Exploring the Ecosystem of Kindle for Marketing

Before I start with my topic for the day, I want to announce a new Novel Matters book club. I'm reading Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling by Donald Maas. I'm loving what he has to say so far about the death of genre, and I would love to chat with you, my most respected writing friends, about his ideas. The next couple of months aren't the best time to start a new project like this, so I'm thinking January. You can ask for the book for Christmas and read chapter one while munching on Christmas-tree shaped cookies. We'll talk in January.

Last time I posted here, I highlighted James Scott Bell's marketing book for ebooks. This is the journey I'm on with my next novel, so I'm happy to share what I'm learning along the way. After all, authors do most of the marketing for their books whether they're working with a legacy publisher or going indie like me.

Bell echoed the approach many of us have heard at writers conferences--building a platform and social media networking, plus pricing strategies and more--but with the knowledge to do a great job for our books. The book is full of wisdom I intend to use in marketing Goodness & Mercy.

But to become a market genius before March--that's my goal--I can't stop at one book or opinion.

Trust me, there are tons of ebooks out there to help you sell your ebooks on Amazon. And you have to be careful which ones you bet the success of your book on. Some of these how-to books are written by authors who have experienced major success with their Kindle ebooks. One book. One big success? Is their success a fluke? Do they come from a large family that owns many Swiss bank accounts?

I chose a book by Michael Alvear because he takes a totally different approach to marketing ebooks. Also, his book has the longest, most specific title ever. I knew what I was getting! Check this out: Make a Killing on Kindle without Blogging, Facebook and Twitter: The Guerilla Marketer's Guide to Selling Ebooks on Amazon.

Phew! Of course, we have to ask, "Just how do you sell books on Amazon without social media or full-page magazine ads?"

Alvear believes it's all about understanding the ecosystem of Kindle with the objective of optimizing the position of your book. That way the readers who are most likely to buy the book will see it as they browse.

This kind of thinking is so rare in book marketing that Alvear gives an example with his own book. At first, he tried to market conventionally through social media. After five years of work, he got 25,000 unique visits to his blog per month. Of those, 5,000 went to his book page. To determine the "conversion rate," meaning how many views it took to make a sale, he divided the number of sales by the number of visitors. Alvear came in right in the middle of the industry average at 1%.

That's only 50 books per month for all those years of work.

Ugh.

And so, Alvear systematically goes through every aspect of developing your book for market to make it rise to the top of pile. He promises everything can be done in 18 hours. This also appealed to me. But you have to start with a stellar book that you believe in. Otherwise, all the marketing in the world won't produce satisfactory results.

So far, I'm listening carefully to this guy.

Here are some of the topics he examines in his confident, been-there-more-than-once voice. I should tell you that he has 20 years of marketing experience. Ya gotta love credentials.

Okay, let's get on to the topics:

1. Create an attention-getting title. If the title doesn't work, you can always change it. That's one nice thing about digital publishing.

2. Hire a professional to design you book cover. Really? In an ideal world, yes because your cover in all of its 7/8" x 1" glory in Kindle-land needs to make a punch, a promise, and a come-hither message.I hired a photographer and a graphic designer, but I'm the art director. Probably a bad idea. I'm hoping not.

Alvear does give guidelines for hiring these professionals, depending on your budget from low to high.

"If you have already passed that hurdle of having a customer be attracted to the cover, and then they pick up the books," said Patricia Bostelman, vice president for marketing at Barnes & Noble, "an enormous battle has been won."

3. Once you have a visual hook for your potential reader, you want to set up your book to gain top search engine results every time someone looks for a book in your category. I sure hope I understand this better by the time I'm launching my book. Alvear isn't stingy on pointing authors to places where keyword phrases can be embedded, so the chances of your book popping up in the first page of results increase. Keyword phrases, who knew?

"You are destined to fail if you don't use keyword phrases that lead to your book."

So, I guess I better learn.

4. Beyond keyword phrases, Amazon lets you choose two categories for your book. "Think of [categories] as the section of the bookstore you'd like your book placed (literature, fiction, history, etc.)." From working in both a bookstore and a library, I know how important these categories are. Most reader beeline to their favorite genre and do very little browsing. There are browsers--God bless 'em!--who wander the whole store. That makes your cover and title even more important.

Alvear's book gives me hope. There are things I can do to get my book before the reader. For instance, he explains how to put a billboard for your book on a competitors pages. And he talks about the power of great reviews, even how many you need to make your book page a powerful selling tool.

One chapter deals with how to write ocean-front book descriptions, another highlights the importance of formatting and using the "Look Inside" feature.

And then he tells about a feature in Kindle I'd never seen before that will definitely effect the way I format my book. It's the "Before You Go" feature. If your reader's Kindle or other reading device is set up to Facebook and Twitter, you can ask your reader to kindly rate the book and share with their friends right there and then.

Aha, there is a place for social media!

Alvear does recognize the value of social media once the book is successfully launched and selling. Your readers will be curious about you and will want to find you online. Then a blog makes tons of sense.

I plan on using Alvear's ideas to optimize the chances that Goodness & Mercy will have its best chance of finding an audience.

Michael Alvear doesn't write the kind of books (other than this one) most of us read, but he seems to have a good handle on what it takes to sell on Amazon. I appreciate that about him very much.

Next time, I'll be talking about yet another marketing philosophy. And then I'm formulating a plan for full speed ahead marketing. My brain is getting full.

Have you worked with a graphic professional? What's your take on Alvear's approach, knowing that I was only able to present the briefest details? I'm looking at this information as power, not an insurance police, success isn't following a formula, but it is knowing how the game is played. Can you recommend what I should read about marketing next? 

She Reads Guest Post: Book Club Blogger Melissa Hambrick onNever Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I don’t know how it is where you are, but here in Tennessee we are just on the fringes between summer and fall. The days are warm and pleasant, and in the evenings it is time to slip on a jacket. Just perfect for our book club to gather on the screened porch and feel the soft early fall air, sit with our feet tucked beneath us and talk books.

This month’s book was one of those books—you either loved it or you hated it. It was a little slow to get into, and the story was very internal. But the prose was beautiful and the concept was thought-provoking. And being one of those books—we had quite a lengthy and involved discussion. Those are always the books that get us going!

Never Let Me Go is a dystopian novel by Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro, who also wrote The Remains of the Day. It released in 2005 and was incredibly well received—in fact TIME magazine named it the best novel of the year—and it was made into a film (starring everyone’s favorite pirate girl Kiera Knightley) in 2010. We were going to watch the movie as well, but since Redbox only has new releases...you know sometimes you don’t realize how much you miss a good old corner video store.

Although this novel fits into the science fiction genre because of its plot, the setting is actually quite pastoral, taking place in East Sussex, England. Hailsham is a boarding school there, and as we come to realize, its students are quite unusual: they are clones.

At some point in what we understand to be recent history, it has become permissible and nearly an industry unto itself to breed human clones. These clones are raised separately from natural humans by Guardians (teachers), and are raised to an age (around 18) when they either become Donors, who may donate various organs potentially more than four times, or become Carers, who literally care for these donors during the process. Carers will also eventually become donors themselves. Once they donate as many times as possible, they die, which is referred to as Completion.

Ishiguro’s novel takes us into the mind of Kathy, a clone who has been a Carer for 12 years—a remarkable span of time for this duty. Written entirely from her perspective, it jumps about a bit, just as it would if she were talking with you and telling you the story. To me, it was like a fictional memoir—very personal, internal, and with many assumptions about other characters which came only from her perspective. Although she refers to hear early childhood occasionally, she primarily narrates her teenage years through to her time as a Carer, which takes the reader into a lot of complex emotions and relationships with her fellow students as they are educated at Hailsham, through a strange existence surrounded by questions. The students themselves fill in a lot of blanks with their imaginations, creating rumors that are accepted as fact because they’ve been passed about for so long.

A great deal of time is spent on the art they are encouraged to create—paintings, sketches, poetry. They don’t completely know why, but to them it is a great honor to have your work chosen by one of the Guardians for The Gallery. And, they don’t really know what The Gallery is either—they just know they want to have their work in it. Ultimately we find out that The Gallery is a way for the Guardians to try and convince others that these clones do, in fact, have souls. Think about that—what would it mean if you had to create art, in its most commonly accepted forms, to prove that you had a soul, as if it is somehow a reflection of your being?

Caring, Donation, Completion—they are all simply what these students have been created for, and they seem to accept their fate, perhaps the way many oppressed cultures still do today. It isn’t only history; as Ishiguro writes, unfortunately oppression is still part of our future. We thought of women in male dominated societies, where tradition or religion keep them in submissive roles. Escape is not really a concept, although they dream of having their destiny deferred so that they can do things like be in love, or work in an office. Not so far off from some headlines you may have read recently? It reminded me of A Dream Deferred, a poem by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes (see below). Although they are kept away from society, told they are created for one purpose alone and for the most part, accept that purpose—perhaps it is their dreams, not their art, that reveal them as fully and deeply part of the human experience.

There are moments in which I connected with the characters in Never Let Me Go, thinking of what it is like to be a parent. We do our best to give our children purpose, to teach them—but we, like the Guardians, sometimes only show them part of the world. We skew their vision with our own, and sometimes we keep the truth from them for their own good. Yet we see ourselves in them as well. And like the students, we are created as parents to give ourselves away to our children. We give them little bits of ourselves—our love, our hearts, our passions, perhaps sometimes our frustrations, or even our paychecks. And we know—we accept—that this is our duty, until completion. Sometimes the arrival of our children defers our dreams; other times, our children are the fulfillment of them.

I have a feeling that this male, Japanese author probably didn’t have this in mind when he wrote it. But then again, I maintain that we all find bits and pieces to relate to in literature, and find things that are deeply personal and meaningful and that reflect the human journey, no matter what the story. You might think dystopian science fiction isn’t for you, but you might need to think again—because you never know what will move you.

A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Grace For The Reader, Grace For The Writer- A She Reads Guest Post

Today's post comes from Marybeth Whalen of our sister blog She Reads.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I had committed to a conference call with a book club that requested it, only to be challenged by them on the contents of my book to the point that I was put on the defensive. I kept wondering why this group had asked to talk to me at all if they disagreed with the book so much. My husband, who was in the background while I was talking and could only hear my side of the conversation, kept asking, "Who are you talking to?" He couldn't understand why I kept offering explanations for my characters' actions, why I seemed to be arguing about my book with whoever was on the other end of the phone.

Finally he said, "I don't care who that is, you need to get off." He was frustrated that I had taken time away from our family on a weekend, only to be ganged up on by women who were accusing me of encouraging readers to divorce so that they could find the true love of their lives. (Yes, they actually said that.)

My book, The Mailbox, wasn't written to encourage others to divorce. It was written to explore the themes of forgiveness and second chances and grace. Grace that I was not hearing from the book club I spoke to that day. Yes, my main character, Lindsey, is newly divorced in the book. And yes, she does reconnect with her first love on a trip to the beach following her divorce. But Lindsey is also grieving the loss of her marriage. I wrote the book because I've known one too many women in my real life that have been in that same situation. Where was this group's grace towards them?

After that conversation, I hung up the phone feeling stung and condemned. Though my husband tried to talk me down from the ledge (one of his main roles in life, poor guy), I couldn't stop hearing their voices. I wondered if they realized the power their words had over me; if they gave any thought to the way the conversation would make me feel, not just as an author but as a human being. I walked around processing the conversation for about a day.

And then the most wonderful thing happened.

I got an email from a woman who had read The Mailbox. She is one of those women who found herself divorced even though it wasn't what she ever wanted. She is still dealing with the loss of friends and lifestyle that comes from a divorce. She has felt the stinging judgments of others. And she wanted to thank me for presenting divorce as it really is, for creating a character that dealt with divorce in a way that felt familiar. She wrote words that were a balm to my soul, an affirmation that I believe was prompted by God so that I could break free of the condemnation I had felt following my conversation with the angry book club. I read her email over and over, letting the words sink in. Then I forwarded her letter to my publisher because I know that if I am getting criticized for writing it, they're probably getting criticized for publishing it. They wrote back to let me know that they loved her letter so much, they were reading it at their next staff meeting!

Writing is a solitary task. It is a risk when you write your solitary words and then send them out into the world. Sure your critique group or writing partner might sign off on them, your agent might tell you they're good, and the publisher might buy them. But you really can't know how they're going to be received until readers get their hands on them. I didn't expect to be called on the carpet for encouraging divorce but I did expect to help women who had been affected by it. I wanted to offer those women the grace they deserved through my writing. I am thankful for the woman who took the time to extend grace to me at a time that I needed it most. It turns out that writers need grace as badly as readers do.

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I loved Katy's post on Monday. She spoke to the profound interaction that can take place between a work of fiction (the author!) and its reader. For Katy, Walter Wangerin Jr. taught her the missing element in her own writing. She learned to love her characters, and she learned her lesson well.

Until I read Elizabeth Berg's novels, I didn't even know I wanted to be a writer.

It was my turn to choose a book for book club. I hadn't been a member of the group for very long. The weight of choosing a book to suit varied tastes made my pits sticky. I wandered around Barnes & Noble for hours reading back copy and first paragraphs, beginning to believe the perfect book didn't exist.

And frankly, I was looking for more than the next book. I was looking for a new direction. We'd read about plague years and dream-seeping violence and horrendous violations. Don't get me wrong, I'm not squeamish when it comes to hard-hitting fiction, but a steady diet of the stuff had left me battered.

And so, the search labored on. My checklist included these requirements: rich language that wasn't syrupy or distracting, a story that valued the small things that tower large in our lives, a story about familiar things portrayed in surprising ways. That's all. Simple. A story that is neither contrived nor soul-crushing.

Why was this so hard?

And then [cue the rapturous music], I picked up Joy School by Elizabeth Berg. My prize! The story is ordinary and extraordinary. Human. Winsome. Transparent. The girl's mother wears Tabu perfume, for heaven's sake.

I read the book quickly and set it down, only to pick it back up again. I read random scenes. Underlined favorite passages. Carried the characters around in my head for days, maybe weeks. Is anyone gagging yet?

I'd read many wonderful books up to this point--classical, popular, and literary. This is the book that made me want to be a writer. But why?

I wanted to spend my days playing with words and writing stories that become friends to the reader. That's my goal, anyway.

BTW, I traveled a thousand miles to attend a writers conference where Ms. Berg was the keynote speaker. I sat in the front row at all her appearances. The poor lady was on the tail end of a long book tour. She looked ragged. Did that keep me from schmoozing my way into a conversation with her? No! Are you kidding? I have the picture to prove it.

So, is there a novel, a book, a teacher, an experience, a person who provided a turning point for you as a reader/writer?