Amazon Attribution Provides Long-term KU Page Read Data
By: Ginger | Posted on January 27, 2023
Tracking individual sales that come from each advertising channel is incredibly useful, but if your book is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, there is more to it than that. You might still be earning money without actual sales, when someone “borrows” your book and starts to read. In a way, KU borrows actually change how we have to look at how much our books earn from ads, because those page reads aren’t tied as closely to our ad run as more traditional sales. As Ginger reminds us, KU page reads mean your ROI doesn’t just stop at the end of your campaign. Using one of his own books as an example, Ginger takes us through the numbers to demonstrate how page reads can continue to pay dividends long after your ad run is over, and how attribution tags finally allow us to specifically track this metric. As you’ve probably noticed from… Read More >
The Dangers of Mixing Politics and Writing
By: Ginger | Posted on January 20, 2023
If you were to judge solely by the backlash so often seen erupting in social media these days, whenever an author gets too political in their writings, you might think that voicing those opinions was a new phenomenon. But in fact, writers have always used their work as a soapbox for their political leanings, we’re simply paying more attention to it now, with everyday readers finally having a place to sound off from when they agree or disagree with what they’ve read. That’s not to say that writers shouldn’t speak their mind or fill their work with messages about how they think the world should work, but it does mean that it should be done with care. There are many examples of big name authors that have alienated their fans and paid the price, but there are also those that have done it in a way that is embraced and… Read More >
What I’ve learned after spending over $100k with Facebook Ads
By: Matt Holmes | Posted on January 13, 2023
We write a lot of articles about advertising your book on the various platforms, along with what we believe are best practices and the tips we’ve learned along the way. But when it comes right down to it, nothing beats hard data from the field. Matt Holmes has made a career out of helping authors with their advertising, starting with the Fantasy novels written by his wife. His ad spend tops six figures, which has provided him with a lot of data to draw conclusions about what works and what doesn’t. After so much time and money spent advertising different books of different genres from a variety of authors, Matt has come up with a list of the five biggest lessons he’s learned about advertising self-published books on Facebook, and he’s sharing them with us today. Spending over $100,000 on anything is going to provide you with some HUGE lessons… Read More >
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 >
What can Jack Carr teach us about writing?
By: Ginger | Posted on December 2, 2022
Despite following in the footsteps of Lee Child, there is still much to learn from the meteoric rise in popularity of former Navy Seal turned author Jack Carr. Carr is a relative newcomer to writing, with only about five books to his name so far, but he’s been a chart topper since his debut, and his first book has already been turned into a streaming series on Prime. That’s why it makes sense for Ginger to examine what it is that has led to Carr’s quick success and what it can teach us that can be applied to our own writing, in this latest installment of his informal writing lessons series. Right now, there are two deadly badasses on my Amazon Prime menu screen – Jack Reacher and James Reece. The former is played by Alan Ritchson, who takes the role of the eponymous star of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher… 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 >
