Book Marketing
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Market Research for Authors Who Want to Improve Their Sales
Today, we’re going to take a moment to acknowledge that all of us are not having the book sales that we thought we would. We are not selling as many books as we hoped and dreamed. No matter where you are in the publishing process, it is possible to start fresh and begin promoting and selling more copies of your books. The best part is that you can do this in as little as 24 hours by doing just a few simple things.
We are going to start by doing some very basic marketing exercises. First, we are going to identify the top books in your genre as well as the top authors. That’s because you are going to use that list to go find your target readers. By knowing the bestselling authors in your genre, you’ll also be able to look into what they are doing to sell to their target audience.
If you’ve written a fantastic book that was meant to be read to a five-year-old, I promise you that they have a book basket that’s already stuffed with favorite books. Do you know who wrote those books? Do you know the names of the books that are on the bedside tables of children everywhere? What are the bestselling books in your genre today? How do you find that out? These are the types of topics we will be going over throughout this article.
We’ll be talking about how to research the bestselling books in your genre. Again, you’ll be gathering a long list of comparable and competitive titles so that we know where our readers are and what they are buying. One of the easiest ways to find your readers, once you know what the books are, is to see who lists these books, both on Amazon and Goodreads.
Comp Title Research
I did some research for a student of mine, named Heather, who thought her book was comparable to Goodnight Moon. Let’s say that this was your book. You could begin your research by heading over to Amazon and looking that book up. Now, let’s say that your book is available in both paperback and as a hardcover. You find that the hardcover version of Goodnight Moon is $18.99, and it’s in the “Classics” subcategory. Unfortunately, that’s not a category that will work for your “new” book. So, it’s time to search onward.
Now, let’s say that your book is not only a bedtime book for little kids, it’s also a counting book too. Since that’s the case, you might move on in your research to look up “counting books”. I did this and “counting books for toddlers” came up, which was perfect for the type of book we are researching. Once your search results appear, you should see some search filters over on the left-hand side of the screen, which you may want to use to be more specific in your research.
Upon doing this research myself, I narrowed my search down by choosing the subcategory “Children’s Counting Books” and the filter for hardcovers. The first book to come up was Goodnight Numbers, by Danica McKellar. It had 155 reviews, and the hardcover was priced at $16.99. When I clicked on the book and scrolled down the book’s sales page to the “Product Details” section, I found that it was listed under Children’s Books > Early Learning > Basic Concepts > Counting.
I clicked on the word “counting” in this category list, within the Product Details section, and I was redirected to that category. The page showed me all of the bestseller in that category.
The very top book listed was an Eric Carle book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I would like to take a moment to warn everyone against going after the classics. Trying to compare yourself to Eric Carle as a children’s book writer would be like writing a horror novel and compare yourself to Stephen King. That’s just not an apples to apples comparison. Your book might be comparable to Numbers Colors Shapes by Rodger Priddy, however.
How to Go Further
At this point, Heather felt like we were closing in on books that were much more similar to hers. Another book that came up in my search was Happy Easter Mouse, which is by Laura Numeroff. That’s the same author that wrote If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Doggies, by Sandra Boynton, is another one that came up. This author is very famous. There was also Counting with Frida, by Patty Rodriguez. You might have to go through a number of these books to find a half a dozen or more books that are comparable to your own. One that I thought was a great example was How Do Dinosaurs Count to Ten? This book is written by Jane Yolen.
If you thought that this book would be one which your readers would like to read as well, and it’s not written by an author so famous that you could never keep up, then it would be a good book for you to research. When you reach the listing page, for the book you are researching, be sure to also look at the “Customers who bought this item also bought” section, just to see what else is there.
Now, Jane Yolen is very popular, so a lot of her books were in this section. There were also quite a few other dinosaur books for children. There weren’t any comparable counting books, really. So, I continued looking at the bestsellers in the “counting” subcategory. Next, I looked at Twenty Yawns by Jane Smiley. This book’s description boasts that it is a Huffington Post Best Children’s Book of the Year, and at the time this research was done, it had 796 reviews.
This is a terrific book, and it’s one that the readers of your books would probably have on their bedside table. Again, that’s if you were publishing a children’s counting book that’s meant to be read at bedtime. Of course, if your book is different, you would want to find books that are comparable to your own. They can’t be books that are phenomenally famous, but they should be books that are selling well that you are pretty sure are sitting on the bedside table of those people in your target audience. I recommend finding about 12 different books that fit this description.
Don’t Just Settle for Online Research!!!!!
When you are done with this Amazon research, I recommend that you get in your car and drive to the nearest library and the nearest bookstore. Tell the librarians and bookstore employees about your book, let them know what books you would compare it to, and tell them that you are looking for other books that are checked out a lot, or are bought a lot, that are comparable to yours. Get their opinions as well. Don’t just depend on Amazon.
Librarians are often lovely people, as are bookstore clerks in many cases. Tell them that you are an author doing market research. Let them know about the books you’ve already found and ask them to help you find books to add. They will probably be excited to help you, if they aren’t super-busy, that is. Before you know it, you’ll have a list full of books that you can look at further to help you in your own marketing.
I only chose the picture books that were also counting books because they were the most like Heather’s. Hopefully, I gave her enough ideas to start doing this research on her own, and I would encourage you to do the same. This is the initial research that you should do, but there’s far more to be done. We will continue on in future articles by discussing what you can do once you have gathered a list of the top authors and books in your genre.
Make Your Book Easier to Find Online
They Can’t Buy Your Book If They Can’t FIND Your Book….
Setting up your book’s listing on Amazon and your Author Central page is kind of like getting your house ready for a Christmas party. First, you have to make sure that your house is in good shape. You have to make sure that everything is clean, and put away, and everything is set up. Now, once your page is set up perfectly, the way you want it to be, then it’s time to start reaching out and driving more people to that page. That happens by making your book easier to find.
The fact of the matter is that Amazon.com is the second largest, and second most-powerful, search engine in the world, after Google. So, Google.com is the largest and most powerful search engine in the world. Most of us already know that, but many people don’t realize Amazon.com’s search engine takes second place. If you treat Amazon the same way that you treat Google when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), and ranking, and searchability, you will not be sorry. There are a lot of benefits to that.
So, how does ranking work? Ranking works in a number of ways. It starts by being a reflection of how your book is doing. A number of my clients and students have come to me, and they’ve asked for tips and tricks on how to improve their ranking. I say to them, “Who cares?” Your ranking isn’t something that affects sales. Your book’s ranking is simply a reflection of how the tools you are using to increase your sales are doing. However, your ranking will improve when more people are looking at your book, more people are clicking on your book, and more people are putting it in their shopping cart.
Your ranking will also go up as more people purchase your book, and even if more people just mention your book, either in the reviews or on Amazon’s discussion forums. There are a lot of different ways that your book’s ranking could be affected. Let’s say that your mother, your sister, and your best friend all buy your book. Of course, they would all need to have different last names than your own. If your reviews come from people with the same last name as you, Amazon isn’t going to pay much attention.
Alternatively, if I get people with three different last names, who aren’t so obviously connected to me, and they all three write a review for me on the same day, my book’s ranking is going to go through the roof. Don’t get too tied into the rankings. They don’t always mean that your sales are increasing. What a good ranking will do is help you to gauge how your marketing efforts on Amazon are going. That’s why a book’s ranking, in my opinion, is so important. It’s nothing that you want to lean your shoulder against, though.
The secret to better ranking and showing up at the top of the search results used to be getting preorders. Let’s say that you have a new book coming out in March, and by mid-January, you have your book up on Amazon, and you even have your eBook up as well as your print version. You are going through your preorders, and you’ve got hundreds of people to preorder the book. That way, on March 3rd, when your book goes live, your book shoots to the top of the search engine results, and it becomes #1 in its category. That’s how it worked for quite a while.
Amazon doesn’t play into that so much anymore. There are new algorithms and rules in place. Nowadays, if you want to be #1 in your category, and you want to show up at the top of the search engine rankings for your category, you need to be a little subtler. What you need to have, now, is constant and consistent sales over a 30-day period.
So, let’s say your book is coming out on March 3rd, like in the previous example. What I’d recommend is that from March 3rd to April 5th, you begin promoting your book and getting organic sales. You can get people, such as clients, friends, and family members to buy your book and leave you an honest review during this period of time, which will help drive your rankings and your sales further, but you can also promote through your blog, or website, or through other strategies. The point is to have consistent and constant sales over a 30-day period of time, and then this must be followed by a strong surge of sales.
If you really want to drive your rankings, the easiest and best ways to do it in the past was through preorders. Those days are over. Now the best thing to do is to hold off and ask people to order your book on a particular day or within a 48-hour period a month or two after your book is launched. The reason is that now Amazon.com factors rankings by taking all of the sales made over the last 30 days, spread them out, and divide by 30. So, if you had no sales for 29 days, and then you sold 200 copies on the 30th day, you will only get the same ranking as someone who sold about 7 books a day over the last 30 days. That’s how it works now.
Now, if you are looking to get preorders just to get people excited about your book, that’s great. But, if you are using this as a strategy to grow your ranking or become a bestseller on Amazon, I want you to be aware that the new algorithms that are in place will thwart you, unless you understand how to play. Another aspect of this that I want to mention is that the growing number of reviews you get from month to month will do more to increase and hold your ranking than anything else.
Amazon cares about organic, honest reviews, and if you have a bestseller ranking (BSR) of 16,000 for your category, and you don’t get any new reviews for two months, your ranking will sink. It doesn’t matter how many tricks you pulled. If you can get a constant flow of reviews, even just one or two a week, or at least, you don’t let too much time pass between reviews being posted, your book’s ranking will improve week by week.
Keywords!
One of the places you might use keywords is within your author biography. There are other places you’ll want to use them, which I will touch upon in a moment. For now, I’m going to tell you about my three favorite websites that I use to find keywords. You see, I might think that “book expert” is the best keyword out there, but the truth is that I found out differently when I went to Kendlepreneur.com, Yasiv.com, and used the Google AdWords tool.
All three of these tools are very powerful. They all gave me keywords that I thought would be crazy to use. Guess what the #1 and #2 most purchased keyword that worked for me were. They were “books on books” and “bird on bird”. I never would have chosen those. I advise that you use all three of these sites. They are each going to give you a very long list of authors, titles, and phrases that you can use in your keyword work.
Once you’ve found your best keywords, get them into your bio and your book description. My book description contains the questions, “Have you written a book,” “Are you thinking about writing a book,” and, “Have you heard that it’s easy to self-publish?” Do you think that these questions just came out of thin air? No, those were generated from the keywords that I found using the keyword tools that I’m recommending to you today.
There are other places that you can use keywords, other than just your book description and your bio. You can also seed them in your Author Central page and in your blog names. Let’s say that one of the suggested keywords that I have found is “book sales funnel” or “book expert”. Can you guess what my next blog is going to be called? It’s going to be called “Book Sales Funnel” because that blog name is going to show up on my Author Central page.
If I use these keyword generators, and I find out that my biggest competitors and comp-title authors are Joel Friedlander, Jane Friedman, and Frances Caballo. You can bet that I’m going to put those books and those authors in a Wishlist so that my book and their books are intimately linked in Amazon’s algorithm. There’s one last thing that I advise you do, concerning keywords. If you have friends, loved one, and cohorts that are going to write a book for you anyway, you can actually seed reviewers and reviews with certain keywords.
Let’s say that a student of yours has decided to write a review for your book. You can ask them to mention somewhere in your review that you are a book expert. Ask them to use the specific phrase “book expert,” if they feel comfortable doing so and if they feel that the term really does fit you. Of course, “book expert” is just an example. You’d want to ask them to include a keyword that you feel fit you, and be sure that they know to use it only if they feel it fits you too, but if they could do this for you, then that’s yet another place that you can add a keyword that would help your listing thrive.
Summer Reading
Have the perfect beach read? As we head in to the Memorial Day weekend, summer is just around the corner. If you are a publisher or author with a book that’s perfect for summer reading – for adults OR kids – now is the time to make sure that your Amazon page is ready to go and you have a marketing and sales plan to get the word out about your book over the summer.
Here are 5 things you can do to get the word out!
1. Amazon Optimization and Top Review Campaign – Can readers find your book on Amazon? Do you show up in the first several pages? Do you have recent reviews. Now is the time to make sure that your Amazon page is ready to go for the summer. If there hasn’t been any recent activity on your book page, make sure that you are updating your tags and information. New reviews are also important. Don’t let your book page languish during these key summer months. If you want help setting these up, take a look at The Cadence Group. They do a terrific job.
2. Get Reviews – If you have the perfect summer read, you want people talking about your book. A great way to do this is to approach book reviewers, book bloggers and category bloggers and ask if they are willing to read and review your book. Always be respectful! If a reviewer or blogger doesn’t have time to read and review your book, offer to write a guest post. Most book people are willing to help get the word out – even if they don’t have the time to do it themselves. The more that people are talking about your book, the more buzz you will create. Get people talking today!
3. Visit your Local Book Store – If you think your book is appropriate for a summer read, visit your local bookstore and ask if they would be willing to stock a couple of copies of your book for the summer. Dress professionally and have a sales pitch. If they say no, thank them for their time and move on to the next store. A lot of local bookstores are willing to support local authors. Don’t be afraid to ask!
4. Launch a Giveaway program – Nothing sells a book better than a book! Spend the summer months doing giveaways. You can do this online as well as offer free copies of your book to local book clubs, libraries and other organizations. Commit to giving away your book to as many potential readers as possible. Just one free book could result in a recommendation that could increase your sales. Don’t discount word of mouth!
5. eBook – Do you have an eBook? Is your ebook available on the eBook sites at Amazon.com, and BN.com? If not, it’s not too late! You can get an ebook created and uploaded in just 5-10 business days. More and more readers are choosing eBooks – unlimited books at their fingertips and all they have to carry is the eBook reader of their choice
D5 Creation