Category: Business

This year I’ve been experimenting with Amazon Ads for my books, both fiction and non-fiction. I’ve been trying to be as thoughtful and careful as I can.

Yet I still made a big mistake.

One I’m embarrassed to write about. But I will because maybe it’ll prevent another author from doing the same.

Sales And Percentages For Amazon Ads

The Amazon Ads dashboard (for the U.S., where I’m based) shows your ad spend and your total sales. You can look at it for different periods of time, including the current day, week, month, or year-to-date.

It also calculates for you a percentage of what your ad costs compared to your sales. So if your total sales were $100 and you spent $30, your average cost of ad per sale was 30%.

The thing to remember is that this figure is a percentage of sales, not royalties. If most of your books are priced so that you earn 70% in royalties, a 30% cost of sales is pretty good.

I knew all of this.

Yet because I failed to take into account the difference between my ebook and paperback royalties, I didn’t realize for weeks that I was running ads at a loss.

Selling And Losing

The first novels in my two series earn a 30% royalty and the rest earn 70%. My non-fiction ebooks are mostly at a 70% royalty. So I thought any total percentage below 50% would mean I was earning more than I was spending.

And that worked pretty well for January. As I wrote about in Advertising Books in 2019, I figured if I expanded my ads and gradually spent more I could raise my total sales and come out ahead.

I knew I’d likely lose some money as I tried different ads. That’s why I checked every day to see how the ads were doing and what they were costing.

What I didn’t factor in was that my paperback ads would trigger the most sales.

Because I initially published paperbacks mainly so readers would see the higher price, highlighting what a good deal the ebooks were, I hadn’t been looking at the profit margin.

Which I found out the hard way when my writing workbooks started selling well.

Know Your Paperback Royalty

On a paperback, what you earn depends on a formula based in large part on the length of your book.

So it’s not a flat percentage. One $6.99 paperback might earn me $2 and another only $0.50. I don’t have any priced in a way that gets me a 70% royalty. If I did that, the prices would be far higher than those of similar books.

I didn’t think about any of that when I expanded my Amazon Ads to my workbook editions and started to see my sales climb.

It wasn’t until I neared the end of the month and compared royalties to sales that it hit me that on most paperbacks I earned less than a 20% royalty. As my cost of ad per sale was often around 45%, that was bad.

The more paperbacks I sold, the more money I lost.

Adjusting Up And Down

It turned out not only were the royalties low if I planned to keep advertising, publishers of similar books priced them higher than mine on Amazon. Once I saw that, I adjusted the paperback prices up by $1 each ($2 for the longest book).

Even at the new prices, though, my royalty is around 28%. So I also lowered my bid for each click.

It’s been a bit hard watching slower sales. I really enjoyed seeing those spikes on the sales graph! But not enough to lose money on ads.

Since then I’ve watched the total royalties for each month (which you can find on your KDP Reports page) and it’s staying above the cost of the ads. Which means it’s time once again to try to increase ad spend.

I hope I won’t make any more mistakes like that, but it is all part of learning.

That’s all for this week.

I’m taking the next few weeks off (my longest vacation ever and the first one in quite a while). But I’ll be back at the end of the month. Until Friday May 31–

L.M. Lilly

 

I’ve written before about how to improve the content and look of BookBub ads for better results. But how do you choose which readers to whom to advertise? In particular, how do you find books similar to yours and their authors?

One way is through Yasiv.com.

A Graphic Look At Your Book

Yasiv.com is free to use.

Once there, enter the title of your book and wait for it to show on the right. You’ll also get a list of other books, so you may need to scroll to find it.

Click on it and you’ll get a graph showing your book cover and the covers of books that readers of your book bought on Amazon and vice versa.

Here’s a page from the search of the first book in my Awakening supernatural thriller series:

You can keep scrolling in any direction to see what other books the ones that appear near yours connect to.

Learning About Other Authors And Genres

I often discover books and authors with which I’m not familiar near mine on Yasiv, and I don’t always see the books I expect. That’s why Yasiv is so helpful.

Instead of guessing which readers will like your books and spending money advertising to them, you can instead target authors and books you see on the Yasiv graph. I’ve used these authors for both Amazon and BookBub ads.

Experiment with other sales platforms as well, not only Amazon.

For example, I found Harlan Coben, whom I target with ads for Kobo for my Q.C. Davis series, through Yasiv. Ads targeted to his readers on Amazon, though, don’t work that well for me.

Yasiv also helped me see that a lot of sci fi readers like my Awakening series, despite that it has no hard science at all. But it loosely falls in the sci fi/fantasy genre and it’s a four-book series, which often appeals to fantasy readers.

Connections To Your Own Work

If you have a number of books published, you’ll be able to see whether readers move from one to another. The later books in my Awakening series (The Unbelievers, The Conflagration, and The Illumination) appear pretty close to The Awakening.

That didn’t surprise me, as I generally see sales of the later books after a spike in sales of Book 1.

What did surprise me is that When Darkness Falls, which I think of as my orphan book, also appears pretty near The Awakening. I’m surprised because WDF doesn’t sell much.  Occasionally I run a Free Day through Kindle Unlimited and people download it or borrow it.

It’s a standalone that loosely fits in the same genre as The Awakening but has significant differences.

WDF is a paranormal romance that features a woman in love with a man who has become a vampire-type creature but doesn’t know it. In contrast, The Awakening has little romance and no supernatural characters. It’s about a young woman against a powerful cult convinced she’ll trigger an Apocalypse.

I had thought about making When Darkness Falls wide (available on multiple ebook platforms) like my other books. Now that I know that free downloads of When Darkness Falls drive some sales of The Awakening, though, I decided to keep it in Kindle Unlimited.

I also learned that not many readers cross over from the Awakening series to my Q.C. Davis series, a suspense/mystery series with no supernatural or occult elements. Disappointing, but it confirms that I need to target entirely different readers for the two series.

That’s all for today. Until next Friday–

L.M. Lilly

 

A CVS I once shopped at every week closed the other day. Its disappearance made me think about customer service and how that relates to the business of being an author and publisher.

An Unsurprising Store Closing

The CVS that closed was once directly on the way to my office, which is how I started shopping there. When I switched my place of business, I detoured a few blocks out of the way because the pharmacist was helpful and cheerful, and I was in the habit of picking up things like toothpaste and Advil there.

Gradually, though, going a few blocks out of my way became less and less appealing.

It started when CVS put in self-checkout machines.

No matter how long the lines were, how many employees were stocking shelves, or how many machines errorred out and stopped working (I found them very unreliable in the beginning), the employees rarely opened up a regular cash register to ring people up.

Also, working or not, I find the machines cumbersome and awkward to use.

There’s no room to put anything down, as the machines are jammed against one another.

The only shelf is for bagged items you’ve already rung up, as the mechanical voice sternly advised me when I momentarily set my purse there to keep from dropping it.

All of that means that when it’s twenty degrees and sleeting outside I have to juggle my umbrella, hat, mittens, shoulder bag full of files, wallet, credit card, and items to check out with only two hands. While sweating under my winter coat.

Other times the specific item I need is out of stock.

Or it’s been recategorized and shelved elsewhere. (I don’t have kids, so it doesn’t occur to me that I might only find cotton swabs, for instance, in the infant aisle.)

While I occasionally buy a few things at CVS, these days I usually order online. And that’s despite that because I now work in my home office I’m looking for reasons to take walks and interact with other people.

CVS simply makes it far too hard for me to spend money there.

What Good Service Looks Like

My first order with Amazon might easily have been my last.

Early on when Amazon sold only books I ordered five on the origins of monotheism and on goddess cultures. I wanted them for research for what eventually became my Awakening supernatural thriller series.

Local bookstores didn’t carry the books.

Amazon offered free shipping. But weeks after I ordered I’d gotten nothing. Happily, I pretty easily found a link on Amazon to report the missing books.

A few days later a box of books came. No questions asked. Two weeks later the original set of books also appeared at my door. But Amazon had already told me to just keep them if they ever showed up.

I was thrilled. One set stayed at home for close study. I kept the other at work to read in those rare times when I had a break.

I also became a customer for life. Especially later when one-click ordering made it even easier to buy.

Putting It Together

What I learned from these experiences about retail business:

• Make it easy, not hard, for your customers to give you money
• Make your products easy to find
• If you make a mistake, fix it quickly and add some value

These seem like obvious points. Yet I go into stores all the time that don’t follow them.

Authors And Customer Service

What does all of this have to do with your author business?

Easy Spend

Most of us sell through other companies like Kobo or Amazon, so we we have limited control over how easy it is for a reader to buy.

But one thing we can do is make our books available in as many places and in as many formats as possible.

Audiobooks, for example, took off very slowly for me. But the other day I sold my 1,200th audiobook, not counting The Worried Man, which is published by a separate company. And the great thing is that I either did a royalty-share deal or paid the narrators up front. So all royalties to me are pure income at this point.

Similarly, at first I issued only ebook editions. But as I met more people who only bought paperbacks I decided I ought to make those available too.

Now about one-third of my sales are paperback editions.

Findability

Having books in multiple formats and on multiple platforms also makes them easier to find. Having your own website that lists all the editions also makes it simpler for a reader who hears your name to track you down.

In addition, covers and book descriptions that accurately convey your genre will help readers determine quickly if your books might interest them.

Fixability

If you learn that there’s a typo in your book, or if you discover your book description is giving people the wrong impression, if you’re a self-published author you can fairly quickly make changes and updates.

And, as an author, sometimes fixing an issue means responding to a reader who emails you. If the reader didn’t like the ending, you can say thank you for the feedback, empathize, and let the reader know that with the next book you’ll keep those thoughts in mind.

It doesn’t mean you need to change your writing style. But if you’re thoughtful and appreciative in your response, the reader may give your next book a try. And you may learn something.

That’s all for today.

Until next Friday–

L.M. Lilly

For the last 3 months I’ve been running BookBub ads for my novels and non-fiction books. (More on why I started doing this in Advertising Books in 2019.)

Here’s what I learned about split testing and ad appearance so far:

Split Test To Learn The Why

On BookBub you can target readers of one particular author at a time. So I regularly tried the same tag line in one ad targeting a particular author’s readers and a different tag line in another ad to the same readers.

This approach is called split testing and I’m so glad I did it.

Otherwise, had I tried a tag line targeting one author and gotten few or no clicks, I might have assumed that author wasn’t a good target for my books. Or that the tag line didn’t work.

Or both.

Instead, for example, the tag line “One woman stands against an ancient and powerful cult” resulted in Amanda Carlson’s readers clicking on it 10%-20% of the time.

Douglas Clegg’s readers, though, barely clicked on ads with that tag line at all.

But Clegg’s readers clicked often on a different tag line: “They thought she would give birth to a messiah….” This ad led to sales of my Awakening series 4-book box set at $9.99. That set is my highest priced item, so finding an author whose readers it interested made a big difference to my bottom line.

Had I not done the split testing, I would have thought Douglas Clegg wasn’t a good choice for my Awakening series at all.

Create Ads Similar To Target Book Covers 

I also played with different background colors and typefaces in ads. That didn’t seem to make a whole lot of difference in clicks or sales.

In in Month 3, however, it finally occurred to me to see if I could evoke the color schemes and patterns of the target authors’ book covers.

When I targeted Harlan Coben’s readers with an ad for my domestic thriller The Worried Man and tried to echo themes I saw in many of his book covers the click-through rate doubled.

To the left is the latest ad, which I created on Canva.

If you click through Coben’s covers here you’ll see many use similar shades of yellow. Also, many have a sort of distressed or cracked look in the background.

 

Echoing Key Words

When I looked at Coben’s book descriptions, too, I noticed they often referred to “secrets.”

As The Worried Man includes the main character discovering secrets about her boyfriend (the victim) and various suspects, I added the word into the ad copy above.

This month I plan to try a variation on this ad with a shorter tag line. I’ll let you know if that works better or not.

That’s all for today. Until next Friday–

L.M. Lilly

It’s hard to find time each day or week to market your books. Especially if you’re also working another job. One thing you can do once to help books sales is to add Amazon categories.

When you upload your book on the KDP Dashboard (which you can use to publish a Kindle ebook or paperback edition) you’ll be asked to choose two categories.

But where do you check out other books in those categories?

And are you limited to just two?

Number Of Categories

About a year ago at a writing conference a speaker said that if you contact KDP support, you can request a total of up to ten categories. So that’s eight in addition to the original two.

While I haven’t found an official rule confirming that, when I’ve requested additional categories, they’ve been added.

You do that through the KDP Help once you’re signed into KDP. You need to provide the ASIN for the Kindle edition of the book, its title, and the categories.

What’s New

The first time I asked for additional categories, I copied them from the sales page of books that I thought were similar to mine. A KDP support person added most of them.

For a couple, the support person advised that categories had changed but added my book into similar ones.

I still think this is a good way to get ideas.

But when I requested categories this week, I discovered I hadn’t conformed with current requirements.

In my first request for my latest non-fiction book Happiness, Anxiety, and Writing: Using Your Creativity To Lead A Calmer, Happier Life, I asked for these categories:

• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Self-Help > Stress Management
• Books > Self-Help > Anxieties & Phobias
• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Personal Health > Healthy Living
• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Counseling & Psychology > Mental Health > Mental Illness
• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Counseling & Psychology > Pathologies
• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Counseling & Psychology > Mental Health > Mood Disorders
• Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Mental Health > Mood Disorders
• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Counseling & Psychology > Pathologies > Anxieties & Phobias

KDP Support responded that I needed to choose specific, current Kindle categories, which apparently I hadn’t done.

Where To Find Them

It turns out you find the current categories on the New Release page.

The email also advised that the categories are different for each Amazon company. So the U.K. might have different categories than the U.S.

On the U.S. page I found on the left hand side toward the middle a broad list of categories. Clicking on each expanded to sub-categories.

Sometimes there were multiple layers of sub-categories. I had to drill down quite a bit to get to ones that struck me as worthwhile. Doing that took me over an hour.

Better Something Than Nothing

In a perfect world I’d investigate the top books in each possible category. Ideally, my book would be similar to those in the Top 20 or so. Also, I’d want books in the Top 20 that didn’t rank so high (say in the Top 5,000 overall) that I’d need massive sales to get there.

I’d also want ones where the Top 20 books didn’t rank so low (say 200,000 and up overall) that probably no one is browsing those categories.

But because I’d already spent over an hour, I had other things to get done (including write), and it’s better to do something than nothing, I skipped that research.

Instead I picked what I thought were the best categories based on the topics and the number of reviews the books had. I requested the following:

• Kindle Store : Kindle eBooks : Self-Help : Stress Management 
• Kindle Store : Kindle eBooks : Self-Help : Happiness 
• Kindle Store : Kindle eBooks : Health, Fitness & Dieting : Counseling & Psychology : Mental Health : Mood Disorders 
• Kindle Store : Kindle eBooks : Health, Fitness & Dieting : Counseling & Psychology : Pathologies : Anxieties & Phobias 
• Kindle Store : Kindle eBooks : Reference : Words, Language & Grammar : Reference 
• Kindle Store : Kindle eBooks : Reference : Writing, Research & Publishing Guides : Writing Skills 
• Kindle Store : Kindle eBooks : Reference : Writing, Research & Publishing Guides : Nonfiction 
• Kindle Store : Kindle eBooks : Reference : Writing, Research & Publishing Guides : Publishing & Books 

I left researching other countries for another day.

It may not be the perfect list. But at least there will be more places where U.S. readers may come across the books.

That’s all for today. Until next Friday–

L.M. Lilly

 

A marketing coach told me when I was a full-time lawyer that I ought to tell clients about my fiction writing. All of them met and dealt with skilled attorneys all the time, but a very small number of those attorneys also wrote books. What was different about me, he said, was what clients–and potential new clients–would remember.

He was right.

I’ve been thinking about how this same concept applies to marketing novels and non-fiction.

So Many Books

With millions of books on Amazon alone, and new authors releasing work every day, it takes more than a good book to stand out from the crowd.

I’ve been exploring advertising, but I don’t think that alone is enough. Also, I want to connect in a more personal way with readers. Artificial Intelligence is advancing at a rapid rate. Soon AIs will be able to write tons of content. So a personal touch matters more than ever.

For all those reasons, I’ve been thinking about what’s different about me and how it ties into my writing.

A Song In My Heart

I started playing guitar and signing when I was in junior high. My first paid job singing was at age sixteen at the Two Way Street Coffeehouse in Downers Grove. (It’s still there.)

But I got away from playing music in my twenties for a few reasons. One was that I was working a regular job and writing novels on the side, and I only had so much time. Another was that I developed a repetitive stress injury in my hands and wrists. Faced with limited use of my hands, writing won out over guitar playing.

Since then I’ve played and sung now and then for fun but not professionally.

Writing What You Know

My music background comes into my fiction, though, and into my non-fiction.

The main character, Q.C. Davis, in my new suspense/mystery series is a lawyer, but she’s also a singer in an a cappella group. In addition, I talk about singing in my upcoming book Happiness, Anxiety, and Writing: Using Your Creativity To Live a Calmer, Happier Life. Because when anxious thoughts grab hold of me in the middle of the night and won’t let go I often sing a few bars of an upbeat song in my head to derail them.

So for my Q.C. Davis series, I recorded myself singing a cappella the song quoted at the beginning of the second book. It was fun to do, and my readers enjoyed hearing the song. It also allowed me to post about the book on Facebook and Twitter without doing an actual sales pitch.

For the Happiness and Anxiety book I’m planning to record myself playing and singing Keep On The Sunny Side, one of the songs I use to derail those anxious thoughts.

I’ve got some practicing to do before then, and my guitar desperately needs new strings, but I’m hoping to post the video within the next two weeks.

And there’s another plus — guitar strings became a tax deductible expense.

What about you? What’s different about you that you can have fun with, tie to your writing, and share with the world?

Until next Friday–

L.M. Lilly

Most of us have a To Do list a mile long. And it almost always includes things that we don’t like to do.

Maybe we used to like a particular task. Maybe we never did. Either way those items keep moving from one day to the next or one month to the next, always hanging out there, weighing on us because we’re not doing them.

I find this is particularly true when it comes to marketing.

Building Your Platform

Whatever kind of writer you are, though, and however you publish marketing is likely to be key to your career. A big part of that is building your author platform. (Jane Friedman defines your author platform as your “ability to sell books because of who you are or who you can reach.”)

And so many tasks go into building a platform.

Here are just a few you might have tried or that might be on your list:

• building and regularly updating an author website
• interacting on social media
• staying in direct touch with fans, potential fans, and readers
• networking with other authors and professionals who might be able to help you and whom you might be able to help
• book signings
• other types of public speaking or personal appearances

In addition, a lot of writers still need to work another job or have multiple other responsibilities.

Shortening The List

When I’m feeling overwhelmed often my answer is to try to power through my list. Like it or not, if I decided a particular task is one most successful authors do I feel like I need to keep it on my list.

So it was with great relief when I heard Jim Kukral of the Sell More Books Show say this week that if you don’t like something relating to marketing don’t do it.

When I thought about it, that made a lot of sense.

If you don’t like something, it will probably take you more time to do than focusing on something that achieves the same purpose but that you enjoy. You’re also less likely to be effective, or come across as genuine, if you’re trying to engage with readers in a way that’s not fun for you.

Finally, what works for one author doesn’t necessarily work for someone else. So why push yourself to do that thing that you keep moving from one week to the next (or one month to the next) on your To Do list.

Changes And Social Media

What you enjoy or don’t can change.

As an example, when I first started using Twitter, I loved it. I was working 10 or so hours a day (sometimes including weekends) at my law practice. Twitter was a nice way to take a break for 5-10 minutes a few times each day.

I connected with other writers, shared blog posts I’d written, and found content that helped me in my writing and publishing journey. It reminded me that I was also a writer in addition to being a busy (and often super-stressed) lawyer. It’s how I first came across The Creative Penn, which is now my favorite podcast on publishing and writing.

I also met terrific people who made a huge difference in my career.

Women’s fiction author Melissa Foster and I connected when I had only one book out, my first supernatural thriller, The Awakening, Book 1. Melissa included it in one of the first book launches she organized. We advertised that launch mainly through Twitter.

That experience was key to me learning more about how to present my e-books and introduced me to other authors that I still keep in touch with to this day.

I also met Shiromi Arserio. She later produced and narrated three of the audiobooks in my Awakening Series. We bonded over a shared love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We traded blog posts, proofread each other’s manuscripts, and became friends. The last time she was in Chicago, I got to meet her in person.

Over the last year or two, though, scheduling tweets is one of those things that keeps moving from one To Do list to the next. I’m just not as excited about spending time there. While I still check in with people that I already know, it’s been a long time since I met anyone new through Twitter. And there’s so much content out there now that my issue is scaling back on what I read and listen to rather than searching for insights and information.

Finally, I see a lot more angry and frustrated tweets these days about politics. I’m all for people sharing their viewpoints, but Twitter no longer serves as an escape for me.

All this is not to say I’m abandoning Twitter.

But I decided to stop feeling guilty if I don’t go there a lot. I’ll post the articles from this page and other occasional updates. I’ll see what friends are tweeting. But otherwise I’ll probably let it go.

What Do You Enjoy?

Without particularly planning it I’ve found myself spending more time on Instagram.

I like it because it’s very different from when doing the rest of the day. Rather than sitting in front of a laptop I use Instagram on my phone. Also, rather than writing more words, which I do the rest of the day, I’m looking at or taking photos. I really enjoy using that visual part of my brain.

Also, because I haven’t been on Instagram that long and I’m pretty particular about who I follow everything I see there is something I find inspiring or encouraging or striking or peaceful. Or that makes me think in a new, interesting way.

Is it as good for marketing?

I’m not sure, but maybe that’s the point. I connected the most with readers and other authors on Twitter when I was enjoying it for what it was rather than saying to myself “time to market.” So I figure that’ll be the case for Instagram too.

Anyway, it’s fun.

Have you been struggling with something on your to do list? If so, can you let it go and do something else instead might serve the same purpose?

That’s all for today. Until next Friday—

L.M. Lilly