How accurate are Attribution Tags in tracking book income?
By: Ginger | Posted on March 17, 2023
Ever since the introduction of Amazon’s Attribution Tags, authors have been able to track the book income resulting from their advertising and promotional campaigns to a level not seen before. This is incredibly useful for determining the value of these campaigns and planning strategies around then. But how accurate are they? In terms of tracking the sales that come directly as a result of a click from one of your attribution links, they’re very accurate, but that doesn’t actually tell the whole story. Even when the only promotion you’re doing is running a campaign with a tracked URL, you may very likely see more sales than are actually being reported. To demonstrate the issue and explain what’s going on, Ginger takes us through an example using an ad campaign he recently ran on one of his own books, complete with all the sales and page read numbers. I’ve been writing… 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 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 >
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 >
Should your Amazon ads use keywords or ASINs?
By: Ginger | Posted on July 29, 2022
Advertising on Amazon is the advertising foundation for many successful self-published authors, but it has a notoriously steep learning curve in order to prove successful. One common conundrum for rookie advertisers is whether to use keywords to try and find new readers, or advertise using ASIN numbers. There are different schools of thought about this approach, so Ginger is dedicating this week’s blog post towards helping you decide which option might work best for your books. What is the difference between keywords and ASINs? Every product for sale on Amazon has an ASIN, which stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number. It’s a 9-digit code that quickly identifies exactly which product you’re trying to specify out of the millions of things you can buy on Amazon. Self-published ebooks have their own unique ASIN, while paperback books (even the Print on Demand ones made using Amazon’s printing services) have a publishing… Read More >
Self-Improvement Books To Help Achieve Your Goals
By: Hidden Gems | Posted on July 26, 2022
For most people, New Year resolutions have long been abandoned by the summer months. No matter your goals, or your progress, we are certain that there’s a self-help book out there for you within this broad category. With those thoughts in mind, today we’ve rounded up the self-improvement books our Hidden Gems readers loved the most recently. Raising Backyard Chickens: A Beginner’s Guide to a Healthy Flock, Boosting Egg Production, and Fresh Eggs for Life! by Daniel A. Hart With 147 ratings on Amazon, and a 4.8 average star rating, our readers were not alone in their interest in raising chickens. As the title implies, this book is meant to help a beginner chicken owner understand all aspects of this popular sustainable living trend. Ladonna M. shares about her experience in her five star review, “As a new chicken mama, I found this book extremely helpful. I wish I would… Read More >
Latest Tips for Advertising on Amazon
By: Ginger | Posted on July 22, 2022
Over the years, we’ve posted multiple blogs about how to get the most out of Advertising on Amazon. However, things change – and some of the the advice Ginger has given authors a couple of years ago isn’t necessarily what he’d recommend today. So here are a few of his latest thoughts on how Advertising on Amazon is working these days, and what authors can do to take advantage of the changes. A Changing Landscape Technology changes. It’s inevitable. If it wasn’t, we’d still be stuck using the same interface and operating systems we were a decade ago on platforms like Facebook and Amazon. There are multiple reasons why ecommerce and social media platforms update their layout and interface, and many of the choices the folks in Silicon Valley make don’t necessarily make a lot of sense to the likes of us. However, there’s no use complaining about these updates… Read More >
A Template for Your Book Launch
By: Ginger | Posted on July 8, 2022
Most established authors have their own strategy for book launch that they swear by, but while there are probably a lot of similarities, it’s likely there are just as many differences between them as well. That’s because every author and book is different, and what works for some may fail for others. As with so many things, you have to test and try different things to find what works best for you, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t helpful to have a starting point. This week, Ginger is sharing his own template for launching a book in the hopes that it can help both authors that are starting out, or more established authors that might be looking to try something new. Even if it’s not an exact fit for your own launch, hopefully it will at least be enough to point you towards the path to success. The other day,… Read More >
How to know when to change your book cover
By: Ginger | Posted on February 11, 2022
Every book and story is different, but if I had to pick a single element that was most commonly at fault for poor sales, I would point to covers without any hesitation. We all know that we shouldn’t choose a book by it’s cover, but most readers do it anyway, and for good reason. Whether browsing top 100 lists, scrolling through search results or just looking at also bought recommendations, few people have time to drill into every option to read blurbs or analyze reviews. Instead, they narrow the list down to just a handful that warrant further investigation, and the easiest and most obvious criteria available to do that is the cover. Images that catch a reader’s eye and spark their interest are the ones they’ll be drawn to first, giving those books a huge advantage over ones with less appealing covers. Of course, there are many reasons why… Read More >
