Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Amazon ads work on an auction-based system.
In essence, with your ad campaign you tell Amazon, “I want to show my book to people who are searching for x, and I’ll pay X dollars to do so.”
Your book, of course, is what is you’re advertising. The lowercase x stands for the keywords people type into Amazon when searching for a book to buy. The capital X is the dollar amount you’re willing to spend to have that ad appear on the pages that pop up when readers type in those keywords.
When a reader enters a keyword that you selected for your ad campaign, Amazon’s bots instantly look for all of the authors out there who have said they want their book shown when that keyword is typed in. It then gives preference to whoever has typed in the largest dollar amount for that x. If another author has a higher amount than you, then they outbidded you. If you typed in the highest amount, then you outbidded them and get preference.
Fortunately, you won’t get outbidded every time. That’s because authors set limits on their daily spending. So if an author bid $1 for a keyword but has a daily budget of $5, the sixth time that keyword is shown, they’re out of money and the next highest bidder gets preference. With far more than 200 million people typing keywords every day into Amazon, don’t worry, your turn will come.
In a nutshell, that’s generally how it works. Of course, Amazon’s system is more sophisticated than this as there are other variables. For example, if you set your bids to be “dynamic,” Amazon’s bots on their own will identify keywords that best sell your books and then raise your bid to make sure your ad pops up.
But like all software and algorithms, human intervention is needed to make sure everything works the way you want it to. A danger of the dynamic bid, for example, is that Amazon’s bots will start bidding a dollar amount higher than the amount of profit you would make from the book sale. A sale is great, sure, but not if you’re losing money on it…but more on that later.
In a future entry, we'll show how to set up an ad campaign for your book.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
You’ll benefit the most from Amazon ads if you have multiple books to sell. There are several reasons for this.
First, someone who has several books on Amazon looks like a serious author who others read, increasing your standing in readers’ eyes. After all, you wouldn’t keep writing books if people weren’t buying them. If you’ve just got one book out, however, that must mean you’re a new author, and who knows how good you are then? In fact, you may be advertising your book because it isn’t selling, as it isn’t any good. While none of this may be true about you or your book(s), it is the psychology of a good number of readers.
Secondly – and especially if you’re selling nonfiction – the book you’re advertising may not quite be the one the reader wants. A reader may take a look at it just to make sure. Perhaps one of your other books, which shows up on the Amazon.com page for the one the reader has looked up, is the right book, however. Your ad led to a sale, albeit not of the book that was advertised. But a sale is a sale is a sale.
Third – and especially if you’re selling fiction in a series – if readers buy the book you advertised and really like it, many of them come back to Amazon and buy the next book in your series. If you don’t have a second book, however, then you’ve just “lost” a sale. The reader will move onto another author.
So, before you consider using Amazon ads, build your list of published works. If you’ve written one book in a series, write a second one then advertise. If you already have a series, consider making one permafree (meaning you give away the first book in the series) and advertising the entire series or combining it into a boxed set and putting up an ad for that. Go over your manuscripts and see if you can publish some of them as short stories/novellas or if nonfiction as a short read; this will be very useful if those stories are in the same genre or if the nonfiction book is on the same general topic.
You still can publish just one book and advertise it with success. The book, however, usually will do less well than if you advertised one in a series. In addition, you lose out on the additional sales that naturally occur when readers buy a book in a series.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Sometimes after the title page and before the copyright page, authors will place excerpts from a number of positive reviews about their book. The idea is to give readers thinking about your book another sales pitch to help them make a decision.
A headline on the first page of reviews will help readers understand what’s going on in the section. Keep it simple and place it in all caps or boldface. Something as simple as PRAISE FOR “(YOUR BOOK’S TITLE)” will work.
How the rest of the review appears is up to you. One general rule is to keep the blurbs short; any more than four to six sentences is pushing it. Another is to not place it in italics; many readers find long stretches of italicized type difficult to get through. Lastly, always tell who said the blurb and give some credentials, such as Alan Watson, New York Today book critic.
If you don’t have any blurbs for a review section, solicit them in advance. You can send advance reader copies of your book to potential reviewers or perhaps send out formatted copies of the book that you’re still editing. The blurbs, however, ought to come from readers with credentials to make such statements, such a book critics, experts in the field you’re writing about, established authors, and so on. Blurbs from your mother, best friend, and a beta reader no one has ever heard of won’t help your cause.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
In the Age of the Internet, just about everyone has an email address at which they can be reached. Knowing the email addresses of those people interested in your writing would go a long way in helping you sell more books, as you could inform them when new titles are coming out, when you have events, when your books are on sale, and more.
An email list quite literally is a collection of emails of those people who are interested in your writing. Though an email list can be done by hand, you’ll probably use email marketing software or an online service to help you build your list, create your promotional messages, and then email those messages to people on the list.
The challenge is to find those people interested in your writing and then for them to willingly give up their email address to you. Never build a list in which you use the address of every person you’ve emailed during the past year or that you’ve purchased from a third party. In the first case, your second-cousin Sara and car mechanic named Jim probably aren’t interested in your book beyond polite conversation. In the latter case, many of those addresses really aren’t from people who know anything about you as an author or even like to read books in your genre. That doesn’t help you sell books and means your promotion often will be sent to a spam folder.
Instead, you want people to sign up for your email list. They should know that by giving you their email address they’re agreeing to receive regular updates about your writing. These are the readers who are most likely to buy your books – your ideal audience
So how do you find these people? There are plenty of ways:
There are other methods as well that work well for some businesses but not so much for authors. For example, a bookstore might have the option to enter your email when a person pays via credit card. Since your books are sold online through Amazon and other distributors, that wouldn’t really work for you.
Usually to get people to give you their email, you need to offer them something in exchange. For retail stores, that's easy – a discount on their next purchase. For authors, it might be a free pdf of a book. Often the promise of email updates about your next book is sufficient though.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.