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.

Litrpg

Funny thing happened to me recently. I started listening to podcasts about three months ago – specifically podcast about India office writing marketing and became a little bit of CEst but that's the thing number one. And then in addition to that I was in Lancaster and I picked up a cop copy of ready player one I am Skynet. I didn't get round to reading it until recently and I devoured it. I loved it and I've got decree of it and thought of playing games and all that stuff.

My history with these games is 30 in the late 1970s and I was just a kid I got a copy of Dungeons & Dragons rules. I Dodie played fancy wargames dragons is like a step up from that yeah do you clever micro adventures of a few people other than his. So I was sitting in playing that road and going out with my friends drinking.

And from that I also started playing online on the work online computer textbase cancer just bad stuff which I loved and an extra couple stepped-up was dungeon master which is in the tarragon butter especially for. And then that was it for strictly by computers just to play games specifically to make a requirement to those games. And the one of the big ones was alone in the dark and I got me into college call of Cthulhu.

So I continue to play games very much at the same time as trying to have a life and relationships. I then got into online games in the late 90s and is playing Avalon which is a tax post featuring but a multiplayer one.

I left Avalon I still do but after playing it for five years and not sucking for not spotting the max because I think minimax is the thing in online peaches even express ones

My next movies onto Dungeons & Dragons online. Of course I played other games such as Skyrim assassins Creed free for a chat love

And then I can address the late RPG genre my mind is blown

The decline of organic reach

I've been listening to a lot of marketing podcasts recently and one of the things I've been hearing about is the so-called decline in organic reach. What this is chimes very much with my own experience over the years I've dabbled in the Internet and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was really easy to get lots of traffic just by putting quality stuff on the Internet. The search engines and indexes noted you and sent traffic to you without any effort.

However things have changed. Though they look the same , things are very different. I've been puzzling about this sitting in my room and then what I was hearing from the podcasts reinforced my own experience. It seems the engines like Google and Facebook and other big big companies have finally decided to come more commercial in outlook. Once upon a time they gave traffic away, but now it seems that they are only going to send you traffic if you pay them.

The other problem with the Web is there is just so much noise out there now. Once upon a time there were only five quality websites for providing information and say on haunted hotels. That was my area. And now I find that there are thousands of pagess and so we don't scroll down more than one or two pages on Google so if you are down the page of that, no matter how good your website it is you just aren't going to get seen.

I've even written a little blog about Cumbrian place names which is a pretty specialist area. If I say so myself it brings a lot of learning and scholarship and research to it and I put up tens of high quality posts that will provide lots of information for people looking for that. But if I search for that website, I simply don't find it on on Google. So does that mean there are now a lot of websites about the subject? I don't think so. It's just stuff is harder to find.

So I think your days of putting stuff up and just hoping and actually succeeding are gone. There's so much noise out there that even if your product is top quality unless you promoted it using money and probably more clever marketing techniques, you won't get seen.

So that leads me onto my new endeavour – finding clever marketing techniques!

Emotion Machines

Recently become almost possessed by marketing. And I was thinking well what are we actually selling through the medium of stories? And clearly it's emotions. Now when you take that into account and you look at the bestseller list on Amazon – particularly the best selling categories, then that's quite interesting.

The bestselling category of all is romance with a R. So the emotion that the people who want to read those books are looking for is a kind of ... (I said vicarious but the app dictated carious love affair – I like the idea of the carious love affair - one that is full of holes. I've had a few like that. ) come to think of it though, looking for love through story sounds little bit insulting. But I don't mean it like that. I think fiction allows is to live lives and go places that we otherwise I'm free to do. However the fact that so many people want to read about other people's love affairs and thus create emotions in themselves suggests that there is an awful lot of people living without love.

The next best selling category is suspense/adventure. I guess hear this suggests that there are lots of people living quite boring lives would like to aspire to be a cop or a fire fighter or a jet pilot. Or even a spy.

And then there's erotica. I have even been guilty of writing erotica but not under my own name. What would my mother think! (I hope my mother doesn't read that kind of thing) what would I think if she did? Even so, I think my theory holds true. If people are reading erotica that suggested the kind of emotions and feelings that literature instills in them meets a need that they're not having met in their real life. 

There are lots of genres of course but I write horror. I have suggested that in writing and reading this kind of literature stories we are looking for an experience of the other – some kind of presence or intelligence that isn't human. But I guess it might be a lot simpler than that. It may just be people looking for some kind of entertainment. Because it is ultimately entertaining to have these emotions go through our bodies and minds in a controlled way. I may want to fantasise about being a jet pilot shooting enemies down and we never really want to do it. Or I may want  to imagine being in love with someone wonderful - a perfect woman or man but wouldn't really do anything about that because I'm very happy where I am. And  as for erotica I guess I may want to have those feelings and imaginings but never ever want to pursue them in real life.

I talked elsewhere about stories being a kind of inoculation. So it's about our fear of being predated being prey and getting eaten And it might be quite thrilling just to have a little bit of that but not too much. And I guess that's true about romance, suspense, erotica and all the rest.

I just want to have a dabble  at feeling things but not do them in real life and that's why they invented stories.

The Ghost of a Place (2)

I woke last night in the middle of the night and this is always a great time to think. I began to think about writing and some of the recent blog posts I've done on www.tonywalker.live.

I was trying to find what essence that is in common between all the things I do and write. I was listening to a marketing podcast by some guy whose name I forgotten – but he was speaking a lot of sense, at least it seemed to me. He said that if you listen to someone talking. then you will find what they're interested in. He said some people will always talk to people about parenting or sports, or cars of writing. That's how you can identify their key themes.

In my case it's always been about ghosts, the paranormal,the feeling that you get in certain places. And that really is the key theme in my work. I see that I write about places I've been and when I wonder why I've gone to these places it's because of this feeling of numinosityy that I am looking for. In the ancient cultures of Europe and Asia and America the Native Americans and the South American native peoples and in Australia, in fact all over the world there are certain places which are set apart is being sacred.

This is the Temenos - the sacred lying around the place where people went to see the gods. And I know that I've always been interested in going to places like that in the UK - at Glastonbury, Iona Lindisfarne - in fact the whole of Wales for me - Cornwall, the list goes on. And when I go on holiday abroad to Japan are Europe or America I find myself going to temples and sacred sites.

I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I used to run ghost tours. How that started it was that I wanted to go to these places myself and show people what there was to be seen or more exactly what there was to be felt in them. You may have read about the dragon energy in the stone circles. This was a project done in the 1970s and that they found this bizarre energy in certain places that was partly electromagnetic. I had a funny experience this year at Avebury stone circle in the south of England. And here there is a village have - a pretty, old village – surrounded by stone circle and I was trying to find with my compass at East and kept spinning round it was most bizarre.

So,  I used to run goes tours and I used to go to old castles and very atmospheric buildings and put on these Cthulhu mythos murder mysteries. That was set in the 1920s so I got to got to dress up but instead of being a Miss Marple or Agatha Christie thing it ended up being some horrible tentacled monster or a Dimensional Shambler going to get you. It was great fun but it was an attempt to artificially create this feeling of the Other. And I see that in my writing - I tend to go to that again and again/  I tend to talk about places in my writing very specifically and link it to this feeling of something else being there. Now this could be a monster or a ghost or just a feeling that there is some intelligence that that isn't human. And I guess ultimately I'm looking for God. Whatever that means.

But how does that link to this blog? I think that I'm trying to share with you my discoveries - so my discoveries about books and films and especially places where we can get that special feeling that there may be something there , something more mysterious something that reminds us that we not alone that there is an intelligence in this world that is in human

By the way, did you hear that we've found signals from aliens finally?

Follow me on Twitter for a lot of tweets about this kind of stuff @bigtonywalker

Amazon unlimited

I recently signed up for Amazon unlimited. It was the  month's free subscription that got my attention. You may have noticed that I have been a little bit manic this past month. And I’ve been devouring books about digital marketing. The trouble with these books is that the writers promote them fiercely and tell you that they're the best thing since sliced bread: their book is the one that’s going to give you all the secrets that will help you break through. Before reading them you can’t really judge. Many of them have hundreds of positive reviews and that might be genuine or it might actually be because they’ve paid people or influenced people to write a good review.

I’m going to reserve this blog here (Thoughts from the Microcosm) by the way from my thoughts about writing while my WordPress blog is the one I’m going to use for thoughts about the macabre bra (I left that dictation error in because I thought it was funny) and ghosts and alchemy and magic and haunted places.

Anyway, I was looking at all of these apparently indispensable books and thinking these books are going for $4.99 each. And there are lots of them!

And then Amazons advert caught my eye-and that’s what Amazon is really good at. Amazon unlimited is the answer-it’s £7.99 for a month but the first month it’s a free trial. You can have 10 books out at any time and this allows me to get any book out then I want and most of these books on marketing and writing are actually in Amazon unlimited.

I’ve also picked up a lot of criticism from writers about Amazon unlimited. Apparently they pay you half a cent  per page read so on average writers are earning half as much as they would from lending a book out compared to selling it. And a lot of advice from writers has been to  avoid Amazon unlimited. I can see this from a writer’s point of view however I think subscription services certainly have a large part to play in the future development of reading. So like it or lump it, I think we stuck with subscription services such as Amazon unlimited. That’s the view from the writer’s point of view however from the readers point of view  I think it’s wholly positive.

So I’ve been able to go through the books at great speed both  the good ones and bad ones. To be honest there are many that I wouldn’t have bought but when I read them I found I have some very useful information in them. I would never have got to see that without Amazon unlimited. Simply because I wouldn’t of shelled out 5 pounds for the privilege of seeing whether this was trash or valuable.

So I think it’s a good deal. You can actually get out a ton of books in your first free month without paying a penny and read what would’ve cost you a whole lot of money. So I would recommend that you sign up for Amazon unlimited and read as many books as you want for the first month and then if you don’t like it you simply cancel your subscription

You could even read my books!

And guess what I dictated this whole piece was sitting in the car by the side of a busy road. That’s not bad is it?