Stretching Your Ad Budget (Part 3) – Increasing Visibility
By: Ginger | Posted on November 8, 2019
In the first two parts of this series, we discussed a couple of different strategies you might want to use your marketing dollars for, but at the end of the day the goal of any author comes down to one of two things (and often both). Selling more books, and getting more readers. In either case, increasing the visibility of your book is key – you run ads on your books so that more people see them, you increase your readership so more people know about you and talk about you, which also leads to more sales and more readers. Running ads to sell books or grow your subscriber base are great ways to do this, but there is another way you can make readers more aware of your book – by weaving its presence directly into the digital algorithms of Amazon itself. Each of the parts of this series… Read More >
Make Amazon’s Sales Rank Work for You
By: Ginger | Posted on November 1, 2019
If you’re an author that ignores the Amazon Best Seller Rank (ABSR or Sales Rank) because you think it just exists to stroke the ego of successful authors or because you don’t think you have enough sales to ever get to the top, then it may be time to reconsider and start paying attention to it. Because even though only the #1 spot bestows a bestseller label to your book, just getting in the top 100 can be massively beneficial to your sales. Think of it as free promotion targeting all the readers that search for new books by browsing the top lists (which a great many do). The best part is that there isn’t just one bestseller, or one top list, but many of them – one for each genre and many sub-categories within those genres – which means that you don’t need thousands (or even hundreds) of sales… Read More >
Getting the Most Out of Amazon Advertising
By: Ginger | Posted on August 16, 2019
There’s more to advertising on Amazon than just finding a bunch of great keywords and plunking them down, waiting for the money to roll in. Amazon advertising is a complex system, and the key to squeezing the most profit out of it is in truly understanding how it works. This long and detailed breakdown by advertising expert Ginger does just that, giving you the how and why the system works the way it does, as well as a number of tips and examples to help you get the most out of your keywords and Advertising on Amazon in general. I paid my money – where’s my profit? Like many authors, when Amazon launched their Amazon Marketing Services – now Advertising on Amazon – I was stoked. FINALLY, I’d thought – a way for me to throw money at my books and get them in front of the readers who want… Read More >
Sell More Books with an Optimized Author Central Account
By: Penny C. Sansevieri | Posted on August 9, 2019
If you publish on Amazon, understanding the importance of your Author Central account and what you need to do to keep it updated is essential. Author marketing expert Penny Sansevieri spends her days helping authors sell more books, and so she knows all about how to optimize Author Central to help do just that. We’re grateful she’s agreed to share a number of tips and suggestions with us on how to make your book stand out from all the others! As an author you’ve no doubt spent a lot of time determining the most lucrative keywords and categories on Amazon, but too few overlooking the juice you can get by optimizing your Amazon Author Central Page with all the free features that come along with it. First I want to point out that technically every author on Amazon is represented by Author Central, but it’s really doing you no good… Read More >
The Hidden Gems Best Mystery Books for 2019
By: Hidden Gems | Posted on April 23, 2019
Sign up for Hidden Gems and you’ll be sent the opportunity to read books from over 15 different genres each and every day – including titles from top authors. This year, we’ve already featured some of the best mystery books around – from the cozy to the creepy – and here are a few of the top-rated of the year so far! Student Body by Charlene Tess and Judi Thompson Big city cop Chance O’Brien and FBI Agent Macy Adams burst onto the bookshelves with When an Angel Whispers, and Student Body is the eagerly awaited follow-up. When a beautiful high school cheerleader is found murdered, all clues point towards local coach Jake – but are the clues too perfectly aligned? That’s what Chance and Macy start to suspect, as they peel back the layers of seedy corruption in this small town to discover a sinister truth. Sandra’s Book Reviews… Read More >
Using Amazon Ads to Sell Your Novel
By: Liam Clay | Posted on March 22, 2019
These days, advertising is an integral part of any book launch and not something any self-published author can ignore. We’ve covered the topic of advertising in the past, but one of the things we didn’t go into in details was Amazon’s advertising platform (formerly called AMS). Luckily, Liam Clay recently spent time learning their system and testing it out, and in today’s guest post he shares what he’s learned. Are you an indie author with a recently completed debut novel? Then chances are good that you either have, or are about to, place your book on Amazon. The question then becomes, what next? Because if you think that strangers are going to start buying your book en masse without any further action from you, I urge you to think again. I say this because two months ago, I was in exactly the same position. Watching tumbleweeds roll through the ghost… Read More >
The Difference Between Bad Reviews and “Bad” Reviews
By: Craig | Posted on February 26, 2019
Everybody’s opinion differs, which means that even when writing a review that’s critical of a book, you should try to explain what you didn’t like about it – or what you did like if it’s a positive review. This is because not all ratings are created equal – and what one person hated about a book another reader might actually like. It’s also worth remembering the impact and power you have as a reviewer – and whatever you feel about a book, a review should always be based on the book itself, and not written as a way to take a stab at the author who wrote it. We’ve discussed what goes into a good review in the past, but let’s look at it from the other side this time. While no author wants a bad review on their book, most will eventually get them – some more than others…. Read More >
Combined Knowledge: You and Your Subject Matter Expert
By: Robin Reardon | Posted on February 22, 2019
We’ve published articles in the past about the importance of writing what you know vs writing to market, or about using personal experiences to fuel your stories – but what about when you want to step outside of your comfort zone? In that case, you need to do your research. Author Robin Reardon has a lot of experience with this, and today she’s giving us her advice on when you can research something on your own, or when (and how) it’s better to find and contact a subject matter expert. There’s a maxim fiction authors hear all the time: Write what you know. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But does it go far enough? Not for me. But sometimes I need help. Because while much of fiction writing is making up stories, many novels are grounded in real world settings, touch on historical events, or include characters with a… Read More >
5 Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Thriller Books Like Bird Box
By: Hidden Gems | Posted on January 15, 2019
Here are five recent recommendations similar to the hit post-apocalyptic thriller Bird Box. Netflix recently released a fantastic post-apocalyptic movie called Bird Box, starring Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich. The movie was based on the 2014 novel by Josh Malerman, lead singer of The High Strung (they wrote the theme tune to Shameless) and the New York Times described it as: “A book that demands to be read in a single sitting, and through the cracks between one’s fingers. There has never been a horror story quite like this.” We highly recommend Bird Box – but if you’ve already read it, here are some more recent post-apocalyptic and near-future thrillers that will also leave you on the edge of your seat. Written By Blood: Conviction by Dwayne Gill The Written by Blood series is the work of author Dwayne Gill, who envisioned the concept when he was just twelve years old, and… Read More >
Ginger’s Guide to Marketing & Advertising Your Books: Part Four – PROMOTIONS
By: Ginger | Posted on November 30, 2018
Hitting ‘publish’ on your book is the biggest step in the road towards self-publishing success, but only the first one. In this final part of his four-part series, self-published author Ginger gives a top-level introduction to how to promote your book, using paid and free methods, to get as many potential customers to see it as possible. Last week, we nearly broke the website with a massive post about advertising your self-published books – and we barely scratched the surface! In fact, as reader Erin Wright pointed out, there were other advertising opportunities we hadn’t even explored in that post; like Bookbub. We’ll be revisiting options like that in both the original post and future ones – so stay tuned, and don’t be shy about letting us know what you think we missed! Today, though, we’re going to be looking at the adjacent avenue to advertising: Promotions. There’s some crossover with promotions… Read More >
