In this short episode, Jo and Lindsay jump on the bandwagon and share some of their marketing and publishing (but mostly marketing!) predictions for 2019.
Will Amazon ads expand and offer more opportunities? Or will authors get fed up with the high cost of clicks and flock to something else? Is the mailing list swap dead? Will group promotions become more sophisticated?
We recorded early this week, since Christmas is on a Tuesday, so we hope you enjoy the show while you’re traveling or after you’ve had fun with the holidays. The three of us answered listener questions that covered the range from what the heck is meta data and SEO to what kind of marketing we plan to try in 2019 and which advertising platforms we’ve found best for their books.
Here’s a list of the questions as well as some Bookbub-related links that Lindsay promised:
How do you market cross-over fiction such as a mix between urban fantasy and near-future-SF?
Is urban fantasy with a lighter humorous note a trend now?
What is meta data and SEO, and does it matter for authors?
How much value is there to in-house promos on the various retailers, such as prime reading on Amazon, the promo tab on Kobo, and Apple and B&N features?
What new will Jo, Jeff, and Lindsay be trying in 2019 in regard to marketing?
Are book blog tours worth your time as an author?
What should you do to build buzz and sell books if you don’t have money to spend on advertising?
Who are the guys’ favorite authors and how did they influence them?
How do you go about improving as a novelist and keeping new books from being too much like what you’ve written before?
Have you tried to publish your audiobooks on Spotify?
Do you need an ISBN for an Amazon paperback and a different one for an IngramSpark paperback?
What’s the biggest thing you learned/realized in 2018, and how will that change your approach to publishing in 2019?
How would you go about calculating ROI for advertising a series that doesn’t have a set reading order? Whenever people talk about this calculation, it always hinges on figuring out your readthrough, but if the series has multiple entry points and you can skip books, what then?
What do you find is the most effective platform for authors for ads?
What marketing avenues would you recommend for authors who aren’t big fans of marketing?
How have your audiobook sales done for your different series? Does releasing a new audiobook for a backlist book help boost sales?
Jo and Lindsay talked with the famous (not infamous!) Brian Meeks today, author of Mastering Amazon Ads, as well as thrillers, satire, and science fiction (under a pen name). He started tinkering with Amazon ads a couple of years ago when they first came on the scene, and they turned into a game-changer for him, allowing him to sell a lot more books and eventually quit the day job.
Now, he spends a lot of time in his Amazon ads Facebook group helping other authors, and he’s also got a course you can sign up for if you want more than is in his book. If you want to check it out, he’s offering our listeners 30% off — throw in the coupon code of SFFMP30.
The difference between product display ads and sponsored product ads (and why Brian is a big fan of the former even though most people jump on the latter).
How long you should wait to see if an ad is going to catch and run well.
How recent changes to the ad system (August 2018) have got everyone bidding higher right now and authors may want to wait until things settle down again.
Why you should be patient and give everything time before raising the bid or selecting the new option to increase your bid up to 50%.
Whether it makes sense to advertise books that are wide and that can’t make money from page reads in Kindle Unlimited.
Whether it’s possible to pay for ads on a free ebook and come out ahead (i.e. when it’s a series starter).
How good copywriting is important, not just for the ads but for your book description.
Having an effective hook and drawing the reader to click more on Amazon.
How much time it really takes to get Amazon ads to move the dial for you — it’s not a quick fix or a set-it-and-forget-it method.
This week, we answered some listener questions that had been piling up. We touched on a variety of topics, such as…
Should you try to put your books in as many categories as possible, and what can we do about books that shouldn’t be there knocking us out of our Top 100s on Amazon?
How many downloads a day can you expect from permafree titles?
Is it worth trying to sell English novels in countries where English isn’t the primary language?
How can trad publishers get away with charging 9.99 or more for ebooks, and can indies do this if their books are well edited and professionally done?
How do you market cross-genre books that fall into more than one category?
How do you guys feel about killing characters, and does it ever get easier?
How does your plotting process work?
Has anyone tried Kobo Plus yet and gotten results?
Where you can advertise as a newer author with less than twenty reviews on your book? Here are the links to the spreadsheets Lindsay mentioned (that C. Gockel maintains). We’re not sure if they’re up to date though, so let us know if you know of a good and recent resource. Where to Advertise Free Ebooks | Where to Advertise 99 Cent Ebooks.
How did Lindsay relaunch her pen name successfully after a long gap between releases?
If you want to write three books before launching any of them, can you use novellas as part of the plan?
Jeff and Lindsay are working on new projects, but Jo has some links if you want to check out what he’s up to right now. Here’s his serial-in-progress: The Adventures of Rustle and Eddy. Also, he’s recently done a series of “How I Write” blog posts, which cover his plotting process, among other things.
We chatted with Moses Siregar III tonight, a busy epic fantasy author with two novels out. Like many folks in our audience, he has a lot on his plate, and it takes a while for him to write, edit, and publish new books. We talked about whether it’s better to self-publish or seek a traditional deal with this kind of schedule and what kind of marketing you can do when you don’t have the momentum of frequent releases behind you.
Moses also talked about his experience with podcasting (he was a host on Adventures in SciFi Publishing for some time) and how he met other authors and made some helpful contacts through seminars and conventions. When trouble with wrist problems bothered him, he became a fan of walking around the neighborhood and dictating his story. He used a service called iDictate which, for a reasonable fee, transcribes what you dictate into your phone.
We discussed some of the challenges, both of marketing and keeping the momentum going, when you write long epic fantasy novels. Since he doesn’t release his novels that quickly, Moses decided to make preview novellas for both of his books, as a way of getting something out there during the in-between years.
On this hot summer day, we chatted amongst ourselves about going wide and improving sales on the sites other than Amazon, specifically Kobo, Apple, and Barnes & Noble. We even brought up the subscription sites (Scribd and Oyster) and Google Play. We also answered a couple of listener questions.
Here’s a closer look at what we covered:
Does it matter what time of year you launch a new series? I.e. are summer sales slow, and should you wait until fall?
When is it acceptable to call yourself an Amazon bestseller?
What are the pros and cons of publishing on all of the stores versus going exclusive with Amazon?
How the heck do you sell books on those other sites anyway? We talked about using the free book or the 99-cent intro boxed set, trying to talk with the distributors to get promotions, linking to all of your books on all of the sites, and including sneak previews to entice the people who read the freebies to pick up the rest of the series.
Should you adjust prices at all on the other sites?
Is it better to go through a distributor such as Smashwords or Draft2Digital or upload directly everywhere that you can?