David Gaughran's Blog, page 6
May 7, 2019
Reader Targeting Influences Everything
Reader Targeting is yet another concept we have to juggle. It’s no wonder many writers take to the drink, or otherwise lose the run of themselves. Or can be a little… kooky. We have to wrestle with a number of contradictory notions all the time — it’s enough to make anyone batty.
The most obvious is with the writing itself: we need at least some level of ego to push something out into the world and ask money for it. But we also must have the requisite critical faculties to see what’s wrong w...
April 8, 2019
How To Build An Author Platform
What is an author platform? Which elements should it contain? And is any of this stuff more important than just writing another book? Perhaps not. But certain aspects of an author platform are important tools for reaching readers and, especially, for holding on to them.
The topic can be confusing as everyone seems to be mean something different by the term. And then this problem is compounded by a lot of terrible advice proliferating, quite frankly. Number-chasing nonsense which doesn’t serv...
April 1, 2019
How To Sell Books In 2019
Marketing these days can feel like tackling a high-wire on a unicycle… while juggling chainsaws. And that’s for experienced authors. For those with lower budgets or fewer books, the challenge can seem like entering the World Ice-Sculpting Championships armed with a box of matches and an ice cube.
Because what you are aiming to do is this:
Sell enough to rise in the Best Seller Lists and get seen by lots of new readers.Shift sufficient units over an extended period to jump up the Popularity...March 2, 2019
BookBub Ads Expert Is Here To Help
BookBub Ads Expert is here! You can download it right now from all retailers for just $4.99. A bargain at twice the price, says you.
Amazon USA | Other Retailers/International
Everything I know about BookBub Ads is in this book – I’m not trying to sell you a course or a webinar or anything like that; it’s all here. In fact, I’m doing the opposite, and giving you lots of extra stuff too. More on that in a moment, as well as news of a huge sale on my other writer books – and you’ll especially w...
February 21, 2019
Level Up Your Author HQ With GoCreate.Me
Author websites are an increasingly important tool, but one that can cause a lot of aggravation. While most people have a handle on the basic set-up needed, they can quickly run into issues when trying to level up; these days your Author HQ needs to be slicker than the cobbled together afterthought we got away with a few years ago.
There are a bunch of solutions out there, but most aren’t fit for purpose in one way or another — either too expensive, overly complex, or just not attuned to the...
January 4, 2019
Book of the Year – Newsletter Ninja
My book of the year is Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Labrecque. It has wonderful things to teach authors at any stage of their career; it helped to revolutionize mine.
This is a febrile time of year. The sins of the old year are washed away, and the ambitions of the new are laid out. It’s a clean slate, a fresh start, a time to gather stones together. It’s also a time when people like to review the year gone by and make predictions for the next.
I won’t poke that particular hornet’s nest, let’s j...
December 7, 2018
Clever Ways Authors Are Using BookBub Ads
BookBub Ads is the platform where I’ve seen most growth in the last year, to the point where it is rivaling Facebook, especially when factoring in conversion. The amount of money I can spend effectively on BookBub — and by that I mean get an immediate return on investment — has quadrupled in the last twelve months.
This might sound incredible, in the literal sense, to anyone who hasn’t cracked BookBub Ads yet. It can be an unusual platform for those more used to Facebook or Amazon Ads, leadin...
November 28, 2018
How To Make A Pretty Facebook Page
Most web traffic is now mobile, but we can forget that when considering how to make a pretty Facebook Page, leading to ugly header images that are cropped in weird ways — a terrible first impression to prospective new readers.
The tipping point with mobile was probably reached some time in late 2016 or early 2017, yet here we are in 2018, often still optimizing for desktop, when most of our customers are accessing our web pages and viewing our ads on mobile devices of some description — not j...
November 12, 2018
KDP Books Unavailable To International Readers
A situation blew up at Amazon over the weekend which is ghosting most KDP ebooks (and many Amazon imprint titles) for international readers who use the US Kindle Store — which has also exposed a glaring security problem. Amazon appears to be unaware of either issue.
This issue — which is either a bug or a very badly bungled roll-out — is causing great confusion as its effects are only visible to those outside the USA, which might explain why Amazon has been so slow to address it, or even unde...
November 3, 2018
Amazon and the Also Bought Apocalypse
A real horror story has been slowly building for the last year or so and I’m getting a lot of emails on the topic so it’s time to deal with this head-on: what the hell is going on with Also Boughts?
For those unaware, the strip of books right which are usually placed underneath your product description on Amazon, headlined with “Customers who bought this item also bought” are popularly known as “Also Boughts” and have become the subject of much attention lately, as our knowledge of their impo...
