Gaughran - Let’s Get Visible: How To Get Noticed And Sell More Books (Let’s Get Publishing)

Let's Get Visible

How To Get Noticed And Sell More Books

by David Gaughran

Editor: Karin Cox

Cover Design: Kate Gaughran

Published May 2013 by Arriba Arriba Books

Kindle Edition

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If youre reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright 2013 David Gaughran

Introduction

In my book Lets Get Digital: How To Self-Publish, And Why You Should I explained how the distribution system for bookspreviously monopolized by the large publisherswas blown apart by the digital revolution. As many of you will have already discovered, the open nature of digital distribution can be a double-edged sword; there are more than 1.5 million e-books in the Kindle Store, with new titles being uploaded every day, around the clock. When anyone can publish a book, the floodgates open.

As such, getting your books noticed can be a huge challenge. Even when it seems as if you have cracked the code, and sales are trucking along nicely, the rug can be pulled out from beneath your feet, and it seems like your work has become invisible again. Visibility isnt just a challenge that must be bested once; it requires continual work. Indeed, probably the biggest complaint authors have in this brave new world is not sales (or the lack thereof) but the constant promotion that eats so much into precious writing time. Barely a day goes by without a blog post touting the next essential promotional venue for our work, or the latest social network that we have to be active on if we want to get our sales moving. Often, such advice suggests moving into areas that make us feel uncomfortable, such as relentlessly pushing our work on Twitter, or disingenuously making friends on Goodreads only to hit them with the hard sell further down the road.

How do we get noticed without driving ourselves crazy or crossing our own ethical boundaries? How do we make our books visible without spending so much time on promotion that we have nothing left for writing? How can we promote in a cost-effective way (that wont make us go nuts)?

Fear not, fellow writer. Lets Get Visible is here to help.

This book will do two things. It will break down Amazons famous recommendation engine and detail the various opportunities for exposure on Amazons sites. Plus, it will give you practical help on how to implement this knowledge. By using the tips outlined in this book, you will get your book noticed. Whether your book sells or not is up to you. Because if you dont have the basics in placea striking cover that speaks to your genre, an enticing blurb that draws readers into the book, a sample that grabs them (with clean formatting), and a price that doesnt make them think twiceno amount of visibility will do you any good. If you arent sure whether you have those basics in place, or you havent published anything yet, I urge you to read Lets Get Digital first, which will cover all of the steps you need to get your book in shape and ready to profit from the visibility that Lets Get Visible will help you attain. Considering that a lot of the strategies here aim to place you on various lists on the Amazon site, an appealing, professional cover is particularly important. I cant stress that enough.

Assuming you do have those basics in place, you probably share the same frustrations that many writers have when it comes to the promotional treadmill. Getting your book noticed can seem like an impossible task. Even when you manage to carve out some visibility for your titles, it often seems fleeting, and the sales surge can disappear as quickly as it arrived. Many writers are awkward penguins who dont enjoy promoting their work and are aghast at the notion of becoming the internet equivalent of a door-to-door salesman. Thats fine. This book will not urge you to flood Twitter with spammy buy my book messages. Nothing in this book will make you penguins squirm. Promise. This book also wont push time-heavy strategies on you. I wont urge you to join Goodreads and spend countless hours reviewing books and forcing yourself on various reader groups. I wont suggest you join teams where you spend hours tweeting about other peoples books, which you havent read, in the hope that they will do the same for you.

None of the strategies outlined in this book will take up too much time. Indeed, I will urge you to cut back on time-heavy promotional activity and substitute it with something altogether more powerful: knowledge of the algorithms that determine which books receive the spotlight, and ways to exploit that knowledge to your advantage. In short, this book will help you make your books visible, and will free up more time for writing (and the rest of your life).

Some of the tricks are simple: such as having a short note at the back of your books asking readers (nicely) for a review. Doing that led to my review rate tripling overnight. No longer did I have to spend countless hours hounding book reviewers, only to have my novel join the back of an endless queue. Instead, the reviews poured in without any further effort on my part. Another simple suggestion is to set up a mailing list, and to make that link the first thing readers see when they finish your book. Doing that has allowed me to build up a considerable list of readers who will buy my work the second it is releasedlanding my books high in the charts, gaining them crucial exposure to new readers, and driving further sales.

Thats the easy stuff, but not everything in this book is that straightforward. Some of it will require a little work on your part. The inner workings of Amazon arent always easy to decode. The strategies I outline might, at times, seem strange (such as staggering news of a new release over several days, rather than telling everyone all at once). But there is sound reasoning behind such thinking, and everything is explained in the simplest possible terms with plenty of concrete examples. By the time you have finished this book, you will have a series of different marketing techniques you can apply to all of your titles, depending on their current sales level. You will learn how to choose the right categories (and when to change them), and you will learn what factors actually govern Sales Rank and how the Best Seller & Popularity lists work (and the difference between the two). Once you understand that, you will learn how to maximize free runs, and how to get the most out of a paid advertisement, a group promotion, or a limited-time sale.

Most importantly, you will have divested yourself of time-wasting, frustrating promotional strategies that do nothing other than cost you precious writing time. But before we get to that, we have to deal with the dreaded sales cliff.

The Sales Cliff

All authors know that sales can ebb and flow. Sometimes the reasons are clear, but at other times they are mystifying. A spike in sales after being featured on a major site like Pixel of Ink, Ereader News Today, or BookBub has an obvious explanation: your book is suddenly visible to thousands and thousands of new readers who have never heard of it before. Featured authors can enjoy the afterglow of a resultant spike for the following days or weeks.

What is often less obvious is why sales suddenly collapse. The same book that was riding high in the charts one day suddenly becomes untouchable. Its as if the book has become invisible to readers. If you keep a close eye on your daily sales numbers, you might even notice this phenomenon occurring roughly a month after a big sales day. But what is the cause? Can this trend be reversed? And is there a way to avoid this sales cliff altogether?

To answer those questions, you need to understand what feeds into the various algorithms that Amazon and the other retailers use to calculate lists such as Best Sellers and Hot New Releases that are dotted around their sites. Sometimes, these recommendation engines are working in your favor, displaying your book to thousands of potential purchasers. Other times, its as if your book has been warehoused, and readers never seem to stumble across it. But what if there were a way to get the system to view your book more favorably? What if there were a way to trigger those recommendations for your own titles?