? Are you willing to attend writers’ workshops? Are you willing to join writer’s groups (real ones, not virtual ones) to get feedback on your writing? Are you willing to sit and listen to feedback that says you could do it better? Are you willing to spend years practicing so that you can improve as a writer? Are you capable of dealing with the self-doubt and imposter syndrome that plagues many writers? And all before you write the first word of your first actual novel. OK, I’ll admit that some authors do have enough natural talent to make it big at the first attempt. But they are the exception, they are not the rule. The chances of being one of those prodigies, is extremely small.  But, thanks to modern technology, it is easy to find out if you are one of these prodgies. Join a Facebook writers’ group, post a piece of work on the page (anonymously) and ask for feedback. I can be pretty sure that what you receive back will not be overwhelmingly positive. Even though a lot of the feedback will be couched in positive language, it will be negative in its meaning. So, you’ve put the hard yards in, and your first novel is ready to be released into a world that couldn’t give a damn about it.  Because that is another lesson the newbie author has to learn. The world is not waiting with bated breath for their novel. This is when they find out that getting your book published is even harder than writing it. Querying (as it is known) is brutal. Most authors get rejection after rejection before they find an agent to represent their work to publishers. Are you ready for that? We speak from experience when we say that those rejections hurt, and the pain doesn’t get any less the more rejections you get. The biggest named authors in the world have all had at least one rejection. It’s on record that J K Rowling had ten before eventually landing a deal for her first Harry Potter book. Even getting an agent isn’t the end of the journey, because publishers don’t like taking risks on first time authors. Your agent may like your book and have faith in it, but it doesn’t mean they can sell it to a publisher. J K Rowling’s publisher had so little faith in her book that the first print run was only 5,650 copies. Most of those went to reviewers. So, how many rejections are you willing to accept before you call it a day? Actually, thanks to the internet and the mushroom like growth of self-publishing platforms, you don’t have to call it a day anymore. You can self-publish your book.  No one is going to stumble over your novel by accident! But that is just more hard work, You now have a whole new set of skills to learn, and they are called editing, cover design, formatting and marketing.
That last one, marketing, is the hardest of all. Sorry to have to tell you this, but no one is going to stumble over your book by accident. You have to take them by the hand and lead them to your book. With a lot of hard work, you may sell 1,000 copies of your book. That would put you into the top 10% of all authors. Yes, you read that right. Only 10% of all published authors sell more than 1,000 books in their lifetime. Here’s the breakdown.
If an author wants to sell their book, they must first learn how to market it if they want to eat regularly. So, do you still want to be a writer? I hope so, because there is room in the world for you. But don’t believe that it is an easy path to fame and fortune, because anyone who says it is, is a liar. Yes, maybe anyone can become a writer. But not every writer will be good at it and not every good writer will be successful. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. This week we have a guest blog from Gene Ramsey. Gene , a seasoned marketing professional, is sharing his downsizing adventure. After his youngest son, Jacob, recently got married and left home, Gene and his wife found themselves in an empty nest. Recognizing the marketing principles of consumer behaviour and market segmentation, Gene and his wife embarked on a strategic downsizing journey. With "Downsizing Dad", Gene shares the ups and downs of their experience, offering valuable insights for others considering a similar lifestyle change. He demonstrates how his marketing background informed their decision-making process, from identifying their needs and preferences to effectively navigating the complexities of the downsizing market. In this blog Gene adapts his approach to strategic decision making to show how it can be used by the Indie book publisher. All images courtesy of Pexels.  In today’s vibrant digital landscape, creatives such as artists, fashion designers, and writers have unprecedented opportunities to showcase their work and carve out a unique space. However, the vast sea of talent also poses a challenge: standing out. This article from delves into robust strategies to not only capture attention but also sustain a growing audience in your creative endeavours. Harness the Power of Social Media  You must consider social media platforms as your digital stage. Platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok cater specifically to visual and creative content, making them ideal for displaying your work. Build a following by consistently posting high-quality images, engaging videos, and insightful stories about your creative process. Engage actively with your followers by responding to comments and messages. This interaction fosters a community around your work, enhancing your visibility and appeal. Seek Wisdom Through Mentorship  Navigating the creative industry can be daunting without guidance. Seek out mentors who have successfully carved a niche in your field. These relationships provide you with a wealth of knowledge on navigating market trends, pricing, and consumer behaviour. Mentors can also introduce you to networks and opportunities that were previously out of reach, accelerating your growth and helping you avoid common pitfalls. Kickstart with Crowdfunding  Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo offer more than just funding—they provide a platform to validate your ideas in the real market. Launch a campaign for a new project or collection, and you’ll gather not only funds but also a base of supporters who believe in your vision. This initial validation is crucial and can serve as a springboard for future endeavours. Craft a Comprehensive Business Plan  To ensure your creative talent flourishes, anchor it with a robust business strategy. Your business plan should detail your vision, analyze the market landscape, define your marketing approaches, and project financial outcomes, serving as a comprehensive roadmap for success. This pivotal document not only steers your creative projects but also attracts the investors or partners necessary to expand your reach and impact. Personalize with Email Marketing  Through email marketing, you can forge a direct and intimate link with your audience, turning casual viewers into dedicated followers. By sending out newsletters filled with exclusive content, sneak peeks, and early access to new releases, you invite your subscribers into the inner circle of your creative process. This approach not only deepens customer loyalty but also continuously re-engages your audience, keeping their enthusiasm for your work alive and vibrant. Market Your Masterpiece  For writers, understanding how to market your books effectively is essential. Develop a marketing plan that includes book signings, readings, online promotions, and collaborations with other artists. Utilizing platforms like Goodreads for writers or Etsy for crafters can also help you reach audiences looking for your specific creative niche. Optimize for Visibility  As a creative, using SEO techniques to sprinkle relevant keywords throughout your online content can significantly boost your visibility. By optimizing your portfolio, blog, or online store, you ensure your work ranks higher in search results, capturing the attention of more potential fans and customers. This strategic visibility not only draws increased traffic but also connects your art with audiences that are actively seeking your unique expressions. Educate Through Workshops  Conducting workshops or online courses elevates your status as an expert while drawing in an audience eager to learn from your expertise. As you share your skills, you simultaneously open a new revenue stream that benefits both you and your participants. These learners often become advocates for your work, spreading the word through their own social channels and broadening your influence. This ripple effect not only increases your exposure but also solidifies your position as a leader in your creative domain.
Achieving prominence in your creative career goes beyond mere talent; it calls for an active engagement with both digital tools and traditional tactics. Each piece of content you create and every interaction you have are integral to constructing your legacy in the arts. By embracing these tools today, you can forge a path that will lead audiences worldwide to recognize and celebrate your work. Engage relentlessly, innovate consistently, and watch as your efforts transform into a celebrated artistic journey. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  This week’s blog owes its origins to Facebook writers’ groups once more. A common question for consideration is “How do you writers find time to do a full time job, look after your family AND write?” Well, the simple answer is “time management”. When I still worked in business, time management was identified as a skill that some colleagues didn’t possess. They got behind with their work, missed deadlines, suffered with stress and a whole lot of other issues that degraded their performance. When this was discussed at reviews, the answer those colleagues gave was always “I just don’t have enough time!”. However, when the discussion was opened up to discover why the colleague didn’t have enough time, it wasn’t that they were overloaded with work, it was more that they managed their time poorly, which meant that a lot of time in the day was wasted. And this is the difference between writers who manage their time so that they can write, and people who want to write but can’t find the time to do it. We are all the same in many respects – we all have things going on in our lives other than just writing. The difference is how we manage our time so that everything gets done, including our writing. Because the time management issues that act as a barrier in the workplace, can also act as a barrier in the rest of a person’s life. The reasons for this break down to some common areas and I’ll address them under their headings.  Time Bandits At work, Time Bandits are the people who steal time from your working day so that you don’t have enough to do whatever it is that you want (or need) to do. It is the colleague who comes and perches on the corner of your desk and starts to talk about what was on TV last night, or who wants to talk about their troubled love life, or whatever it is they want to unload onto you. It is also the colleague who comes to you looking for a favour, because “they haven’t got time to do it themselves”. We’ve all met these people in the workplace. The key to getting rid of them is to remember that THEIR problems are not YOUR problems. You don’t have to sit there and listen to them. You don’t have to do their work for them. You can ask them to go away. You can even insist by pointing out that you have work to do, even if they don’t seem to have any, and you want to get on with it.  Translating that into home life, it may be the neighbour who stops you outside your house and, instead of just exchanging polite hellos, they start to unburden themselves on you and before you know it, half the day has slipped away. Or maybe the neighbour that pops by “just for a coffee and a chin-wag”. I’m not suggesting that you should be rude to these people. After all, we all have to live side by side, but you do have to find a way to extricate yourself from the situation without causing offence. The easiest way is to invent an urgent engagement. “Sorry, I’d love to stay and listen to your problem, but I have to be at the (whatever) in ten minutes and I’m running late.” Or you can invent something happening inside your home, such as a running tap that needs to be turned off, or a casserole that needs to be attended to. Whatever it is, put a smile on your face and suggest that you really would like to stay and listen to the story about how their bunion operation went, but you really do have to go and turn that tap off. And it isn’t just the people in the street. It’s the phone calls, emails and social media that suck you in to lengthy conversations that you just don’t need to get sucked into. Just don’t allow it. Take control and prevent the Time Bandits from robbing you of valuable writing time.  Distractions Distractions take many forms. Social media is perhaps the greatest distraction of our age, with FOMO dragging us in to make sure we don’t miss the latest video of a cat playing a piano. I am guilty of this one myself. Many’s the time I’ve logged on to social media with the intention of taking a “quick look” only to find myself, 3 hours later, trying to win an argument over which actor was the best James Bond (Sean Connery, obvs). But there are other distractions in our lives, and we have to learn how to deal with them and prevent them from taking up our valuable time. For social media I now set a countdown timer on my phone for the amount of time I can afford to allow myself to be on there. Typically, that is 15 minutes in a day, per social media channel that I use (mainly Facebook and X), so for me that is 30 minutes a day. When the timer runs out and plays its little tune, I then stop whatever I’m doing on social media and get back to doing something more important. Other distractions include TV, YouTube, streaming services (Netflix et al), gaming and more. But here’s the great thing about these distractions – they are inanimate. If you stop doing them abruptly, no one is going to be offended. I now use these sorts of things as rewards for hitting a word count or editing target and similar. That way I can justify my half hour of TV soaps without feeling guilty. But it is only half an hour!  Task Overload This is all about working out what is actually important in your life and what you can get rid of. A lot of the things we do, we do out of habit. If we thought about them we could cut some of them out of our lives completely, or at least reduce the amount of time we spend doing them. A “time management journal” is great to help you sort this out. At the end of each day, take 10 minutes to write down all the things you did that day, and how long you spent doing it. And I do mean everything. Yes, even that 5 minutes you spent making coffee (multiplied by however many cups of coffee you drink each day) and the ten minutes you spent completing your time management journal.. You don’t have to be 100% accurate in your time keeping. If you can approximate to the nearest 15 minutes that is fine. Do that for about a month, then open a spreadsheet on your PC or laptop and create 6 columns. Head 3 of the columns “Essential”, “Desirable” and “Could Live Without” The adjacent column to each of those headings is where you insert the amount of time you spent on each activity each day, and you can total that up at the bottom to show you how much time you spent doing each activity each month..  The aim from here is to move activities out of the “Essential” column and into the “Desirable” column, and from “Desirable” into “Could Live Without”. Now, when it comes to essentials, everyone’s lives are different. Some people have frail family members to look after. Some have children to raise. Some people have to do 2 jobs just to live. Some people are in relationships and others aren’t and have no desire to be. So, what is essential to one person is not necessarily going to be essential to another. You have to decide what is really essential to your life and therefore can’t be moved out of that column. But you don’t have to move an item out of the “Essential” column to benefit. You can reduce the amount of time spent on an activity. My wife assures me that doing the laundry is essential, and I’m not going to risk my life by arguing with her. But ironing sheets is not essential. Nor is ironing towels, socks, underwear and some other types of laundry. By taking my approach to ironing I was able to save nearly 30 minutes a week (2 hours a month) on the laundry task the last time I undertook it. My wife didn’t approve, of course, but she was unable to come up with a valid reason for ironing towels (I think she went back and ironed them later, when I wasn’t around – but that was her time, not mine). The same applies to the “Desirable” column.  I can agree that it is desirable to meet up with friends, but it doesn’t have to be every day (or 2 days, or each week). It also doesn’t have to be with “friends” you don’t actually like that much. Evaluate these activities objectively and ask yourself what you would lose if you were to move them to the “Can Live Without” column, or if you were to reduce the amount of time you spend doing them.. You will be surprised what you can actually live without when you start to take a critical look at your life. I’m not suggesting that you should cut all entertainment out of your life. As we all know, all work and no play makes Jack (or Jill) a dull boy (or girl). Everyone needs to relax and let off steam from time to time. But you may not need quite as much time as you take. That “quick drink” after work that ends up 3 hours later really can be just a quick drink. That trip to the shopping mall with a friend to buy new shoes doesn’t have to take all day. So, at the end of the exercise you have to look at the “Can Live Without” column and, in particular, the total number of minutes that you spend on those activities. That is the amount of time you can free up to do your writing because if you can live without them, you can cut them out without losing anything from your life. Get rid of those things from your life and you WILL have time to write as well as to do the essentials and the desirables. The last time I undertook this exercise (I do it about once every 2 years, because new habits develop without us noticing them) I was able to free up around 10 hours a month from my life. That’s about the time I need to write 10,000 words of a novel.  Dead Time Not all the time we save is in nice chunks like 1 hour. Some of them are a few minutes here and a few minutes there. Those few minutes are “dead time” because they are too little to use productively. Or are they? At the same time there are things we do that have “dead time” included in them. Dead time is also time we spend waiting for something else to happen. Typically, this is things like waiting for buses or trains or waiting for the washing machine to finish its cycle. But that is time that can be used for something else. So, there is one final thing we have to do and that is to plan our lives a little bit better, so we can make use of dead time, or so that we can add those odd minutes of time together to make longer periods.  I discussed laundry a few paras ago, but our washing machine takes about an hour to run the cycle we use, so that’s an hour I could be using to clean the bathroom, for example. Or maybe I could use that hour to work out the plan for the next chapter I’m going to write, Or maybe I can research deadly poisons for use in the murder mystery I’m going to write. You get the idea. The same applies to the time spent waiting for the bus or sitting on the bus. In fact, the only commuting time that can’t be used is if you have to drive yourself. That’s where car shares come in handy, if you can arrange one. It’s also better for the environment. Doing the school run? Maybe you could arrange to take turns with another parent, so they do it one week, and you do it the next. How much more time would that add to your day?  Whatever remains in your “essential” and “desirable” column needs to be planned out and scheduled in, so that you can maximise the “free” time you need to write. Fail to plan – plan to fail!
This is not rocket science. Lots of people have learnt how to do this and, while I can’t claim to have covered every time management technique you may need, I have given you some basics to work with. But the most valuable technique by far is that time management journal. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  When you try to do something, whether it is new to you or familiar, it is always useful to know how the process works. So, it is with selling a book. But to understand how the selling process works, you have to understand it from the point of view of the buyer – which could be you. Imagine you go to a shoe shop to buy new shoes. You may not realise it, but before you even enter the shop you have already made some critical decisions. For example, why did you choose that particular shop and not a different one? Now you are inside the shop, you browse the styles available, and you pick one out. Why did you pick that particular style and not of the hundreds of others on display? What drew you to it? You may not end up buying that shoe, but something about it captured your interest, if only fleetingly. Now, fast forward to the point where you are at the checkout, paying for the shoes you have selected. In terms of decision making, how did you get from picking a style to actually handing over your money? As you can see, from deciding you need new shoes to actually walking out of the shop with your new shoes in your hands, you have gone on a decision making journey. And you go on that same journey no matter what you are buying.  More importantly for you as an author, when readers want to buy a new book they go on that same decision making journey. Your job, as an Indie author, is to guide them through that journey so that it is your book that they buy and not one by another author. It is your job to make sure they buy your Nikes and not someone else’s Adidas. BTW, I’ll be providing some links to useful resources at the end of the blog (for selling books, not shoes) Fortunately, psychologists and experts in sales have mapped out the selling journey for you so that you can learn the path. Unfortunately for you, knowing the path by itself is not enough. You have to do some practical things in order to ensure that the path you know is the same as the path your readers will take. But the path on the map can be described using a simple acronym: AIDA*.  A – Attraction. I – Interest D – Desire A – Action. Those four words make up the “sales funnel” as it is known. That’s the path someone takes while making buying decisions. And we do it every time we buy something, whether we realise we are doing it or not. It is so ingrained in us that a lot of the decisions we make while going through the sales funnel have actually become subconscious. OK, those four words by themselves don’t mean a lot, so I’ll now expand on each in turn to describe what you have to do in practical terms.  Attraction Returning to our shoe shop analogy for the moment, you have to attract the buyer to your shop and make sure they don’t go to another shop instead. In terms of your book that means attracting them to wherever you sell your book. Generally speaking that means the Amazon sales page for whatever book you are trying to sell. But if you don’t sell on Amazon, the same techniques apply. This is about how you communicate with your readers to tell them what book you are selling and where you are selling it. This communication can take many forms, but typically they are social media posts, email newsletters or advertisements. Making these things as attractive as possible is key to the “A” in the sales funnel. So, you need professional standard graphics for your social media posts, newsletters and emails. But the graphics are going to feature your product, which means that your book cover has to be attractive too. And if the reader is attracted by what you have done, they will click the link to find out more about the book. The same applies if the book shows up in search results (I’m not going to get into keywords. If you don’t know about them by now then search the archives for past blogs on the subject). However, in search results the reader will only have the book’s cover and title to work with, which means they have to do an even better job.  Interest OK, you’ve got the reader into your shop - onto the Amazon page (or wherever you sell) for your book. Now you have to turn attraction into interest and that is the job of your blurb. Many authors think that the blurb actually sells the book. It doesn’t. It just nudges the reader through the sales funnel to the next stage. That doesn’t diminish the importance of the blurb, because if it doesn’t pique the reader’s interest, they won’t take that next step and the sale will be lost. So, learning how to write a good blurb is a critical skill in marketing your book. And once you have learnt how to do it, you need to test the blurb to find out if it is as good as you think it is. But the important thing to remember about the blurb is that it has to make the reader want to know more about the book. So, trying to tell the story in your blurb isn’t a very good idea, because if the reader knows the story, they don’t have to buy the book. A lot of blurbs read more like flash fiction than they do a sales pitch. A good blurb stimulates questions, and the reader has to move along the sales funnel in order to get the answers. If you provide the answers in your blurb the reader doesn’t have to buy the book. So, you have to tease the reader. There are just four things you need to tell the reader within the blurb.
Nothing else really matters, so:
But above all, it has to sound exciting, it has to engage with the reader at an emotional level, and it has to leave the reader wanting to know answers to questions they have asked themselves subliminally! When it comes to blurbs, always leave the reader wanting more.  Desire If your blurb has piqued the reader’s interest, they will move along the sales funnel to the next step, which is to desire the book. Many of us will have experienced this in our purchasing lives, that moment where we say “I must have that” about a product. For me it’s usually golf related, for some people it's shoes, for some it's a particular model of car. But for readers it has to be your book! But for your reader it has to be your book. Desire comes from one of two sources and is often a combination of both. Social proof stimulates desire. If other readers are saying your book is a great read, then a new reader will feel confident about buying it. They may buy on the strength of that social proof alone, or they may move on to the other part of the desire equation, which I’ll return to in a moment. On a sales page, social proof comes in the form of reviews. Good strong reviews at 4 stars or better reassures the reader that they are on the right track. This is why reviews have such an impact. I a reader is saying "I loved this book" then other readers will be influenced by that. OK, a brand new book may not have many (or any) reviews, but all is not lost. The other place where desire is stimulated is in the “free sample” (aka “look inside”). Let’s travel back in time to the days when people still went into bookstores to buy books. They didn’t just walk into a bookstore, grab a book and go and pay for it. No, they picked it up, read the blurb on the back cover and, if they were interested, they opened the book and started to read the first few pages. If they got to the point where they ran out of time, there was no way they could put the book back on the shelf. They had to buy it in order to keep reading. The modern day equivalent is the free sample, and it works exactly the same way. If, by the end of the sample, the reader just has to keep reading, they are bound to buy. They may actually reach that point before getting to the end of the sample, which is even better. So those first few thousand words of your book, the ones that are going to be in the free sample, have a lot of work to do to close the deal. If you start off with an info dump about your world, or page after page of backstory, then it is likely that the reader won’t want to carry on reading. Never before has the start of a book been so important.  Action.
This is the “call to action “ or CTA. Fortunately, the retail sites take care of this for us. On Amazon there is a CTA at the end of the free sample, and even if the reader has made up their mind before reaching the end, there is a nice big CTA on the sales page anyway. But your reader has to reach the point where they desire the book, or they won’t respond to the CTA and all the work (and possibly money) you expended on the attraction and interest phases has gone to waste. So, there we have it, the sales funnel from start to finish. If your book isn’t selling, then you have to ask yourself which bit of the sales funnel is letting you down. You then have to ask yourself how to fix it, which is where the resources below may help. For a video on how to make some great graphics for your book, click here. The focus is on Facebook ad graphics, but the same lessons apply to all graphics. The best guide to creating book blurbs I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of them) is Robert J Ryan’s book “Book Blurbs Unleashed”. It really gets into the psychology of blurb writing and once you understand that it will help you to create really effective blurbs. And, bonus, it’s free on KindleUnlimited. Click here to find out more. * The name of a Verdi opera set in Ancient Egypt. If you have never seen it, it’s very good, If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. We're away enjoying the Christmas and New Year festivities, but we'll be back with a new blog on 4th January 2025.  Is it worth Indie authors entering book award contests? If I tell you that none of the book marketing gurus suggest it as a way of marketing books, then you can probably guess the answer. If book awards/contests sold books, then the marketing gurus would be all over them. The biggest awards, eg The Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize, sell a lot of books but we’re talking about Indie authors here and none of us are going to get close to a nomination for those levels of awards! But even those levels of awards don’t sell more books for many of their nominees. We can probably all name a Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize winner, but how many people can name the runners up? Even fewer people can name any nominees? At the most basic level, book contests appeal to the vanity of authors. They say “you know your book is good, so why not come and claim your prize, because winning is a foregone conclusion.” Well, get over yourself. It is readers who decide if a book is any good, not authors.  But I guess all Indies feel tempted to enter book contests from time to time, on the basis that being able to claim that your book is a prize winner will sell you more books. However, sales data doesn’t back that up. Data suggests that being able to put “Winner of the (whatever) Book Award” in your book blurb has very little impact on sales. Being able to put a good quote from a reader’s review in the blurb is far more effective., OK. Maybe winning an award might sell you a few more copies, but what are your chances of winning? The websites that run these awards are businesses and they make money from them, so they want as many entrants as possible. Entry fees can range from as low as $20 (£18 approx) up to several hundred dollars. So, it can be a big money earner for the websites. Let’s say that they manage to attract 1,000 entries. The only books that the readers may be interested in are the winners – or at least the top three. So, you have something like a 999 to one chance of your book winning.  I wouldn’t back a horse at those odds – would you? All the other entrants remain unknown to readers, even if they get a place on the website. They just get lost amongst the other 1,000 entrants that the website attracted to enter the contest. OK, some contests award prizes for the best books in a range of genres. This makes it more likely that an author can win a prize, especially in a niche genre. There are generally recognised to be around 50 genres* (publishers disagree on how many exactly). If you rule out non-fiction, the number of genres shrinks considerably to around 30. But let’s stick with 50. So, 50 winners, and another 100 in second and third places. Add in the overall winners and runners up and that gives you 153 prize winners. But that still leaves 847 entrants without anything to say on their blurb despite having paid their entry fee. And a lot of book contests are considerably bigger than 1,000 entrants, so the probability of winning a prize gets even more remote.  There are book “contests” which, if you pay a large enough entry fee, you are guaranteed to win a prize. You are buying the prize, not winning it.
But readers generally aren’t fooled by those. If they haven’t heard of the prize, they won’t be suckered in by a fake like that. OK, at the end of the day it’s your money. If you want to spend it on entry fees for a book awards, real or phoney, that’s your business. But in terms of increasing sales, you would be better off putting that money towards an advertising campaign. The probability of increasing sales is considerably higher. * Genres are different from book categories. Amazon has thousands of book categories which are created by slicing and dicing the main genres until they are so niche that some have hardly any books in them.. Genres can often be subdivided, eg Fantasy alone subdivides into a dozen different sub-genres, but the overall genre is still fantasy and that is the level at which book contests award prizes. After all, they want to hang onto the entry fees, not pay them out by awarding lots of prizes. 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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