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.

Every author should be on Goodreads!

Well, I’m sure you’ll agree that is a very bold statement, but I stand by it, and here’s why. Goodreads is the single biggest website on the Internet for bringing authors and readers together. Currently over 16 million members use the Goodreads website. It provides a platform both to share your books, read the books of others, enjoy engaging forums, promote new releases with a giveaway, link up with your followers from Twitter/Facebook etc etc.

I want to use this post to highlight three aspects of Goodreads (and there are plenty more) which you can use to help with marketing your book.

1) Giveaways

When I initially published my book I decided to give away a few paperback copies. I thought, optimistically, a hundred or so people on Goodreads would be perhaps interested in receiving a copy. I was staggered when over 1,800 people requested one of the free copies. That, straightaway, meant 1,800+ people (and all those who saw it, but didn’t request it) knew my book now existed. I also had over 300 people place it on their ‘to read’ list. There are a few rules regarding the 'giveaway' programme on Goodreads, but it certainly will create some immediate exposure.

2) Harvesting Twitter followers

This is a tip I was given by an author friend. You’ll find with Goodreads you’ll only be permitted to add a certain number of friends per day, before the system blocks you until you enter a new day. However, Goodreads do appreciate you may have Twitter followers on Goodreads, which you currently haven’t yet befriended on the site. These they will allow you to add as friends in bulk. You can do this by going to your profile page, scrolling down to your Friends list, clicking where it indicates how many friends you have, and then clicking on ‘Find Friends From’. Then select Twitter (and you can use the other social sites too) from the choices available. The system will then tell you how many Twitter followers you have on Goodreads that you can send a friend request to. Those who do agree to be friends on Goodreads will then slowly start to populate your 'friends' list.

3) Listopia

If you have a book riding high in one of the Listopia ‘lists’, it provides a good opportunity for further promotion. Currently I have a book which has been in the top ten ‘Thrillers You Must Read’ category for over 16 months, of which for two months during 2013 it was #1. This particular listing on Goodreads has given the novel some excellent exposure.  (I’m sure, now that I’ve just said that, one or two will see it as their duty to topple it, sooner rather than later. C'est la vie. However, any additional votes will be gratefully received.) 

In tomorrow’s post I’ll be looking at the painful issue of poor book reviews.

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 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.

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 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.

Does your Website/Blog pass the 8 second test?

Did you know 50% of website visitors will leave a website if they can’t see what they are looking for within 8 seconds?

Furthermore they’ll want to gain that information from the correct “landing page” and see it “above the fold”.

Landing Page

So what exactly does all that mean? Well, the landing page is what many of us may think is the home page of a website. In other words, it’s where the prospect lands after typing in your web address. But what if he or she, for example, wants to read your blog without going through several pages on your website to get there? This can be done by creating an extension to the web address. As an author your primary web address may be www.johndoeauthor.com. Now if a potential reader of your blog types in to a search engine “John Doe Author” they may very well get your website at the top of the search engines listing. But if they click on the link it will take them to your home page, not your blog. But this isn’t the page the reader wants as it may just have pictures of you, your book covers and a bio. He/she is looking for details of your great blog on writing tips.

If you want people to read your blog, you want them to go straight to the page on your website which features the blog. So you may call that page ‘blog’ and create a secondary web address www.johndoeauthor.com/blog.html, which when selected sends the prospect directly to the blog on your website. This is what is referred to as the ‘landing page’. It is the page that you want certain readers to go straight to, based upon their search criteria. The reader who wants to read an interesting blog, and ends up on the main website home page, may well look elsewhere if they can’t see what they want within 8 seconds. The other advantage of URL extensions is you can point readers to a specific page of your choice. So if you've just launched a new book, which has its own specific page on your site, and you want to send readers straight there, you can provide the appropriate URL extension.

Tip 1 – Develop multiple landing pages to provide the correct information quickly. Remember the internet is primarily used as an information gathering tool. If you can’t provide the reader with the information they want quickly, whether it is details of your latest novel, your writing tips blog, etc., they’ll look elsewhere. If you use Twitter a lot, then shortening of URLs can make life easier. (Take a look at www.bitly.com and develop specific shortened URLs for when you want to point people to a specific page on your site.)

Above the Fold

Now that we have discussed ‘landing pages’, let’s move on to discussing what ‘above the fold’ means. Imagine you have a copy of the Evening News in front of you and it’s folded in half. What can you see? Well apart from the name of the newspaper, and the date, it will also have an attention grabbing headline. Headlines sell newspapers and the same principle works with websites. How many newspapers, particularly evening ones, would be sold if the main headline was on page two or three? Your website needs to have some attention grabbing information immediately the page pops up on the screen. A reader isn’t going to scroll down the page looking for it, in the same way as they won’t pick up a newspaper and turn the pages looking for a headline story. They expect it to be on the front page, at the top. So above the fold is everything a reader sees on your website before they scroll down.

You may have to play around with the information you have on your website, and the layout to achieve this. Also the use of pictures can help deliver/support a message very effectively. I changed the wording on my home page many times before I was remotely happy with it. My key objective is to engage people who are interested in novels within the broad spectrum of thriller, suspense and mystery. I don’t write romance, YA, erotica, steampunk etc., so if someone arrives on my site looking for that . . . sorry, they need to look elsewhere. The same principle regarding grabbing attention applies to other pages. Each book page has a ‘headline’ before the main synopsis. The home page, individual book pages, articles and interviews are the key pages on my site which require immediate and relevant information to keep my readers on the page.

Tip 2 – Make sure that all the key information about your genre can be viewed ‘above the fold’. Remember you’ve 8 seconds on average to grab the readers’ attention.

Does the approach work? One way of knowing is by measuring how long people stay on each page before moving on. That can be done using Google Analytics, which is covered here. 

Marketing Tips for Authors - AIDA Part 2 of 2

In Part 1 of this series of articles I discussed the benefits of adopting AIDA as part of a marketing approach. Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. With the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter, it is virtually impossible to successfully incorporate all of this in one tweet. In fact, to try and do it is actually, in my opinion, an incorrect use of Twitter. I believe, from an author’s point of view, and it is this angle I am writing from, Twitter should be used for two things. Developing relationships and creating awareness. In this regard only Attention and Interest are applicable to Twitter.

I have seen so many tweets where people are trying to encourage people to buy their book there and then. 'Download my novel from Amazon today for 99 cents'. That's fine so long as other messages are included within tweets, and the pricing message is related to a special offer or price. Use of reviews to promote your books work well. Buyers are more likely to be encouraged by other readers, than a 'buy now' message. Messages like this are from people who don't understand the buying process. We all have a set of scales in our head - one side says 'Costs' and the other says 'Benefits'. It is only when the costs outweigh the benefits, are we likely to buy something. Consider for a moment some of the genres you personally don't like. Even if a book in that genre was offered FREE, as a Kindle download, the chances are you wouldn't download it. The 'cost' now becomes the precious space it would take up on your Kindle, and the time to download it. There is no benefit to be gained, and because the cost now outweighs the benefit, a purchase isn't made. So why would anyone consider buying an unknown book from Amazon, just because it is only 99 cents?

On the opposite side of the coin, if one of my favourite authors, let's take Michael Cordy, as an example, tweeted me to say he has just published a new book and he provided the link, I'd go straight to Amazon and order it. As an author he provides a 'product/brand' which I have a loyalty to, in the same way we all have loyalties to brands, products, authors etc. However, if you hadn't heard of Michael Cordy, and you received the same tweet, the chances are you'd ignore it. So apart from direct contact with a known customer, Twitter should only be used for grabbing attention and creating interest. The 'Desire' and 'Action' needs to be created via your website, because here you are not limited to a word/character count. Use Twitter to get people to your site and create the desire to read your book within the site. Have your link to Amazon (and all the other online shops) next to your book details, together with any special offers you may have for your book(s). I was once told many years ago by a very successful marketing guru - 'If you want to get into my pocket, first you must get into my mind.' In later posts I'll share some tips about websites which I've used in marketing training programmes, and I'll also look at the benefits of using Google Analytics. In the meantime, why not think of some tweets you could use to encourage people to look at your book on your website.