 Week 14 - Differentiate or Die*  Fact: there are currently over 33 million individual book titles listed on Amazon. OK, some of those are in foreign languages or their subject matter is of no interest to your readers, but even taking them into account, there is a lot of competition for the Indie author to contend with. So, two questions: 1. What can you say about your book that will make it stand out from the crowd? and 2. How can you present that message in a way that will appeal to the reader? If you can answer those two questions you have a fighting chance of selling your book. If you can’t, then I suggest taking up fishing or knitting, or anything that isn’t writing books. "you are creative with words" But you are an author. That means you are creative with words. That is a good start. But you also need to engage with other forms of creativity because words alone will no longer sell books. Back in the days when the written word was king it would suffice, but in the 21st century, written promotions are as out of date as water mills to grind corn. Think about the amount of different media that is now available and then think about the sort of content that is most popular.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video has to worth ten thousand. That’s why Twitter sets its character limit at 280. They know that some people don’t want to read messages that are longer than that – but those same people will watch a video. We know that because YouTube is so popular. Differentiating a product is the art of making it more appealing when compared to its competitors. Car makers do that by adding different features to their cars, changing the exterior shape or providing different colour schemes and interior finishes. Ice cream manufacturers do it by selling different flavours. Some businesses differentiate on the basis of quality (“luxury” chocolates, for example) while other differentiate on the basis of price; making their product cheaper than the competition. And the author must do it by making sure that their book is more appealing to the reader than the hundreds of similar books that are available. But authors have to do it before the reader has even sampled the product. “sell the sizzle, not the sausage”  There is a saying in the world of sales: “sell the sizzle, not the sausage”. What that means is that you have to create a vision of the product, rather than the details of what it is. Imagine a sausage (a vegan one if you wish) sizzling away in a pan, the aromas wafting through the air to reach your nose. Imagine it being placed on a plate alongside potatoes and vegetables. Imagine a piece being sliced off and being raised to someone’s lips as they start to eat. Compare that to the actual description of a sausage I found on the internet: “an item of food in the form of a cylindrical length of minced pork or other meat encased in a skin, typically sold raw to be grilled or fried before eating.” Which of those two paragraphs is going to make your mouth water and make you think about going out to buy some sausages? That is how you have to differentiate your books. Saying that your book is a love story about two strangers who meet on a train before being separated by a train crash may be factual, but it isn’t exciting. It is the equivalent of the dictionary description of a sausage. But saying “Alex and Sam were doomed to be parted. Fate had its own plans for them and it would take all their hopes and dreams to bring them together once again. That’s the sausage sizzling description. "everyone can now be a movie director"  Now, imagine that you are watching TV or perhaps YouTube and you were actually presented with the image of Alex and Sam being parted and searching for each other across whatever divides them. Wouldn’t you want to know if they find each other once again? And that is what modern technology allows us to create. Because everyone can now be a movie director. All they need is a phone, some software and a bit of imagination. You don’t even have to have the phone. You can create videos from montages of photographs or other images (providing you have the right to use them). A little bit of training is always helpful and this free course offered by Future Learn is all about creating the right content for the right audiences,  Throughout this series of blogs, we have focused on social media as the way to market books, because it is free (unless you use their paid advertising services). But just because it is free it doesn’t mean that you can’t get creative with it. Microsoft Moviemaker 10 (other free film making packages are available) allows you to do a wide range of things just using slides created from Powerpoint or similar packages, but if you can create video clips with your phone's camera then you can do even more. It isn’t hard to learn to use so go, play, have fun and be creative.  If you think that making a movie is too complicated, try a podcast instead. These allow you to read extracts from your books to stimulate interest. Platforms such as Spotify for Podcasters allow you to upload your podcasts and you can promote them through your social media channels. The one difficult thing about podcasts is making sure that the listener knows which character is speaking, or whose point of view is being observed. Professional narrators often use different voice ptich or different accents, but you will have to find your own way of doing it.  But whatever media you are using for promoting your work, make sure the language is:
If you are writing for a young audience then you can use the sort of relaxed forms of language that young people use, but if your target audience is older, then more formal language may be appropriate. By tone we mean that the words you use match the type of book you have written. If your book is supposed to be humorous, you can adopt a bantering type of tone. If it is serious you have to use a more serious tone. If it is dramatic, then dramatic language is appropriate.  Record yourself saying the words and play them back to yourself. Do they sound right, in the context of the book you have written? If they don’t, your audience may be put off. They certainly won’t be engaged by what you have produced, regardless of the media you are using. Above all you have to create the “sizzle” for your book to encourage the reader to click a link and go to the place where they can buy the book. If they don’t do that then your message has failed. OK, you won’t get a click from very viewer/listener/reader, but if you get enough clicks you will get sales. There are two areas we have yet to cover in detail. First of all, if a reader wants to buy a new book but hasn’t seen any of your social media content (despite your best marketing efforts that’s still a possibility), how do you help them to find it? This is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). We’ll be discussing that next week.  We have covered measurement in passing, within other blogs, but it is an important subject in its own right, because if you don’t measure the right things at the right time, you’ll never know if your marketing strategy is working. And if you don’t know if it’s working, you can’t improve it. So, we’ll also be covering that in next week’s blog.
* Jack Trout, marketing guru. If you have enjoyed this blog and want to make sure you don’t miss future editions, you can sign up for our newsletter. Just click the button below. Don’t be afraid, we promise not to “spam” you and if you don’t like it, you can unsubscribe later.
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Week 12 - “Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time.” *  Marketing pioneer John Wannamaker There will come a time when you, as an Indie author, are tempted to spend some of your hard-earned money on advertising your book, but is this a wise thing to do? That is the subject of this week’s blog. The marketing pioneer John Wannamaker (1838-1922) is famous for saying “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” That quote resonates especially with small businesses and people like Indie authors, because they can’t afford to waste any money, let alone half of what they spend on anything. But we have to remember that times were different back in Wannamaker’s day.  True, it is sometimes difficult to establish cause and effect. If you launch an advertising campaign and you then sell a book, is it because of a response to the advert, or because the purchaser had the book recommended to them by a friend? But that is just a single purchase. If sales increase over the entire period of an advertising campaign, it is far easier to establish cause and effect. "it is sometimes difficult to establish cause and effect" We also have to consider the metrics (measurements) available in Wannamaker’s day. They were fairly primitive; basically just money spent, newspaper and magazine circulation figures, and sales achieved. Today, however, on-line advertisers can provide users with a wide range of information regarding the performance of their adverts.  For example, Facebook Ads offer these measurements: - Reach – how many people saw the advert while they were using Facebook. - Total post engagement – The number of actions taken when the ad was viewed (likes, shares, link clicks). - Clicks – How many people clicked on a link in the ad. - Likes – how many likes the post earned. Technically speaking, Facebook doesn’t call this an “advertisement”, it is just “boosting your post”, but it is the same thing. Click on Facebook’s “Ad Centre” and you get exactly the same range of posting options, but they charge you a lot more – a £100 minimum budget compared to a £10 minimum for boosting your post. "If your ad is being seen by a lot of people, but you aren’t getting many engagements, something is wrong" If you can see how much “reach” you get, you can compare that to the number of engagements you got (clicks, likes and shares). If your ad is being seen by a lot of people, but you aren’t getting many engagements, something is wrong with the ad or its targeting. If you know how many clicks you got, you can then compare that with sales made and make a calculation of conversions from clicks to sales – and therefore work out how much each click cost you and earned you, eg, if your ad cost £10 and you got 1,000 clicks, each click cost you a penny. If you then made 10 sales, each sale cost you £1, with a conversion rate of 1 sale per 100 clicks. If you made £3 from each sale, it means you made £20 profit on the campaign.  Trying to disentangle multiple campaigns. The problem comes when you mount multiple campaigns running concurrently, using different advertising platforms. Although you can see which advertiser is getting you the most clicks for your money, there is no way to work out which clicks are generating the sales. You may be getting 1,000 clicks a day from an ad on Facebook, but you may be getting 10,000 clicks from an ad on Google. But if you got a total 10 sales from the two campaigns, you won’t know which ad on which platform generated the most sales. You are forced into assuming that Google is delivering the better results because they generated more clicks - but assumptions can be wrong. For this reason, we at Selfishgenie Publishing only advertise each of our books on one platform at a time, so we can be sure which adverts are generating our sales. That is also our recommendation for you.  We then compare advertising platforms to decide where to spend our money next time. We don’t necessarily ignore a platform, but we may reduce our spending on one and increase it on another. We are also able to compare budget size to results. For example, doubling the budget for an ad campaign might double sales, but it might also treble them or quadruple them – or have no effect at all. "Advertising a bad book will never lead to a profit" Throwing money into advertising can work. On all the social media platforms we discuss, the more you spend, the more people who will see your advert which means more potential buyers. But be very sure about the quality of your product. Advertising a bad book will never lead to a profit. Money saving tip - if you have published a series, advertising the series is cheaper than advertising each individual title. But you have to make sure that the series is properly set up on Amazon so that you can link to it. Consult the KDP website on how to do that.  When it comes to social media advertising, we have used four platforms: Facebook, Amazon, Google and Twitter (we treat Google and Amazon as social media for these purposes, even though they aren’t). Some of them are better than others for producing results and why that should be comes from the discussion we had in earlier blogs about audience targeting. Google has by far the largest “reach” of all the platforms. An incredible 10 billion Google searches are made each month. It is used by more people per hour and in more countries than any other platform on the internet. But that doesn’t mean that it’s the best place for us to advertise. Facebook allows far better targeting of audiences, which means that, although fewer people will see our advertisement, more of them will be the people that our books are aimed at. But we have to also consider age profiles in terms of their use of social media. Older people prefer Facebook to Twitter, whereas it’s the reverse for younger readers. So, although Twitter may not be as good an advertising platform as Facebook in general terms, it may be better for us than Facebook if a book is aimed at younger audiences.  As you can see, choosing the place to spend your money is neither an easy nor a quick decision. In terms of rankings for advertising, this blog rated the following platforms in terms of their number of users, genders and age demographics: 1. Facebook, both genders, 18-65 2. Twitter, both genders, 18 -49 3. Instagram, both genders, 18-64 4. Pinterest, women, 18-64 5. Linkedin, both genders 25-64 The principal criteria used for ranking, however, is number of users.  Numbers of users doesn’t tell the whole story, however. The ability to refine target groups is one of the most important considerations in advertising. It’s called market “segmentation”, being able to break a potential audience down the way an orange can be divided into segments, so that you only direct your advertising to the segment(s) that are most likely to be receptive. The ability to reach over 2 billion users with Facebook isn’t much good if most of them don’t read books. Because it is the book readers that you want to reach. So, I have done a bit more work to show you what each platform is able to provide. Targeting Facebook Google Amazon Twitter Region/country Yes Yes Yes - Note 1 Yes Gender Yes No No Yes Interests (eg science) Yes No No Yes Use of Keywords Yes Yes Yes - Note 2 Yes Write your own ad or post Yes Yes No - Note 3 Yes Other Note 4 Notes:
 Twitter posts get their highest visibility for only 24 minutes after posting, whereas Facebook posts remain most visible for 3 hours after posting and this visibility remains true for advertising, 75% of all the people who will see a Twitter ad will see it in the first 3 hours, whereas 75% of all those who will see a Facebook ad will see it during the first 5 hours. This greater longevity for Facebook means that you cover longer time periods each day. If you post at midday and one of your targeted readers doesn’t log into Facebook until 4 pm, it is quite likely that they will still see your ad. But on Twitter it is less likely. You may think I’m pointing you towards Facebook, but I’m not. There are reasons for choosing Facebook over Twitter and reasons for choosing Twitter over Facebook. If your target audience is older, Facebook is the place to spend your money. If they are younger, then its Twitter. You will notice that I haven’t mentioned Instagram, Pinterest or Linkedin much. That’s because they aren’t platforms with which we have much experience. Certainly, in terms of audience rankings, they fall behind Facebook and Twitter, but we also know that, in Instagram’s case at least, they are more used by younger audiences. So, where does that leave us?  Basically, with a lot of decision making. First of all, it is no use advertising unless you analyse the data that is collected during your campaign. If you aren’t getting much engagement from your ad, these may be the reasons:
If you are getting engagement but few sales, then these may be the reasons:
 The only one of those things that you can’t fix is the last one. Actually, there is something you can do about that last one. You can “unpublish” the book. It isn’t selling and it isn’t helping you, but it may be affecting the sales of other titles, or it may affect the sales of future books. There is nothing you can do about the reviews themselves. If you have 100 good reviews (4 and 5 star) and only a couple of bad ones, then the bad ones don’t really matter. But if you have 100 bad reviews but only a couple of good ones, then you have a problem. If you unpublish the book, it is as though it never existed (except for those few people who did read it). You can start afresh with the next book. But don’t try to republish under a different title or pen name to fool the readers. If a previous reader buys it and spots what you’ve done, they will complain to the retailer and that could get you barred from their site.  Advertising does work; if it didn’t businesses wouldn’t spend so much money on it. But we also know, from the adverts we see on TV, that there are good adverts and bad adverts and a bad advert is a waste of money.
Sometimes, however, it isn’t always easy to see the direct success of an advertising campaign. I’ll give you an example. We recently ran an advert for Operation Absolom, the first book in Robert Cubitt’s “Carter’s Commandos” series. The campaign did alright but didn’t set the world on fire in terms of results; it covered its costs and returned a small profit. However, a couple of days later we noticed that sales started to increase for book 2 in the series, then book 3 and finally book 4. By advertising the first book, we had created some new fans who read the rest of the series and, hopefully, will now also buy book 5, which has now been released. The end result, measured over a longer time period, was a much higher profit on the campaign. This delayed reaction is something to consider if you are the author of a series of books. We’ve discussed “content” before, but it is an important subject, especially if you have to create your own content to support your social media marketing, so next week we’re returning to that topic. * Henry Ford If you have enjoyed this blog and found it informative, then be sure not to miss any future editions. Sign up to receive our newsletter by clicking the button below. Week 12- Location, Location, Location  There is one P of the marketing mix we haven’t really touched on yet and that is Place. This comes in two different forms for the Indie author – where to sell your books and where to promote them. We’ll start with where to sell. There are a lot of Indie authors (and other people) who get very snooty about Amazon. Because it is so big and because its owner is so rich, they take a “stand against the man” and won’t trade with them. OK. You’re entitled to your view and I respect it. But let me tell you something. In 2019 Amazon accounted for 47% of all self-published books sold in the world, in all formats. That leaves all the others (Kobo, BookNook, Smashwords, Lulu, et al) dividing up the other 53% between them. No matter what your favourite platform, it is never going to match Amazon in terms of market share. "it is never going to match Amazon in terms of market share"  Amazon are shy about revealing details of how many Kindles have been sold, but the estimates are between 20 million and 90 million. Some of those will probably be shared between users. There is no data that I can find on how many times the Kindle app has been downloaded, but it is available to everyone who has a digital device if they fancy reading a Kindle book. That is an estimated 5.2 billion phone handsets and an estimated 1.14 billion tablets. Trust me, Amazon aren’t paying me to tell you these things. I’m just providing the data and you can make your own decisions. Can you really afford not to be on Amazon? Can you really afford not to link your book to Amazon if you are already on there? OK, that’s just going to make Amazon bigger, but it is in the hands of the other retailers to try and compete with Amazon, but right now they aren’t even in the game, let alone inside the stadium and fighting for a win.  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be on the other platforms. It makes sense to be everywhere you can, but the most likely place for your book to sell is the Big A. One of the advantages of some of the other platforms is that some of them allow the author to offer coupons and other ways to provide discounts and free books to readers. You can do this on Amazon but it is far harder. For example, we passed a milestone for a number of followers on Twitter, so we Tweeted a Smashwords coupon code for a 100% discount on one of our books that was only valid for 24 hours. We got several downloads (and lots of new Twitter followers) and then a couple of sales from people who missed the cut-off time for the coupon but decided they wanted to read the book anyway. We couldn’t have done that with Amazon.  Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) programme is the biggest subscription service/lending library for Indie books. This puts the Indie author into a bit of a quandary. Because it is part of KDP’s T&Cs that you can’t enrol your eBook on KU if it is published on another platform. Sneaky, I know. So, you now have to try to work out whether you are going to be financially better off by not enrolling in KU and selling through multiple platforms, or whether your sales on other platforms aren’t worth you being there, so it is better to be on KU instead. That’s not always an easy choice to make.
books. That is part of your market research. For example, women are more likely buy Kindles than men – but men are more likely to become permanent Kindle users than women, if they have one. Maybe it is just that women buy the Kindles as gifts for men in the first place, but I have no evidence to back up that supposition. The good news is there’s room for some trial and error. You can enrol your book in KU at any time, so if you aren’t making sales on the other platforms you can de-list the book and enrol it on KU instead. It’s harder to unenroll from KU as you have to wait until the end of a 3 month period and if you miss the date it will auto-enrol you for another 3 months.  Now, which social media platforms are you going to use to reach your target audience? We touched on this in earlier blogs but it is time to take a more in-depth look. The demographics of social media usage varies from platform to platform. Those that are better for visual images, especially video, tend to be more popular with young people. The ones that allow you to “tell a story” in words, like Facebook, are more used by people in the 30 to 50 age group. This is going to affect your choice of platform and your choice of messages. You can be on all of them, of course, but you are going to waste some of your effort by concentrating on the wrong ones. Platform usage also varies from country to country, so here’s some stats:
 From that you might assume that the UK is all on Twitter. You would be wrong. When you look at the actual number of users it goes FB (38 million), Insta (28 million) then Twitter (17 million) so the place to be seen would appear to be FB. The same applies to the USA (310m, 95m and 68m). What makes it more difficult is that these numbers change every year. Those are the ones for 2020. Who knows where people will be by the end of 2021. But what this means is that if you are targeting a global population for your books, you can analyse data like that and decide which platform is going to be best for you to concentrate on in that country. In both the USA and UK, it is most definitely FB, not Twitter. This becomes even more significant when it comes to spending money on advertising (a topic for a later blog), then clearly you are better off spending your hard-earned cash on FB advertising, not Twitter, because FB can reach more people. "In both the USA and UK, it is most definitely FB, not Twitter. "  Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg Of course, that takes us back into the world of personal politics because a lot of people don’t like Mark Zuckerberg and don’t want to make him any richer than he is. On the other hand, those same people want to sell books. Whatcha gonna do? You can slice and dice the data in a number of other ways. For example, is your target audience college educated? If yes, then more college educated people use Facebook than Twitter. Is your ideal reader a high-income earner? Then Facebook is also the place for you. On all 3 platforms the largest proportion of users is amongst the higher income bracket, but on FB it is a massive 74% of high-income earners. That is to say, of all those users of social media who are high income earners, 74% will use FB but only 31% will use Twitter. "You can slice and dice the data in a number of other ways" Where did all that data come from? It came from this website, to which we provided a link in a previous blog. The data relates mainly to users in the USA, but there is no reason to suggest that the data doesn’t transpose to the UK, especially when you look at that number of users for the different countries that are shown above.  Market research companies allow some of their data to be accessed, which can be helpful. For example, on the Yougov website (registration is free) I discovered that fans of Bernard Cornwell are more likely to be male, over 55, interested in history and politics and follow the news and, when it comes to reading, they want to find a series that “they can dive into for a while”. Now that I know that age bracket, I can find out which social media platform they are most likely to use and target them on that and I know what sort of messages they are going to be interested in reading and engaging with. OK, the amount of data I got from Yougov wasn’t that much, but they make their money by selling data, not giving it away for free. Having registered with them I’ll probably be bombarded with emails inviting me to take out a subscription. I may not need to, because the insights I got from them without paying were high value in terms of audience profiling.  Best-selling author Bernard Cornwell Why Bernard Cornwell? Well, I’m a fan. But I could have got similar data for the readers of authors of any genre of book that we publish. Because their fans are probably the people we want to target for advertising.
As you can see this is, again, very time-consuming stuff. If you are juggling family, work and being an author, you haven’t got much time leftover for marketing. Well, I don’t want to pressure you, but you can always find someone who can do some of it for you. Yes we will take a share of your royalties, but a share is better than no royalties at all. In the next edition of this blog we’re going to look at the one place where you may be tempted to spend some money – advertising. Is it something an Indie author should be considering? If you have enjoyed this blog and found it informative, make sure you don't miss future editions by signing up to receive our newsletter. Just click the button. Week 11 - What Price Fame?  Best-selling author Bernard Cornwell In September this year, Bernard Cornwell is bringing out a new “Sharp” novel and to pre-order it for Kindle will cost you £14.99. So, as a self-published, Indie author, what price should you set for your next masterpiece? Let’s look at the economics of pricing a book. Publishers, even quite small ones, have costs they must cover: rent, utilities, editing, proofreading, marketing, distribution, “back office” staff etc. All of these costs have to be recovered and, to help the company’s balance sheet, they like to recover those costs within the financial year in which the book is published. To keep the shareholders happy, the company also needs to make a profit. "the author needs to make a living" Then the author needs to make a living, so some income for the author has to be factored into the price, which also has to take into account the percentage that will be paid to the author’s agent, anywhere between 10% and 20% of the author’s royalties (the author pays the agent, not the publisher).  Finally, a well-known author like Cornwell has a loyal fanbase who are eagerly awaiting this book and who are prepared to pay top price in order to be amongst the first to read it. You have seen a similar effect with fans queuing to be the first to be the owners of the new iPhone or PlayStation. Put those three things together and you get the price that is being asked for “The New Sharp Novel” as it somewhat bizarrely titled (I suspect that’s just a placeholder until Cornwell decides what the title will be). Once the publisher has recovered their initial costs, usually after a year, they start to reduce the price of the book while maintaining the level of royalties they pay to the author. You can pick up most of Cornwell’s back catalogue as eBooks for around £6.99. The price of the hardback is usually reduced when the paperback is released, perhaps 6 months after launch. Even paperback prices are reduced over time.  So, how much do you think you should charge for your books? Firstly, you don’t have most of those overheads. You have expended time to write the book and you may have paid for some services, such as editing or cover design, you may also have to pay for some marketing activity, but those costs are miniscule when compared to those of a major publisher. Interestingly you can make the same royalties, per copy, for your book charging quite a modest price as Bernard Cornwell will at £14.99 a pop. The difference in income between you and him is that he will sell hundreds of thousands of copies, but you will probably be doing well to sell a few hundred copies. At least, until you are better known. I don’t know why you got into writing, but if it was to become a millionaire, you are barking up the wrong tree. According to this research, the average annual royalties for an author in the UK in 2018 was a fraction over £16,000. The top 10% of authors earn 70% of all royalties. These are the big, well-known names. A statistician will tell you that it is the top 10% that is keeping the average as high as it is. I’ll just to do the maths for you: if you price your book to pay you £3 per copy in royalties, you have to sell 5,300 copies to make the average annual income – without taking your other costs into account. The mode (that’s statistics jargon meaning what the largest number of authors earn) is much lower than the average. It’s less than £11k, or 3,700 sales. "If you want to make money don't become an author, become a publisher." So, even if you can climb to the dizzy heights of earning the average income for an author, you will struggle to live on it. By comparison, the 2020 UK average wage was a fraction over £30k. It is interesting to note that many of the authors who are signed to mainstream publishers are probably earning less than their editors. They are certainly earning less than the middle ranking managers in the publishing company. If you want to make money don't become an author, become a publisher.  The big money for authors isn’t in selling books; it is in selling the TV and film rights to their books. Not only do they go for a large lump sum (and probably a “percentage of the gross”), they also catapult book sales into the stratosphere. It should be remembered that the first print run for “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (Sorcerer’s Stone in the USA) was only 500 copies, 300 of which went to libraries. It took two years to sell 300,000 copies in the UK. You need to sell around 100,000 copies to make it to the Sunday Times best-sellers list.  But that hasn’t answered the question: for what price should I sell my book? The answer is, it’s up to you. Some authors believe in setting a low price, hoping to sell more copies. Others set a higher price because they place a higher value on the content. I don’t believe in setting too low a price. I think the readers look at the price and say “If it’s that cheap it can’t be very good” and pass it by. Besides, if you want to drop the price to boost sales, perhaps ahead of the release of a sequel, then you have nowhere to go. "When you sell on Amazon, they set a minimum price" When you sell on Amazon, they set a minimum price (some other platforms also do that). The minimum price is what Amazon thinks they deserve for allowing you to use their platform, which includes delivery via their internet channels. Above that you can sell at whatever price you wish. We set a price of between £2.99 and £4.99 depending on the length of the book. That gives a total royalty between £1 and £3 (approx) per copy. But that is shared 50:50 with the author.  As suggested, there are times when we reduce the price. Amazon will allow us to do that once per title every three months, for up to 5 days per quarter. We will take advantage of that if we want to stimulate interest in a series ahead of the next book being released. Amazon also allows a book to be given away for free using the same parameters and we have also done that. What do the experts say? Well, we came across this article which seems to cover the main points. Now to Kindle Unlimited (KU), Kindle Select and Kindle Lending Library. These are three names for pretty much the same thing. Readers pay a subscription to these services (they also get it free with their Prime subscription) and the income for that (after Amazon has deducted its fees) is pooled. Every time a reader downloads and reads a book, the author gets a share of the pool. This is currently about 0.5p per standard page (ie standard Kindle sized page) read. So, if your book is 300 pages long and the reader reads it all the way through, you will earn about £1.50. Depending on the sale price, that may be less than if they bought the book.  Because of this disparity, there is a difference of opinion about whether to allow your book to be listed on these services (you do have a choice). Part of that is because the big names don’t use these services. But there’s a reason they don’t use them – it takes too long for them to recover their overheads. But Indie authors don’t have that problem. “But if they download my book for free, I won’t make so much money.” is the usual objection. But you will make some money and if they don’t download your book for “free” you don’t make any money. Let me give you an example. If someone sees a film on Amazon they want to watch, but they also subscribe to Netflix, are they going to buy the film from Amazon? No, of course they aren’t. They’re going to download it for “free” from Netflix. The same applies to these other subscription services. The reader may be interested in your book, but if they can’t download it for “free”, they’ll pass it by and find one they can. Just so you know, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited paid out over $250 million (quarter of a $ billion) to Indie authors in 2019. It currently accounts for 14% of all books read. So, we enrol most of our titles in those programmes, unless the author asks us not to.  By the way, if you are a KU subscriber and you download a book but don’t finish it (for whatever reason), don’t just stop turning the pages. Please keep clicking through until the end. That way the author gets the full share of the pool for that book. It’s a small thing, but it is a good thing to do to help other Indie authors and it costs you nothing. Giving away books for free - other than through the subscription services - is something we are reluctant to do. The thinking is that the free book will raise the author’s profile and the reader will buy other titles by the same author. We have little evidence that, for example, giving away the first book in a series will encourage a new reader to buy the second book. There seems to be plenty of readers who are only interested in free books and will take them, but that is all they do. We don’t even know if they actually read them. It’s a bit like a pub giving away a beer brand for free for a period as a promotion. The drinkers will take the free beer for as long as it lasts, but they won’t necessarily buy it when it’s sold at its normal price. They often go back to their usual tipple.  We do give away one title for free every Christmas as a good will gesture.
It’s called “An Alternative Christmas Carol” and it gets a lot of downloads. Strangely, when we take it off free offer after Christmas, we often sell a couple of copies. Bizarre! You can find out more about "An Alternative Christmas Carol" by clicking on the link, but if you want it for free you'll have to come back at Christmas. So, that’s pricing for you. If you think you can sell at a high price – try it, but don’t be surprised if readers don’t buy the book. Better to be modest when you start out (< £5) and increase your prices later when you have established your reputation. One final tip: never make your price a whole number of £s (or other currency). For some reason customers prefer to see .99 at the end of a price. We know - it doesn't make sense to us either, but it makes sense to customers and the customer is King (or Queen). If you have enjoyed this blog and found it interesting, make sure you don't miss out on future editions by signing up to our newsletter. Just click the button. Week 10 - I Hear What You’re Saying  It doesn’t matter how many people you engage with on social media, if the messages you send them aren’t clear, they won’t buy your book. So that is the subject of this week’s blog – coming up with clear marketing messages. There are a number of ways to create content and creative people are coming up with new ways all the time. But we’ll start with the basics and you can get creative yourself once you have got the idea. If you’d like to do some training in this topic, our old friends at Future Learn offer an online course that is (yay) free and you can sign up for it anywhere in the world. We recommend it. For this blog we’re going to look at two specific types of content.  You will recall, all the way back in Week 2 of this blog, I mentioned the “elevator pitch”. I said that it wasn’t much good for approaching an agent, but it did have its uses elsewhere. Well, this is “elsewhere”. If you haven’t read that blog and don’t know what an elevator pitch is, it’s a short description of your book, designed to catch the attention of a potential audience in a very short space of time – typically the duration of a ride in an elevator, hence its name. Elevator pitches aren’t unique to the publishing world. They can be used in any interaction where you need to get an idea across quickly and concisely. Imagine you are at a party and you find yourself in conversation with a stranger. “What do you do for a living?” They ask.  “I’m an author.” you reply (because you are if you want to sell your books, no matter what you actually do to earn a living). “Oh, that’s interesting.” They say, because this is a party and they feel obliged to make small talk. “What sort of books do you write?” “Well, my latest book is …” And you launch into your elevator pitch, which is basically your book’s description in thirty to sixty seconds. Then you pause. If their eyes have glazed over and they change the subject, let it drop – don’t bore them to death with it. But if they say “Oh, that sounds intriguing,” They may ask you more and you can feel free to elaborate until they run away screaming.
there are so many available on the internet already. This is one I found quite quickly. If you don’t like that one, there are plenty more where that came from. But that elevator speech is your basic marketing message for use on social media because it is concise and easy to understand. If you can get it down to 280 characters, then it’s ideal for Twitter, but if you can’t then it can still be used on other social media.  Here’s a trick for Twitter. Turn your message into a picture. Use Powerpoint (other graphics packages are available), put your elevator pitch into a text box, insert the cover image alongside it and save it as a .jpg (image) file. All you need to do then is upload it into your Tweet and add a link so that anyone interested can click through to its retail page on whatever platform you are using for sales. But, of course, you can also use the same “slide” for other social media. But you don’t have to stop there. If you can set up a series of slides you can join them together and make them into a video using packages such as “moviemaker”. Or you can make some actual videos with yourself or family members in them. These are ideal for use on Youtube and Instagram (you could actually video yourself in a party situation, in conversation with a “party guest”). I have what is known as a “good face for radio”, which is a euphemism for being ugly, so I wouldn’t want to be in a video, but there’s nothing wrong with my voice, so I can do a voiceover for a video made up of slides  Some music helps and you can find stuff to download for free on this website. You can also find some sound effects there. You may want to edit the soundtrack or music clip, and there is a package called Audacity which can also be downloaded for free. It isn’t easy to use, so be prepared to take some time to learn how. With Audacity you can also create and edit your own podcasts and you can upload them to sites such as Spotify for Podcasters. (other websites for podcasters are available). But if you are going to do a podcast, you are going to need a lot more material than just your elevator pitch.
available on some retail platforms. Your elevator pitch provides the intro, to “hook” the listener and then the extract reels them in. I think you can see that this is all very time consuming, which is why small publishers want 50% of your royalties if you sign with them. If you are a full-time author you may have time to do all this marketing, but if you have a day job and a family to juggle, then it becomes more challenging. But if your books aren’t selling and you aren’t doing some (or all) of this stuff, then that may be one of the reasons. "But if your books aren’t selling .... that may be one of the reasons."  Next, I’m going to take a look at your book’s “blurb”. The blurb is the book’s description that appears beneath the cover image on the retail website and will also appear on the back cover of a hard copy book – or maybe on an inside page. You will find a lot of blogs about writing elevator pitches, but not nearly so many about writing blurbs. That’s because elevator pitches are mainly considered as being a tool to catch an agent’s eye. If you do that, they will find you a publisher and publishers have people who are paid to write blurbs, so the author doesn’t need to know how to do it. But you are here, reading this blog, which means you haven’t got an agent, nor a publisher who employs a blurb writer. So, you need to know how to do this for yourself. Imagine yourself walking along the street and you happen to glance sideways through a window before looking back to where you are going. After a fraction of a second your brain catches up with your feet and says “Hang on, there was something going on in there, but I don’t know what.” Well, that is the elevator pitch. Now you go back and take a proper look through the window and see someone being attacked with an axe. That is the blurb.  Like the elevator pitch, the blurb has to be concise. If it starts to go on too long the reader will lose interest and move onto another book. But it also has to tell the reader that this is a book that they will enjoy reading, which means it can’t be too short. We found this blog that provides some useful tips. They tie in well with an approach using a fishing metaphor: hook, line and sinker (it’s also the titles of the books in a trilogy by Len Deighton, but that’s another story - sorry, pun intended).  The hook is a short, snappy statement designed to catch the eye, just like the hook catches the fish (that would make the elevator pitch the “bait”). This is the sort of thing we mean: “When you’re up to your backside in alligators, it’s hard to remember that the object of the exercise was to drain the swamp.” That sort of sentence excites all sorts of questions, not least, “what does it mean?”. Thinking about your own book, what sort of short, snappy sentence or couple of sentences could you come up with that would catch the eye? Typical romance ones usually focus on unrequited love. Crime thrillers mention the bizarre nature of a murder. The hook for one of our author’s books, Operation Absolom, is “There’s an old saying in the Army, ‘Never volunteer for anything’. It has been said many times, so why on Earth did Steven Carter ignore it?” Straight away you get two things from that: The book has something to do with the Army, and also the main character’s name. But he obviously volunteers for something that he later regrets – but what is it? If you have to find out what he volunteered for, you are "hooked".  The “line” is where you flesh out the plot and characters for the reader. It will be about a paragraph in length, saying enough to keep the interest going, but not so much that you are giving the book away for free. That’s why it needs to be limited a to a paragraph in length – probably no more than 100 words. Returning to Operation Absolom, here’s the “line” we used: “After volunteering for the Army Commandos, Carter finds himself cut off in enemy occupied Norway. It’s winter, it’s cold and the enemy is hunting for him. Can he survive against all these odds? Even if the Nazis don’t capture him, can he find a way back to England?” So, now we know what Carter volunteered for and why he may now be regretting it. We are also setting up the background against which the story is told – Nazi occupied Norway. Finally, we are asking a “cliff-hanger” question – will the hero escape? If the reader wants the answer to that question, they know what they have to do.  People like to read books similar to the ones they have already read and enjoyed. It is a comfort to them – even if it is frustrating for new authors. So, if you can compare your book to well-known books that the reader may have enjoyed, it tells the reader that they might enjoy this one as well. So, the “sinker” is “If you enjoy the stories of (inset well-known author’s name) and (insert another well-known author’s name) then you will love (insert book title) by (insert author’s name). You can jazz that final paragraph up a bit more if you want, by saying things like “tenser than …. more dramatic than …. more tear jerking than ….” etc. But you don’t have to name authors. You can just use a well-known title or even a film or TV series. Our blurb for “The Deputy Prime Minister” compares it to “House of Cards” and “The West Wing”. Amazon, who know a bit about book marketing, suggest a word count of about 150 for a blurb. That’s only a target, of course, but it gives you something to aim for.  The whole idea of the blurb is to encourage the reader to “look inside” ie start reading the book, just as they might if they were standing in a bookshop with the book in their hand. If you succeed you have a better than 50:50 chance of the reader buying the book. Let’s face it, if you have got the reader this far, the only reason for not buying the book is that, based on the ‘look inside’, they don’t like it or they think it is poorly written. Which is the other main reason your book may not be selling. It doesn’t matter how much marketing you do, if the reader doesn’t like that ‘look inside’ bit, they aren’t going to buy your book. But that is for you to reflect on.
you want, but it’s not so easy to refresh your blurb. Basically you have to republish your book, so taking your time to work on your blurb is time well spent. Why not try it out on your beta readers as well? Send them two or three versions and see which one they prefer. They might even be able to suggest improvements.
Like your elevator pitch, your blurb can be used on social media. It is quite well suited for Facebook, for example, with a link to the book’s retail page so the reader can ‘look inside’, or perhaps to a website where they can get a free extract, as discussed in last week’s blog. Your blurb can be turned into a video and used as the introduction to an extract in a podcast. If you know how to do it, you could even produce an animation. The limit is your own imaginations and skills – and how much you are willing to spend on software packages. We would advise keeping things simple (and free) to start with, then perhaps re-investing some of your royalties later, once you have sold some books. Talking about selling, what should be the price of your book? That’s what we take a look at next week. If you have enjoyed this blog and found it informative and you don't want to miss an edition, make sure you sign up for our newsletter. Just click the button below. Week 9 - Timing Is Everything  Imagine, if you will, that you are a British author, but for reasons we won’t go into, you are living in Australia. Your books are aimed at a British audience mainly. Australians may read them as well (you hope they do), but when you were sitting writing your book, you had visions of busy London streets, leafy Surrey lanes or majestic Scottish glens. Q. You want to use social media to tell your British readers about your new book. When is the best time for you to post on social media? A. When your audience is awake and using social media, of course. Ah, but you are in Australia, which means that when your audience is awake, you are asleep and vice versa. That is going to present a problem. But that is an extreme example. There are, however, many different times when different people are online and knowing when your audience is online is critical to your social media marketing campaign.  Nurses, who work shifts, don’t get much time for social media while they’re at work, so they use social media when they finish their shift, which could be midnight, 6 a.m. or the middle of the day. But if your target audience includes nurses, you will want to be posting to social media at the time they are using it. Think about it – when do toy manufacturers advertise their toys? When they know children will be watching TV. Yes, we know that it’s the adults who buy the toys, but it’s the kids who pester the life out of the parents to buy them.
sporting events, of course – but also when people are getting back from the pub after having one drink too many and not wanting to go to bed just yet (ah, the good old days). The timing of your messages has to be just as targeted. It’s no good knowing who your target audience is and what they are interested in, if you are in bed when they are on social media. There is a myriad of information on the internet that can help you to identify the best times of day to use different social media platforms and even what days are best and which are worst (Saturday isn’t a good day for Twitter, apparently).  You’ll have to do some digging (Well, you didn’t think we were going to do it all for you, did you?) OK, we’ll help a bit. This website shows what times to post in generic terms, but doesn’t give you much insight into such things as age, employment, gender etc. There are plenty of blogs on the subject on that website, dig around a bit and you should find what you are looking for. Here’s a couple of facts for you. A post on Facebook is most read during the first 1½ hours after posting. After that the number of people who will see it starts to dwindle towards zero. 75% of the people who will see it, will view it in the first 5 hours after posting.
minutes. Yes, 24 minutes after you post your Tweet, fewer and fewer people will see it. On Twitter, 75% coverage is achieved after 3 hours. That’s why timing is so important.  These statistics are vital for engagement. If you want to stay engaged, you have to be there when people see and respond to your post, especially on Twitter. If you go back the next day, or even later the same day, the world has moved on already. That’s why you have to be careful of claims such as “We have a gazillion followers to whom you can Tweet”. Very few of that gazillion will ever actually see your Tweet. A portion (of unknown size) of that gazillion followers will actually see it and out of that portion, 75% of them will see it in the first 3 hours after posting. That could mean that only ten people from your target audience will actually see it. The rest of the gazillion just aren't interested or will never see the post. "to keep your marketing message “fresh” on social media, you have to keep posting at regular intervals" If your head is starting to hurt, we don’t blame you. Ours is hurting too. What that all means, however, is that to keep your marketing message “fresh” on social media, you have to keep posting at regular intervals. But that means that you have to interrupt your work, sleep, leisure time, etc to keep on posting.  Fortunately help is at hand. There are websites that will allow you to set up and schedule posts in advance. When the clock ticks over to the appointed time, your post will magically appear on your chosen platform while you continue to snore your head off, or play golf or complete the monthly report on the snail population of the Galapagos Islands, or whatever it is you are usually doing at that time. Unfortunately, most of these websites charge for their services. This one, Hootsuite, does offer you a 30 day free trial so you can see if it is right for you and they also offer a free package with limited functionality. But the big advantage of sites like this is that you can sit down for a couple of hours once a week to schedule all your posts to that one platform in one go, then get on with the rest of your week without having to worry about them. If you have Facebook business page, which is different from a personal page, you can schedule posts for free. Look under the "publishing tools" menu for more information. You can also schedule Tweets. It's one of the little row of icons underneath where you insert your message (the one on the right with the calendar symbol and the little clock). Hootsuite and the other sceduling apps are quite picky about you sending out identical messages time after time, but that’s because of the rules governing spam. We like to post in the afternoon and again in the evening, so when we duplicate a post, we schedule it for the evening of the next day, rather than for the same day. That seems to get past the problem, but you may have to edit the message if it is specific to a single day - or limit it to one posting.  This blog is posted at midnight every Friday night, but do you imagine we spend our Friday nights with our fingers hovering over the mouse, waiting to click on it?
We do not. Our website has the facility to schedule our blog posts. When this went live, I was probably deep in the arms of Morpheus or, at least, draining the dregs from a bottle of wine. So, our big messages this week are:
We have talked a lot about “engagement” with your audience, but we haven’t talked much about what actual messages to send them, so that’s where we will start next week. We hope you have enjoyed this blog and found it informative. Please feel free to take a look around the rest of the site to see what we have to offer. And if you want to make sure you don't miss a future edition of the blog, click the button to sign up to our newsletter. Week 8 -To Blog Or Not To Blog, That Is The Question.  As discussed last week, writing a blog is one of the ways that you can engage with potential readers in your target audience. But we’re not just talking about written blogs like this one. The term also covers things like videos on YouTube and Instagram. If you are trying to engage with a young audience, you are going to have far more success with those than you are with the written word. There are also podcasts, which are audio blogs and have a considerable following of their own, especially among people who spend a lot of time travelling. So, anything you read here about blogs, transpose to those other media as well. What is a blog? Time to look in the dictionary. I came across this definition, which is good enough for my purposes: “a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style.”
(long before the www was a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye) its purpose was to “Inform, educate and entertain”. We couldn’t put it better ourselves. That is what your blog should aim to do. You can do just one of those three things or any combination of them. We hope this blog covers “educate” and “inform”, but if you are entertained as well, that’s a bonus. The important thing is that after reading our blog, you don’t feel you have wasted your time.  If people like your blog, they will come back again for the next one. They may even look forward to the next edition eagerly. And if they are doing that, they are almost certainly going to be interested in anything else you have written. They may even sign up to your email list so that they can keep up to date with your blogs – but be careful not to start spamming people. That’s a quick way to lose friends and followers.  Use the right tone. The “tone” of your blog is very important, it says a lot about you and affects the way readers will perceive you. If your tone is too stiff and formal, then you will come across as “stuffy” and it may be assumed that your books will be stuffy too. On the other hand, if you are too chatty and informal, people may not take you seriously enough and, therefore, they may not take your books seriously. We’d be interested in hearing from you about what you think of our “tone”. Is it right for what we are trying to do? Is it too stiff and formal or is too laid back and relaxed? Or, is it something else? Feel free to use the comments section to let us know what you think. We have talked already about what interests, other than reading, your target audience might have and that is one thing you can use in your blogs. If your target audience is likely to be interested in dogs, then you can blog about dogs. If they are likely to be interested knitting, you can blog about knitting. If you have done your homework on your target audience, you will probably have come up with a list of things they may be interested in and you can blog about most of them, because you are interested in them too. We have created a list of blog prompts and you can download it at the bottom of this blog.  Where can you post your blog? There are a number of websites that will allow you to host a blog for free. Some of them might try to flog you a range of other services, such as a full-blown website, but they will let you post your blogs as well, so that’s the important thing. We Googled “free blog hosting” and came up with this list, which also happens to be a blog (though not by us). Is there anything that you shouldn’t blog about?  You are trying to make friends and there are two things that will lose you friends quite quickly: politics and religion. To that I might add climate change, veganism, gender issues, conspiracy theories and a few more. I once read the following Tweet “If I’d known that Val McDermid (a popular Scottish crime writer) was a socialist, I’d never have bought any of her books”. OK, that’s a particularly extreme viewpoint, but not untypical of the sort of narrow mindedness that exists. Venture into those fields if you feel you must, but make sure they aren’t minefields. It doesn’t matter how open-minded, reasonable or rational you think you are being; you are going to upset someone. This isn't a hard and fast rule. There are times when blogging on those sorts of issues is justified.
politics. This is particularly true if your book is aimed at people with a specific political perspective. If your books are religious themed, then you might be justified in blogging about religion. Just be careful, that’s all we are saying. You went to a lot of trouble to identify your target audience and build up a following on social media, so don’t throw it away by alienating them with one ill-advised rant about Brexit, the Pope or Greta Thunberg. You are entitled to your opinions, but not everyone will share them – even in your target audience.  It is time consuming to write blogs and that is enough to put some people off taking that route. So, it’s a good job it isn’t the only way to engage with your potential audience. There are also chat groups and discussion forums. One of the best known of these is Mumsnet so I’m going to use them as my model, even though I’m not a Mum (I am a Dad though). These groups offer the opportunity to discuss a wide range of topics that are of common interest. It is probable that if you try to plug your book there you will get kicked off, but a popular topic for discussion is “what to do during maternity leave” (as if raising a child wasn’t enough) and that is where you can drop into the conversation that a good way of using time is to write a book. You can also discuss books by other authors quite legitimately, under the appropriate thread(s). That at least allows you to let it be known that you are interested in books. "you try to plug your book there and you will get kicked off" The aim of using these chatrooms is to attract new followers to your other social media channels, where you can and do plug your books. And that is what happens when you engage with people. You turn them into friends and friends stay in touch. I’m a keen golfer myself. In researching this blog (yes, we do that), I discovered that there are some golf forums that run like Mumsnet. We also happen to publish a book about golf. Guess who’s going to join a couple of those fora as soon as they have enough time between writing blogs, promoting books and editing.  Now onto another popular way of engaging with your readers. The “freebie” or “teaser”. It is another strand of “engagement”, but one that is a bit more direct in its approach. The idea of the teaser is for potential readers to look at your work before they buy it. This ability already exists on some retail platforms with “look inside” or similar features. But they rely on you having a manuscript (MS) uploaded to the platform and on sale. What if you are still a few weeks away from getting the final version ready for launch? You want to start engaging your audience’s interest, but the MS isn’t yet ready for publication. It also relies on people stumbling across your book on the retail platform and that is unlikely to happen. In a previous blog we pointed out that there are 4,000 new books published very day, so you are walking a busy street. There is a facility on many retail platforms for customers to pre-order. This is great for getting a boost up the sales rankings on Amazon and other sites. If your books have been pre-ordered, then all the pre-orders get counted on the day the book goes “live”. That can catapult you up the sales rankings, which means that your book might feature in the “best-sellers” list for the day which, in turn, can lead to more sales. This is known as “momentum”.
you set up the pre-order. You can set the pre-order up a year in advance. That’s great for well-established authors who already have a loyal following eagerly awaiting the next book but, for you, a month or two in advance is all you need. But why should anyone pre-order a book when they don’t know if they will like it? Because if there’ no MS uploaded, there’s no “look inside” to read.  Because you have posted a teaser elsewhere and that has whetted their appetite. We encourage our authors to do this – and it works. One of our author's books got above 300 in the Amazon sales rankings for their book on the day it was released, thanks to pre-orders. OK, it isn’t quite Harry Potter – but it encouraged more sales on launch day. What is best practice for teasers? Well, whatever you offer has to engage the reader, so it really has to give them a flavour of what the book is about. If the first chapter or the first 10% of the wordcount does that, then that’s the bit to use, but you may want something a bit more dramatic, a bit more emotional or a bit more exciting, in which case you may want to cherry-pick from elsewhere in the book. You might even assemble a collage of extracts from different parts of the book – but for goodness sake don’t give away the ending. But the most important part is the last line of the extract. It has to be a “call to action”. This will include a link to the specific page on the website where the book can be bought or pre-ordered. The call to action will say something like “We hope you enjoyed this extract. You can find out more about “Book Title” by “Author Name” here. “Here” being the link to where the book can be bought or pre-ordered.  Note that the call to action didn’t use the words “buy”, “order” or “pre-order”. This is because people may feel pressured by those words. You are just being helpful by pointing them to the place where they can find out more. If they click the “purchase” button, it must be because they have made up their own mind to do that. Of course, giving people a teaser relies on having somewhere they can download it, which usually means a website, but some social media does allow you to post things that can be downloaded. Here at Selfishgenie we have a specific Free Stuff page where our authors can post their teasers and we promote them through our social media and they promote them through theirs. There is also a website called Wattpad where you can post extracts (or even complete books) and link them to other social media or websites. Or you can post your freebie as a blog on one of the websites that allows free blog hosting. In last week’s edition of this blog, we used an almost throwaway line when we said that YA readers are mainly online between 7 and 10 pm and that’s when you may be drinking your cocoa and watching Corrie and Midsomer Murders. But it isn’t such a throwaway. Reaching your audience at the right time of day is critical and we’ll be taking a closer look at that in next week’s edition. See – we even use teasers when we’re blogging. If you have enjoyed this blog and found it informative, make sure you don't miss the next edition by signing up for our newsletter. Ah, g'wan, ya know ya want ta. Just click the button. 
Week 7 - Knowing Your Organics From Your Inorganics  Strategy – it’s a big scary word used by clever people who earn lots of money. No it isn’t. Strategy isn’t that complicated, at least not as a concept. Really, all it means is knowing what result you want and working out a way to achieve that result using the resources you have available to you and then knowing when you have achieved your result. We already know what result you want – you want to sell your book. "social media, which is a resource you can use for free" This weekly blog is discussing the ways that you can achieve that result using social media, which is a resource you can use for free (or, at least, quite cheaply). And you will know if you achieve your results if your book sales increase. Actually, there are some other things you can measure along the way to tell if you if you are heading in the right direction, but we’ll cover them later.  You can write your whole social media marketing strategy in five bullet points or less. Here’s ours:
As you can see, it isn’t exactly rocket science. There are other layers of actions below those five, but as someone once asked – how do you eat an elephant? The answer is: one bit at a time (apologies to vegans and wildlife conservationists – but it’s only a metaphor).
target audience for your book(s), but that only takes your strategy to the first bullet point. Because each audience is unique, we have to engage with them in unique ways. This is why blasting out generic Tweets doesn’t work. You need to understand the “organic reach” of your social media marketing channels to get the best out of them.  Let’s take Young Adult (YA) fiction as an example. YA fiction is aimed at readers in the 12 to 18 age group. They are social media savvy and they are usually on the latest and trendiest social media platforms. If your idea of social media is Facebook, then you are onto a loser with the YA audience. Only 51% of teenagers who use social media use Facebook, the second smallest group after the over 65s. Even Twitter is a bit old hat for them, taken over by oldies who only want to argue about politics.
allowed to use their phones or other devices during school hours, except for schoolwork. The best time to engage with YA readers is going to be during the evening, typically between 7 and 10 pm. But that’s when you are sitting down with a mug of cocoa, watching Corrie and Midsomer Murders. When we talk about the organics of social media, we are really talking about the way your messages “grow” and get noticed. It’s like applying fertiliser to a plant. Put it down at the right time and in the right place the plant will flourish. But put it down at the wrong time and the rain will wash it away and the plant will wither and die and if you put it in the wrong place it won’t get to the roots of the plant, with the same result.  YA is a good example of this, because young people love sharing things on social media – far more so than their elders. So, hit the YA audience with the right message at the right time and it won’t just reach the ones who follow you, it will be shared with all their friends as well. And then their friends will share it and so on and so forth. If you do it right, you may even “go viral” and your message will be seen by millions of YA readers around the world. But on the other hand, the YA audience is the most challenging to reach because they respond best to visual images – particularly video. That’s why Tik-Tok is currently the fastest growing social media platform on the planet. But how do you get a message out about your books on Tik-Tok? We’re not going to answer that question - yet.  The first plant you have to nurture and grow is your own social media presence. If you are an author using Twitter and you have only 100 followers – you haven’t got a social media presence. In organic terms, you aren't even a seedling. Until your followers number in the thousands, probably tens of thousands, your social media presence isn’t going to help you at all. This is when people get tempted to buy “followers”. Well, it’s your money and if you want to waste it, that’s your privilege. Because most paid for followers aren’t real people, they are bot (robot) accounts. They only exist as a username. And bots don’t buy books. "If you are an author using Twitter and you have only 100 followers – you haven’t got a social media presence." The cleverest of these bots re-Tweet other people’s Tweets, just so they can appear more human. Strangely, people actually follow some of these bot accounts, including other bots, so you have bots following bots. Crazy, isn’t it? You know those biogs that say “Follow me and I’ll follow you back”? How do you know you aren’t following a bot? A lot of bot accounts are used to bombard people with advertising. OK, I know that sounds hypocritical when we’re blogging about social media marketing, but at least we’re real people (honestly – we are!).  There is an app called Tweepi which will help you to gain followers over time. It’s a bit of a blunt instrument, based on the idea that if you follow a lot of people, some of them will follow you back. You have to pay to use some of their features, but you can also get a free account with a limited range of features, which is enough to get you started. But if you are prepared to spend twenty minutes a day on Tweepi you can probably add about a hundred new followers a week to your Twitter account. We’ve produced a guide to using Tweepi which you can download at the bottom of this blog. It's bit dated now, so bear with it. One of the things you can do with Tweepi is to use keywords to identify your target audience. You can also suggest accounts to find followers, so if the biggest name in your genre has a Twitter account, you can put their user name in as a suggestion when you set up your account. The real secret, however, is to attract more followers because of the stuff you post on social media. This is your “engagement strategy”. Let’s say that when you identified your audience characteristics (the homework we set last week), you thought that many of your audience would probably be dog lovers. So, if you Tweet lots of things about dogs, anyone who likes dogs is going to be interested in reading your Tweets.  Not only will they read your Tweets, but they may re-Tweet (RT) the best ones. That will bring you more followers. But, more importantly, if your Tweets get lots of “likes”, they are more likely to appear at the top of peoples’ Twitter feeds, which makes them more likely to be seen. That’s how social media algorithms (horrible technical term) work these days. If your Tweets are the first ones that are seen, they are more likely to be read and they are more likely to be RT’d and because of the number of likes, they are more likely to bring you new followers. That’s organic growth in a nutshell (groan at bad pun). If you are good at it, you will soon have more followers than people you follow yourself – just like Katie Perry or Steven Fry.  The whole point about “social media” is that it is social and that means engaging with other people first, taking an interest in what they have to say. Mind you, reading some of the posts it is sometimes easy to re-name it anti-social media, but that is a whole different blog. So, the other thing you can do is engage in conversations about other people’s posts. If you are engaged, then other people in the conversation may find what you have to say interesting enough to want to follow you and, of course, you want to follow them. It’s another way of getting organic growth.
but Tweet about dogs (or whatever) far more frequently. A ratio of 10:1 is probably about right. What sort of message to post about your books is the subject for a later blog, so stick with us. These last few paragraphs have mainly been about Twitter and that is because it is the easiest platform to demonstrate the points we wished to make. But the same basic rules apply to all the other social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest et al: social first, commercial second. It’s a hard lesson to learn if you want quick results, but if you want to be in this for the long haul, it is worth taking the time. And, more importantly, if you want to see your sales growing, you have to be in it for the long haul.  Get a head start! If you have only written the first chapter of your book, or even the first paragraph, then now is the time for you to start engaging with your audience. That way you will already have an engaged audience by the time your book is published. But it’s never too late, so even if your book has been out for years, you can start today. You will probably have worked out by now that this is all very time consuming. Which is why some Indie authors choose to use (small) publishers, like us, to do this for them. But not all small publishers are equal, as I explained in a previous blog. Paying for services up-front rarely produces the results hoped for. There will be no attempt to establish any sort of social engagement, which means the posts about your books are less likely to achieve any results.. OK Selfishgenie Publishing, put your money your money where your mouth is - what are you doing to engage with your audience?  You’re reading this blog, aren’t you? That is part of our engagement strategy. We identified the fact that if you are an Indie author, you are going to be interested in knowing how to market your books. If you are an author then, almost by definition, you are a reader too. So, we’re publishing this series of blogs so that you will engage with us and we can engage with you. You might take a look at our books while you’re here or you might not, but that doesn’t matter. It is the engagement that matters. In previous blogs we have used some of our books as examples of what we were talking about. It comes as no surprise (to us) that our sales for those books went up a little bit after those blogs were posted. I mentioned at the top of this blog that there are some measurements that will help you work out whether your strategy is working or not and social media provides some easy measurements for you to use: Number of followers, number of RTs and number of likes. If those numbers keep going up, then your engagement strategy is working. Some sites offer even more “analytics” and you might want to take a look at them to see what they might tell you. For us here at Selfishgenie we also measure “number of visits to our website”. When you clicked on the link to get here, you showed up on our metrics (more jargon, it means the way we measure success). So, do you read a lot of blogs? Many are part of someone’s engagement strategy. Don’t worry about that though. The important thing is whether or not you find the blog interesting or entertaining.  In terms of the “marketing mix”, engagement on social media falls under two different Ps: Place and Promotion. Place is the “channels” that are used: FB, Twitter et al and Promotion is the messages that you put out to help you engage with people. Next week we’re going to take a more in depth look at blogs and also look at using extracts and teasers to promote your work. If you have enjoyed this blog and found it informative, do be sure to register for our newsletter so you can be sure of never missing an edition. Just click the button
Week 6 - The Big Shout Out  I’m starting this week’s blog with some basic maths for you. Let’s say you write at a rate of 1,000 words every two hours and you produce a book that is around 90,000 words long. That means that it took you about 180 hours to write. Those 180 hours may be spread over a few weeks, a few months or even a few years, but it doesn’t matter. If you were to pay yourself the UK national minimum wage (at time of writing) for your work, you would get £8.72 per hour if you are over 25. So, multiply the number of working hours by the hourly rate and it means that you need to receive £1,596 in “royalties”, just to pay you for the time taken to write your book, which doesn’t include time spent editing, re-writing, proofreading, formatting, up-loading and marketing. But we’ll keep it simple and call it £1,600. If you sell your book as an ebook on Amazon for £4.99, which is a typical price for an Indie author, you will receive about £3 in royalties, which means you need to sell 533 books just to cover your wages for writing the book.
royalties, because the publisher takes the other 50% to cover the work they do (they don’t work for minimum wage). That means you need to sell 1,066 books to earn £1,600. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? There are many self-published authors who sell a lot more books than that. Actually, that is quite a lot of books for an unknown author to sell. So, the unknown author has to find a way to become a “known” author and that is where marketing comes in. There are 4,000 new books published every day, that’s over 115,000 a month. Most of those books will be by unknown authors and most of those authors will remain unknown – unless they learn how to market their product.  Trust me, 1,066 people aren’t going to stumble across your book by accident. But if I’ve got a publisher, why do I need to do the marketing? A good question. All authors, even those signed to big publishing houses, have to do some marketing – remember it’s the authors that do the book tours and radio interviews, not the publishers, and those are marketing activities just as much as the sort of things I’m going to talk about. But the short answer is that your publisher has several authors on which to concentrate, but you can concentrate on you. Double the marketing activity means double the likelihood of selling some books. You have to work as a team on this to get the best results. But this blog is actually aimed at all Indie authors, so this is aimed at the self-publishing community just as much as the published community.
number of things. If you are good at it, it may cost you almost nothing. If you aren’t any good at it, it could cost you sales. This is where “social media marketing” comes in, because that is the cheapest form of marketing there is, short of standing on street corners and shouting about your book. However, just putting something on Facebook or Tweeting your book's title isn’t going to work. Why not? Let me use an analogy.  Let’s say you live in a house and on the wall outside your house you hang a loudspeaker. Inside you have a microphone connected to the speaker (for the nerds, yes it is connected through an amplifier). Then you close the curtains so you can’t see the street. Now you stand in your house, speaking into the microphone saying “buy my book” over and over again. Will this sell your book? First of all, lots of people who might buy your book won't even come along that street, they'll be using another street entirely, so they will never hear your message. Then you don’t know if there are any people outside your house to hear your announcement. At some times of the day the street might be quite busy, but at others it will be empty. Even if people are there, you don’t know if they read books and, finally, even if they read books, you don’t know what sort of books they read. If they don’t read books like yours then you are wasting your time. "your announcements are getting lost amongst theirs" But it’s worse than that. Because there are 99 other houses in your street and in each one of them there lives another author and all 100 of you are doing exactly the same thing, so your announcements are getting lost amongst theirs and theirs are getting lost amongst yours. And that is why social media marketing fails for so many authors. Which means that just posting on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter is probably not going to sell you many books.  Which brings me to paid posting services. There are dozens, even hundreds, of online suppliers offering to Tweet your book to their millions of followers – at a price. The problem is that they are doing exactly what I have described in my analogy. Not only that, they are trying to add even more authors to their list, which makes the noise worse, not better. Which means you are paying them to do something that you already know doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how many followers they have, or how many likes their FB and Insta accounts get, if they aren’t reaching the right people, they aren’t selling your book for you. "you are paying them to do something that you already know doesn’t work" Our recommendation is not to pay for services like that. But if social media marketing doesn’t work, why do so many businesses spend so much money on it? Because it does work, but not if you just stand in your house shouting “buy my book”. There is a science behind social media marketing and if you learn how to use that science, your book will sell.  If you have been following this series of blogs you will know that we are great advocates of “learning” and this is something else you can learn about. This course with Future Learn is free and serves as a good starting point for learning how to use social media marketing. It is only two weeks of study (you could complete it in a day if you felt like it) and you can sign up from anywhere in the world. And it isn’t just for authors – any small business can use social media marketing. In last week’s blog I listed the 6Ps of marketing and I said I’d return to them. So, I’m going to start with that first P – product and how it relates to social …. Tell you what, let’s call it SMM for short. What is your product?  Yeeeees, it’s a book, we know that. But is it just a book? For example, is it fiction or non-fiction? There’s no point in trying to sell a fiction book to someone who only reads non-fiction. Next, what genre is it? Some people read only one genre, some read a few different genres and some people read anything and everything. The problem is, you have to assume that they only read one genre and that it is yours.
they may be people just like you. But if you write in several different genres, you may have several different types of reader and you need to address each one in a different way. You won’t attract a reader of Young Adult (YA) fiction in the same way as you attract a reader of military history – they are two very different people. This is called audience targeting. If you know what your audience looks like and behaves like, then you can target them better. You can be online, on Twitter for example, at the same time of day as them. You can shape your marketing messages in a way that appeals to them. Most importantly, you can engage with them.  Because social media marketing isn’t about advertising, it is about engagement. No, not that sort of engagement. If you can establish a relationship with your target audience – even if it is only via a social media platform - they are more likely to take an interest in you and more likely to take an interest in your work. I’ll give you a frinstance (as my Mum called it). If your ideal reader is likely to have an interest in brewing craft beer and you have an interest in brewing craft beer, you can engage with them by talking about craft beer brewing. The fact that you are also an author becomes incidental. One day they may decide to look at your profile on whatever social media platform you are using and then they will discover that you're an author (it does say you're an author, doesn't it?), at which point they may take a look at your book(s). But you haven’t forced it on them.
to themselves “Oh, I didn’t realise he/she was an author as well as being a craft beer brewing enthusiast. I wonder what his/her books are like?” and they might take the time to find out. Because you have done your research on your “ideal” audience, the chances are they will read the sort of books you write and that’s the battle half won. But most importantly, engagement builds up your audience numbers, because you will be joined by more people who want to talk about craft beer brewing (or whatever), which means more people see what you post on social media. This is what is known as "organic growth". The opposite to organic growth is "paid growth", which is where you pay to reach an audience, usually through advertising. Does this sound like manipulation? We’d prefer to think of it as understanding human behaviour. In any business, of any size, there are people earning salaries far bigger than mine who are “understanding human behaviour” and using it to sell you something. At least you do have a genuine interest in craft beer brewing (or whatever).  So, a bit of homework for you for next week. Draw a pen picture of your ideal reader. Here’s a few things for you to consider:
Identifying your target audience is an important first step in your marketing strategy.
Strategy: that’s a big scary word. Don’t let it scare you though because it is far easier to understand than you may think. It is the implementation of the strategy that is actually the hard part. But I’m getting ahead of myself because we'll be discussing strategy in more detail in our next blog. See you next week (I hope). If you have enjoyed this blog and found it informative, make sure you don't miss any future editions by signing up to our newsletter. Just click the button. Week 5 - Judging A Book By Its Cover  I’m going to be honest with you up front. To market your book properly you really need to do a business management course with a strong marketing focus, then work in a marketing department or consultancy for several years to gain experience. But you haven’t got time for that, so you read blogs about marketing instead. Fortunately, one of our team (me) has a Masters in Business Administration and knows a bit about marketing, so we can post this blog and not worry about being accused of not knowing what we’re talking about. But it is a complex subject and in a blog all we can really do is scratch the surface and provide you with a few pointers to get you heading in the right direction.  Our starting point is the “6Ps”, aka “The Marketing Mix”. These are the six areas on which a marketing strategy is based. Get them right and you have a fighting chance of selling your product – any product. Get them wrong and you are going to struggle to sell anything. Pretty much anything you have ever bought that isn’t an essential to your survival, you have bought as a consequence of responding to the marketing mix. Even the brand you have selected in preference to another brand is as a result of successful marketing. You are even reading this blog because of marketing.
word “advertising” so far. That is because advertising is just one small part of the marketing mix – though it is the bit that probably costs the most. But what are the 6 Ps? They are:
 But before that we’re going to talk about book covers. Why? Because they are actually part of your marketing mix. They are a “promotion” tool. But they are so important that they need a whole blog of their own. They say “Never judge a book by its cover” (African Journal of American Speech, 1944 - the original version actually said “spine”, which is even more pertinent). But people judge books by their covers all the time. And they will judge your book by its cover too. "And they will judge your book by its cover too." Imagine you are in your favourite bookshop, looking for your next read. You browse along the line of shelves and all you can see is their spines. On the spine you will see two things: the author’s name and the book’s title. The rest of the spine is just coloured paper and maybe a few stray lines from the book’s cover that the designer wrapped around to make it look nice.  You will be drawn to the book either by the author’s name – it is familiar to you - or by the book’s title - it is intriguing and you want to know more. So, you pull the book off the shelf and you read the blurb, which is either on the rear cover or on an inside page where it’s easy to find. By the end of reading that you are halfway to buying the book. You may, by now, have noticed the front cover, but you may not have. But on a website, you aren’t just presented with the things you are in a bookshop. On a website you can see the entire front cover of the book. If it grabs your attention it may draw you in before you even know the author’s name or you read the book’s title. So, the cover of the book is now a vital ingredient of your marketing strategy. Whatever we are here at Selfihsgenie, we’re not experts on book cover design, but we know that if you put the right cover on the right book, it will sell. It needs to tell you something either about the plot or about the main character(s). Most of all it needs to tell you something that will make you want to read the blurb.  Look at the cover for Stalker, which is one of the books we publish. The cover is dominated by a shadowy, menacing figure. Straight away you know that this is a book about menace and threat, it is trying to unnerve you and make the hairs on your neck stand on end. It is probably more unnerving for a woman, which is unsurprising as it was written by a woman, but some men may also feel threatened by it. If you like books that do that, you may want to know more, in which case you will probably read the blurb and, if the website offers the facility, you may “look inside” and start reading the story. You are well on your way to buying that book. In fact, statistically, you are more likely to buy it than to not buy it. BTW, you can click on the image to find out more. There are a few ways to go about getting the right cover for your book. We’ll start with the cheapest.  If you are an artist or designer, you can do it for yourself. One of our author’s was lucky; his sister* is an artist and because the book is a biography of their father, she was willing to design the cover for free. And it is a particularly good example of what we’re talking about. It’s the image shown alongside. I don’t know about you, but when I saw that face I wanted to know more about the man behind it. The eyes, in particular, have a quality that invites the question “What sort of man is he?” and to find out the answer, you have to read the book. Which is why we published the book. I’m not going to pretend it’s one of our best sellers, it’s in a very niche genre, but it has sold enough copies to justify its presence in our catalogue. Again, you can click on the image to find out more.  The next cheapest option is to find a designer online who will design your book cover. There are plenty plying for hire on Fiverr.com and some of them are very good. Prices vary, you can get a simple design for about $20, but anything that requires more work is going to cost more. It is necessary to be very clear about what you want from your designer. They will do what they’re asked to do and they won’t read your book first to find out what it is about. This means that you need some sort of idea of what you want your cover to look like before you brief them.
women in big bonnets and hunky men with their shirts open to the waist are fine for romances, but they aren’t going to sell you many sci-fi books or spy thrillers. So, make sure you understand what the norm is for your genre. It’s fine to be original and mould breaking, but only within the “rules” for your genre.  My recommended start point would be to go onto Amazon (or any other bookselling website) and browse through the books that are on offer, within your genre. Try to ignore the titles and author’s names. Just focus on the cover images. Which ones stand out for you and which ones don’t? The answer to that will inform what you ask your designer to do. If necessary, copy an image and send it to the designer and say “something like that!” Many designers work with Photoshop or similar software to merge and overlay images. That’s fine if they produce the result you want. But remember, you have to own the right to use the image(s).  If you didn’t take the photo(s) yourself, you don’t own the copyright and you can end up in trouble if you use the image without the copyright owner’s permission. And it doesn’t have to have the © symbol displayed for you to be liable. There are hundreds of thousands of images available on websites such as Depositphotos and Shutterstock (and similar sites) and their general licences allow you to use them for book covers (sometimes up to a maximum number of copies sold). Bite the bullet and buy from them. Yes, you can go onto a search site such as Bing Images and select the filter that says “Free to share and use commercially” – but that doesn’t mean they are. I have seen images that are the copyright of companies like Getty Images that are displayed under that filter and Getty Images are very litigious if you use one of their images without purchasing a license. Never assume – always check. As an aside, the same applies to ANY image you use in a book. If you didn’t take it or make it, you can’t use it without permission and you may (more than likely will) be sued for breach of copyright. Yes, we know that lots of people do it, but that doesn’t mean they won’t end up in court one day. Just remember the story of Wikipedia and the monkey that took a selfie.  Many publishers offer a design service for book covers. Some ask for payment up front, but others don’t, and some state that if the author takes back the publishing rights for the book then they have to purchase the right to use the cover image. So do make sure you know who owns the copyright for the cover – it may not be you. You may have to have a new cover designed if you want to self-publish the book or sign with another publisher. FYI, we make it clear in our contract that if we design a cover, or pay for a cover to be designed, then we own the copyright for it and it has to be purchased if the author wants to use it elsewhere. To be honest, we’d rather the author came up with their own cover design, but we know that isn’t going to happen very often. Not every author has a sister who is a talented artist. For some more tips on book cover design, try this blog. So, you have an edited and proofed book, you have a cover and it is sitting on a retail platform just waiting to be discovered by eager readers. What happens next? Find out in next week’s blog. If you have enjoyed this blog and found it informative and don't want to miss the next edition, you can sign up to our newsletter by clicking the button below. Go on - you know you want to. * To find out more about the artist who deisgned the cover for "A Commando's Story", Di Cubitt, you can visit her website.
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