Welcome to my ramble on selling books. I’ve thrashed this out quickly and I by no means think I’m an expert. I’m very new at this and this is just my thoughts, opinions and discoveries.
You want to sell lots of books?
Great! First things first. It’s hard! Writing your book was 20% of the time and effort. Selling it is 80%.
We all like to think our book is so good that we can just gently release it into the wild and it will find its way.
Your book is not good enough. My book is not good enough. Even if there is a book out there that is good enough, chances are that won’t work.
Yes, you can think of an example, because as with everything there are exceptions. But that’s why we talk about them, they are EXCEPTIONAL.
Why hope and dream for that, when you can make it happen?
Let’s start with numbers.
My $1,000 in royalties for April 2022 (my 3rd full month as a self-published author) came from 192,339 Kindle Unlimited page reads and 112 book sales. My books are around 200 pages, so 1,074 people read or bought one of my two books.
Many years ago when I was helping with event promotion someone told me that for every thousand people that saw an ad, you might get one customer.
Now this is an extremely vague rule of thumb but it’s a good starting point. Obviously WHO sees your ad is more important than how many. For example a million homophobes seeing my gay romance book is probably going to be less successful than 50 avid gay romance readers.
But, the point I’m trying to make is, to make 1,000 sales I needed to get my book seen roughly 1,000,000 times.
No matter how good your social media reach is, it is not that good.
The way to get your book seen that many times is to show up on Amazon lists and Also boughts. And to get there, you need a certain number of sales. A catch-22 right? But it can be done. I talk about this later, in the audience section.
But first, you need to get 5 other things right.
It comes down to five things.
Cover
This is without a doubt the most important thing. If there was a bar chart on things that will sell your book, your cover would be the Empire State building and everything else put together, a bungalow.
It’s not just a matter of being a whizz on Canva and able to make a beautiful looking cover. It’s little about art and all about industry standards and psychology.
The VAST majority of your sales are not going to come from personal recommendations. (see the numbers discussion above) They are going to come from people browsing. Browsers make a decision to click or not to click in nanoseconds. This is why your cover is so important.
It has to tell the potential customer in nanoseconds that this is the book they are looking for. So if your lovely red wine is in a ketchup bottle, it’s not going to work.
Because, imagine you are pushing your trolley down the wine aisle, you see a stack of ketchup. You will just assume the shelf stackers had an off day. You are not going to pick it up and discover the best bottle of wine that ever existed.
(Okay, I can hear the pendants saying “I would.” Well MOST people won’t and that’s who you need to sell to)
There is also the psychology behind it. For instance, covers that draw the eye into the center of the page have proven to sell more books. Sci-fi covers with spaceships on sell more, even if there are no ships in the story. Thrillers with red titles and a shadowy figure running away sell better.
A good cover artist knows all this. They are cover EXPERTS more than good artists that do covers.
My cover artist charges $200 for print and ebook, and $150 for ebook only. Message me if you would like their details.
If you can at all afford one, I highly recommend it. If you really can’t, you are going to need to spend a lot of time researching the covers of your genre and making sure yours matches.
If your cover looks like a homemade Canva job, people will assume you spent equal amounts of care and attention on the writing. Not fair, but that’s the truth.
In short you need to give as much attention to your cover as you did your book.
Title
Okay, Title. Back to the nanoseconds to grab a customer's attention. Does your title clearly give an impression on what your book is about?
Look at your title and your cover. Imagine you have never seen it before. Can you tell the genre? Subgenre? Key plot points? Could it be about something else entirely?
Imagine a book called “Crimson Dawn.” pretty, but could be horror, military, vampire. Or several other things. Yes ESTABLISHED authors have vague titles, but you're not established yet.
Okay, so ‘Crimson Dawn,’ is a gay cowboy romance. ‘Saddle up.’ or ‘Ride on,’ portray that far more than ‘Crimson Dawn’
Even better is adding a subtitle. ‘Saddle up: A Gay Cowboy Romance’
Now Amazon are cracking down on subtitles and if the subtitle isn’t on your cover they may moan at you, but plenty of people are still getting away with it.
Aside from your cover, your title is the first thing people learn about your book. Make it good.
Use it to show what's unique about your book, what’s most exciting.
I just finished writing a book about a guy who escapes from hell to find his soul mate who has been reincarnated but the man doesn’t believe him. I wrote down over 50 titles. Hell Broken. Escape from Hell. Eternal Love. Love you for Infinity.
But honing down on what’s unique, is the past life stuff. So ‘Past Life Lover’ is a much better title. Clearly romance. Clearly conveys the plot. Tells the reader straight away the type of book I am offering.
Blurb
So your cover and title have caught their eye and they have clicked on your book. Your last hurdle is the blurb.
In short the purpose of the blurb is not to describe your book, but to sell it.
Or thinking about it another way, to tease the reader.
An example off of the top of my head, Little Red Riding Hood. A descriptive blurb would be,
‘Little Red Riding Hood lives by the woods. One day she is sent by her mother to deliver food to her Grandma.”
Whereas teasing would be more like,
‘One big bad wolf. One little girl. Who is going to win?’
Or
‘Little Red Riding Hood has never been alone in the woods before. She’s scared, she thinks she might be lost. But her Grandma needs her. She has to make it.’
Make the reader need to know what happens. Make them feel the character's emotions.
Get it right and you will sell a lot more books.
Categories
Amazon lists three categories on your books page but will put you in up to 10 - 12. You can request which categories by contacting them from your KDP page.
Now some categories you need to be in. I need to be in Gay Romance so the algorithm links my book to others in that category and will eventually know to recommend my book to customers who read that category.
Others you choose by finding categories that are a good fit for your book and that you have a chance in hell of showing up in. You have nothing to lose by using the maximum amount of categories and everything to gain.
There is tons of information online about how to choose your categories, but that’s the gist.
Keywords
Same principle as Categories. You can choose 7 keywords, but here’s the catch, they are not keywords at all. There are key phrases.
What you are aiming for are search terms that a decent amount of customers search for each month AND that you have a decent chance of showing up in the results for.
For example, ‘Gay Romance’ is searched thousands of times but I wont stand a chance in hell of showing up in the results. Whereas ‘MM Kindle Romance’ describes my books, has about 1000 searches a month and I have a good chance of coming up in the results.
Basically, you can’t just guess your keywords. You need to do a ton of research.
Again, there is tons of information out there on how to find your keywords.
Audience
Okay, you’ve got that all sorted. Now last but not least. Your audience.
You need to know your audience. I don’t mean ‘people who like horror’ or ‘people who like romance with a twist.’
I mean the demographic. Are they Italian grandmas? British Teenagers? Gamers? Ex-forces?
I write gay romance but my audience are 95% American woman roughly 30 - 45 years old.
I know this and this lets me know, having a stall at London Pride isn’t going to reach my main audience.
Once you know who your audience is, you can figure out how to reach them. Because you are going to need to drive up your first sales. To get you all those all important Amazon lists.
It’s like rolling a snowball. At some point you will have built up enough momentum and it will roll away on its own, continuing to grow. You will show up on the amazon lists and Also boughts. But the start is all on you.
Find your audience and show them your book. Are they in FB groups? Are they on Instagram? TikTok? Do they read review blogs? Listen to Podcasts? Devour author newsletters? (If they do, ask authors in your genre to shout out your book)
Email newsletters like The Fussy Librarian are great ways to get your book seen by your audience.
A quick note about Twitter, because I only shared this link on Twitter, so I know you use it.
Twitter is useless for selling books. I have 1k followers. A good post of mine gets around 300 views. Unless someone has decided to search for a hashtag I’m using (Say #mmromance) the SAME 300 hundred people see my posts. Okay I might go viral or get a bit of variance on views depending on who likes it. But not enough.
Whereas Tiktok for example, I have 500 hundred followers but even my worst videos get 800 views AND it’s a lot of NEW people every time. I’m not saying TikTok is great, I’m just using it as an example of how Twitter is not suited for selling books. Sure you might have made some friends on there who bought your book, you might have bought some friends books. But you can’t meet and charm 1,000 people every month into buying your book.
You need to think bigger.
If you don’t know who your audience is, try stalking the five books most similar to yours. Look at the reviews, look at the authors' social media, definitely Facebook group, if they have one. Get a feel for what the audience is like. Stalking these books is also great for cover, title and blurb research.
On that note, don’t stalk the big hitting authors. Stephen King could release a book tomorrow with no publicity, a blank cover, and titled ‘Booky’ and it would sell millions. You are not Stephen King.
The people to copy are the midlisters. Those that are doing very well but having to work very hard to be there. Learn from them. They are geniuses.
That’s enough from me, I hope some of it was helpful. Good luck!
You want to sell lots of books?
Great! First things first. It’s hard! Writing your book was 20% of the time and effort. Selling it is 80%.
We all like to think our book is so good that we can just gently release it into the wild and it will find its way.
Your book is not good enough. My book is not good enough. Even if there is a book out there that is good enough, chances are that won’t work.
Yes, you can think of an example, because as with everything there are exceptions. But that’s why we talk about them, they are EXCEPTIONAL.
Why hope and dream for that, when you can make it happen?
Let’s start with numbers.
My $1,000 in royalties for April 2022 (my 3rd full month as a self-published author) came from 192,339 Kindle Unlimited page reads and 112 book sales. My books are around 200 pages, so 1,074 people read or bought one of my two books.
Many years ago when I was helping with event promotion someone told me that for every thousand people that saw an ad, you might get one customer.
Now this is an extremely vague rule of thumb but it’s a good starting point. Obviously WHO sees your ad is more important than how many. For example a million homophobes seeing my gay romance book is probably going to be less successful than 50 avid gay romance readers.
But, the point I’m trying to make is, to make 1,000 sales I needed to get my book seen roughly 1,000,000 times.
No matter how good your social media reach is, it is not that good.
The way to get your book seen that many times is to show up on Amazon lists and Also boughts. And to get there, you need a certain number of sales. A catch-22 right? But it can be done. I talk about this later, in the audience section.
But first, you need to get 5 other things right.
It comes down to five things.
- Cover
- Title
- Blurb
- Categories
- Keywords
- Audience
Cover
This is without a doubt the most important thing. If there was a bar chart on things that will sell your book, your cover would be the Empire State building and everything else put together, a bungalow.
It’s not just a matter of being a whizz on Canva and able to make a beautiful looking cover. It’s little about art and all about industry standards and psychology.
The VAST majority of your sales are not going to come from personal recommendations. (see the numbers discussion above) They are going to come from people browsing. Browsers make a decision to click or not to click in nanoseconds. This is why your cover is so important.
It has to tell the potential customer in nanoseconds that this is the book they are looking for. So if your lovely red wine is in a ketchup bottle, it’s not going to work.
Because, imagine you are pushing your trolley down the wine aisle, you see a stack of ketchup. You will just assume the shelf stackers had an off day. You are not going to pick it up and discover the best bottle of wine that ever existed.
(Okay, I can hear the pendants saying “I would.” Well MOST people won’t and that’s who you need to sell to)
There is also the psychology behind it. For instance, covers that draw the eye into the center of the page have proven to sell more books. Sci-fi covers with spaceships on sell more, even if there are no ships in the story. Thrillers with red titles and a shadowy figure running away sell better.
A good cover artist knows all this. They are cover EXPERTS more than good artists that do covers.
My cover artist charges $200 for print and ebook, and $150 for ebook only. Message me if you would like their details.
If you can at all afford one, I highly recommend it. If you really can’t, you are going to need to spend a lot of time researching the covers of your genre and making sure yours matches.
If your cover looks like a homemade Canva job, people will assume you spent equal amounts of care and attention on the writing. Not fair, but that’s the truth.
In short you need to give as much attention to your cover as you did your book.
Title
Okay, Title. Back to the nanoseconds to grab a customer's attention. Does your title clearly give an impression on what your book is about?
Look at your title and your cover. Imagine you have never seen it before. Can you tell the genre? Subgenre? Key plot points? Could it be about something else entirely?
Imagine a book called “Crimson Dawn.” pretty, but could be horror, military, vampire. Or several other things. Yes ESTABLISHED authors have vague titles, but you're not established yet.
Okay, so ‘Crimson Dawn,’ is a gay cowboy romance. ‘Saddle up.’ or ‘Ride on,’ portray that far more than ‘Crimson Dawn’
Even better is adding a subtitle. ‘Saddle up: A Gay Cowboy Romance’
Now Amazon are cracking down on subtitles and if the subtitle isn’t on your cover they may moan at you, but plenty of people are still getting away with it.
Aside from your cover, your title is the first thing people learn about your book. Make it good.
Use it to show what's unique about your book, what’s most exciting.
I just finished writing a book about a guy who escapes from hell to find his soul mate who has been reincarnated but the man doesn’t believe him. I wrote down over 50 titles. Hell Broken. Escape from Hell. Eternal Love. Love you for Infinity.
But honing down on what’s unique, is the past life stuff. So ‘Past Life Lover’ is a much better title. Clearly romance. Clearly conveys the plot. Tells the reader straight away the type of book I am offering.
Blurb
So your cover and title have caught their eye and they have clicked on your book. Your last hurdle is the blurb.
In short the purpose of the blurb is not to describe your book, but to sell it.
Or thinking about it another way, to tease the reader.
An example off of the top of my head, Little Red Riding Hood. A descriptive blurb would be,
‘Little Red Riding Hood lives by the woods. One day she is sent by her mother to deliver food to her Grandma.”
Whereas teasing would be more like,
‘One big bad wolf. One little girl. Who is going to win?’
Or
‘Little Red Riding Hood has never been alone in the woods before. She’s scared, she thinks she might be lost. But her Grandma needs her. She has to make it.’
Make the reader need to know what happens. Make them feel the character's emotions.
Get it right and you will sell a lot more books.
Categories
Amazon lists three categories on your books page but will put you in up to 10 - 12. You can request which categories by contacting them from your KDP page.
Now some categories you need to be in. I need to be in Gay Romance so the algorithm links my book to others in that category and will eventually know to recommend my book to customers who read that category.
Others you choose by finding categories that are a good fit for your book and that you have a chance in hell of showing up in. You have nothing to lose by using the maximum amount of categories and everything to gain.
There is tons of information online about how to choose your categories, but that’s the gist.
Keywords
Same principle as Categories. You can choose 7 keywords, but here’s the catch, they are not keywords at all. There are key phrases.
What you are aiming for are search terms that a decent amount of customers search for each month AND that you have a decent chance of showing up in the results for.
For example, ‘Gay Romance’ is searched thousands of times but I wont stand a chance in hell of showing up in the results. Whereas ‘MM Kindle Romance’ describes my books, has about 1000 searches a month and I have a good chance of coming up in the results.
Basically, you can’t just guess your keywords. You need to do a ton of research.
Again, there is tons of information out there on how to find your keywords.
Audience
Okay, you’ve got that all sorted. Now last but not least. Your audience.
You need to know your audience. I don’t mean ‘people who like horror’ or ‘people who like romance with a twist.’
I mean the demographic. Are they Italian grandmas? British Teenagers? Gamers? Ex-forces?
I write gay romance but my audience are 95% American woman roughly 30 - 45 years old.
I know this and this lets me know, having a stall at London Pride isn’t going to reach my main audience.
Once you know who your audience is, you can figure out how to reach them. Because you are going to need to drive up your first sales. To get you all those all important Amazon lists.
It’s like rolling a snowball. At some point you will have built up enough momentum and it will roll away on its own, continuing to grow. You will show up on the amazon lists and Also boughts. But the start is all on you.
Find your audience and show them your book. Are they in FB groups? Are they on Instagram? TikTok? Do they read review blogs? Listen to Podcasts? Devour author newsletters? (If they do, ask authors in your genre to shout out your book)
Email newsletters like The Fussy Librarian are great ways to get your book seen by your audience.
A quick note about Twitter, because I only shared this link on Twitter, so I know you use it.
Twitter is useless for selling books. I have 1k followers. A good post of mine gets around 300 views. Unless someone has decided to search for a hashtag I’m using (Say #mmromance) the SAME 300 hundred people see my posts. Okay I might go viral or get a bit of variance on views depending on who likes it. But not enough.
Whereas Tiktok for example, I have 500 hundred followers but even my worst videos get 800 views AND it’s a lot of NEW people every time. I’m not saying TikTok is great, I’m just using it as an example of how Twitter is not suited for selling books. Sure you might have made some friends on there who bought your book, you might have bought some friends books. But you can’t meet and charm 1,000 people every month into buying your book.
You need to think bigger.
If you don’t know who your audience is, try stalking the five books most similar to yours. Look at the reviews, look at the authors' social media, definitely Facebook group, if they have one. Get a feel for what the audience is like. Stalking these books is also great for cover, title and blurb research.
On that note, don’t stalk the big hitting authors. Stephen King could release a book tomorrow with no publicity, a blank cover, and titled ‘Booky’ and it would sell millions. You are not Stephen King.
The people to copy are the midlisters. Those that are doing very well but having to work very hard to be there. Learn from them. They are geniuses.
That’s enough from me, I hope some of it was helpful. Good luck!