M. Eigh's Blog, page 20
October 4, 2013
Thank you Germany, for Making My Book a Bestseller on Your Unification Day
Take a casual look at the Web Marketing, book Publishing or Authorship category on Amazon and you get the picture instantly. Everybody is trying to sell you a pipe dream. The “self help” books in those categories follow a pattern: “How I Made [Insert a Number Comparable to a Lottery Winning Here] by Selling My Kindle Book in [Insert a Better-than-Expected Short Time Here]” or “How to Sell [Insert an Astronomical Number that Often Appears in a NASA Document] Copies of My eBook.”
Sad, but true. Why not? If people who normally don’t read or write books can waste a few dollars a week on lottery tickets, the average Indie authors or self publishers are entitled to wasting some of their hard-earned royalty money on fantastical tales.
But the truth always prevails. What sounds too good to be true is usually too good to be true. The perfect analogy of this shocking phenomenon is the golf industry. If you ask a PGA pro what he envies Tiger or Phil most, the answer is guaranteed to be “their short games.” The pros know what really matters. But if you look at what the average weekend golfers spend money on, it’s normally the drivers. They dish out $400 to buy the latest model every year. In addition, they also spend a few hundred dollars a year on practice ranges where they hit those drivers in search for that perfect swing and drive, just like the average Indie authors are looking for that bestseller that will change their fate forever.
But, just as with weekend golfers, there are some cooler heads. The smart amateur golfers practice on their short games and end up beating their peers on the weekend rounds. Victory also comes cheap to them, as they never buy the latest model of drivers, nor do they ever read those “How to Hit Over 300 Yards with Your Driver” type of self-help books.
I will be the first one to admit that my books on Kindle book descriptions do not offer the miraculous home run that will immediately change your sales rank on Amazon. Rather, it showcases the best practices of effective Kindle book descriptions. For the formulas presented in my books to work, the readers are required to work — well, someone has to enter verbiages, images, videos, Flash or jQuery widgets as well as social media widgets into the book descriptions; you can do it yourself, but you can also hire someone to do it for you.
It’s wonderful to see that there are some cooler heads in the Indie author crowd. This morning when I woke up, my book How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages. has jumped to the # 1 Bestseller spot in the Web Marketing category on Amazon.de:
How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages
Hats off to my German fellow authors for being able to tell the real science from fantasies. After all, 50% of Germany’s GDP comes from export. And little or none of Germany’s export falls into the fantasy category. (No, Bollywood cheap budget movies do not come from Germany.) They make high-quality, superbly engineered products that requires meticulous craftsmanship and take-no-prisoners quality control. No wonder they will fall in love with my no-nonsense book.
How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages
Thank you Germany, for letting my book occupy the #1 Bestselling spot, and for making that happen on your Unification Day.How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages
Thank you Germany, for Making My Book a Bestseller on Your Unification Day
On a theoretical level, we are all very familiar with Occam’s razor (or Ockham’s razor,) which says that all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one. But in practice, when we are scrambling for a solution, we always fall for the potion, elixir or the secret formula of alchemy.
Take a casual look at the Web Marketing, book Publishing or Authorship category on Amazon and you get the picture instantly. Everybody is trying to sell you a pipe dream. The “self help” books in those categories follow a pattern: “How I Made [Insert a Number Comparable to a Lottery Winning Here] by Selling My Kindle Book in [Insert a Better-than-Expected Short Time Here]” or “How to Sell [Insert an Astronomical Number that Often Appears in a NASA Document] Copies of My eBook.”
Sad, but true. Why not? If people who normally don’t read or write books can waste a few dollars a week on lottery tickets, the average Indie authors or self publishers are entitled to wasting some of their hard-earned royalty money on fantastical tales.
But the truth always prevails. What sounds too good to be true is usually too good to be true. The perfect analogy of this shocking phenomenon is the golf industry. If you ask a PGA pro what he envies Tiger or Phil most, the answer is guaranteed to be “their short games.” The pros know what really matters. But if you look at what the average weekend golfers spend money on, it’s normally the drivers. They dish out $400 to buy the latest model every year. In addition, they also spend a few hundred dollars a year on practice ranges where they hit those drivers in search for that perfect swing and drive, just like the average Indie authors are looking for that bestseller that will change their fate forever.
But, just as with weekend golfers, there are some cooler heads. The smart amateur golfers practice on their short games and end up beating their peers on the weekend rounds. Victory also comes cheap to them, as they never buy the latest model of drivers, nor do they ever read those “How to Hit Over 300 Yards with Your Driver” type of self-help books.
I will be the first one to admit that my books on Kindle book descriptions do not offer the miraculous home run that will immediately change your sales rank on Amazon. Rather, it showcases the best practices of effective Kindle book descriptions. For the formulas presented in my books to work, the readers are required to work — well, someone has to enter verbiages, images, videos, Flash or jQuery widgets as well as social media widgets into the book descriptions; you can do it yourself, but you can also hire someone to do it for you.
It’s wonderful to see that there are some cooler heads in the Indie author crowd. This morning when I woke up, my book How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages. has jumped to the # 1 Bestseller spot in the Web Marketing category on Amazon.de:
How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages
Hats off to my German fellow authors for being able to tell the real science from fantasies. After all, 50% of Germany’s GDP comes from export. And little or none of Germany’s export falls into the fantasy category. (No, Bollywood cheap budget movies do not come from Germany.) They make high-quality, superbly engineered products that requires meticulous craftsmanship and take-no-prisoners quality control. No wonder they will fall in love with my no-nonsense book.
How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages
Thank you Germany, for letting my book occupy the #1 Bestselling spot, and for making that happen on your Unification Day.
October 2, 2013
When Amazon KDP Select Meets Social Share Buttons
Hi folks,
Want to share with you my latest experience with KDP Select. I put my book How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages for a two-day free giveaway last Sunday and Monday. I was planning to take advantage of Friday and Saturday rush traffic, but it took KDP about 24 hours to publish my book, and when it finally became “live” in KDP Bookshelf, it was somehow not available on Amazon for another 4 hours. So I missed the scheduling and had to settle for Sunday and Monday.
I did not advertise or list it on any of the free book sites, simply because of the book’s category (Kindle authorship and Web marketing.) I did Tweet like crazy and got about 12 RT’s. One of them from freeebooks.org (I think) and they listed it on their site.
The book did extraordinarily well for not costing me a penny to advertise. It stayed at #1 free download spot for most of the time in Authorship and #2 or #3 most of the time in Web Marketing.
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“How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages” # 1 Most Popular on Amazon
Some 8 or 9 hours before the end, I was hit with a very bad luck. An author posted a 2-star review on the book, a day after K.A. posted a 5-star review on it. It turned out to be a mistake on the reviewers part. But she did not respond to my inquiry as to why she did not like the book until the next day when the free promo was over. She subsequently pull the 2-star review but the damage was done. The book went down in the last few hours from #1 in Authorship to #4.
Overall, It had 190 downloads in US. Worldwide total is probably 240. Not bad for a 2-day efforts in a very small niche category. The day after the promo saw 4 purchases. Not very impressive, that inopportune mistaken 2-star review definitely did its damage.
Since all the links are blasted out by myself, I made about $15 in commission for embedding my Affiliate id in the URL.
The one thing that stands out — something I have done for the very first time, and is what this book’s topic — is the set of floating social share buttons I put on the book page (you can see them live here on the book page: http://amzn.to/18xrEHq.
Out of the 240 downloads, I got 22 shares out of these buttons. Not quite but roughly 10 percent. I think it is a significant number. These 22 shares are something I would never have gotten if I did not put the share buttons in the book page.
Had I not had the misfortune of getting a erroneous bad review at a very bad time, my promo would have finished with much more robust finale and the number of shares may be much more, so would the immediate sales afterwards.
Plus, it does not cost anything to put these viral buttons on my page. Well, if you want to do it, it will cost you a whopping $0.99 for the know-how contained in my book. All you need to know in order to drop those buttons in your book pages is carefully documented in it.
Predictably, Amazon’s “product correlation” algorithm shows it magic once again. Now, when you browse to the “Buttons” book, you get the “Customers who bought this item also bought” prompt, as shown in the screenshot below:
KDP’s Best-Kept Secret Revealed: How to Embed Videos and Widgets in Your Book Description
I’m dying to know what the “share” percentage would be for a fiction book in a more popular category. If someone does that, please share!
Thanks for reading. M. Eigh
September 30, 2013
“How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages:” No 1 Most Popular on Amazon
This morning, my latest release “How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages” takes the No. 1 most popular spot in the Kindle authoring tool category for free download. This is extraordinary, considering that it is a niche tool, not a general tool. And it is not a tool for KDP novice. It is a tool only those who have undergone the process of KDP publication and KDP Select program and know the tough restrictions Amazon puts on authors can truly appreciate. And it looks like they are a well-informed bunch, since they pushed my book to the top of Amazon’s free download chart.
So what are you waiting for? You owe it to yourself to go there now and get yourself a free copy!
How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages #1 Most Popular
September 29, 2013
“How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages:” No 2 Most Popular on Amazon
Tonight, my latest release “How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages” takes the No. 3 most popular spot in the Kindle authoring tool category for free download. This is extraordinary, considering that it is a niche tool, not a general tool. And it is not a tool for KDP novice. It is a tool only those who have undergone the process of KDP publication and KDP Select program and know the tough restrictions Amazon puts on authors can truly appreciate. And it looks like they are a well-informed bunch, since they pushed my book to the top of Amazon’s free download chart.
So what are you waiting for? You owe it to yourself to go there now and get yourself a free copy!
How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages
September 28, 2013
How to Run a Book Ad: A Three-Part Theory
This three-part theory is my response to a GoodReads discussion on whether it is effective to buy and run book ads. You can see the original discussion thread here:
1)Never put out a book ad without embedding your Amazon Affiliate ID in the URL. I’m surprised many authors on this forum do not pay attention to it. Advertised or not, I never give out my books’ URLs without my affiliate ID in them. And the result is satisfactory. I took a screenshot of my account statement from 9/1 to date: https://googledrive.com/host/0B6NosDC….
You can see that I’ve earned a whopping $19. Humble, laughable. But hey, it offsets something if I have to pay for ads. But for this month, I have not paid any ads. The income is just from my spreading my books’ URLs everywhere.
2)I have to disagree with you on where to direct the click-through. I strongly believe it should be your Amazon book page. Nobody does it better than Amazon. The top portion of the book page is designed with a killer instinct. On the left you have the “Look inside,” and on the right you have the Buy button and a Download sample button right there. Anyone who arrives at your book page is instantly fed with those three visual gauntlet.
I would not kid myself that my own blog has that kind of “squeezing” power as Amazon’s tested book page.
3)And this one is a MUST. Learn from the grandmaster — Amazon is the inventor of the “chao algorithm.” That is the equivalent of window shopping of the physical world. If a buyer browsed your book and then moved on to Joyland, there is a chance when someone else is looking at Joyland, he is presented with an icon of your book cover, along with a few others under the “Customers who viewed Joyland also viewed these items.” Same principle with free giveaway; just more potent as free download counts as an “Amazon verified purchase.”
To maximize this effect, you yourself should create random affiliations that favor yourself. My book “Secret” talks about this and gives a specific procedure through which you can drop an Affiliate widget right there in a prominent spot of your book description, to entice the visitor to click on other titles of the book. That way, when you are running a free promo, and you have some caption on the other tiles saying things like “Click to check if it is free,” you are going to get clicks. The rest is up to your books. They have to sell themselves when the prospective buyers are looking at them.
Here’s what Philip Henley did this morning to his book page http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B72JQTG?t… — he dropped the Affiliate widget in his book. He also dropped his Tweet box in the description, which in my humble opinion should be below the Affiliate widget. With Twitter you get follows. With the Affiliate widget you get book sales or advertising commission, as I did.
Honestly, a big portion of the Affiliate commissions may be generated from the Amazon widget as I have such widget in every book page of mine. You can see one example here: http://amzn.to/1evdevT.
The end result is when a stranger comes to one of my books, there is a chance he’s gonna click on that Amazon widget to view another title of mine. Once he does that, he becomes my captive audience. No matter what he buys that session, be it my book or something else, I get paid.
September 27, 2013
Free on Amazon: How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages
Hi guys,
M. Eigh has just released a new book, titled How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages. To show my heartfelt appreciation for your purchase of my book KDP’s Best-Kept Secret Revealed: How to Embed Videos and Widgets in Your Book Description, I’m offering this book free to you.
The book is here: http://amzn.to/18xrEHq. It will be free for two days, starting midnight Pacific Sunday till midnight Pacific Monday.
I know we live in a viral society and Amazon does not offer a mechanism for me to control who can enjoy the free download, so some people who have not purchased “Secret” will enjoy the free download too. So you might as well do your friends a favor and let them know.
But rest assured that this book is by no means going to devalue the “Secret” book you have bought. That is still and will always be the bible of Kindle book description, forever the holy grail.
So, don’t miss the free download. And if you have enjoyed my books and benefited form the know-how’s in it, please post a review on the book’s Amazon pages. One good turn deserves another, from an Indie to another Indie.
Cheers,
M. Eigh
Copyright © 2013 M. Eigh, All rights reserved.
I Give Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami a 5-Star
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Murakami has skillfully created a quiet and gentle world in Norwegian Wood. So quiet that you do not hear the campus slogans of the revolutionaries of the late 60′s. You only hear the deepest inner voices of lovers separated by sickness and death. So gentle that Watanabe volunteers to watch a dying man on his hospital bed, changing his bedpans and feeding him a cucumber. And there is so much details: when it rains you can tell that Murakami wants you to feel the drops on your skin. And the constant longings and denials…
And there is a rather charming fascination with death — self-inflicted death — in this book, probably the only thing truly Japanese. Death somehow becomes beautiful; it becomes a continuation of life. And when one reflects on life, as the main character Watanabe does to begin the book, tender memories seems to outweigh the heavy-liftings one had to do in life.
I highly recommend this book to anyone over 35. There is a lot of walking on the part of the main character in this book. And it feels like a long restful walk to read through this book. It lets us behold the wonder of life at every turn, and the pain we have to endure in order to embrace that wonder.
And I’m sure that’s why I could read every word of those long letters from Naoko and not be bored. Because I too had yearnings when I was at that age. Because I was also once very fragile, just as breakable as Naoko.
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