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 >
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 Amazon Attribution Changes the Game for Self-Published Authors
By: Ginger | Posted on December 9, 2022
Selling your books these days means advertising them, and up until now, if you were advertising an Amazon book on a platform other than theirs, you had to use a lot of guesswork to determine whether or not your ads were converting into actual sales. Recently, however, the retail giant has provided a method that allows you to track what happens when a customer follows your ad from elsewhere, and when used properly, this can be a game changer for self-published authors. Here’s Ginger to tell you all about it, and next week he’ll go through setting it up in more detail. Writing and self-publishing a novel is often only half the battle for self-published authors. The next step is to market that book to a receptive audience – hopefully one willing to reach into their wallets to support your work. That’s why advertising has become such a vital part… 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 >
How to know when to change your book cover
By: Ginger | Posted on February 11, 2022
Every book and story is different, but if I had to pick a single element that was most commonly at fault for poor sales, I would point to covers without any hesitation. We all know that we shouldn’t choose a book by it’s cover, but most readers do it anyway, and for good reason. Whether browsing top 100 lists, scrolling through search results or just looking at also bought recommendations, few people have time to drill into every option to read blurbs or analyze reviews. Instead, they narrow the list down to just a handful that warrant further investigation, and the easiest and most obvious criteria available to do that is the cover. Images that catch a reader’s eye and spark their interest are the ones they’ll be drawn to first, giving those books a huge advantage over ones with less appealing covers. Of course, there are many reasons why… Read More >
Creating a Lookalike audience that actually buys!
By: Ginger | Posted on January 21, 2022
Creating a Lookalike audience for your Facebook ads is far more useful than simply trying to advertise to FB users as a whole, even when you try to narrow that group down by the specific demographics you’re targeting or the interests you think your potential readers might all share. But creating that Lookalike from your entire mailing list isn’t nearly as effective as creating it from a more refined subset of that list, and when it comes to sending out ads looking to sell copies of your book, the subscribers you want to focus on are the ones most likely to buy a copy. Figuring out which ones those are, however, can be tricky. Luckily, Ginger has some advice on the best way to do that. Last month, I wrote a blog post about how the Apple IOS 14.5 update had disrupted the performance of a lot of authors’… Read More >
Should you advertise direct to your Series Page?
By: Ginger | Posted on December 24, 2021
It’s an unfortunate reality that many authors cringe when they hear that Amazon has made yet another change to their storefront with regards to how product pages are displayed or laid out. After all, it seems like more often than not those changes are more of a benefit to Amazon than to the actual author whose book is being sold on that page. So it’s a welcome relief to learn that they’ve finally added something that is actually useful. For authors that like to write books as part of a series, Amazon now allows more customization around how your series landing page looks and acts, making it a much more powerful tool for selling multiple books. Here’s Ginger with how you can start taking advantage of this! It’s a pretty well-established fact that the most successful self-published authors tend to write multiple books – often as part of a… Read More >
Tweak your Sales Strategy before Cyber Monday!
By: Hidden Gems | Posted on November 12, 2021
Every year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday seem to grow bigger as consumers save up their money for when they think they’ll get the most bang for their buck. But most of the really big deals are limited, and not everyone is looking for a new 60 inch TV or fancy espresso machine anyway. There are plenty of consumers that don’t even know what they want, and they’ll just be browsing online on Cyber Monday for anything that catches their fancy. And that’s why authors are missing an opportunity if they don’t try to capitalize on all those new eyeballs. Here are a few ways to get yourself and your catalog ready for the biggest online sales day of the year. For decades, America has been gripped by Black Friday fever. The day after Thanksgiving – the last Friday in November – is when department stores and retailers traditionally… Read More >
The startling importance of your “Look Inside”
By: Ginger | Posted on October 22, 2021
I never feel my age as much as when I catch myself referring to the “good old days”, and yet with self-publishing I can’t help but think back about how much easier things were (or at least seemed) back when the online eBook landscape wasn’t so crowded. With less books to choose from, it didn’t matter as much if you clearly did your own covers or hadn’t tweaked your blurb to perfection. Writing in less popular sub-genres was no big deal, either, because while there were fewer readers, they were hungry for content and there weren’t many authors feeding each niche. And don’t even get me started on advertising! It not only cost less but gave a much better return. True, those days are gone, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make money as a self-published author anymore – you just have to pay a lot more attention to the… Read More >
Showing appreciation to your reviewers can go a long way
By: Ginger | Posted on September 3, 2021
One of the biggest challenges you’ve likely faced as an author is getting reviews for your books, especially early in your self-publishing careers, and helping with that is one of the reasons I started Hidden Gems in the first place. But just as you appreciate getting reviews, your reviewers will appreciate being acknowledged. So whenever possible, take the time to publicly appreciate your reviews and the readers that take the time to leave them. Ginger has some examples of how you can go about doing this, as well as some advice on what to be careful not to do. We all like to feel valuable. It’s the human condition. From reading your kids their bedtime story, to sharing your own stories with readers, there’s a validation to be had in contributing something meaningful to the life of others. Many of these things we do without expecting or demanding acknowledgement… Read More >
