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 >
Make Amazon’s Sales Rank Work for You
By: Ginger | Posted on November 1, 2019
If you’re an author that ignores the Amazon Best Seller Rank (ABSR or Sales Rank) because you think it just exists to stroke the ego of successful authors or because you don’t think you have enough sales to ever get to the top, then it may be time to reconsider and start paying attention to it. Because even though only the #1 spot bestows a bestseller label to your book, just getting in the top 100 can be massively beneficial to your sales. Think of it as free promotion targeting all the readers that search for new books by browsing the top lists (which a great many do). The best part is that there isn’t just one bestseller, or one top list, but many of them – one for each genre and many sub-categories within those genres – which means that you don’t need thousands (or even hundreds) of sales… 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 >
Successful Writers Write
By: Ginger | Posted on September 27, 2019
Despite all the marketing and promotion suggestions that we’ve provided in the past, if we could only offer a single piece of advice that would apply to authors everywhere, it wouldn’t be anything to do with getting reviews, or how to market your book, or even about where the best places are to advertise. It would simply be to keep on moving forward. Keep writing that next book, keep to a publishing schedule, and eventually success will find you. There’s one reliable path to writing success – but it’s a lot of hard work! Whatever you do, just keep writing! When I speak to writers 1-on-1 with advice and tips on their advertising strategy, a lot of them are surprised by what I always feel is the most important factor – to just keep writing. Authors who write and publish on a regular basis are more successful than those who… Read More >
Should I Stay or Should I Go? Sticking with Amazon’s KDP Select, or Going Wide?
By: Ginger | Posted on August 30, 2019
One of the most frequently asked questions about self-publishing is whether or not to sell your books on Amazon exclusively, or to ‘go wide’, sending them out to a multitude of different online bookstores. There’s no one right answer, just like there is no one right way to write a book – so today Ginger is diving into the issue to give you some of the pros and cons – and also on what his choice is, how he made it, and some ideas on how you can decide for yourself. Of course, this is just one author’s opinion – and if you have one of your own, please let us know via the comments below. This is definitely a conversation that benefits the community most when we hear from many different sources… What are the benefits of ‘going wide’ when it comes to your books? So, let’s not beat… Read More >
Successful Self-Publishing – It’s All About the Conversions
By: Ginger | Posted on August 2, 2019
Advertising expert Ginger is back this week with some more thoughts on what happens after you’ve written and published your book – specifically how to advertise, promote and hopefully sell copies to eager readers! Today, he’s talking about the cornerstone of any successful promotional campaign – conversions. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about how to make sense of your Amazon Advertising facts and figures – and I had a few questions from readers about one important aspect of that: Conversions. Conversions are the technical term for when you ‘convert’ a visitor to your Amazon product page to a paying customer; or, in short, when they buy your book! In terms of successful self-publishing, any promotional efforts you make to drive potential customers to your product page need to result in a good percentage of ‘conversions’ – otherwise you’re leading horses to water, but none of them… Read More >
Free Cover Promo Creation Tools
By: Ellen Mint | Posted on May 3, 2019
A professional, eye-catching cover is a key start to getting your book noticed against a sea of competition, but book promotion shouldn’t end there. Many authors create other imagery for marketing their book in a variety of different places, whether it be on social media or paid advertising spots. While you can usually commission these from designers, if you are comfortable with photo editing and have an eye for putting together compelling imagery, you can save money by doing it yourself. Today’s guest author, Ellen Mint, gives us a quick primer on some of the free tools out there to get you started. Writers, you’ve got an amazing book, a perfect cover, and can’t wait to tell the world about it. You need a beautiful picture to make ads for facebook, amazon, or blogs. Readers are far more likely to click on a link if an eye-catching infographic entices them…. Read More >
Author Spotlight Interview: Luke Smitherd
By: Hidden Gems | Posted on November 20, 2018
Continuing our series of author interviews, we were delighted to sit down live with Luke Smitherd, the best-selling author of The Stone Man and many other critically-acclaimed and popular novels. One of the defining characteristics of the novels of Luke Smitherd is that they defy easy classification – which is somewhat true of himself, too. A former singer and guitarist – well-liked for his traveling homage to the likes of Michael Buble – Luke also played his hand as a professional darts play, commercial copywriter and much, much more. Today he’s a full-time writer with a loyal following who enjoy his unique and thought-provoking books; which I once described as “Stephen Kings meets Ben Elton.” Luke very kindly sat and chatted with us live, and here’s what he had to say: HG: Luke – your books aren’t easy to pin down as a specific genre, although you’ll often find them… Read More >
The Fundamentals of a Successful Book
By: Ginger | Posted on July 18, 2018
Recently, resident HG designer Ginger wrote an article about the importance of a strong cover for your novel – but there are many other fundamentals that go into whether a book is successful. Today he follows up on some of the other factors that can help lead you towards publishing success. “I don’t get it,” one aspiring author said to me recently. “I’m spending all this money on Facebook ads for my books – but I’m just not selling any!” Another complained: “I keep getting bad reviews!” A third lamented: “Nobody downloaded my books during my free promo days. Why?” These are questions that keep plaguing many would-be authors, and they don’t like the answer when they finally hear it. But it’s a bitter truth anybody who takes writing and publishing needs to hear – and take to heart. You can invest as much time, money and effort into promoting… Read More >
