Should you judge a book by its cover?

Consider these two sayings:

'Never judge a book by its cover'

'You only get one chance to make a first impression'

Both make sense, in isolation, but when put next to each other, there seems to be a slight conflict. If your book cover fails to impress, it may get overlooked, and regardless of how good the content is, may not get read by as many people as it deserves. 

In an earlier post I discussed the marketing concept AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. A book cover needs to help you achieve the first two elements. If the cover doesn't grab a potential readers attention, and create  interest, it has essentially failed to do its job. The front cover of a book has three key components - a title, an illustration, and the author's name. Now unless your name is JK Rowling, Dan Brown, etc., it probably won't have a huge amount of impact on the buying decision. That leaves the title and the illustration to do the lion's share of the work. Putting the illustration to one side for the moment, let's consider the title. Assume you have just written a book and titled it 'Wanted!'. This could suggest a number of themes and genres. It could be erotica where one woman is wanted by many men. Alternatively a romantic theme, about a woman who only ever wanted to be loved. What about a thriller, where a dangerous fugitive is wanted by the authorities? To help the potential reader better understand the title, a well crafted illustration is required. So if you are on the look out for an entertaining thriller, and the book 'Wanted!' is about an armed and dangerous criminal being hunted by the police, an illustration depicting this theme will be needed to grab your attention. Below are two possible book covers for the same story. Which one is likely to grab your attention?

The book buying process goes something along the following lines. See a cover and title you like (Attention), pick it up (Interest), and read the blurb on the back cover. You like what you read (Desire). You then look at the price, and when you realise the benefit of reading it outweighs the cost, take it to the check-out (Action). What you don't know, until you've read it, is whether or not you think it's a good story. But that is now too late, you've already judged the book by its cover. . . and as authors, that is very important, because your thriller of the year could have been easily overlooked if the cover just didn't deliver.

Sell more books with CreateSpace

What is stopping so many self-published authors, who are now selling their ebooks via Amazon's Kindle platform, from offering a paperback option? This question has puzzled me for sometime. Having gone to the trouble of getting the book formatted, and a cover designed, it seems to me the next logical step has to be developing another sales channel in the form of a paperback edition. Many pundits have predicted the demise of paperbacks due to the popularity of ebooks, but then other reports state paperback sales are still healthy. It doesn't really matter which report is correct, the simple fact is, BOTH formats sell in large quantities. With Amazon accounting for about 85% of ebook sales globally - again figures depend on which source you believe, but those I've read all believe they take the lion's share by some sizeable margin - it clearly makes sense for self-published authors to use their Kindle platform. The reluctance to go down the paperback route may come from a number of perceived problems, such as setting up the book, choosing which publisher is best, etc. However, these are not insurmountable obstacles, and once overcome will open up a unique client base - namely those who still prefer the feel of a traditional book in their hands, as opposed to an e-reader. 

Manufacturers of e-readers will talk of the benefits in owning one - 'x' thousand books conveniently stored in one place, downloading the book and having it immediately available, and so on. But it's not all doom and gloom for the good old paperback. You can read them safely in the bath, also on take-off and landing when flying, and they don't need to spend a lot of their time 'tied' to the wall, as they don't have batteries. 

With regard to choosing a publisher, opting for CreateSpace makes a lot of sense. To start with it is owned by Amazon, and therefore it's in their interest to make the interface with their website as efficient and effective as possible. As printing is done on a demand basis, there is no need to hold any inventory. Their set up programme is totally free, and the royalties very generous. My own personal experience is I sell many more ebooks than paperbacks, but the simple matter is, I do sell paperbacks, which wouldn't necessarily convert into ebook sales if I didn't offer the paperback option. I also gained a lot of exposure for the book when I offered a number of free copies via Goodreads 'giveaway' promotion. Over 1800 requests for the book, and several hundred people adding it to their 'to be read' list. This promotion at Goodreads is only available for physical books, and not ebooks.

If none of the aforementioned convinces you to offer a paperback version of your ebook, then hopefully this will. Ask any self-published author what it feels like to hold a physical copy of your own book in your hands for the very first time. It's a very special moment I can tell you.

Is your name on this database?

There are many free sites on the Internet where you can place your details, but one particular site is growing exceptionally quickly - namely AUTHORSdB. I mentioned them in an earlier blog, but think they are worth giving a further shout out. Not only are they building a database of authors at a remarkable rate, but they also offer some exciting benefits for those same authors, such as:

• A blogger of the week - with free banner advert
• Featured author - with free banner advert
• Author of the week - again, with a free banner advert
• Regularly sending out personalised tweets about their top 25 rated authors

As an author you can also add book reviews, a book synopsis, social network links (including Goodreads), book trailers, book covers, Amazon links, and links to blogs/websites. AUTHORSdB also provide a variety of 'badges' you can download to promote yourself with. Here's an example:

AUTHORSdB is growing by the day, and as an author I suggest you get your details on their database. It's free, so really there is nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

Why you need to create a BRAND

As authors we generally have one goal, apart from writing books . . . and that’s to sell them. If you accept that as a key goal, then one thing is vitally important, and that is getting the message out there that your books exist. Without some form of marketing, your book will just reside on Amazon’s server as a Kindle file, and do nothing more. So what do I mean by an author having a brand? The picture below represents arguably the best known brand on the planet.

Certainly, if a company called Interbrand are to be believed, the Coca-Cola brand is the most valuable in the world, with a current estimate, for the brand alone, in the region of $67billion. No, that’s not a typo. It’s valued in billions of US dollars. Why? The answer to that is quite simple, although the calculation Interbrand use is very complex. Wherever you go in the world you’ll generally be able to buy a bottle, or can, of Coca-Cola. Compared to a ‘local cola’ or supermarket ‘own brand’ cola, Coca-Cola is more expensive. So it sells more than any other cola, and sells at a higher price than any other cola, and the logo is recognised the world over. That’s the value of the brand.

Now as an author you’ll never compete with Coca-Cola. Not even JK Rowling comes close, and neither should she. It is a different product, in a different market. But let’s get back to the Coca-Cola logo for a minute. It has remained unchanged for decades - hence why we immediately recognise it. So if Coca-Cola advertises on the TV, in the press, on poster sites, the logo is consistently the same. I now want to raise the question . . . what is YOUR logo? It can’t be your book cover, unless you only write one book, and most authors write several. Most marketing of books, particularly indie books, is done on the Internet, using, in the main, social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. If you do use Facebook, make sure it’s an ‘author fan page’ you use to market your book, not your page which family and close friends connect with you. Sure, mention the odd success on the latter, but leave the marketing to your author page. I digress slightly, but within intent. Your logo needs to be YOU! Until your books become a brand in their own right, like Harry Potter, the only common theme running across your books is you.

So how do you build a brand around you? The first thing is create consistency across all marketing platforms, and one way to do this is use the SAME photograph of yourself on EVERYTHING related to your books. Now, I loathe having my picture taken, and the photo I use is one taken by my youngest daughter (using my camera!) when I wasn’t looking. It probably looks posed, but I can assure you it wasn’t - but it’s the one I chose to use. You’ll not see another photo of me on anything linked to my books. I use it on Twitter, Facebook, my website, other websites which promote my book, etc. I know other people who do the same, and it helps me enormously. If I’m interested in their tweets, and I can see their face on my Twitter feed, I’ll click on the tweet. The same goes for Facebook, when I’m scrolling through the latest updates. However, if they change their profile picture, and many do, I’ll easily miss their message, and what’s the point of messaging in the first instance if you give people a barrier to seeing it.

So for me, rule number one is - select a picture you are happy with (or in my case find acceptable), and STICK with it. (Leave the profile picture changing for your family and close friends on your personal Facebook account.) Don’t hide behind a book cover, or some other artwork. People interact best with people, and are more likely to trust you if they can see what you look like. I very rarely follow back ‘Eggs’ on Twitter, and I certainly don’t start the following process with them.

Rule number two is - ensure you maximise the potential of your bio on Twitter. If you are an author, tell people that. Use the limited number of characters wisely, and also come across as a real person. I’ve had many people tweet me after following, making an observation about my bio, and in particular my comment about getting 100,000 words in the correct order. (Although that has since been updated to promote this blog.) I’ve seen some authors with just the word ‘author’ in their bio, and nothing more. If that’s as creative as they can be, do I want to look at their books, let alone read them? Probably not. Your bio should also provide a link to your website, not your book on Amazon. Your website gives people the chance to find a little bit more about you and your work. They can always go to Amazon from your website, if they like what they see/read. (See the post about AIDA to understand more why an Amazon book link on your blog isn't ideal.)

By creating a common ‘theme’ across all the marketing platforms you use, you will start to become more recognised, and recognition will, if established correctly, build a good reputation. That good reputation will then help to sell your books.

Finally, at the beginning of this article I drew your attention to the Coca-Cola logo at the top of the page. So ingrained is that logo in our brains, you probably didn’t spot the subtle mistake in the one I used. (See if you can spot it.) When you can see and recognise a logo, and not immediately see a subtle mistake, you know that logo is part of a very strong brand. 

Do book trailers provide a benefit?

In this short post I want to consider the benefit of book trailers. Let’s first of all look at the benefits. If done well, they can help create exposure, in the same way as trailers to movies stimulate your desire to watch a movie . . . or not, as the case may be. Not everyone will want to watch the same movie, or read the same book – but if your target market see it, and like what they see, then it will definitely generate readership.

If you recall my earlier post about AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action – a good book trailer, like a good movie trailer, will deliver on all four counts. Once your viewer's attention is grabbed – either through something visual, or audible, the trailer should try to build on this interest and develop a desire for the him/her to want to read the book. Finally, there should be some form of call to action. In other words, details of where the viewer can obtain the book, or at least give them more information about it.

So the major benefit is additional exposure, and potential extra sales. But what about the negatives? The biggest negative is cost, and this is where a minefield exists. Some companies charge huge prices for the creation of a book trailer. An expense you need to re-coup from additional book sales.  Yesterday’s post outlined the number of hits you need to generate to make sales. However, if a book trailer can be created for a modest cost, then it reduces the number of sales required to cover the cost. My own book trailer, below, was produced by Tracy Stewart (www.allaboutthecover.com) for a very modest $50. (Tracy’s normal price is $75, which includes the sourcing of graphics – but I provided my own.)

Once you have a book trailer it can be used on any website, without the need for the website to upload a huge file. My book trailer is on a number of sites, including, for example, my author page on the Independent Author Network website. I’ve already had a number of people inform me directly that they have purchased the book as a result of watching the trailer. I took the view that the cost was low enough to warrant taking a small gamble, primarily due to the flexibility of being able to have the trailer on more than one website.

So in summary, book trailers can help create additional exposure, but you need to be very cautious about how much of your hard earned royalties you are going to invest in them. 

Do cost per click promotions work for authors?

The answer to this question is a simple case of mathematics, and considering a ‘conversion funnel’.  For many years I worked as a Dealer Principal in the automotive retail sector. Based on the performance of the sales staff, I knew how many people, on average, they would need to speak to, to make one sale. We constantly measured conversion rates. How many people who test drove a car would buy one? How many visitors to the showroom would take a test drive? How many people who rang in making any enquiry would make an appointment to visit the showroom, etc etc.

Below is a conversion funnel relating to online book sales.

Let’s create a scenario, relating to the promotion of books, using the above conversion funnel. We’ll say you’ve been approached by an online company who want to promote your book on their website. They state you’ll only get charged if a visitor ‘clicks’ on your link/advert on their site, and they want to charge 10 cents per click. We need to make another assumption – the royalty you receive from the sale of your book. If using the Amazon 70% royalty scheme it could be two or three dollars. Let’s be reasonably ambitious and say $2.50. In our scenario that $2.50 will pay for 25 clicks. If 20%, who click on the link, buy your book, that will provide five sales. So that’s $2.50 out, to get $12.50 in. That’s a pretty good return on investment in anyone’s eyes. But wait a minute. How realistic is it that 20% will make a purchase? We can examine the question by developing the scenario further.

The company approaching you has, say, an impressive 100,000 Twitter followers, and use Twitter to promote their service . . . and your book. The first thing to consider is how many followers actually visit the site, and how many of these visitors are unique? This is the first question to ask the promoter. That 100,000 audience will drop dramatically in terms of active clicks. Let’s be generous and say 10% do. So now the site has 10,000 visitors. What percentage will click on YOUR link? This could be 5%, or in other words 500 people (That would be a high percentage considering all the books being promoted on the site). If you are being charged 10 cents per click, those clicks have just cost you $50. You now need to make 20 sales to cover your costs. OK, so we now have 500 viewers looking at your promotional page on this particular site, with a link to Amazon. How many will click the Amazon link? 10%? If we are lucky. So now we have 50 visitors on the Amazon site. Yikes, you need 40% to buy the book just to achieve breakeven. What sorts of numbers convert to sales on Amazon? Sadly it’s a lot lower than that, and when I say a lot lower, I mean something in the region of 0.1%. Some items will convert higher, and some will be lower, but when I looked at a recent sample of 160,000 visits, across a selection of e-books, it wasn’t far from 0.1% in terms of those actually making a purchase.

I’m now going to turn the numbers on their head, using a 0.1% Amazon conversion. I think I’ve been exceptionally generous with all the previous conversions, but I’ll stick with them for the point of this exercise. To make one sale, you’ll need 1000 visitors to your book’s page on Amazon. If 10% clicked on the Amazon link on your promotion page, you’ll need 10,000 visitors to that page . . . to make one sale . . . and earn $2.50 in royalties. If those 10,000 visitors to your page came from a conversion of 5% visiting the website promoting your book, then the website will need to have 200,000 visitors, and if they arrived at the site due to 10% of all Twitter followers reaching the site, then this particular company need 2 million followers – not 100,000. If you think that’s bad news, remember you’ve had 10,000 visit your page on the promotional website, at 10 cents a click. That $2.50 sale has cost you $1,000.

I accept all the figures here are hypothetical, but one of the biggest mistakes people make in business is vastly overestimating conversion rates. I’ve seen it time and time again when looking at budgets and business plans. The only person who is going to win in the above scenario is the guy charging 10 cents per click.

Marketing Tips for Authors – Author Online Toolkit Part One

Part One - Creating a Presence

So you’ve published your first book and now you need to market it online. This will require a few essential tools, and they will fall under two categories – creating a presence and measuring. Let’s start with creating presence. As a minimum I’d suggest a Twitter account, Facebook ‘fan-page’ and a website.

Before you jump in with a Twitter account based upon the title of your book, consider this question. Do you intend to only write one book? If the answer is ‘no’, then avoid naming your account after your book. If you do, what is your strategy for book 2? Start all over again with a new Twitter account? Not the best idea, I’m sure you’ll agree. I personally believe people are more likely to engage with you on Twitter if you include three things within your Twitter account. 1) A photo of you 2) An informative bio and 3) The word ‘author’ in that bio. The reason for item 3) will become apparent in a moment.

A Facebook ‘fan-page’ is also a useful addition when trying to ‘get the word out’. Unlike a ‘standard’ Facebook page, a fan-page also provides a few tools for measuring your reach, and letting you know the most viewed/liked/shared posts. All useful stuff for deciding upon the content of your future posts.

The final key tool for creating presence is a website. I’d suggest avoiding just a blog, as it has its limitations. A website provides greater flexibility, but perhaps also have a separate blog, using Blogger or WordPress. (I've chosen Blogger as it is extremely versatile, and easy to use.) There are numerous pre-designed websites on the market, but if you are trying to display creativity, (and what author isn’t?),  then a bespoke solution is probably more appropriate. If you don’t want to be dealing with html coding you may want to consider Serif’s WebPlus x6. It’s inexpensive, easy to use and very flexible. My author website was built using it. You’ll also need suitable ftp software for uploading your updates onto your server. FTP Commander is available free of charge in its basic form. I've used it for several years for various websites, and it's both simple and reliable.

So, you now have your ‘presence’ toolkit. The next stage is to measure what you are doing, and to start using a few tools to help you become more efficient and effective online. This I’ll cover in Part Two of this article.

Generating even more exposure for your books

It's just a short article today. Well, actually it's hardly an article, it's more of a recommendation. As I've probably mentioned before, estate agents (realtors) say the three most important things about getting the best price for a house is 1) Location 2) Location 3) Location. As authors we have a similar triad, and those three keywords are 1) Exposure 2) Exposure 3) Exposure. The more people see details, reviews, recommendations, covers, you name it, about your book, the more they are likely to buy it. So get yourself interviewed, featured, and blogged about on as many websites as possible. As I mentioned in the previous article - back links to your page improve Goggle PageRank, which in turn makes your page more important for search engines. This too will increase exposure. So this week I recommend you get yourself on the Author Database, or AUTHORSdB to give it its official title. Just click on the link to go straight to the site, and register today. Oh yes, I almost forgot . . . it's FREE!! And on the subject of FREE, I've also placed details of other platforms on my author website, which will promote your book absolutely free of charge.

How to move your Website/Blog up the Google rankings!

OK, so you’ve designed a website/blog, uploaded it onto an Internet server, but when you type the details into Google . . .nothing! It’s nowhere to be seen. Why is this? To start with Google probably hasn’t yet identified that it exists, among the 633 million, or so, websites in the World. The quickest way for Google to find out you have a site, is to tell Google. Sure, it will eventually stumble across your site, but that could take some time. If you visit their submissionpage, you can give them the details they need.

Let’s assume you’ve now done that. How can you stand out in a search among 633 million other sites? One method is to ensure you have keywords embedded in the different pages of your site. As an author, ‘books’ may be one of them. This should be done when the site is developed. However, Google has its own method of determining how important your site is, and it’s called PageRank. It uses a VERY complex algorithm, but it centres around one key aspect – back links to your site. Google consider your site to be more important the more other sites link to your site. And the more sites those sites have, with links back to them, the more important your site will be. If a site with a PageRank of 8/10 links back to your site; that is deemed more important than a site with a PageRank of 1/10.

Every website is given a ranking of 1 to 10 – with the exception of those sites which have so few back links, which then get non-classified, with a ‘N/A’ against their name. eBay.com, for example, has a ranking of 8/10. It gets more and more difficult to move up the rankings, so 10/10 is almost impossible, with only a few sites globally having achieved it. Google.com itself ranks at 9/10. One domain which does achieve the coveted 10/10 ranking is Twitter.com (Facebook.com, even with more users worldwide, trails it with 9/10) So, the more back links you have to your site, particularly from sites with good PageRank scores, the more important your site will appear to Google. To check out your sites PageRank (NB – Each page on your site has its own PageRank score) use the free tool which can be found at the base of my author website home page.

Marketing Tips for Authors – The 4Ps Part Four

So far in this series I’ve covered the first three Ps – Product, Price and Promotion. This then just leaves the fourth part – Place. Before I move on to Place let me first just recap on the other three. The idea of the 4Ps concept is it pulls the key elements of marketing together. First the product needs to be right. In the case of an author, a book, for example, needs to entertain the target audience. That entertainment comes at a price. The idea is to price it at an optimum price to get the balance right between generating sufficient profit per unit, whilst maximising volume. The next step is to then promote the product with the right message to the right audience. And it’s this last step which leads me on to Place. Place isn’t, necessarily, a physical place. A potential reader needs to know where to go to get the book. Prior to the digital revolution, this, in previous decades, would generally have been a book store. But now even physical books can be ordered from the comfort of your home, as indeed can be e-books.

In an earlier post I discussed the importance of online tools such as Twitter and Facebook as methods of generating awareness. Books can’t be bought directly from these platforms, so the awareness campaigns on these sites need links to other sites. This can be places like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, iTunes store etc. But also your own website if it has e-commerce capability. If you have a Smashwords account you can download your own book in all the various different formats and put them on your site. (Please check the Smashwords T&Cs before doing this to ensure it doesn’t breach their contract.) So a Kindle user can download a Kindle formatted book from your site, as can an iPad user etc. However, the key point, regardless of where your book is sold, is that there is a link between promotion and place – in the case of online selling, this should be a hyperlink. I’ve lost count of the number of people promoting their book on Twitter and there being no link within the tweet. It is hard enough to sell anything these days, but make it harder for the customer to buy a product and the chances are they won’t. They’re not going to copy a book title from a tweet, then ‘open up’ Amazon and paste it into Amazon’s search facility. The purchasing ‘journey’ needs as few obstacles as possible. Let me finish by giving an example. People will only put in extra effort if they have a high desire for a product or service. Many shops in the UK selling clothes over more than one level adopt a simple policy. Men’s clothes are displayed on the ground floor, and women’s clothes on the first floor. Why? Because the shop owners know that women, generally speaking, will put in more effort to buy clothes than men. In essence, they’ve removed the ‘barrier’ of the staircase. I hope you’ve found this series about the 4Ps of marketing helpful.

Marketing Tips for Authors – The 4Ps Part Three

In the previous posts in this series I covered the areas of Product and Price. In this penultimate post in the series I would like to briefly discuss Promotion. Earlier this week I mentioned the concept of AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Our promotions need to grab the Attention of our prospective readers and generate Interest. This interest needs to build Desire in the prospect, so ultimately they take Action – and buy our book! As authors we have a number of online tools at our disposal to help us achieve this – Twitter, Facebook, Websites, Blogs etc. However, Twitter is NOT a selling platform. With just 140 characters at our disposal, the best we can hope to achieve is grabbing our prospects’ attention, at the same time as planting some seeds to generate interest. Therefore, it is important to always have a link within tweets promoting books. Links which take the prospect to either our website/blog (preferably) or Amazon book/review page (if you don't have a website). These are the platforms where desire must be created, with a carefully worded message. Now here is a challenge for you. I want you to carry out a sanity check on the sales message, within your website/blog, which relates to your book. (If you don’t have a website or blog, just go to your book’s Amazon page.) Imagine you’ve never seen the page before, and this is your first introduction to the book. Based upon your ‘sales pitch’ would YOU buy your book? If you hesitate in saying yes, then the message probably needs a bit of a polish.

The next aspect of promotion to consider is the small matter of cost. You’ll find plenty of people on the Internet only too glad to help you part with some money. You’ll hear terms such as ‘our site will provide great exposure for your book’. If you are not ultimately interested in making money from your hard work then look away now. If, however, you do want to make some money by SELLING your book, you will now need to disconnect your heart from your decision making process. Yes, we all love to see our books in all their glory, on various websites, with people waxing lyrical about them. But this section is about the cold numbers. Let’s assume you’ve been approached by a website owner, who’s given you the ‘exposure’ speech, and he/she just wants just $50 to place your book on his/her well visited website. You know that Amazon is currently paying you a $1 royalty on every e-book sale. You just need to sell 50 to break-even.

Before you go anywhere near your wallet or purse, grab a calculator and start asking questions.

Question 1 – How many unique visitors does their website attract each month? They proudly say 5,000. You quickly calculate you only need one out of every hundred customers to buy your book in month one to break-even. WRONG CALCULATION!

Question 2 – How many of those 5,000 will visit your page on the site? It may be only 10%. So that’s 5,000 reduced to 500.

Question 3 – How many of the 500 will click on the link to Amazon? That again may only be 10%. So 50 people visit Amazon from your page on their website.

Question 4 – How many visits convert to sales? It may be just 2% - not an unlikely figure by any means. 2% of 50 is ONE!  Yes, that’s one sale from 5,000 site visitors in the first month – and I believe I’ve been generous with my percentages. So, to get your money back will take over FOUR YEARS!!

The above scenario is known as a ‘sales funnel’. Each stage reduces the numbers going through to the next stage. Good use of AIDA will certainly help you to widen the neck of the funnel. I hope the above has been of help to you. My final post in this short series will be based on the last of the 4Ps – Place. Until then, happy marketing.

Marketing Tips for Authors - The 4Ps Part Two

In the previous part of this article I explained the basic elements of the 4Ps of marketing were Product - Price - Promotion - Place, and then talked about Product. Today I'm going to discuss that very thorny issue of Price.

Getting the price of your product correct, and this instance I'm referring to the product as your book, is a very careful balancing act. Over price it and sales will plummet. Under price it then the margins (royalties) may suffer. However, there are a number of other factors to take into consideration - exposure being one of the most important for a writer. Personally I'd rather sell 10,000 books at $0.99 (£0.62) each, than 5,000 books for $1.98 (£1.24) each. Technically the royalties are the same (if it's a straight percentage), but having 10,000 people talking about a book is better than 5,000, particularly if there are more books in the pipeline.

Now for the more 'technical' marketing bit - elasticity of demand. For demand to increase for a product the benefits of owning the product must out-weigh the cost of buying the product. There are certain genres of book I personally don't like - so even if they were free I wouldn't download them. On the flip side of the coin there are some books I want as soon as they are released, and then price becomes less sensitive, to a degree. Prices are always higher for products which are in demand. Take games consoles as an example. When Sony bring out a new version of the PlayStation, demand is generally so high Sony are able to 'skim' additional profits from the market by placing the initial launch price at a high level. After a few months the demand reduces, and prices slowly drop to 'lift' the demand back. Companies have to focus very carefully on the elasticity of demand. If a price of a product is increased by 10%, with a resultant drop in demand of 50%, then the product is very price sensitive. However, if the demand only drops by 5%, then the product is less sensitive. A product is said to be 'elastic' when a change in price can stretch demand disproportionately. (e.g Demand increases by 50% when the price is dropped by 10%, and demand falls by 50% when the price rises by 10%). Conversely, a certain product's price could be lowered and lowered and still the demand wouldn't increase. This product's demand would then be deemed to be 'inelastic'. Products which rise in price but the demand hardly alters are also classified as inelastic. Electricity is one example. If prices rose considerably we may get into the habit of turning off lights in unoccupied rooms, but our demand for electricity wouldn't change greatly.

So when pricing your book, you initially need to consider what the demand is for the genre, and then price it to be competitive within that specific market. Then experiment with the price to see how small changes (up and down) affect demand. In the next part of this series I'll be discussing 'Promotion'.

Marketing Tips for Authors - The 4Ps Part One

Pick up almost any text book on marketing and somewhere within it you’ll find the ‘4Ps of Marketing’ (The Marketing Mix). Some ‘gurus’ have, since the inception of the 4Ps, added a few more Ps to the tally, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll, for the moment, stick to the original four.

So what does each ‘P’ stand for? The first is ‘Product’, and in this article we will assume you have a book to sell, so the book itself is the first of the 4Ps. (Well not totally, but we’ll come to the reasons why a little later). Next comes ‘Price’, and with it a whole host of associated problems. The third ‘P’ is ‘Promotion’ – primarily getting the correct message over to the correct audience. That isn’t as easy to achieve as it might sound, and of course price will play an important part. Then finally, the fourth ‘P’, which stands for ‘Place’. How are you going to get your product to your customers? With the introduction of ebooks and print-on-demand, the cost implications of printing and storing physical books have reduced significantly. This huge differentiator between the traditional publishers and self-publishers, where the latter couldn’t compete with the former due to the huge resources required, is slowly becoming less important.

In this particular session I’m going to discuss in more detail Product. Price, Promotion and Place will all be dealt with in later articles, when I’ll be looking at each in turn.

I stated earlier that the book was not the whole story (no pun intended) when considering what was meant by Product. I can explain why by giving you just two names – JK Rowling and Dan Brown. Ignoring JK’s latest book for a moment, when these two authors released Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Lost Symbol, respectively, the result was global sales from day one. If JK Rowling had in fact released Harry Potter #8 at the time, Amazon would probably have crashed, such would have been the demand. Because The Da Vinci Code was such a success, almost regardless of what Dan Brown wrote, the next book was going to be a huge seller; and it was.  However, almost 3,000 reviews on Amazon US suggest The Lost Symbol has been considered average, at best (with all the five rating levels getting almost the same number of reviews), but The Da Vinci Code had already done the hard work, and had created a brand for Dan Brown. All the previous books were re-released, new covers complemented one another, and book shops were selling copies by the truck load. Some may say all the hype may have ‘overvalued’ his brand, which didn’t really deliver with The Lost Symbol. I look forward to his next release with interest, just to see if the wheels are in fact starting to wobble on Dan Brown’s wagon. Conversely,Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows has a little shy of 4,000 reviews on Amazon US, of which a staggering 78% are 5 star. JK Rowling has created an enormous brand with Harry Potter, plus a bank balance, allegedly, in the region of $1bn. It will now be interesting to see how her writing career progresses after Harry Potter. Early reviews of The Casual Vacancy are totally split, suggesting a ‘Marmite’ book, which will mean in the long term, if the reviews continue in a similar vein, the weakening of her brand. The key point for me about product is, understand what your customers want, then give them what they want, again and again - without compromising on quality.

In the next article I’ll discuss that all important topic of Price.