Maximize Your Book’s ROI with Attribution Tags
By: Ginger | Posted on February 24, 2023
Advertising can be expensive, so it’s important to be careful with your ads and always test the different elements to make sure that you’re maximizing your book’s ROI. Changing up the ad images and copy are the obvious first steps, but you can even experiment with other things, like what potential readers see when they click through the ad to your product page. And keep in mind that positive changes to your book’s product page won’t just help sell books to customers finding it from your ad, but from anyone that stumbles upon it organically as well. The ability to properly measure the results of your changes has only become realistic recently, though, with the introduction of Attribution Tags. Without them, you’re really just guessing. That’s why today, Ginger is going through how to use these tags to figure out the net result (whether positive or negative) that your changes… Read More >
Should Authors Embrace the AI Revolution?
By: Ginger | Posted on February 17, 2023
ChatGPT exploded onto the scene a few months ago, and I honestly don’t feel like I’m overstating things when I say that it literally changed almost everything overnight. There’s a reason why it set a record for the fastest user growth ever, hitting 100 million active users within 2 months of launch. People are finding new uses for it almost daily, and one of the most interesting (to us) is in how it can help authors. Sure, there are negative stories about how students are using it to write essays or pass their tests, or the sky is falling type articles warning how everyone is about to lose their jobs to AI, but we can either fear change, or embrace it. The reality is, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The cat is out of the bag on this, and it’s NOT going back in. AI is here… Read More >
Discover a Fresh Perspective with the POV Challenge
By: Ginger | Posted on February 10, 2023
This week’s podcast with Courtney Brandt explores the intricacies of writing in first and third person perspectives, which is an excellent reference to listen to before (or after) reading this blog. In many cases, whether due to genre norms or story requirements, one perspective is more suited than another for a particular story, but there are also plenty of occasions where either POV could work (although the results would likely be two very different versions of the same tale.) Yet despite this, many authors favor one POV over another, even when the alternative may be a better fit. Both perspectives have their unique strengths, which is why experimenting with them can be an incredibly valuable exercise. By switching things up, authors can gain a fresh perspective on their plot and characters, which in turn may result in a their ability to write a much stronger and engaging story. But don’t… Read More >
Navigating the Challenges of Publishing Alternative Editions
By: Ginger | Posted on February 3, 2023
One of things that authors love most about self-publishing is the freedom to make your own choices with regards to your work. You can do whatever it is you think is right for your book, without a publisher looking over your shoulder and second guessing your decisions and ideas, if not overruling or blocking them completely. Unfortunately, it’s that same lack of oversight that, over the years, led to many authors finding ways to game the system in their favor, turning Amazon’s early eBook storefront into a big mess and eventually leading them to the creation of broad rules designed to reign people in. The side effect of all this was that those rules often also block authors from making completely legitimate and creative choices with their own work, such as creating alternative editions of their books, or publishing copies with covers that appeal to a different audience. You can… Read More >
Amazon Attribution Provides Long-term KU Page Read Data
By: Ginger | Posted on January 27, 2023
Tracking individual sales that come from each advertising channel is incredibly useful, but if your book is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, there is more to it than that. You might still be earning money without actual sales, when someone “borrows” your book and starts to read. In a way, KU borrows actually change how we have to look at how much our books earn from ads, because those page reads aren’t tied as closely to our ad run as more traditional sales. As Ginger reminds us, KU page reads mean your ROI doesn’t just stop at the end of your campaign. Using one of his own books as an example, Ginger takes us through the numbers to demonstrate how page reads can continue to pay dividends long after your ad run is over, and how attribution tags finally allow us to specifically track this metric. As you’ve probably noticed from… Read More >
The Dangers of Mixing Politics and Writing
By: Ginger | Posted on January 20, 2023
If you were to judge solely by the backlash so often seen erupting in social media these days, whenever an author gets too political in their writings, you might think that voicing those opinions was a new phenomenon. But in fact, writers have always used their work as a soapbox for their political leanings, we’re simply paying more attention to it now, with everyday readers finally having a place to sound off from when they agree or disagree with what they’ve read. That’s not to say that writers shouldn’t speak their mind or fill their work with messages about how they think the world should work, but it does mean that it should be done with care. There are many examples of big name authors that have alienated their fans and paid the price, but there are also those that have done it in a way that is embraced and… Read More >
What I’ve learned after spending over $100k with Facebook Ads
By: Matt Holmes | Posted on January 13, 2023
We write a lot of articles about advertising your book on the various platforms, along with what we believe are best practices and the tips we’ve learned along the way. But when it comes right down to it, nothing beats hard data from the field. Matt Holmes has made a career out of helping authors with their advertising, starting with the Fantasy novels written by his wife. His ad spend tops six figures, which has provided him with a lot of data to draw conclusions about what works and what doesn’t. After so much time and money spent advertising different books of different genres from a variety of authors, Matt has come up with a list of the five biggest lessons he’s learned about advertising self-published books on Facebook, and he’s sharing them with us today. Spending over $100,000 on anything is going to provide you with some HUGE lessons… Read More >
Are Apple and Google Screwing Over Self-Published Authors?
By: Ginger | Posted on January 6, 2023
As the titans of the internet duke it out for as much profit as they can squeeze out from each other, those of us just trying to earn a living selling our books are getting caught in the crossfire. If you’ve seen a drop in your book sales, digging a little deeper may help you figure out if recent changes are affecting you and give you some ideas on how to combat it. Ultimately, though, the only real long-term solution may be for the big companies to finally realize that their current path hurts everyone, and it’s better to have a smaller percentage of something than a larger percentage of nothing. Is Big Tech punishing small-time publishers with their exorbitant transaction percentage fees? This June, Amazon quietly made a decision to remove the “Buy Now” button for books in the Amazon Android app – something they’d done on their Apple… Read More >
Track Your Subscriber Behavior with Attribution Tags
By: Ginger | Posted on December 30, 2022
Generating a list of readers of your books is an invaluable marketing source that can be used in a number of different ways, and it’s one of the first things that authors should set up when they begin their self-publishing journey. Until now, however, many of the benefits you gain from your list were hard to directly quantify, especially for those that have a tendency to run multiple promotions at the same time as sending out newsletters announcing their latest release. In this final (for now) installment of our impromptu series of posts on Amazon’s new attribution tags, Ginger explains how these tags can take the guesswork out of the whole mailing list marketing process, allowing you to track your subscriber behavior down to the individual book purchase or page read. Not only can this knowledge help you grow your list and earn more money through more targeted advertising, but… Read More >
Use Amazon Attribution to Make Your Social Media Work For You
By: Ginger | Posted on December 23, 2022
As we continue to experiment with Amazon’s new attribution tags, we discover more uses for them that are worth sharing with the self-publishing community as a whole, which explains why this is now the third week in a row that we’re covering the topic. This time, Ginger is sharing his thoughts on how to use these tags to enhance what you do with your social media posts and profiles. In particular, how you can now overcome one of the biggest complaints you probably have about your author social media accounts: How can you tell if any of your tweets, shares, posts or followers are really making any difference to your bottom line? Last week I wrote a post about Setting Up Attribution Tags for your Facebook Advertising and that brought me around to thinking about other ways we can use the exciting new Attribution feature of Advertising on Amazon. One… Read More >
