Today, the guys took on a batch of listener questions that ran the gamut from what’s the best schedule for a rapid release of a trilogy to what kind of markets we’ve targeted with Facebook advertising to what to do (and not to do) when choosing a book title.
And in case you missed it last week, we have a 30% off coupon code for Brian Meek’s Amazon Ads course. For those interested in signing up, you can use the code of SFFMP30: Mastering Amazon Ads: An Author’s Course
Here’s a look at the questions the guys answered:
What’s the best lag time between books in a trilogy rapid release? Is it best to dump all at once? 1/week, 1/2-weeks, or longer in between.
In your ideal rapid release schedule, how many days/weeks/months apart would you release each new novel in a science fiction series?
Any tips for marketing epic fantasy novellas/novella serials?
How do you decide when a series and it’s spin-offs should end?
How does (Lindsay) keep romance from overtaking an adventure story?
For Facebook marketing, do you find one demographic marker more useful than it’s counter-parts? Ie: is it effective to target age, income, etc, or are your best results from targeting by interest? Do you still boost posts?
Are you planning your calendar for 2019? will you be at any conferences this year? I missed you at the Sell More Books Show summit this year, but I can go next year. 🙂 Do Jo and Jeff attend anything?
Promos: is there a deeper marketing reason to choose to run them only on selected markets, or does a world-wide one mean a world-wide bucket of headaches? (See: yours and Jo’s Bookbub books being at the same time discounted on .com and full price on .it)
Lindsay, I’d love to hear about how the blog-novel went. Did it impact the launch much? How about blog traffic? Was there a bump in your other books via affiliate blog links?
Which writing craft books help/have helped you?
What does your outlining process look like?
What’s your best advice for picking a novel’s title?
How do you decide what genre to list as if it’s a bit of everything?
How do you guys get a universal link for one of your Amazon books (Amazon only), or did you not bother? Specifically a link that will send UK readers to the UK store, US readers to the US store, etc. Or did you provide links for all the separate countries?
I would love to hear an updated list of which promo sites you use.
A lot of Book Funnel/Instafreebie group promos I see all have the same group of books, even if there is a “theme” to the promo. Have you seen anyone having success doing a more targeted and small group promo?
I’d like to hear how Patreon is going. Any tips or anything you’d do differently? (I’ve just set up Patreon with early release books + other rewards like personalized copies via Ingram.)
This week, fantasy author NM Howell (AKA Nikko) joined the guys to talk about her journey from semi-pro cosplayer (yes, that’s a thing!) and magazine creator to full-time fantasy author.
Here are some of the details that we covered:
Cosplaying and starting a magazine.
Getting into publishing fantasy under multiple names (NM Howell also writes as Nicole Marie).
Genre hopping with witch cozies, YA fantasy with dragons, and reverse harem fantasy mysteries.
The challenges of starting and maintaining multiple pen names.
Are there too many dragon fantasy novels out there now to jump in?
Starting out with Amazon exclusivity (KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited) and gradually making some series available everywhere.
How some advertising venues (Facebook, Amazon AMS, Bookbub, etc.) work better than others for different genres. Nikko likes Facebook for her fantasy romance and Bookbub for her cozies.
How she’s found success with rapid releasing the first two books in a new series.
Experimenting with permafree Book 1s.
Does marketing later books in a series work?
Whether big multi-author bundles are still worth it as far as getting readers to try more of your stuff.
This week, we were joined by data cruncher Alex Newton who runs the K-Lytics (i.e. Kindle Analytics) service for authors and publishers. He’s been taking a look at trends in Science Fiction and Fantasy this summer, so we invited him on to talk about the findings of his latest report. He also gave us some great information on the Amazon store such as how keywords work (and don’t work) on the site and the differences between Amazon bestseller lists and what comes up in Amazon search results.
Here are some more of the specifics we covered:
Some SF/F sub-categories that are trending upward.
Finding categories where it’s easier to get a bestseller tag (and whether it can be useful to rank highly in a tiny niche few people browse).
Finding the intersection between writing what you love and writing books that can fit into hungry and less competitive sub-genres.
Using keywords to appear in searches related to your genre.
Why there’s no point to throwing keywords into your book’s description or into the book itself.
Whether books that shouldn’t be in genres (i.e. paranormal detective romance stuck in the Arthurian fantasy category) skew the data or matters in the long run.
Why you might not want to change your keywords and categories around willy nilly.
Amazon’s natural tendency to promote churn and whether it can be fighting an uphill battle with continuing to advertise the same books for months and year at a time.
Average price points for books in the Top 100 for various subgenres.
If you’re interested in checking out K-Lytics, their website is here, and they also have some free videos and posts up on their blog.
If you want to see the screenshots that Alex shared, make sure to check out the YouTube video this week:
This week, one of our first guests ever on the show rejoined us after more than three years to talk about switching from contemporary fantasy to historical fantasy/steampunk. Becca Andre, author of the Final Formula series and her new Iron Souls series, publishes regularly while working full time and being a mom. We talked time management, the unique challenges of selling historical fantasy, and what it was like to use a big multi-author boxed set to launch a Book 1 in a new series.
Here are a few of the specifics we discussed:
Switching from urban/dark fantasy in a contemporary setting to a historical steampunk fantasy setting.
The challenges of researching and publishing historical fantasy.
Marketing a unique historical setting and story idea versus something that follows more popular tropes.
Using a multi-author boxed set to launch a brand new Book 1 in a new series.
Launching a Book 1 on its own after it already went out to your core fans in a boxed set.
Why Becca decided to try KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited for this series after having been wide in all the stores for years.
Fitting in time to write and market when you’ve got a day job and a family.
Choosing a cover design when you’re writing something unique and there aren’t many examples.
Amazon categories that can be used for historical fantasy and using a keyword to get into the new “gaslamp” fantasy category.
This week, epic fantasy/fantasy romance author Miranda Honfleur joined us on the show. She launched her first series last November and has kept book 1 selling well and sticking in the Amazon fantasy charts while releasing more books in the series. She has three out now with a fourth to follow later this summer. We asked her how she did so well as a new author and how she’s maintaining sales.
Here are some more specifics on what we covered:
Miranda’s road to publishing.
How she’s balanced writing epic fantasy that’s heavy on romance, something epic fantasy readers aren’t always looking for.
What she took away from the Sell More Books Show conference as a new author.
How she used Instafreebie to building a mailing list months before she launched her first book.
Tips for getting the most out of Bookbub PPC ads, Amazon ads, and Facebook ads.
Whether she’s needed to cull her mailing list, something we just talked about on last week’s show!
How she tries to be everywhere with advertising.
How much time she’s putting into Amazon ads and other marketing methods to keep her Book 1 selling week in and week out.
Whether Instagram may be the next place fantasy authors should have a presence.
Marketing to “series-adjacent” genres as part of a larger strategy.
You can find Miranda on her website or on Amazon where her books are currently in Kindle Unlimited. If you’re a fantasy fan, check out her first book, Blade & Rose. If you enjoyed fairy tales, she’s a part of the Of Beasts and Beauties boxed set.
Hey, folks! I (Lindsay) got back from the Sell More Books Show Conference this weekend, where I was one of several speakers. I took notes on some of the presentations that resonated most with me, and I shared them with Jo and Jeff on the show tonight. We proceeded to discuss them a bit. Hopefully, you’ll find it useful to listen!
I’m going to share the books of the speakers we were talking about, so if you want more information on a particular topic, you might want to check them out. After that, I’m going to paste in my notes from the convention, in case you find it more useful than just getting some bullet points here. They aren’t organized, and I’m sure they are full of typos. Read at your own risk!
Notes! (Scroll to the bottom for the YouTube video and download link for the show.)
Chris Fox on creating a flagship series
Many well-known authors have done this, over 1 million words total
Become known for the series if it’s popular enough and might not have to work again
Create by having:
Opening loops – lots of questions to be answered over the course of the series
Narrative drive – lots of stuff going on and carrying the series: simple plots don’t draw in the reader for the long haul
Character drive – lots of characters with goals and motivations they’re working toward. Make sure to flesh out all the side characters and not just the main character. Some books may even focus more on these other characters
Marketing your flagship series:
You’ll keep advertising your book 1 as you release more books so you have to be smart or you’re saturate your target audience and your ads will become less effective.
He likes a “crop rotation” method: With his Tech Mage series, he has three target audiences: military SF fans, epic fantasy fans, and litRPG fans. He started out targeting one demographic with ads and even the cover of the book, then the next when he released Book 2, and he’ll do the other audience later.
Mailing Lists Bryan Cohen
Creating your lists, writing a giveaway, and creating an autoresponder sequence (Andrea Pearson episode, there’s a lot about this) before you go hunting for any signups.
Remember to be personable in your emails, tell little stories about yourself, and don’t always make the hard sell.
But do remember to plug the old stuff and maybe you want to point to a list of all your books or include them.
GDPR – Damon from Bookfunnel chimed in and said most of us are probably okay if we haven’t been doing anything shady, if they have to double opt in, and the unsubscribe is clear in the footer. If readers are signing up on our site for bonus material or just to follow you and you’re making it clear that they’re going to get monthly updates or new release updates – whatever you do.
Be careful if you got subscribers from Instafreebie or joint promos or anywhere you were just handed a batch of email addresses and put them into your database, or if you’ve just been adding people who email you to a homemade list. This isn’t cool even with CAN-SPAM stuff, so fix that.
Thoughts on culling lists?
You may have to do it if you’ve been growing your list fast with a lot of promos to get subscribers, and you’re getting pushed into more and more expensive tiers. Do check before kicking people off.
As Damon said, not all the data is accurate. If people’s email clients don’t automatically load images, your mailing list provider won’t get a ping back that says the pixel they insert was loaded, so they won’t see the message as “read.” You can help with accuracy by including images in your emails that people want to see, so they’ll click load images.
Amazon Ads Brian Meeks
You should have lots of ads that you try for the same book. Tinker with copy and keywords (authors) you target.
After about 5 days, things will start to fall off (may drop as much as 80%) with how many impressions you’re getting. Sometimes a good ad will work longer, but he’s putting in new ads every week to keep the clicks coming on his books. He’ll kill the old ones instead of letting them run.
Good copy on the ad and targeting the right audience will get you more clicks on your ads which brings down the cost of each click and will get you more impressions. Amazon wants to show the effective ads to its shoppers.
Good cover and blurb will help you more than anything. When you send clicks to your book page, you need them to convert into sales or borrows, otherwise you’re spending way more than you need to be on these ads. The better the conversion, the more you’ll make in the long run.
Short blurbs with lots of white space and hooks questions above the “read more” link. He says not to worry about cramming a bunch into that space. Just make them want to click and read more. No walls of text.
You don’t have to say what’s going on in the story. You just have to hook them, make them buy. This is not a synopsis. If you wrote query letters to agents, it’s like that middle paragraph.
Never look at ACoS since it’s slow to report, not always accurate, and doesn’t include page reads.
Important to figure out what your read through is for your series and how much you make when someone reads the series. Then you know how much you can afford to spend on ads to get a new reader.
He tried a test with a SF author with an 8-book series who wanted to advertise a free Book 1 that was 99 cents, so he was only making 35 cents for sale. They had to wait a couple of months to get the full picture, since it might take people that long to read through the series if they were going to. They judged that it took until Book 4 to turn a profit, for the money spent on ads to be worth it.
More competition now, so you have to big higher, so it is getting tougher especially in romance (he mentioned SF as getting there too). It may start to only make sense to run ads on a first in a long series.
He still sees people getting 13-15 cent clicks on niche things for specific keywords, but that’s getting rare.
*Note Amazon will tend to give a boost to ads for books that haven’t been advertised before, so if you’re finding your Book 1 just isn’t working anymore, you might try advertising a later book in a series.
Monica Leonell on Business/Product Funnels
You need a product funnel… free or low cost product that can get people in the door. Then, after they know they like your work, they are willing to buy higher priced items.
People don’t jump from not knowing anything about you to buying a 9.99 ebook.
Novelists Delimma:
In most industries (artists, musicians, non-fiction authors), there are higher priced items ($100 to thousands), but not so much in the fiction world. There are lots of multi six figures authors now, but not many multi seven figure authors, as there are in other businesses, and she thinks it’s because we haven’t yet figured out how to make these higher priced kinds of things for our super fans.
Why not doing it:
Codependent on retailers – if Amazon changed anything, most of us would be hugely effected
Lack of a real model – for most, having movies/series made by Hollywood is the only way to break into the superstardom necessary
Fear the answer to this question: why would my readers spend $100, $200, $500 on us?
Maybe survey your newsletter subscribers and see what cool things they want?
She had a quote by Taylor Swift about how you can be accidentally successful for three or four years, but a career takes work.
We’re joined this week by LGBT urban fantasy author Holly Evans. She believes LGBT spec-fic is an up and coming sub-genre with a lot of potential, and even though it’s niche, she’s able to pay the bills writing it. Whether you’re interested in it or not, a lot of today’s interview should apply to any author thinking of writing in a smaller niche. Interestingly, Holly found more of an audience when she went wide with her books than when she was exclusive with Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited.
Here are some of the specifics that we covered:
Getting started in the crowded urban fantasy market.
Tropes for urban fantasy and also for LGBT fiction.
Why LGBT spec-fic may be an up-and-coming market with room for new authors to jump in.
What qualifies something as LGBT (i.e. do the main characters have to fall into that category?)?
If romance is expected and how explicit sex scenes should be if included.
The pros and cons of selecting the LGBT category on Amazon and other stores (easier to rank versus perhaps being overlooked by people who don’t think they’re looking for that).
Avoiding stereotypes.
Why Holly decided to leave KDP Select and publish her books to all the other stores.
How she’s found success in the other stores in only a few months.
Writing shorter series and wrapping individual books up so you can start new ones easily.
Whether there are any downsides to writing short.
You can visit Holly on her site and check out her books in all the major stores. Her newest series, Forged in Blood, is out now.
This week’s interview features NYT best-selling indie fantasy author Jasmine Walt. She talks about how she burst onto the scene a couple of years ago with her popular Baine Chronicles series and breaks down why she think it hit big even though she was a new author at the time. We also ask her about her various collaborations and how she’s kept the momentum going with the numerous new series she’s started.
Here are some of the specifics:
Expectations for urban fantasy, fantasy with romance, and reverse harem fantasy.
Writing stories that combine a lot of elements and aren’t exactly to market.
When taking on a collaboration partner can make sense and mistakes to avoid in co-writing.
Jasmine’s process that helps her publish a novel almost every month.
How much outlining she does before she starts writing.
How her first launch went and what she did to get pre-orders and sales as a brand new author.
What a launch looks like for her these days as a more established author with a fan base.
The challenges of having success with a second, third, etc. series after the first one was a hit.
When it’s time to move some series out of Kindle Unlimited and try to build a readership in other stores.
The factors that go into deciding how long a series should continue.
What Jasmine does for the back matter of her books.
Whether hitting bestseller lists (New York Times, USA Today, etc.) are useful for marketing or just nice accolades to have.
Our guest this week launched her first novel in April of 2017 to great success. Amanda Milo’s science fiction romance, Stolen by an Alien, stuck in the Top 250 overall in the Amazon store for months and remained near the top of the scifi romance Top 100 too. She’s since published two more novels in the series for the rabid fanbase that she’s already established.
We brought her on to ask about how she launched to such success, why she’s continued to launch her books at 99 cents, and how she used some atypical (for the genre) cover art to find her target audience.
Here’s some of what we covered in more detail:
How Amanda launched her novel without professional editing or a cover that she loved but made it work anyway.
Combining 99 cents, Kindle Unlimited, and a story written for a niche audience to find success.
What level of sex readers are looking for in the science fiction romance category.
Some popular story types in the genre.
What readers expect from the alien abduction trope.
The challenges of writing strong female characters and balancing them with some of the romance tropes of rescues or abductions.
Using the cover, especially in romance genres, to signal to the reader what to expect as far as heat level, in particular.
Why Amanda has stuck with 99 cents so long for her books.
Whether novellas and shorter stories can work in scifi romance.
Using a Facebook page and Facebook groups to connect with readers.
This week, we were joined by Will Turnage, the founder of the discount book promotion site, Book Barbarian (in addition, he runs Red Roses Romance and Book Adrenaline for mysteries and thrillers). He’s also the author of three science fiction and fantasy novels, and is a fan of the genre. We asked him about some best practices for authors using promotional sites.
Here are a few of the specifics that we covered:
What it’s like writing and running a business from Cartegena, Colombia.
How Will turned from author to founder of a book promotion site, one of the first devoted to scifi and fantasy.
The challenges of building up a subscriber base and keeping new people coming in (yes, these guys have some of the same challenges that we have as authors!).
Some trends that Will has seen — what sub-genres of SF&F tend to be most popular and what types of covers work well.
How many reviews you should have before submitting your book to a site like Book Barbarian.
Whether it’s necessary to have a high normal price and deeply discount to appeal to readers.
Best practices when it comes to free books.
Ad stacking across multiple book promo sites to sell/give away more books and in the hope that your book might stick on the store sites for longer.
How often one should submit books to promo sites and when one might experience diminishing returns.