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Advertising and Marketing

Are Apple and Google Screwing Over Self-Published Authors?

By: Ginger | Posted on January 6, 2023

As the titans of the internet duke it out for as much profit as they can squeeze out from each other, those of us just trying to earn a living selling our books are getting caught in the crossfire. If you’ve seen a drop in your book sales, digging a little deeper may help you figure out if recent changes are affecting you and give you some ideas on how to combat it. Ultimately, though, the only real long-term solution may be for the big companies to finally realize that their current path hurts everyone, and it’s better to have a smaller percentage of something than a larger percentage of nothing. Is Big Tech punishing small-time publishers with their exorbitant transaction percentage fees? This June, Amazon quietly made a decision to remove the “Buy Now” button for books in the Amazon Android app – something they’d done on their Apple… Read More >

Track Your Subscriber Behavior with Attribution Tags

By: Ginger | Posted on December 30, 2022

Generating a list of readers of your books is an invaluable marketing source that can be used in a number of different ways, and it’s one of the first things that authors should set up when they begin their self-publishing journey. Until now, however, many of the benefits you gain from your list were hard to directly quantify, especially for those that have a tendency to run multiple promotions at the same time as sending out newsletters announcing their latest release. In this final (for now) installment of our impromptu series of posts on Amazon’s new attribution tags, Ginger explains how these tags can take the guesswork out of the whole mailing list marketing process, allowing you to track your subscriber behavior down to the individual book purchase or page read.  Not only can this knowledge help you grow your list and earn more money through more targeted advertising, but… Read More >

Use Amazon Attribution to Make Your Social Media Work For You

By: Ginger | Posted on December 23, 2022

As we continue to experiment with Amazon’s new attribution tags, we discover more uses for them that are worth sharing with the self-publishing community as a whole, which explains why this is now the third week in a row that we’re covering the topic. This time, Ginger is sharing his thoughts on how to use these tags to enhance what you do with your social media posts and profiles. In particular, how you can now overcome one of the biggest complaints you probably have about your author social media accounts: How can you tell if any of your tweets, shares, posts or followers are really making any difference to your bottom line? Last week I wrote a post about Setting Up Attribution Tags for your Facebook Advertising and that brought me around to thinking about other ways we can use the exciting new Attribution feature of Advertising on Amazon. One… Read More >

How to Set Up Amazon Attribution for Facebook Ads

By: Ginger | Posted on December 16, 2022

If you’ve ever tried to advertise your book on Facebook, you are probably already aware of how difficult it is to judge their effectiveness and whether any of the clicks you’re paying for ever really turn into sales. Well, Amazon has finally rolled out a feature that can give you all that information, and it isn’t even that hard to start using. Ginger talked about it last week, but today he’s back to tell you just how to set up Amazon Attribution so that you can track not only your sales and other clicks, but your KU page reads as well. As he mentioned, this is a game changing feature that can really help authors improve their ad performance, so it’s definitely something you need to start using right away if you aren’t already! It’s finally here. After years of struggling to track the effectiveness of our Facebook ads (and… Read More >

How Amazon Attribution Changes the Game for Self-Published Authors

By: Ginger | Posted on December 9, 2022

Selling your books these days means advertising them, and up until now, if you were advertising an Amazon book on a platform other than theirs, you had to use a lot of guesswork to determine whether or not your ads were converting into actual sales. Recently, however, the retail giant has provided a method that allows you to track what happens when a customer follows your ad from elsewhere, and when used properly, this can be a game changer for self-published authors. Here’s Ginger to tell you all about it, and next week he’ll go through setting it up in more detail. Writing and self-publishing a novel is often only half the battle for self-published authors. The next step is to market that book to a receptive audience – hopefully one willing to reach into their wallets to support your work. That’s why advertising has become such a vital part… Read More >

How To Create a Facebook Lookalike Audience

By: Ginger | Posted on November 25, 2022

As Ginger pointed out in a recent blog post, creating a Facebook lookalike audience is a powerful way to use your own mailing list to build an audience of likeminded readers more likely to buy your books than a more generic group. After reading that article, one author left a comment asking for more details on how exactly they would do that. Well, ask and ye shall receive.  Today, Ginger is providing step-by-step instructions on not only how to create such an audience, but how to make sure you’re pulling the best people from your own list as the source. A few weeks ago, I posted a blog entitled Is Your Freebie Lead Magnet Costing You Money? That was a post about how the source of your mailing list subscribers could be impacting how effective they are at marketing your book – and how it’s more valuable to gain subscribers… Read More >

How to Mine Your Email Mailing List

By: Ginger | Posted on November 18, 2022

There’s a good reason why most authors start working on an email mailing list as soon as they can. Having a list of readers that love your work is not only a great ego boost, but can be an invaluable marketing tool. There are a variety of different ways to build your list, but the different techniques lead to different sorts of readers, each of whom provides a different value, assuming you know how to tell the difference and how to use each type. That’s exactly what Ginger will be going over in this week’s blog. Not only how to identify and separate your subscribers into the types of benefits they can provide, but how best to attain those benefits without alienating anyone on your list. Last month we posted a blog called Is Your Freebie Lead Magnet Costing You Money? The post addressed my belief that the source of your… Read More >

Ian Fleming Publications Quietly Revolutionizes the Publishing Industry

By: Ginger | Posted on November 11, 2022

In yet another blow to traditional publishing’s quickly loosening grip of an industry they once entirely dominated, the estate of Ian Fleming recently announced they would be taking back control of the James Bond books and publishing them on their own.  Self-publishing may have taken off by giving a voice to smaller authors that couldn’t (or chose not to) go the traditional route, but moves like this are a signal that the tide has changed, and it is quickly becoming the self-publishing path that is the more desirable one to follow – for both small time authors and big names alike. I expect that it won’t be long before we start seeing more examples of popular traditionally published authors and franchises making similar moves. On October 5, 2022, the world recognized the 60th anniversary of the celluloid James Bond – marking six decades since the first movie in the franchise,… Read More >

Is Your Freebie Lead Magnet Costing You Money?

By: Ginger | Posted on October 14, 2022

Generally when you advertise your book, you’re paying to show your ad to people in the hopes that they’ll be interested enough to click and buy it. That’s why you have to be very careful to show it to the right people, otherwise you’re simply throwing your ad dollars away. Ad platforms like Facebook let you build your audience from an existing list you provide, and many authors instinctively turn to their own mailing list of fans as the source for that. In some cases, that may very well be the best list to use, but depending on how you drew people to sign up in the first place, it may actually be just the opposite… Advertising your books on Amazon is a complex process. It might not seem like it, but there’s a veritable Rube Goldberg Machine going on behind the scenes that you can only hope will convert… Read More >

Your First 100 Clicks lead to your magic Conversion number

By: Ginger | Posted on September 9, 2022

Last week Ginger discussed spending your first $1000 on digital ads, with the goal of getting both sales and information from that spend. This week, he’s focusing more on how to interpret some of the info you gather, specifically around what those clicks tell you about your “magic” conversion number. That conversion number isn’t really magic of course, but it may seem that way in how valuable it is in terms of giving you a very clear idea as to whether or not your ads are profitable or not. Figuring out your conversion number isn’t always straightforward, though, with some ad platforms making it more transparent than others. But if you know the best place and way to figure it out, you can then use that information elsewhere. Last week, we discussed how you should spend your first $1,000 in advertising budget, and we mostly concentrated on Facebook as an… Read More >