Diem Burden's Blog, page 3

Being #1 in any category pays, & you can do it too!

When people browse books and find something that might interest them, they often scan down the page quickly to see certain elements of the sales pitch: review star average, how many 1-stars, price and so on. They also note the ranking of the book. If they see that the book is currently #1 in its category, they are more likely to click buy as this ranking holds a lot of weight. Do they look in detail at which category it is #1 in? Probably not, but that figure is worth its weight in gold and is well worth trying to achieve, and I don't just mean by selling more books. Since 2014, my first book End of the Road has been showing as #1 or #2 in its category, and has never dropped further than this, and it achieved this with no marketing what-so-ever! I'm sure that this magical number is the reason that this book has been constantly downloaded over the years with next-to-no input from me. So how did I get it there in the first place, I hear you ask? Well, it's important to understand that your book needs to be in the right category and not 'lost'. If you put it in any old category then it will get downloaded by people who perhaps don't like your genre and they won't enjoy the book and feel tricked and will leave a nasty review. Your book must be in an appropriate listing for what it is. Once you've published your book and added the categories, take a look at its position within those categories, monitor the position for a few weeks and note how high it climbs with any spikes in sales you may have. Be aware that there are numerous sub-categories that the book will show up in too. It doesn't matter which cat you get to #1 in, you just want to get that position and then try to stay there. The image above shows my book at #1 in Law Enforcement Biographies, and #3 in Biographies of the Army. I'm happy with both of those cats as the book is about a soldier who then joins the police so they are both a good fit. The other cat, Biographies of Notable People, is not but there is nothing I can do about that and is probably the price I'm willing to pay for the other two positions! And don't stay in the same cats for ever! After many years at #1 and #2 I decided to play around and changed the categories the book is listed in. Foolish, right? Who'd give up those two valuable positions? Well, we are own promoters and we need to test everything out! If it drops me into #97 in another cat and stays like that, I can always go back in a click. However, another benefit of changing cat is that you make the book visible to people who don't usually look at books in your old category! Yes, fresh eyes on your book = more potential sales! When I changed End of the Road from its #1 cat, it appeared at #32 in the new cat but I guess due to new eyes discovering my book, it moved within just a few days to these positions! What are you waiting for, get tinkering with your books category! Update 13th Feb: After a few short days, the book has settled into the #1 spot for Law Enforcement Biographies, and #1 for Biographies of the Army, and #4 for Bios of Notable People. Now I haven't sold any more books than usual over the last few days, apart from one real spike yesterday, so I believe that this is the new, settled position for my books on Amazon UK. As most of my books are sold in my home country (the UK), I have to be extremely chuffed with this new position (especially as the book is #1771 overall in Free Kindle Books in the UK). I don't sell many books in the USA yet, but below is the current position of the same book in the US! So whatever you do, play and experiment with the category placing of your book! If you wish to add anything or ask any questions, please post in the comments section below. I'd love to hear from you! (Update 14/3/2020: The above ranking is currently #14, #2, #4 respectively)

Obsessed with checking your book downloads? Yeah, me too, so get this nifty little free app!

Like any writer and indie author, you too are constantly checking for new downloads of your babies, every. Single. Hour. I know you do, and I know I do, and I've just found this great free browser extension, and suggest you get it too. getbookreport.com Seriously, this is amazing. Once downloaded, you need to give it permission to access Author Central at Amazon (once only), and then when you open it, you are presented with so much information which you can curate to your liking: Total earnings from all books Today's earnings Units per month Free units or paid units Units/earnings by book Earnings by marketplace Track your ranking and reviews (although I've never been able to set this part up, but it is new) With the ability to change and view so much information, such as figures, percentages, pie charts, bar charts etc, you have so much control and ability to see the progress of your book sales, as they come in, in a very visual and clear way. You even have the option to hear a 'ka-ching!' each time a book is sold, as long as you leave the app running. How cool is that? Serious, getbookreport.

Indie authors - check and recheck everything, all the time!

As an indie, you are responsible for everything to do with selling your books: writing, editing, formatting, cover design, publishing, pricing, marketing and so on and so on. Sure, some of these should be given over to professionals to do (such as editing, and cover design) but you are ultimately responsible for ensuring that everything associated with your book is working properly, and the only way you can do that is to test it, constantly. Today, I accidentally discovered that my online newsletter signup form was defective. I've had a Mailchimp form for a number of years now, with 82 followers. (Seriously, if you aren't getting these sign ups signed up yet, you need a kick up the axle!). I've had 3 new sign-ups just this month, so all seems to be working OK, right? Today, an associate of mine asked me to sign her up to it, as she is a bit of a technophobe and couldn't really do it herself. I found the online form, added her name and email to the obligatory fields, and for the full address box I just added her city, as I like to know where my followers are from. The address box was always 'optional'. I sent the form, but the thing bounced, stating that I needed to fill in the full address fields first ie it was 'obligatory'. I never set it like that, and when I went to my Mailchimp account to see what the issue was, it wasn't showing as a 'required field', so I've no idea what was going on. If I were trying to sign up to follow me, and had been asked to complete a full address, I'd have had second thoughts and not bothered. So, all I could do was delete the field so that the issue vanished. Had I not discovered it so promptly, I wonder how many potential buyers the form would have put off from signing up, and therefore how many people/followers/fans/potential clients would have lost. If you wish to sign up to my form, and get a FREE exclusive ebook as a thanks, click here!

Milestones: when a stranger writes you an email, thanking you for writing your books...

There are many milestones on the road to Authorhood: finishing your first book, publishing your first book, your first genuine review, hitting the #1 spot in a certain category, etc etc etc. The list goes on and there are probably many that - like me - you are completely unaware of and have yet to experience. But the one I had today was the most unexpected and an extremely welcome one, and one that makes me want to write even more! "Dear [Diem],
I saw your post on the [Facebook page] this morning.
I wasn’t aware of your books and have just spent the day reading volumes 1-4.
As a fellow survivor, now retired from TVP [Thames Valley Police] and Suffolk [Police], which included some time at Ashford [Police Training College] as an instructor / trainer / facilitator (depending on the day of the week), I just wanted to write to say that I enjoyed reading them very much.
Best regards
Bob C." Priceless. Thank you, Bob, so much, for taking the time out of your day to send an email to a complete stranger. You have no idea how much this means to me.

How to organise multiple short stories (or books) into one large book in Scrivener.

If you are using Literature & Latte's superb writing program, Scrivener, and have a collection of short stories or a series of smaller books written with it, and you now wish to collate all of those separate parts into one book, what's the best way to do it? Well, first of all, I have to tell you that I'm no Scrivener expert - you may even have a much better way of doing this than the one I've come up with! I have been using Scrivener for over 10 years now and have written five such books with it, which have all been published independently (see my books), but I've still got a lot to learn regarding the program. I do, however, now wish to put those five parts (or books) into one larger collection (or single book) so that I can sell it at 2,99. And this is how I went about it: Firstly, I really didn't want to tinker with the original, individual books that have been left sitting there untouched since being published. I really want to be able to go back to each of those books and republish if needed, either with errors corrected or updates, and I just didn't want to risk messing with those proven babies. They are fine, just leave 'em be! So I did! This is the method I used, and it took me about an hour, although I still have some testing and fine-tuning to do: First, I created a new folder in the binder beneath those books and labelled it with the name of the new book (in this case, The Rozzers, The Collection). Then I clicked on the folder containing the whole contents of the original book 1 and copied and pasted it into the new Rozzers folder. This I repeated for books 2 - 5, which meant that I ended up with a duplicate of all five books in a new folder with which to work on, thus leaving the original books untouched, undamaged, and therefore still useable should the need arise. Working only with the new, duplicate folder, I renamed the holding folder of each book 'Front Matter 1' to 'Front Matter 5', and changed the colour of the icons by right clicking on them (from blue to brown). This made the five books in the new book very distinctive from the originals, which helps avoid the possibility of my chopping and changing the original books and not my new copy by mistake (see screenshot below). I then went through each book in the new folder, deleting repeated files such as 'about the author', 'also by' etc, and dragging and dropping files in the binder and so on until I had the layout more or less how I wanted it. And that's it! I now have The Rozzers, The Collection practically ready to compile and test for formatting, and it shouldn't be long before I have it ready for publishing. It really is that simple - and obviously reassuring - to make a duplicate and work only with that new copy. I've added a screenshot to help you visualise my method. You may notice a book located between the original five books and The Collection called Cop Stopper, which has not been included in the new book collection. This is a current #wip which is only going to be given to people who have signed up to my newsletter as a thank you, and will never be published (It's really book zero of the whole series) so please do ignore that. Let me know if you think I've made a lot of work for myself doing this, and if there is an even easier and safer way to do it. Also, if you have any questions, feel free to pop them in the comments section below and I'll see if I can help you. Thanks for visiting! Diem

Are you losing your identity as an eBook author when compared to a print-book author?

One of the most accepted differences between an eBook and a print book, for authors, is that it is possible to have your name and book title at the bottom of every page in a print book. This helps with brand recognition, obviously - people are more likely to remember your name in the future after seeing it at the bottom of so many pages, and that can only help to sell more of your books, right? But in an eBook, when do they see your name? Not at the bottom of each page because an eBook doesn't have fixed pages, so there is no way of adding such information, so we just forget about it, right? What we do is naively put it in the front matter and back matter only, and move on. And that's it! And that is a lost opportunity for you, as an indie-author, to bang your name into the heads of people reading your eBooks. So I'll tell you what you can do to help promote all of that hard-work you've put into making it as an author so far. One little trick that I've picked up over the years is to add, at the end of each chapter, a small reminder of whose book they are reading and what it is called. That way, when your reader says to a friend, "Oh, I read a great book last weekend,' and they ask, "Oh? What was the book called and who was it written by?" they won't say, "You know what, I don't recall." With my little trick they might just remember who YOU are. Do something like this and cut and paste it into the end of each chapter.

So you're building up your author footprint online but not monetising?

In nine months time I'm going to quit the day job and become a full-time writer. (Jealous, huh?) Yup, my dream has arrived, and hopefully I'll become one of the lucky authors that's able to make a living from writing. I have no illusions - it'll take years of hard work and commitment but I have this inner belief that I'll do it. Now, I've had a reasonable online presence for a number of years now, and have even been ranked in 'the top 20% of social media users' in the world by klear.com. (That figure went up to the top 5% for 'influence in writing'). My books have been downloaded, on average, 50 times per month via passive advertising for the last 5 years or so. Not bad, considering I haven't been doing anything to help sell my books for the last four years. Indeed, my book End of the Road has never been lower than #2 in its category since it was published, often sitting pretty in the #1 position. (No, I don't know how I did it!). However, the income from these books is negligible, to say the least. There is no way on this earth I could live off the profits of these four books, even with very active promotion. I fully understand that my book list needs to grow substantially, and that I need to get in on serious promotion of my work before I'm gonna see any form of income that might just pay for the websites and apps I need to help manage my book business, let alone the coffee and bacon sandwiches and gin. So let me get to my point. I need to have an income to live off, principally from my books, one that will slowly grow and grow to allow me to achieve that. But I should also consider other sources of income too. After all, I will be sending a lot of visitors from my website, social media, newsletter etc to Amazon and to Smashwords to buy my books, and surely they should reward me for doing so? And over the next few years, those numbers should hopefully grow substantially, and therefore my reward too? Most visitors, once they arrive at a book page such as on Amazon, often click around on to other books and/or merchandise, buying other products after I send them there (after buying my books, I hope!). And Amazon will actually pay me for this service. Amazon and Smashwords both have affiliate programmes, as do many other sites, and it is these we should sign up to from the start. An affiliate programme is simple for authors such as me. When I paste a link to one of my books, instead of getting that link off the internet address at the top of my browser, I get it from Amazon or Smashwords via my affiliate account, and a code (or associate ID) unique to me gets added to it by them. The link behaves in exactly the same way as any link, and sends the prospective buyer off to my chosen book. The difference is now, if they buy my book I not only get my author royalty as usual, but I also get a percentage more (up to 12%) for sending them there in the first place. Amazon is basically rewarding me for doing so. And what's more, if my buyer decides to shop around and buy other books at the same time, I get commission for that too. And this is true for up to 24hrs of them landing at Amazon. With Smashwords, it's 48hrs and up to 80.5%! I think back over the last five years of how many people I've sent to Amazon and what money I might have missed out on. No more. I've just spent 30 minutes changing my links to affiliate links and will, from now on, do so for every link I make with each new book launch. The only thing you have to do is add a text to your page (see below) to let people know you make money if they click through and buy stuff. Do this, or you could have your account suspended! “[Insert your name] is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to [insert applicable site name].” Be warned, this is not a way to make loads of money quickly, and a website full of Amazon links is gonna piss people off, but if you are in this for the long run, and are serious about growing your online presence and brand, then you need to be in the habit of doing this from the beginning. And whatever you do, do not put Amazon Affiliate links in emails or they will suspend you. (Warning: Affiliate links below) Another affiliate programme useful for authors is the social media management company Crowdfire Inc. Do you know of any others? Please add them to the comments below, thanks.

Book 5 dedication to all the young cops around the world - I salute you all!

DEDICATION This book (book 5, Cop Out) is dedicated to all of the young police officers across the world, as the commitment of such untarnished and idealistic young men and women never ceases to amaze me. It is their resilience, unending motivation and relentless drive to do the job and to do it well that keeps the police service afloat, and carries the burden for all the officers above them, despite the constant crap dumped on them on a daily basis by those very same supervisors. Lions, each and every one of you, led by donkeys. Thank you for your unswerving devotion to duty. I salute you all!

Four years of hell.

I'm back after a long hiatus! Sorry! Book 5 (see cover on right) due for release very soon! Quitting day job this year and writing full-time so expect oodles of books over the next few years.

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Do it here!

Missed you, speak soon.
xxx

So how has my social media experience changed following my 4 year coma?

Not being involved in my writing & publishing for a long time now, I do feel as if I have been in a coma for four years and finally come to, leaned over and checked up on my online social media - and immediately wished I hadn't! The online environment as morphed and evolved to the point that I feel like a stranger in my own home and realise that the slightest mistake could get me banished for life! Politics. Seriously, everything has become so political now. I'm a writer and I don't want to upset people just because I think, for example, that Trump is a danger to the world, people kill people but guns do it a lot faster, Brexit will hurt those who voted for it the most and Meghan is far too beautiful to be a princess. Errrr, think it's best if I stay away from that, not respond to any of this ranting political nonsense. Honestly, it's a minefield out there! So it's best not to get involved, keep my views to myself and to just ignore all of the politiking that has suddenly sprouted up all over the internet. Gifs. Why so many gifs???? Too many people now post inconsequential Tweets and then add a ridiculously annoying moving picture to get your attention. The internet is full of inconsequential crap - nothing has changed there but if you post such tat, and you need to add a silly, irritating gif, why bother posting the message at all? She/her or he/him. WTF? I saw this weirdness all over the profiles of everybody I was interacting with. I thought maybe it was a new law to identify one's gender but no, it appears to be a completely voluntary thing to do!! Now I'm a man of the world, and I've met a lot of people who have challenged my idea of male or female or something else, and yes, it can be embarrassing not knowing whether to refer to a person as a guy or gal or whatever, but this does not and should not apply to a very obvious woman saying she's a woman and should be referred to as such, or to me saying I'm a man so please refer to me as a he/him. Really, I shouldn't need to tell you that and if you were to refer to me as anything else I'd suspect you are either blind, drunk, spoiling for a fight or plain stupid. I understand, from what I've discovered, that it is to support those that are less straight forward. Now I love the idea of supporting and valuing minorities etc, but whatever next? Do I add 'heterosexual' to support gay/lesbian folk etc? 'White' to support ethnic minorities? 'Average height' to support 'vertically challenged' people? Where will this all end????