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