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  Let's Get Visible

  How To Get Noticed And Sell More Books

  by David Gaughran

  Editor: Karin Cox

  Cover Design: Kate Gaughran

  Published May 2013 by Arriba Arriba Books

  Kindle Edition

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Copyright © 2013 David Gaughran

  Introduction

  In my book Let’s Get Digital: How To Self-Publish, And Why You Should I explained how the distribution system for books—previously monopolized by the large publishers—was blown apart by the digital revolution. As many of you will have already discovered, the open nature of digital distribution can be a double-edged sword; there are more than 1.5 million e-books in the Kindle Store, with new titles being uploaded every day, around the clock. When anyone can publish a book, the floodgates open.

  As such, getting your books noticed can be a huge challenge. Even when it seems as if you have cracked the code, and sales are trucking along nicely, the rug can be pulled out from beneath your feet, and it seems like your work has become invisible again. Visibility isn’t just a challenge that must be bested once; it requires continual work. Indeed, probably the biggest complaint authors have in this brave new world is not sales (or the lack thereof) but the constant promotion that eats so much into precious writing time. Barely a day goes by without a blog post touting the next essential promotional venue for our work, or the latest social network that we have to be active on if we want to get our sales moving. Often, such advice suggests moving into areas that make us feel uncomfortable, such as relentlessly pushing our work on Twitter, or disingenuously making friends on Goodreads only to hit them with the hard sell further down the road.

  How do we get noticed without driving ourselves crazy or crossing our own ethical boundaries? How do we make our books visible without spending so much time on promotion that we have nothing left for writing? How can we promote in a cost-effective way (that won’t make us go nuts)?

  Fear not, fellow writer. Let’s Get Visible is here to help.

  This book will do two things. It will break down Amazon’s famous recommendation engine and detail the various opportunities for exposure on Amazon’s sites. Plus, it will give you practical help on how to implement this knowledge. By using the tips outlined in this book, you will get your book noticed. Whether your book sells or not is up to you. Because if you don’t have the basics in place—a striking cover that speaks to your genre, an enticing blurb that draws readers into the book, a sample that grabs them (with clean formatting), and a price that doesn’t make them think twice—no amount of visibility will do you any good. If you aren’t sure whether you have those basics in place, or you haven’t published anything yet, I urge you to read Let’s Get Digital first, which will cover all of the steps you need to get your book in shape and ready to profit from the visibility that Let’s Get Visible will help you attain. Considering that a lot of the strategies here aim to place you on various lists on the Amazon site, an appealing, professional cover is particularly important. I can’t stress that enough.

  Assuming you do have those basics in place, you probably share the same frustrations that many writers have when it comes to the promotional treadmill. Getting your book noticed can seem like an impossible task. Even when you manage to carve out some visibility for your titles, it often seems fleeting, and the sales surge can disappear as quickly as it arrived. Many writers are awkward penguins who don’t enjoy promoting their work and are aghast at the notion of becoming the internet equivalent of a door-to-door salesman. That’s fine. This book will not urge you to flood Twitter with spammy “buy my book” messages. Nothing in this book will make you penguins squirm. Promise. This book also won’t push time-heavy strategies on you. I won’t urge you to join Goodreads and spend countless hours reviewing books and forcing yourself on various reader groups. I won’t suggest you join teams where you spend hours tweeting about other people’s books, which you haven’t read, in the hope that they will do the same for you.

  None of the strategies outlined in this book will take up too much time. Indeed, I will urge you to cut back on time-heavy promotional activity and substitute it with something altogether more powerful: knowledge of the algorithms that determine which books receive the spotlight, and ways to exploit that knowledge to your advantage. In short, this book will help you make your books visible, and will free up more time for writing (and the rest of your life).

  Some of the tricks are simple: such as having a short note at the back of your books asking readers (nicely) for a review. Doing that led to my review rate tripling overnight. No longer did I have to spend countless hours hounding book reviewers, only to have my novel join the back of an endless queue. Instead, the reviews poured in without any further effort on my part. Another simple suggestion is to set up a mailing list, and to make that link the first thing readers see when they finish your book. Doing that has allowed me to build up a considerable list of readers who will buy my work the second it is released—landing my books high in the charts, gaining them crucial exposure to new readers, and driving further sales.

  That’s the easy stuff, but not everything in this book is that straightforward. Some of it will require a little work on your part. The inner workings of Amazon aren’t always easy to decode. The strategies I outline might, at times, seem strange (such as staggering news of a new release over several days, rather than telling everyone all at once). But there is sound reasoning behind such thinking, and everything is explained in the simplest possible terms with plenty of concrete examples. By the time you have finished this book, you will have a series of different marketing techniques you can apply to all of your titles, depending on their current sales level. You will learn how to choose the right categories (and when to change them), and you will learn what factors actually govern Sales Rank and how the Best Seller & Popularity lists work (and the difference between the two). Once you understand that, you will learn how to maximize free runs, and how to get the most out of a paid advertisement, a group promotion, or a limited-time sale.

  Most importantly, you will have divested yourself of time-wasting, frustrating promotional strategies that do nothing other than cost you precious writing time. But before we get to that, we have to deal with the dreaded sales cliff.

  The Sales Cliff

  All authors know that sales can ebb and flow. Sometimes the reasons are clear, but at other times they are mystifying. A spike in sales after being featured on a major site like Pixel of Ink, Ereader News Today, or BookBub has an obvious explanation: your book is suddenly visible to thousands and thousands of new readers who have never heard of it before. Featured authors can enjoy the afterglow of a resultant spike for the following days or weeks.

  What is often less obvious is why sales suddenly collapse. The same book that was riding high in the charts one day suddenly becomes untouchable. It’s as if the book has become invisible to readers. If you keep a close eye on your daily sales numbers, you might even notice this phenomenon occurring roughly a month after a big sales day. But what is the cause? Can this trend be reversed? And is there a way to avoid this “sales cliff” altogether?

  To answer those questions, you need to understand what feeds into the various algorithms that Amazon and the other retailers use to calculate lists such as Best Sellers and Hot New Releases that are dotted around their sites. Sometimes, these recommendation engines are working in your favor, displaying your book to thousands of pote
ntial purchasers. Other times, it’s as if your book has been warehoused, and readers never seem to stumble across it. But what if there were a way to get the system to view your book more favorably? What if there were a way to trigger those recommendations for your own titles?

  Let’s Get Visible attempts to solve a number of problems, but chiefly how to make your book stand out in the endless sea of the Kindle Store. It will explain the ways in which Amazon highlights particular books to readers. It will teach you how to make your book more attractive to the algorithms that determine what books are recommended. And it will show you how to keep the dreaded sales cliff at bay.

  But before you can take advantage of the system, you need to understand how it works.

  In the first section—Amazon Algorithms—you will learn how Sales Rank is calculated, what factors affect it, and what doesn’t (despite popular beliefs to the contrary). You will hear about the various lists that present key opportunities for visibility in the Kindle Store, such as the Best Seller lists, Hot New Releases, the Popularity list, and Movers & Shakers. I will also explain how Also Boughts work, and why they are such crucial drivers of sales. Finally, Amazon’s email recommendations will be covered, and strategies for qualifying for that killer marketing push will be outlined.

  Parts II and III are called Free Pulsing and Price Pulsing, but don’t let those labels intimidate you; they’re just fancy terms for dropping your price briefly, or setting your book free for a short time. These sections will be the first chance for you to put this knowledge into practice, so that your books can start getting some visibility. You will get practical promotional tips to help you hit those Best Seller lists, including running a limited time sale or a group promotion, making the most out of KDP Select, free matching, and perma-free.

  Part IV is Advertising, and it is where you will find out which big reader sites are worth your money and also learn how to evaluate any advertising opportunity to ensure you always get a positive return on your investment. By the end of this section, you will know how to maximize your advertising dollars by estimating potential sales and choosing the correct categories for the promotion. Subjects like post-advertising pricing or category switching will also be covered.

  The fifth section, Launch Strategy, is where you put all the pieces together to make sure your latest book has the best possible start. It will explain why you should avoid the standard launch procedure of seeking to push your book as high as possible on the first day. It will teach you how to set-up a mailing list, how to drive sign-ups, and how to propel your book onto the Hot New Releases list (which will further grow your sales).

  It might seem more natural to place launch strategies at the start, but this entire book assumes you already have several titles released. If you don’t, what follows will be of limited use to you, and your time is probably best spent focusing on new work. The advice in Let’s Get Visible is ordered to teach you how to boost the visibility of your existing titles, before stitching everything together to show you how to properly launch your next book, staking out that crucial exposure right from the start. It might seem a little counterintuitive to have launch strategies towards the end, but to be frank, if you haven’t assimilated what has gone before, launch strategies will be confusing.

  Selling Outside Amazon is the final section. Here, the other retailers are covered, primarily focusing on the biggest players: Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Kobo. The visibility challenges are more extreme outside of Amazon, and the reasons are explained in some depth. Some writers have managed to be successful, however, and their strategies are outlined. You may decide to grant Amazon exclusivity as a result, or at least focus your marketing efforts there, but all options are covered.

  Soon, you will have enough knowledge to make decisions with confidence, as part of an overall marketing plan, instead of shooting in the dark. But first you need to understand the Amazon algorithms. If their mere mention causes you brief panic, don’t worry. Everything is explained clearly. By the end of the first section you will have an intuitive understanding of how Amazon recommends books to readers, and how you can take advantage of that.

  Ready to dive in?

  PART I: AMAZON ALGORITHMS

  More experienced or tech-savvy writers may be tempted to skip this section and move straight to the more practical sections on advertising and marketing. I urge you not to do that and to go over these basics first. There are so many myths about how ranking and Best Seller lists work that it’s crucial to rid yourself of those before attempting to apply the strategies I outline. If you are unsure how the Popularity list is calculated, for example, or how it discriminates against cheaper books, you might fail to maximize returns from a limited time sale or a free run.

  1. Amazon Sales Rank

  Sales Rank has often been the subject of fevered speculation. Amazon typically remains tight-lipped about the exact algorithm—aside from a general declaration that your Sales Rank reflects how your book is doing at that moment in relation to all others—leading some authors to throw their hands up and declare it unknowable. That is a mistake. As for any system, the behavior of Sales Rank algorithms can be observed, and can even follow a clear pattern.

  It’s actually a lot simpler than many think. When you first publish a book, you won’t have a ranking until you get a sale. Once that first purchase filters through the system, you will be assigned a number that reflects how well your book is selling in relation to all others, and that number will be updated hourly (although books at the bottom of the rankings may see less frequent updates). #1 is the top-selling book on Amazon, at that moment. And #23,459 means that there are currently 23,458 books selling better than yours. If you are having trouble finding your Sales Rank, it’s noted on the product page of each book, just below the publisher information. You can also view the Sales Rank for all of your titles simultaneously in Author Central.

  While Amazon claims that sales reports are live, there can often be a delay of a few hours before they register in the KDP dashboard, and then it can be another hour (or more) before that transaction affects your Sales Rank. Free downloads can be reported quicker, but free titles have a separate ranking system. When free books revert to the paid listings, those free downloads don’t count towards your Sales Rank whatsoever (but do affect other algorithms, which we’ll get to). Paid sales take longer to register on the KDP dashboard. In fact, recently Amazon has been batching sales reports, leading to less regular updates. It remains to be seen whether this is a permanent change, or whether it is something that will be resolved at the next update to their reporting systems.

  How Is Sales Rank Calculated?

  Sales Rank behaves in a logical, predictable way. If your sales increase, your ranking improves (i.e. moves closer to #1). If your sales decrease, or if you stop selling altogether, your ranking worsens. If you have access to your sales reports (i.e. if you’re a self-publisher who uploads directly to KDP), you can make reasonably accurate predictions about how your book will shift in the rankings on the next update. As the ranking system is relative, the seasonal nature of the bookselling business plays a part. A burst of 100 sales in a single day will lead to a better ranking on June 26 than it will on December 26, when all of the new Kindle owners will be loading their new devices with e-books. Even so, by looking at the ranking of any given book, you can (roughly) estimate how many they are selling at that particular moment.

  The only thing that directly affects Sales Rank is sales. Some people think the number of reviews you have influences your Sales Rank. It doesn’t, and neither do Likes, tags, free downloads, Also Boughts, clicks, page views, samples downloaded, your book’s genre, or anything else. Free downloads can influence your position on the Popularity list (which some people confuse with the Best Seller list), which in turn can drive sales and will then improve your ranking, but they don’t directly affect Sales Rank. Similarly, having a large number of overwhelmingly positive reviews can help sway a prospective reader who is on the fence ab
out purchasing your book, but it won’t directly affect Sales Rank.

  Finally, a particularly widespread belief is that the price of your book is a factor in Sales Rank. It’s not. Like free downloads, price can influence your position on the Popularity List, which can in turn grant you visibility that leads to sales, and which can then improve your Sales Rank, but it doesn’t have a direct influence on Sales Rank. We’ll cover all of that in detail, but for now, you just need to keep one thing clear in your head: the only thing that directly affects Sales Rank is sales. Most misunderstandings about the Amazon system spring from these myths, so make sure you are clear on that point. (Please note that when an Amazon Prime member borrows a book from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, that borrow counts as a sale for the purposes of Sales Rank calculations. You will only get such borrows if you are enrolled in KDP Select.)

  A believer in the myth that price affects Sales Rank might counter with an example of one book being ranked higher than another, despite the latter selling more. Yes, that can happen, but it’s all explained by how different sales are weighted by Amazon’s algorithms. For example, more recent sales are weighted most heavily. However, after five days or so, those sales have very little weighting whatsoever. In addition, velocity is valued. Selling 20 books in the space of an hour will push you much higher in the rankings than if they were spread over a day (or a week). This led to some authors gaming the system by organizing a group of people to buy their books at the same time. It worked for a while, until Amazon recalibrated the algorithms to push those books down the charts just as quickly as they rose. That development is important, as it now means that brief sales spikes from something like an ad on a reader site no longer lead to as many residual sales afterward. It also affects launch strategy, which we’ll get to later in this book.