Sales Conversion

When you have a book on Amazon you will know that there are certain devices Amazon does to draw attention to your book. When you first publish it it will appear in the new releases – and they will give extra exposure to that. They will also give exposure to you when you and do a kindle countdown. You get exposure on a special page that show shows which books are on countdown.

Both of these will help drive traffic to your book. You can use other devices off Amazon to drive traffic – you could use Facebook ads, or Google ad words, and of course you can use Amazon marketing services, the internal Amazon advertise advertising platform to drive traffic.

However your main concern should not be about driving traffic. Your main concern should be about converting that traffic into sales. But example you can get 100,000 impressions on a MS but if you have a low click through rate people are not going to people are not going to be buying your book.

So you need to do something to firstly attract clicks from impressions and then is to convert those clicks into sales.

When you get an impression of thumbnail image of your book with the title and possibly half a line of text will appear. That cover image that line of text need to be strong enough to induce anyone seeing it to click on it.

So actually what is driving them to look at your book may not actually be your work. Certainly it is not the book itself. And that is why it is worth investing in an image or a cover professionally done – you may be a professional cover design it yourself and in that case that's fine. Because it is so important because it is so important to use that coveting do you someone to click on it. In terms of the headline – we must be thinking of copywriting skills. And that is the whole industry in itself. There are plenty of resources for copywriting but you may want to visit the coffee blogger or the copy Hakka websites

One suggestion is that you have what they call a swipe file. That you keep your swipe all of those one-liners that if induced due to colic. You can then use their syntax and introduce your own words to induce others to click. I wouldn't worry too much about plagiarism here, the copy writing industry is famous for adapting the successful words of those suit of those who have gone before.

You will see if you visit the copy blogger website that they actually have a PDF file that you can download that lists a whole selection of formulaic headlines that have been shown to sell. If you have time and space on your advert it to get the second line in that second line must build on the first. Remember what you're writing is not a description of your story – it is an advertisement. And therefore and therefore you need to use the skills of the advertising agency.

If you do not feel sufficiently skilled in this way – because copywriting is a specialist form of writing. You can easily hire a copywriter from the site such as fiver for a relatively inexpensive fee. Or if you want to get to the bees knees then you might have to pay a bit more. But these are experts in their field and make a living by inducing people to click.

So if when you are looking at your advertising figures and you are seeing not many impressions, then as noted before that means your keywords or your product placement is not good. It could be that people are just not interested.

As a MS becomes more popular the cost per click of advertising increases. So you can expect now to pay $.75 for a click on the keyword romance for example. And that might even fairy depending on time and day.
You can go for what they call longtail keywords so instead of just romance which will be high traffic but expensive, you may find Hobbit romance if that is relevant to your book to be a lot cheaper and probably better targeted to your niche or audience.
So the number of impressions your ad is getting is related into the targeting of your keywords or if you are using product to display which products you are tagging onto.

Once you get the impressions on the customers page, and they are seeing your book cover and your headline then it is the job of the cover and the copy in the headline 20 something quick.

If you are scoring a click to impressions ratio of a round of less than 0.01% then for some reason there is something wrong with either your cover or your headline copy. It's simply not converting the impressions into clicks.

In that case you should go and look at your cover and your copy and experiment with the new cover or a new headline. It's probably best to change only one thing at once because if you change to you won't know which of those was the problem. As I said you should aim for better than 0.01% with my best books I've had around 2% conversion of impressions to clicks. As a rule of thumb you should be looking for one click put thousand oppressions.

If you do better than that – that's great.

So say you are actually getting the clicks what kind of conversion rate should you be looking at. Well as I said at the beginning the secret to selling anything is to give people what they want. There is no point having a product no matter how wonderful you think it is if nobody wants to buy it. It may be the new future years or as the fashion cycles around that your product will your book will become something people want to buy. Fruit sample once upon a time you can send a bug about vampires then everybody wanted to buy books about vampires until now are you will struggle to market a book about vampires. There are of course obvious exceptions to this rule. I'm thinking of those vampire books with half naked men vampires showing their abs on the cover.

Once you have got the click conversion from the impressions the next thing you need to do is to sell the book. You need to convert the click into a sale. Now if you getting a 10% conversion rate that's pretty good – I've had better than that for particular products that were at that time what people wanted to buy, for example a Christmas story at Christmas. You can imagine that after Christmas the conversion rate went down.

In hot new niche genres you will be getting a good conversion rate if there is not as many books on the market as the appetite of the readers.

However if you're getting a conversion around 5% that will seem okay. And what clinches that conversion from you – of course it's the cover and the add headline which you could reuse in your book description; but it is the but it is the book description which is again an advertisement rather than a description of your book in reality. That again has to be written as you would write a piece of sales copy.

A good Okey description with an excellent cover should sell your book.

Of course we haven't even talked about the book yet. Most people buy a book without reading it in before hand. Of course that's the whole purpose of it.

These days you can look at the first few pages on Amazon – and in fact that's what are used to do in bookshops in the old days I would look at the cover I would read the blurb on the back and then I would read the first couple of pages to see whether the style was something I liked.

How are you hope your reader on your first pages is a subject of a whole different discussion and there are some good books available on how to write affective hooks to draw the reader in in the first but I am assuming then to get your sale you need to have good keywords to get the impressions. From the impressions you need a good visible cover that you can actually reading thumbnail with a headline that is based on copywriting principles. That will induce the potential customer to click on your booking details page.

The detail page will have your book description again written that is it as an advertisement using copywriting skills. The cover is now seen on a bigger scale and has to be excellent of course. And then your writing itself – and this is the first time they will see your proper writing – and has to have a hug in it to draw the reader in. And if you have all of those three steps in place then you should be okay.

Of course that presupposes you are selling someone selling a book that people want to buy. 

There is a whole school of marketing that is about the con School of marketing – persuading a customer or even tricking them to buy something they don't want or need. That inevitably leaves a sour taste in the customer or in our case the readers mouth. You actually wanna sell your book to people you want to read it so don't even begin to think of a clever marketing trick is to try and con them. You wanted to draw your people to read your book. There is no point in conning people there is no point in calling people you aren't going to like your book to Byatt because they'll just leave you a stinking review.

Reviews

When you first publish your book and you still enough copies. Figure suggested to me is that you get a review per 50 to 100 copies for yourself. Some of those reviews are going to be five star fantastic. And you will love those people. However there will also be people who give you one stars. And on the Internet people are extremely rude. They will tell you your work is utterly worthless, but you're an imbecile, that you have no talent at writing, they will undervalue everything you do. And in the most brisk way.

And then you look at those reviews and you will cry and you're not sleep and you will rage and I don't want to find those people and kill them, but when you look at those reviews what you will find is that many of them are internally inconsistent. For example I had a review once that said that a particular story was predictable and directionless. I thought I thought well if it is predictable it can't be directionless because to be directional this is not to be predictable. Then you will have a review Sue will be right your grammar and they themselves be full of basic grammatical errors.

I think the key thing to do in the situation is to look at the same story, all the same piece of work, and compare the reviews it says your main character is interesting, that the story kept the reader gripped, and that they were into it from the first page. And put them alongside the review that says your main character is shallow, unbelievable, whiny and obnoxious.

I was reading an article on the Internet by Chuck Wendig, Who is commissioned to write a Star Wars sequel novel. He garnered 111 one star reviews. If you don't know Chuck Eendig you should read his blog. It is thoughtful, entertaining and above all funny.

Chuck had been talking to some representatives from Amazon, and they told him that as far as Amazon is concerned it is the number of reviews the drive is traffic. So the quality of the reviews, and what those reviews say it's not as important as the number of reviews you have on your book. That's an interesting fact, and I do not doubt that it is true.

The only time I would suggest that you take account of reviews is when they are not simple simply abusive or ecstatically praising, but when they point out something in your stories. Example I had one story where a couple of readers had pointed out that they would like extra description. One asked me to describe the main character more. The second suggested that I do more description of the physical world that the character inhabited – the objects in the room. I think that would both of these reviewers were suggesting was that I wasn't spending enough time anchoring the reader in the scene. Neil Gaiman One said, and I paraphrase, that when a reader tells you that they have an issue with something in your story, you should listen to them. Because even if they don't know exactly what the problem is they will have sensed that something is wrong. He also added that while they may be nearly always right incensing a problem, you should never take your advice on how to fix that problem, because it is nearly always wrong.