LinkedIn Advertising – An Overlooked Option for Non-Fiction Authors
By: Ginger | Posted on April 17, 2020
While the overall principles of advertising a book are mainly the same between fiction and non-fiction, it is true that most of our ad and marketing posts are more specifically geared towards writers of fiction. That’s why this week, we’re going to discuss an often overlooked option that is much more suited to writers of non-fiction – and that’s advertising your book on the more professionally oriented social media site LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the professional social network – kind of like Facebook for people in suits. Most of us have a presence there, and because of the way LinkedIn is set up, you might even have hundreds more contacts than you do on Facebook. While it’s not so effective for advertising steamy romance novels, or gritty crime thrillers, there is a lot of value in this audience for authors who write under their own name, and publish books that might… Read More >
Why Your Back Matter Matters
By: Ginger | Posted on January 24, 2020
With any luck, the final page of your book has left your reader eager for more. But how do you make sure they find that next fix immediately, before their attention is pulled away to something else? This is why back matter – the material in the final pages of your book – is so important to the organic growth of your writing career. But you can’t, and shouldn’t, drop just anything back there. The trick is including the most effective content needed to achieve your publishing goals without breaking any rules. There’s a long list of things I wish I’d known before I started trying to launch a self-publishing career, so even though I worry that I’m explaining the obvious when I make posts like this, I’m hoping somebody finds value in them – I know I would have, a few years ago. Today, I want to talk about… Read More >
Author Spotlight Interview: Greg Holman
By: Hidden Gems | Posted on January 21, 2020
In today’s author interview, we chat with serial entrepreneur Greg Holman, who in the past has treated Hidden Gems subscribers to both his books – Bill Houston Rags to Riches and Billy Houston: Fall from Grace. Splitting his time between Noosa, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, and the idyllic beaches of Thailand, Greg has used his lifetime of experience in building businesses to create a vividly realistic and visceral tale with the ups and downs of Australian/American entrepreneur Billy. HG: Hi Greg! So, in a nutshell for readers – how would YOU describe yourself? GH: I’m a serial entrepreneur full of imagination and ideas – and always looking for new challenges! I’ve lived an interesting and challenging life with ups and downs. After selling my last business in 2017 to a public-listed company I decided to retire from corporate life forever. I got sick of living a life of wearing… Read More >
5 New Year’s Resolutions for Writers
By: Ginger | Posted on December 27, 2019
Sticking to a plan is essential when you’re an author, especially if it’s not your full time job and you’re finding you need to juggle writing with all sorts of other things in your life. So start 2020 off right by prioritizing what it is that makes you a successful writer, and resolving to actually do those things regularly and consistently! The end of the year is, to most of us, a time of reflection. We see what aspects of our year went well, and which went badly, and a lot of us write a list of ‘new year’s resolutions’ to follow to give the upcoming year a better outcome. For me, 2019 saw a dip in my overall book sales, but a more consistent outcome to the books I published. I had a good period of book sales which was directly attributed to a process I stuck to –… Read More >
Give Your Audience What They Want
By: Ginger | Posted on December 20, 2019
Santa may only bring gifts once a year, but as an author, your job is delivering what your readers want all year round. That’s why it’s important to understand your market and your genre, and meet the expectations of your audience. That doesn’t mean selling out or having to change your actual story, just making sure you’re telling it in the most effective way. And to help make our point, we have a few popular examples of where this has gone wrong, and when it’s been done right. Readers expect something from you – so, successful writers don’t disappoint. The other day, I half-watched The Mandalorian, on Disney+, since my wife was watching it while tidying up. To her annoyance, I kept predicting what would happen next – even down to the specific lines of dialogue – and eventually she switched it off and snapped: “Well, you might make fun… Read More >
5 Tips for Social Media that Sells Books
By: Ginger | Posted on December 13, 2019
The most successful authors I know have one thing in common, they not only spend time on social media, but they do it right. For some, social media comes easy but for others, it’s a grind. There are ways to make it easier, though, and even if you just do a little it’ll be better than doing nothing at all. But you can’t just spam them with links to buy your latest book, there’s more to it than that… There’s a lot of money in social media… apparently. But a lot of authors I speak to don’t seem to be seeing any of it, or don’t know how to leverage their social media platforms to generate engagement and sales. One common refrain is: “I don’t really know what to post” and for that reason, they don’t post anything. Other authors spend time and effort posting links to their books and… Read More >
Are You Getting Your Categories Right?
By: Hidden Gems | Posted on November 29, 2019
Which category your book is listed under can have a massive influence on how well your book sells, so it’s worth making sure you get it right. Understanding how Amazon organizes their virtual bookstore – and more importantly what factors they use to determine what goes where – can help increase your sales by making sure more of the right customers are seeing your book. Before I write any author blogs, I’m always struck with a dilemma: Is what I’m going to write about too obvious? Does everybody know about it? Normally, if I take the plunge and write the blog anyway, it all becomes worthwhile when I receive an email from a reader saying: “Thank you! I never knew that before.” I face a similar dilemma with this blog post – which addresses the topic of categories. Categories are the silo your self-published book falls into in Amazon’s systems… Read More >
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 >
Stretching Your Ad Budget (Part 2) – Gaining Subscribers
By: Ginger | Posted on October 25, 2019
In part one of this series, we discussed using your ad budget to sell more books, but there are other goals that successful authors use advertising for, such as growing the core group of fans that they can reach regularly via their mailing list. Instead of spending your ad dollars on selling a book once to a random person, you can instead spend those same dollars to have that person join your list so that you can sell to them over and over again in the future – without any additional costs. That makes gaining subscribers one of the most effective investments you can make. In part one, we discussed the challenge of getting the most value from your advertising budget – and how important the concept of strategy was. Tactics are the specific things you do to achieve your goals – which platforms you use, for example – whereas… Read More >
Stretching Your Ad Budget (Part 1) – Selling Books
By: Ginger | Posted on October 11, 2019
As an independent author without a large publisher with deep marketing pockets bankrolling your book, how you spend your limited advertising budget is something you have to think carefully about. Not only do you need to consider how and where to spend your money, but what your overall marketing goals are in the first place. Sure, selling more books is the obvious one and certainly provides the most immediate results – but there are some longer term strategies that advertising can also be used for, such as growing your mailing list or promoting free copies of your book (which itself can increase sales). In this three part series, we’ll go over how to get the most out of your advertising dollar for each of these strategies, starting with the one all of us are most interested in – selling more copies! (And don’t forget to take part in the survey… Read More >
