Tag: how to make money as a writer

How to beat Amazon’s book marketing system

How to beat Amazon’s book marketing system

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This article is Part Two of Why authors are writing books faster – and how to do it yourself. This time we’ll look at Amazon’s book marketing system. We’ll see how it rewards big-selling books and punishes smaller sales. We’ll also look at what happens when your book sells well and when it doesn’t. If you want to sell more books, Amazon recommends paid advertising. But we have some great tips that will let you keep your money.

Amazon’s book marketing system: the thirty-day boost

Amazon gives every new book a thirty-day boost in its search results.

If someone searches for some of the words in:

● your book’s title

● its subtitle

● the seven keywords/phrases on the Book Details page

● or your name

there’s a good chance it will appear near the top of Amazon’s search results.

If people buy your book, it will climb higher up the search results. That means more people are likely buy it. And that will make it climb higher still, so even more people will buy it. You’ll be a millionaire in no time!

Well, that’s what you hope. So does Amazon, because they keep thirty to forty percent of the money from each sale.

Go big or go home

But what if your book doesn’t sell as well as you hoped during its thirty-day boost? Well, Amazon wants rid of it. They gave your book a fighting chance, but it’s not going to make them any money. So they “bury” it where it will never be found.

Your book will still appear in the search results somewhere. But you’ll have to hunt through so many pages to find it that it may as well not be there. Result: you’re not going to be a millionaire (sorry).

(NOTE: You can usually find your book by typing the exact title into the search box. But let’s assume you want it to be found by people who have never heard of it.)

Surely there must be something you can do about this terrible tragedy?

Well, yes. A few things, actually.

Everyone recommends this, but it doesn’t work

Let’s start with something that won’t work (in my opinion and experience). Most self-publishing guides say that if your book isn’t selling you should tinker with your seven keywords. You’ll find these on the Book Details page in KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing).

Choose the keywords people are actively searching for and more people will see your book and buy it. That makes sense. So, problem solved, right?

Well, no. Not if you published your book more than thirty days ago and it didn’t sell all that well. Amazon will have “buried” it – as we saw above. Your book still won’t get found, regardless of what you change. And Amazon won’t give it another thirty-day boost.

Changing the title, cover or description (blurb) won’t do much either – for the same reason. (Yet it’s another thing the guides all recommend.)

Swapping your keywords for better ones will increase your book sales. But only if your book is already selling well and it’s visible in the search results.

Obviously, the best time to choose your “better keywords” is before you publish the book.

(NOTE: If you want to know what the best keywords are, take a look at Publisher Rocket.)

So, if changing the keywords (or the title, cover or blurb) doesn’t work, what does?

Amazon’s solution: give us your money

Amazon loves money. Give them some money and they’ll let you advertise your book to their customers.

Your book will still remain buried so deep in the regular search results that it may as well not be there. But it might appear if someone uses one of your ad’s keywords in their search. Your ad will appear in the “sponsored results” section. It might also appear on other books’ pages.

Your ad isn’t guaranteed to appear though, because Amazon use a bidding process for each keyword. This is partly based on how much you’re willing to pay when someone clicks on your ad. It’s also partly based on past book sales.

Example

Let’s say there are four sponsored slots on a page. Five authors have chosen a keyword (such as ‘book marketing’). They’ve bid $0.60, $0,50, $0.40, $0.30 and $0.20 for each click on their ads.

All things being equal, the first four authors’ ads will appear when someone searches for book marketing. The fifth author will lose out.

Hopefully, that fifth author is monitoring his ads and will see they’re not getting any clicks. The solution: give Amazon more money. (Or, in other words, slowly increase the price he’s willing to pay per click.) Once he bids more than $0.30 (in this example) Amazon will show his ad and people should start clicking on it.

Advertising is a fine art

Advertising on Amazon can be a fine art – and an expensive one. You need a great book, a great cover, a great blurb, the right price, lots of reviews. You also need a list of low-cost keywords that people are actively searching for. (Or you could let Amazon choose them for you.)

(NOTE: Some ads let you add a few words to encourage more people to click on them. Getting that text right can also be a fine art.)

If people click on your ad and buy your book, it will start crawling up the regular search results pages again. If lots of people buy it, it could end up right at the top. You might still become a millionaire after all!

Many leading self-published authors spend a fortune on Amazon ads. Some have hundreds of ads running for each book they publish, and they spend tens of thousands of dollars per month. They sell a ton of books as a result. But they won’t be earning anywhere near as much money as their sales figures suggest. (But it can still be a lot of money and some of them are millionaires.)

Advertising on other websites

Another option is to advertise your book on Facebook. This is also a fine art – but a different one. Many authors report that it works well for them, so it’s certainly worthy considering.

Learning about advertising

If you’re interested in advertising on Amazon or Facebook, there are some great books and courses available. Bryan Cohen runs Amazon Ads School. He also has books on Amazon advertising and writing great blurbs (book descriptions). You could also try the courses at Self-Publishing Formula.

The sneaky relaunch

But what if you don’t want to spend a ton of money? Well, you could always relaunch your book.

If your book isn’t selling and Amazon has buried it, you may as well remove it. Go to KDP and click ‘Unpublish’ (you can’t actually delete it).

Now publish your book again. But this time use the title, cover, description and keywords it should have had in the first place. Amazon will regard this as a new book and give you another thirty-day boost. Hopefully you’ll see much better sales this time around. (But you probably won’t. Because you also need to do some book marketing.)

An easy book marketing system

Don’t panic, book marketing isn’t complicated. All it really involves is being in touch with your readers. And you can do that without giving Amazon a penny.

One of the best ways is to have a mailing list.

How it works

Collect potential readers’ email addresses by offering them something in return. You could offer them

● a short story

● the second book in the series (for free)

● a bonus chapter you deleted

● character biographies

● a photo or video tour of the locations where your story takes place

● or whatever else you can think of

It needs to be something readers will want, but it won’t cost you much time or money to create.

Advertise the bonus on your website and in the back of each book.

If you haven’t published the first book yet, you could write short stories featuring the same characters. Publish these on your website, blog, and Facebook page. You could also ask other writers if you can post them on their blogs. And you could try other websites such as medium.com – where you can even get paid for posting them.

Sign up here

You’ll need to put a link or sign-up box at the end of each story so readers can leave their email address. Then you can let readers know when you publish your next story or your next (or first) book. Don’t forget to mention your special bonus that they can only get if they join your mailing list.

Email marketing services

You’ll need to use an email marketing service to manage your mailing list and send out the messages. Don’t use your regular email account, because it’s not meant for that – your messages will be marked as spam or junk.

There are lots of email marketing services. Some of the more popular ones include MailChimp, AWeber, ConvertKit and MailerLite, but there are lots more. I recommend checking out a few of them before choosing one.

Your mail service will:

● collect all the new signups to your mailing list

● automatically send them their bonus

● send out your messages (without labelling them as spam)

● and remove any unsubscribes and undeliverable addresses

Some services will let you collect around 2,000 email addresses and send out 12,000 messages per month free of charge. That’s more than enough to get you started. Once you pass 2,000 though, they’ll start charging you a subscription fee.

Some of them charge a fee sooner than this, and some of the fees can be pretty high, so choose your service carefully. Having said that though, if you’ve got 2,000+ people on your list, the fee shouldn’t be a problem. After all, you can now contact 2,000+ people who are eager to hear from you every time you release a new book. Simply write one email, click Send, and (hopefully) you’ll sell 2,000+ books and shoot straight to the top of Amazon’s search results.

If they like you, keep talking

It pays to keep your subscribers “in the loop”. Don’t just contact them when you have a new book out. Send them occasional freebies, such as exclusive short stories and personal photos. Send them teasers to get them excited about the next book. It could just be the title. Or it might be the cover or some hints about the plot. Or how about a short extract that leaves them desperate to know what happens next?

A little help can go a long way

There are lots of other things you can do. For example, if your book has already been published, ask other people to link to it from their websites, blogs, newsletters, and so on.

(TIP: If they’re members of Amazon Associates (which is free to join), Amazon will pay them a small amount every time someone buys your book.)

Summary

The best way to sell a ton of books is to build up a decent mailing list before you launch the first book. (Or the first book in a new series.) This will enable you to beat Amazon’s thirty-day rapid-release book marketing system. And you won’t need to spend any money on advertising

Your book should sell well enough during those first thirty days that Amazon keeps it on the first page of its search results. Every other book in the series should do just as well – or even better.

So, as far as book marketing goes, your only expense might be your mailing service subscription.

Find out more

Do you need more information about anything I’ve covered in this article? Would you like more book marketing ideas, tips and advice? I have a book! See The Fastest Way to Edit, Publish and Sell Your Book.

You might also like 75 Money-Spinning Ideas for Self-Publishing and Marketing Your Writing. It’s one of the 35 volumes in the ideas4writers ideas collection.

You can also post a question in the ideas4writers Facebook group or email me at mail@ideas4writers.com.

How to Make a Living as a Writer

How to Make a Living as a Writer

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In this article, we’ll look at how to make a living as a writer. We’ll start by writing letters and articles for newspapers, magazines and online publications, and graduate to writing books later. No experience necessary – we’re starting from scratch here.

In these troubled times, many of us feel … well, troubled.

If you have a job, you probably hate it and it eats up all your time, but you have to keep working because you need the money. (Even though it’s not nearly enough.)

If you don’t have a job, there are plenty of vacancies, but either they don’t want you or you don’t want them – I mean, who wants that sort of job?

Wouldn’t you rather … write a book or something?

Okay, maybe writing a book is too big a step at this stage if you haven’t written anything before.

(But if you fancy giving it a go, check out my books The Fastest Way to Write Your Book and The Fastest Ways to Edit, Publish and Sell Your Book.)

Let’s start with something simpler

How about writing some letters? That’s easy enough, right?

So, what will you write about?

Well, it needs to be something that interests you (because writing should be fun and interesting) and it needs to be something that interests other people. Does that help?

Okay, so what newspapers and magazines do you read? Do any of them have readers’ letters pages? If not, go shopping and look for an interesting publication that has a letters page. Let’s write a letter for them!

What will you write about?

Historical anniversaries are my suggestion: this day in history, the 100th anniversary of Interpol (September 2023), the 175th anniversary of the invention of chewing gum (also September 2023), that sort of thing. Readers (and radio listeners – another potential market) love this stuff. They’re really easy to research and write, and there are so many that you should always be able find some interesting ones.

Where do you find them?

Well, definitely don’t start by searching online. Yes, there are lists of anniversaries, but they’re not particularly helpful for our purposes. For example, Wikipedia has a long list of anniversaries for each day of the year, but nobody has heard of most of them, most of them aren’t notable (as I’ll explain below), and a lot of the dates and facts are just plain wrong. You could waste a lot of time here – or write a letter or article that’s full of errors, which is even worse.

Wouldn’t it be better if there was a book that listed all the good anniversaries months in advance, and they had all been properly checked? There is! Check out The Date-A-Base Book.

(Don’t rush off and buy a copy just yet. I’ll show you how to get some of the anniversaries for free – as well as other bonuses – at the end of this article.)

How to do it

Let’s jump ahead: you now have a good list of notable anniversaries in front of you.

1. Choose an anniversary

Browse through them and have a look for one that’s interesting (to you and to the readers of whichever newspaper or magazine you chose).

There’s no shortage of great anniversaries to choose from – there are at least 3,000 in each annual edition of The Date-A-Base Book.

2. Select a market

Let’s say you’re really interested in cycling (for example). So are lots of other people. And there are several good cycling magazines available. You’ve found one that has a readers’ letters page and a “star letter” spot too, for which you can win a small prize. Perfect!

Now, hunt through your list for some good cycling anniversaries: a notable race, the birth or death of a famous cyclists, the invention of an important bicycle component, the founding of a major bicycle manufacturer – anything like. It needs to be a notable anniversary – the 50th, 75th, 100th or 150th, for example – not the 23rd, 87th or 119th, which no one is particularly interested in.

(The Date-A-Base Book only lists notable anniversaries.)

3. A little bit of research

Once you’ve chosen your anniversary, you can look it up online. Google is the best starting point. Wikipedia isn’t bad either. But don’t trust anything they say without checking it properly.

See what you can find out about the anniversary. Look for facts that are interesting and intriguing, but most people might not know. You want something that will make your readers say, “Oooh, I never knew that!”

4. Write a letter

And then you can write your letter telling the readers all about it.

Don’t write a long letter: check how long the other letters are, and keep yours around the same length. You won’t have much space, but cram in as much as you can, and make it as entertaining and informative as possible.

If your letter isn’t published, just try again. Choose a different anniversary (or a different cycling magazine), write another letter, and keep trying until you succeed. (You will succeed.)

5. Repeat.

Keep doing this until you’ve had several letters published, and (ideally) won the “star letter” prize at least once as well.

How to make a living as a writer

Now, you might be thinking, why I am writing all these letters if I won’t get paid for writing them? Well, this is all about getting people to notice you – especially the editor.

This would be a great time to ask the editor if he would be interested in some short articles about other anniversaries. Send him a quick email, mention your letters that he’s published, and enclose a sample article to show the sort of article you’re planning to write. Just like your letters, it should be interesting, intriguing, and highly entertaining.

Hopefully he’ll say yes – and he’ll tell you how much he’s willing to pay you for writing them.

After that, just keep sending new articles in every month. You now have a regular slot in the magazine, and a regular income from writing.

You won’t make a living as a writer just by writing small articles for one magazine, of course. But there are other tens of thousands of other magazines in the world, and they’re all just an email away. You might end up with regular slots in dozens of them, if you can write that many articles each month (which you can – see my free guide below!)

And then write a book – the easy way

After a year or two of writing articles, you might have enough of them to fill a book – or, more likely, several books on several different subjects, all of which you’re interested in. Turning them into books is exactly what I suggest you do. And you can mention your books (and where to buy them) at the end of each article you write – so your books should pretty much sell themselves. And then you really will be making a living as a writer!

More information (free!)

By this point, I’m sure you’re crying out for more details and proper instructions. It’s all very well saying things like “turn your articles into books”, for example, but how do you get your books published and printed and distributed? How do you even contact newspaper and magazine editors in the first place? What exactly should you say to them to persuade them to accept your articles?

All the information you need is right here in my FREE 68-page guide Ditch Your Day Job. It walks you through the whole process in easy steps.

You get some really useful bonuses too, including a free ebook of 301 article-writing ideas.

Hop over to ideas4writers.com now to grab your copy of Ditch Your Day Job. It’s a free download, and you’re welcome to forward it to anyone who needs it.

***

Dave Haslett is the founder of ideas4writers and the author of Ditch Your Day Job, The Date-A-Base Book series, The Fastest Way to Write Your Book, The Fastest Ways to Edit, Publish and Sell Your Book, How to Win Short Story Competitions (co-authored with Geoff Nelder), a 35-volume collection of ideas for writers, and more.