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 >
How to Set Up Amazon Attribution for Facebook Ads
By: Ginger | Posted on December 16, 2022
If you’ve ever tried to advertise your book on Facebook, you are probably already aware of how difficult it is to judge their effectiveness and whether any of the clicks you’re paying for ever really turn into sales. Well, Amazon has finally rolled out a feature that can give you all that information, and it isn’t even that hard to start using. Ginger talked about it last week, but today he’s back to tell you just how to set up Amazon Attribution so that you can track not only your sales and other clicks, but your KU page reads as well. As he mentioned, this is a game changing feature that can really help authors improve their ad performance, so it’s definitely something you need to start using right away if you aren’t already! It’s finally here. After years of struggling to track the effectiveness of our Facebook ads (and… Read More >
How to Mine Your Email Mailing List
By: Ginger | Posted on November 18, 2022
There’s a good reason why most authors start working on an email mailing list as soon as they can. Having a list of readers that love your work is not only a great ego boost, but can be an invaluable marketing tool. There are a variety of different ways to build your list, but the different techniques lead to different sorts of readers, each of whom provides a different value, assuming you know how to tell the difference and how to use each type. That’s exactly what Ginger will be going over in this week’s blog. Not only how to identify and separate your subscribers into the types of benefits they can provide, but how best to attain those benefits without alienating anyone on your list. Last month we posted a blog called Is Your Freebie Lead Magnet Costing You Money? The post addressed my belief that the source of your… Read More >
Your First 100 Clicks lead to your magic Conversion number
By: Ginger | Posted on September 9, 2022
Last week Ginger discussed spending your first $1000 on digital ads, with the goal of getting both sales and information from that spend. This week, he’s focusing more on how to interpret some of the info you gather, specifically around what those clicks tell you about your “magic” conversion number. That conversion number isn’t really magic of course, but it may seem that way in how valuable it is in terms of giving you a very clear idea as to whether or not your ads are profitable or not. Figuring out your conversion number isn’t always straightforward, though, with some ad platforms making it more transparent than others. But if you know the best place and way to figure it out, you can then use that information elsewhere. Last week, we discussed how you should spend your first $1,000 in advertising budget, and we mostly concentrated on Facebook as an… Read More >
Spending your first $1,000 on digital advertising
By: Ginger | Posted on September 2, 2022
There’s an old adage: “You’ve got to spend money to make money.” Nowhere does this wisdom apply more than in the digital advertising industry – especially when it comes to the business of selling books online. However, it’s important to make sure that any money you spend provides some kind of value – even if it isn’t initially in direct book sales. Here are some of Ginger’s guidelines regarding what authors should focus on when spending their first $1,000 on advertising their books. In 2020, advertisers spent $378 billion on digital advertising, and that looks set to double by 2024 – equivalent to the GDP of the nation of Somoa. Much of what’s driving this is access to self-service advertising platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Self-service ads generated $28.5 billion in revenue for Facebook last year, for example. Authors comprise a significant number of those advertisers. In fact, the… Read More >
Stabbing of Salman Rushdie Demonstrates the Power of Words
By: Ginger | Posted on August 19, 2022
As a child, if someone called you a name you may have responded with the sticks and stones song, in an attempt to show how you were unbothered by mere words. And yet, nothing could be further from the truth. Words have tremendous power, and as we’ve moved into a more digital age, we’re seeing more evidence of that than ever before. Words can lift us up, or bring us crashing down. When used truthfully and logically, they can change our minds for the better, but when twisted or corrupted they can make us believe in things that aren’t true. Words push us one way or another because they appeal to our emotions, which also means our experiences shape how we interpret or react to them. That was certainly the case when Salman Rushdie published his fiction book The Satanic Verses more than 30 years ago, which instantly became one… Read More >
The Essentials of Speechwriting
By: Matthew Hughes | Posted on August 5, 2022
Novel writing isn’t the only way to make money as an author. At the beginning of this year we discussed a few non-traditional writing paths, but today we have a guest blogger bringing you an idea we didn’t cover during that podcast discussion. Not everyone is aware that while politicians and business leaders are great at delivering speeches, they’re often just reading the words that someone else has written for them. Before he was a multiple award-winning novelist, Matthew Hughes spent decades as a freelance speechwriter, putting words into the mouths of many talented orators. Speechwriting can be a well-paying gig, but if you’re thinking about trying to break into the industry, it helps to have an understanding of the essential components that make up a good speech. And that’s exactly what Matt is here to go over with us all today. These days, I write science fiction, fantasy, and… Read More >
A Template for Your Book Launch
By: Ginger | Posted on July 8, 2022
Most established authors have their own strategy for book launch that they swear by, but while there are probably a lot of similarities, it’s likely there are just as many differences between them as well. That’s because every author and book is different, and what works for some may fail for others. As with so many things, you have to test and try different things to find what works best for you, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t helpful to have a starting point. This week, Ginger is sharing his own template for launching a book in the hopes that it can help both authors that are starting out, or more established authors that might be looking to try something new. Even if it’s not an exact fit for your own launch, hopefully it will at least be enough to point you towards the path to success. The other day,… Read More >
