Lincoln Cole's Blog, page 5

Kindle Scout Campaign - Guide - Part 6

The Everett Exorcist was not picked for publication by Kindle Press. They sent me a long email detailing out their reasoning, and a significant part of it was the cover and the use of a rosary. I'm not too concerned because I think the rosary fits the genre and story perfectly, so I wouldn't have wanted to change those things anyway.

It's Over

Time to move on. I'm working on finishing up books II and III and plan out my launch plan. I'm hoping to launch them all in rapid succession, so it'll be a little while before they are available for the world. In the short term, however, I'm also going to start working on some more projects and planning the next book to get out in the world.

So, this is only the end of the Kindle Scout journey for TEE, and there is still a long way for this book to go to get out into the world. I'm actually excited to be able to start making plans to launch it on my own and having complete control over everything because I have some cool ideas to try out I couldn't have used with Kindle Scout.

What comes next?

One more post on the way after the acception/rejection from Amazon with details about everything surrounding the campaign and a little bit more information into the process. 

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Literature & Fiction - IF Giveaway July 2017

Romance - IF Giveaway July 2017

Science-Fiction, Fantasy & Horror - IF Giveaway July 2017

Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense - IF Giveaway July 2017

Get a bunch of my books on sale!

I've got a bunch of books marked down for a couple of days! Get them here for up to 70% off!

This is the first time that all of the World on Fire series is on sale at the same time, so if you haven't gotten copies of those ones then this is the perfect time!

Hopefully, soon we will have some good news about the Everett Exorcism from Kindle Scout!

Kindle Scout Campaign - Guide - Part 5 - Ending Results

First of all, if you want to check out my services list of promotional places and recommendations, click here. I go into pretty deep analysis about a lot of different places I have checked out to get nominations and page views for your campaign! It's worked out very well for me (at least pre-results) and hopefully my advice can help you!

Now, onto the details!

Campaign is over, so here are some final details about how it went! It ended midnight and it is hard to believe it is finally over. Now, I have to go through and fix up my website post campaign. It feels a lot like taking down decorations after Christmas: it is fun putting them up, and not nearly as fun sending them all back to storage!

It's Over

It's good to be over with, and now I can finally sit back and relax. I'm not sure how well I'll be able to relax, but at least I'm busy. I've actually been working on writing the second book in the series. It's coming along slower than I would like, but the fact that I have anything done with it is a huge plus.

If my book isn't picked, I'm planning on releasing them close together in timing. If it is picked, I'm planning to offer it to Amazon, and if they say 'no thanks' then I'll just publish it on my own. Either way it won't be a huge deal, and then I'll be on to new projects!

Thank you all!

Now is my opportunity to formally thank everyone for their support and for following along with this campaign. I put a lot of work into all of this (both writing up the blog posts, running the campaign, and writing the book itself) and to a large extent it is a relief just to be done with it.

I can't thank you enough for your support, and I hope you get a free copy directly from Amazon. Even if you don't, however, I'll make sure to offer free copies up to everyone who nominated after the fact!

A little bit of analysis

Should you spend money on your Kindle Scout Campaign? When it comes to Kindle scout and spending money and why hot and trending and pageviews matter, there are a few launch elements to keep in mind:

*Sales
*Reviews
*Also-Boughts

Sales and also-boughts contribute to how Amazon recommends books. If your book syncs up high on another books also-bought list, then amazon will recommend your book to people who read the first book, and it caps to display 100 books (but could be considerably higher). Likewise, a book that is selling very well is more likely to be recommended by amazon to new readers, so getting sales begets more sales. Reviews show amazon how well their system is working, and thereby contribute a community opinion of the book that helps when recommending.

Kindle Scout books that are chosen are given to everyone who nominated two weeks before launch, and reviews are allowed to be loaded onto the book before launch. This doesn't contribute to sales, but it does contribute to also-boughts and reviews. This can give your book a huge leg up on recommendations, which means more sales, which in turn means more reviews and also-boughts. It's a sort of self-feeding cycle, and so the more pageviews/nominations you get the stronger the initial push to this cycle.

However, you don't need any of this to have a successful book launch, and many books are able to come out in one day and almost immediately attain huge success on the quality of the writing. Kindle Scout is willing to invest in these titles as well, because the goal is to add good content to their library. The best case scenario is good content and this early boost of also-boughts and reviews.

So, no, you don't have to spend any money to get selected. The biggest problem you face revolves around the possibility of not getting picked: investing in page views and nominations is essentially investing in your book's launch, and the more you get the stronger your launch is. However, if your book isn't chosen, then all of that investment is for nothing.

Hence, if you invest, you're essentially gambling that money, and either it can be a huge investment that will pay off in your book's launch through Kindle Scout, or it is a complete waste that could have been better spent on your actual book launch after you are declined.

One way to hedge your bets is, in your thank you note invite people to follow your newsletter for a free copy post launch (which essentially attempts to hold onto the benefit of pageviews and nominations) and to try and build excitement about your book, but even that results in an overall loss.

So, no, you don't need to spend money to get selected by Kindle Scout, and if you do spend money you need to think of it more as investing in your book's future than just running this campaign. Do whatever you can to build things up for after the campaign is over with. My goal with this blog (and why I spend money on my campaign) is as much to tell people what did and didn't work for me and help people put their money in the right places.

What comes next?

Later I will release a few very important posts about the Kindle Scout process, including a post about whether or not my book was picked and my launch plans with or without Amazon, a post about all of the services (paid and free) I've found over all of my campaigns through the years, and a post about all of my stats across the four campaigns I've run.

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AMA: Taking Questions

I'll be taking questions for the next couple of weeks about anything: upcoming projects, my newest book, or any other topics. 

To submit a question, just post it in the comments of below! I'll also post the Q&A in a blog post linked to the video, so there will be multiple ways to see the answers!

You can ask me anything about the projects that I'm working on as well as upcoming projects that are due out later in the year.

Question:

Can you describe your typical writing routine? And when editing, do you use professional or an editing program?

Answer:

I use a professional editor for all of my books because I don't really have time to try and self-edit them all. It just takes too long and I still miss a lot of things. In general, it's been very helpful for me.

I also use grammarly for general writing tasks and to help with simple things, because it does a great job of cleaning up little problems.

My writing routine...

I don't really have one. I write when I can, and when I get in the middle of a project i usually try to push through to the end and then work through a second and third draft. The first draft is the hardest for me to finish, but by the third or fourth I'm usually quite happy with the way things are going.

When I finish a project I usually take a few weeks off before doing anything, because it takes a while to reset. When I start back into something new it's more or less just because I have ideas and I want to get them on paper!

Online Book Club Services Review - Book Reviews/Advertising/Outreach

I sort of stumbled onto the OnlineBookClub website about two years ago and didn't really know what it was all about. I decided to try out some of their services, starting with reviews, and have ended up working with them quite a bit to promote some of my books.

Who runs the club?

Scott Hughes is the guy who created it, but he has a full team of people working with him now who help run social media accounts and other services, as well as assistance from review writers and editors with helping to work through the backlog of reviews and make sure they get vetted and released properly.

It's been building up for over ten years now and Scott is constantly releasing new features and services.

Who writes the reviews?

The community. This is a benefit and a curse for the company, but in general the benefits outweigh the negatives. Basically, this means that professional reviewers who have worked in the industry for a long time are not likely to review your book when you submit for a book review, but since the system is based on a scaling system whereby the better a reviewer does the faster they get access to reviews, it means that paying for more expensive packages means you are more likely to get a better reviewer.

Better reviewer, in this case, means a few things: they will write a better review (which can be beneficial for you when quoting it) and they probably have a bigger audience of readers who watch out for their reviews.

What this also means, however, is that if you submit a lower level package through the system you are less likely to get one of these 'big fish' reviewers and more likely to get a bottom feeder who is trying to become a big fish. That isn't necessarily a negative (because why wouldn't they want to offer larger benefits for more expensive reviews) but it is definitely something to keep in mind when buying a package.

Reviews

Everything is built around a funnel whereby the first thing you must do as an author is buy a review. You cannot just drop in there and pay for advertising on their email lists or other services until you have been vetted, and they take the reviews seriously. 

This forms a sort of self-selection process when an author submits. An expensive gate, if you will. Everyone has to start at the same point and work their way up through the club, and they will point out mistakes with style, grammar, editing, and anything else in your review, along with recommendations about how you can make your book better.

The reviews are guaranteed to be multiple paragraph and at least four-hundred words, which means they will go pretty in-depth without getting into major spoiler territory. This is great, because it means there will definitely be something in them you can pull out to help promote your book as an editorial review.

This is very important, because a lot of authors (including myself) can hit roadblocks here. When reviews are less than you had hoped for, your response can be:

Denial (I know my book is awesome)Ambivalence (Oh well, who cares about this website anyway?)Acceptance (Maybe they have a point...)

The first two cases usually mean that author is done working with OnlineBookClub. Either they make the decision to give up and move on, or the decision is made for them when they act aggressively about the review and shoot themselves in the foot.

When I first submitted books, I sent in early titles that were less than stellar and needed work. The thing was, they had taken months of my life and countless hours to put together, and getting bad reviews (3 out of 4 on both) was difficult to swallow.

However, the points they made were actually very true (especially looking back) and I have since had both books re-edited, re-worked, and both are better than they were partly from these reviews.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you get a bad review, it isn't the end of the world. You can always resubmit for another review later when you fix up a book, and once you do make it through the gate you will have access to a lot more stuff. 

If you think you're ready to take the plunge, you can submit for a review here: https://onlinebookclub.org/review-requests/

Other Services

If you do make it through the review roadblock, then you open up a lot of other services that can help drive your book. There are quite a few of them, but two in particular that are worth focusing on: Book of the Month, and Book of the Day.

With Book of the Day, you get some hefty promotion across a myriad of social media platforms over the course of one day, and in general you get a few thousand people looking at your book. If you offer it for free, you also get a ton of downloads and they have managed to push author's pretty high up the charts with this promotion.

Book of the Month is different in that it is a slow burn campaign. You get your book posted (for three months) on every page of the website with a direct link to your book page on their website. You also get a book of the month forum dedicated just to your book for readers to discuss it. 

Both options also come with built in giveaways (daily, or monthly depending) and book of the month includes a book of the day share along with it.

Here is Raven Peak's book page on the website: 

https://forums.onlinebookclub.org/shelves/book.php?id=79375

From here you can also permanently get to the book forum about your book and see all of the compiled data and links about your book. There is also a book of the year option for all books that received a 4-star review from a top level reviewer whereby readers can nominate their favorite book. 

They also offer social media advertising, bookshelf advertising, and a few other things, but in general you are much better off to go with one of the packages to drive your promotion because it includes these other features in it.

How much does it cost?

Quite a bit, actually. The prices also go up regularly, so I don't want to mention them in the post. Suffice to say, many authors won't really want to take a step down this road because of the sheer up front investment.

However, the results you can achieve through their programs are pretty incredible, including building a new fan base, selling a lot of books, and meeting some great readers who are always interested in finding new authors.

There are minor ways to offset the costs: for example, there is an author program to earn free credits that you can do daily by sharing and adding to bookshelves. There is also a twitter support team you can sign up for to get some money back for sharing things on social media.

Do I recommend it?

Definitely. It was hard to swallow those first few expenses to get started with the company, but what I love most about Online Book Club is just how willing they are to try new things and work to customize promotions.

They take book marketing very seriously over there and are constantly getting new members. Their lists are huge and full of very responsive readers, and you are bound to make a lot of new fans and friends working with them.

Personalized Service

This is the key to their value: I requested to do a promotion for a Kindle Scout campaign I was running recently and they built me a custom promotion to reach thousands of people and get tons of nominations. Scott and his team are incredibly responsive to requests and always willing to engage with new ideas to make their offerings even better.

I can see bright things in the future of the company, and everyone can find something to benefit them from the club. For readers, they can get free books and a chance to make some extra money, and for authors (the focus of this blog post) there is some seriously powerful promotion and a lot of constant growth that make this a website to look out for.

They get a strong recommendation from me. The first step is going to be signing up for a review.

https://onlinebookclub.org/review-requests/

Exclusive Insider's Guide - Kindle Scout Campaign Promotional Services Recommendations List (Paid and Free)

Here is a list of all of the various promotional options I've compiled over running all of my campaigns, and hopefully some of them will come in handy for you (or at least the ones that you end up using).

If there is one blog post of mine that you are going to read to find out everything you want to know about promoting your kindle scout campaign, then this is the one. However, if you're interested in finding out a lot about each of these programs and how the worked out for me, then you might want to go through the blog posts and my guidebook to figure out what will work best for you.

So, without further ado, let's begin!

Paid ServicesRecommendedBest Indie Press - This one was new for me, and up front I didn't really think it would be ideal. For one thing, It is incredibly expensive ($250, though you can get $50 off with coupon code 'TS50' when you sign up). However, one thing they do is direct traffic to both your campaign page and a facebook post to get signups, and I've gotten a fairly large number of people to view my book trailer and like my page on facebook from their service. All told, the cost per click came to about 15-20 cents per click (counting the facebook clicks) so it isn't cheap, but I would definitely consider them to be high value clicks and on the days my campaign ran I saw a noticeable uptick in all sorts of web traffic. You can check it out here.Online Book Club - I've used OBC for a while now and I've had really good luck with their services. The only initial problem is that they are incredibly expensive. This ad ran over one day and generated a trackable external click load of 600 (and It ended up being my second highest campaign day altogether). That being said, the clicks were fairly expensive, but what you get in addition to clicks is targeted advertising across a lot of platforms. For example, they share on twitter, facebook, pinterest, instagram, linkedin, and other places to drive clicks to your campaign, and it ends up generating a lot of action. They also have a built in giveaway that people can sign up for and you can share. All told, it's about $300 dollars for a book of the day package, but I'm hoping to talk the owner into designing a better Kindle Scout package for authors to trickle nominations in.Author Shout - This site builds a landing page for your campaign and then drives traffic to it using links. I discussed it in quite a bit more depth in an earlier blog post from my The Everett Exorcism campaign, and I was please with how well they performed. They drove a fair number of traffic to my campaign, and it trickles in instead of all at once which makes it the perfect supplementary Kindle Scout promotion. Definitely make sure to sign up early in the campaign because it is designed to run all 30 days! Check it out here!Melanie Rockett - This one was new for me as well with my most recent campaign, and like the previous resource Author Shout it makes a perfect supplement. Melanie does a good job building some custom links and shares throughout the campaign to quite a few followers, and it serves to keep a steady trickle of nominations. She also worked extremely fast, which was another plus, and has multiple tiered packages. You can find her on Fiverr, and I would recommend getting the 30 day package (the 15 day seems sort of pointless in the grand scheme of things). Check out her offerings here.Just Kindle Books - This is a fairly well established site with a decent following, and they offer a direct Kindle Scout promotion for only about thirty dollars. Quick responses and a lot of professionalism, and they have a coupon code (PAIDAUTHOR) which might get you $5 dollars off. Check that one out here.Readper - This one was from a friend of mine named Jaxon Reed and he blasts out to his newsletter on your behalf. Super cheap with some solid results. Check it out here.Google Ads -Facebook Ads -Amazon Giveaway -Not RecommendedAuthor Ad Network - I ran this ad one time, and never again. It was incredibly expensive and completely not worth it. I could hardly believe it performed so poorly considering the price, but it was in the range of 100 clicks and came out to around a dollar per click. They are certainly in the business of making money off of authors with a lot of flash but don't have the marketing muscle to back it up. I won't even link to it, so you'll have to jump back on google if you want to find it. Goodreads Ads - I only don't recommend this one because it isn't worth spending time on. All in all, it isn't terrible and they are high value clicks, but my daily impressions were so low while bidding $1.20 per click that it just wasn't worth the effort. You have to load money in advance, and the clicks cost so much that it is a double negative: you'll spend a fortune per click and still take forever to get them. Just not worth it.BookBub Ads - I would recommend this one because of how valuable the clicks can be, but again they are extremely expensive. For example, on Reddit you can get 1,000 impressions for about 40 cents, whereas on BookBub that would cost about $4 dollars. So, 10x as many impressions, which would make it nearly impossible for BookBub to compete. On top of that, you have to get invited into the program to be able to run ads at all, which is a huge negative in my opinion. In general, I just can't recommend it when there are options out there with considerably cheaper clicks. Still, it might be worth requesting an invite to the program and playing around with it, because outside of Kindle Scout it can still be incredibly valuable.On the FenceBooks Butterfly - I used to recommend this one, and in some cases it is good, but it is just too hit-and-miss for me to want to stand firmly by it. You can run the free promotion (gold level is $100) and get a fair number of nominations out of it, but the problem is inconsistency. I've run it and gotten a huge burst (900 ) of clicks, and then on another day you might get 100. Definitely worth checking out if you want to hit a mid-campaign boost, but use at your own risk. You can find it here .Scout Boost - This one barely (BARELY!) made it out of the not-recommended section, because it is expensive and just performed so-so. You can use a coupon code for 25% off (25%-OFF-NOW) which makes it almost worthwhile, but the results were incredibly mediocre. The thing is, I could have spent that money going deeper into ad platforms and gotten as good, if not better, results out of it. Use it at your own risk here.Twitter Ads - A lot of people hate twitter ads, and sometimes I can really see why. They can be incredibly useless clicks, and if you aren't careful they can quickly balloon your costs. If you run a twitter ad, make sure you use cards, have good ad content (do not spam hashtags in ads) and run with incredibly low bids. What sort of annoys me is: they recommend I bid about $2 per click, but when I say 'nope' and bid .07 cents, I still end up spending my entire budget. That means that they would gladly charge me over twenty times the minimum price of a click if I'm willing to pay it. That's the biggest reason I won't strongly recommend them, because you have to pay more attention than most other places.StumbleUpon Ads - Very easy to use beginner platform, but it doesn't register pageviews quite how I would like. The problem is, they use embedded forms to bring a webpage INTO their webpage, so you stay on stumbleupon but you are fed content from outside. To be honest, it is a little too clever for its own good, because the source website isn't tracking credit quite how it should, and a LOT of websites (Amazon, for example) add code that stops this sort of embedding from happening. It's a tool used by a lot of hackers and bad actors to steal data or passwords, so that sort of limits the functionality of this website. Still, it is nifty and you can get fairly cheap clicks (plus, they 'reward' you for running ads) so it isn't too bad. Also, the fact that it is clean and easy to use is a huge benefit for beginners.Pinterest Ads - You have to be careful and make sure to bid low here, which also means results will come slowly. It isn't a bad place to play around with some money and has a pretty huge audience, you just can't use it as a staple platform.Reddit Ads - As mentioned above, you pay by impression and can get quite a few fairly cheap. Then, it just comes down to luck of the draw. The problem is, even though you get impressions cheaply you have to pay a fair amount daily as a requirement, and when you say "spend $5 dollars" they often spend $6 or $7. Not a terrible place for clicks, but be careful. Also, another thing to note: reddit has some pretty ugly corners to it, and you might need to be careful about limiting certain subreddits so that they don't get your ad.Gleam Giveaway - This can get expensive, but it has powerful clickthrough if you make your campaign visit a required action. Giving away bigger prizes draws way more people, and you can customize to also get shares of the giveaway, following on social media, or visiting other places on your website for additional entries. Gleam is fun to play around with, people love winning stuff, so it is a win-win. That being said, this can quickly become a very expensive option.Bing Ads - Just like google with a much smaller audience and payment required up front. Also, clicks are going to default to more expensive, which is a negative. Still, it isn't terrible and if you like google this is very similar.Book Trailer - This can be a lot of fun (and I talk a lot about this option here) but it doesn't directly get your clicks. Sure, there are some cool parts attached to it, but all in all I would say there are better places to spend your money. However, if you don't make it Kindle Scout campaign centric, then you can always re-use it for promotions months and years down the line. In the mentioned post you can find some information about how I made my trailer.Handouts - I printed off some handouts and passed them out, but this takes a lot of effort and time to leave them at places and drive around. If you're looking for an interpersonal campaign, then this is perfect, but for me it is easier to do most of my work online in my spare time (I don't have hours to spare driving around to bookstores and libraries). If you do go this route, uprinting is pretty cheap for making handouts (bookmarks, in my case) and I made them open ended so that after my campaign ends I can just direct the traffic to a new promotion. It just spares me from having to worry about not getting them out fast enough.




FreeRecommendedHeadtalker - This is a great platform for building up shares on social media. Basically, you sign up for an account and then build a campaign. Fill in some details, run it through a vetting process, and then voila it is ready to go. How it works: on the day/hour you pick everyone who signs up will send out the exact same tweet/facebook message/linkedIn post/tumblr share. It also tracks how much 'reach' your team of supporters have (and it is cool to see that 1,000,000 plus people are going to get your post). However, keep in mind one HUGE detail: they are posting it, not retweeting, so if you put a message that says: "Check out my new Kindle Scout entry..." then THEY are posting that message as if it is THEIRS. The trick is to write things in the third person: "Nominate this Kindle Scout entry and get a free copy...". I won't support campaigns anymore that personalize the message because then I get confused readers wondering if I have a new campaign or a new book coming out. It is just bad practice. A couple of links you'll need: headtalker and then a facebook group that trades support. Join the group and then share/post and cross-promote!Posting on Social Media -  Do this, but don't overdo it. Don't spam people or hit them too hard with hourly posts. I've heard of authors sending out newsletters every couple of hours (a huge no-no) and people scheduling twitter posts for ten times a day. Don't overdo it. Invite people to your stuff, keep up a new post every couple of days, but also post about other stuff (what you're working on next, things you think are interesting). Share with your fans, don't deluge them, and social media can be a hugely beneficial way to get nominations.Goodreads - Join groups, meet people, and find places where they invite authors to promote. Leave links to your campaign, and people will click them. This generally gets me a handful of clicks over the life of a campaign, so I can certainly recommend this. There are a lot of things I don't like about Goodreads, but it is a solid community of readers and as long as you aren't spammy and overbearing you can find places that are receptive to your message.KBoards - If you aren't on Kboards, then that is the first thing you need to do. Signup and jump in. It's a very active forum with some incredible information available from the savvy authors who chat there. There is also a dedicated thread over there just for Kindle Scout campaigns. You can share your link, nominate some campaigns, and when your campaign is about to end you'll bump up the list to receive nominations from the other board members. The benefit of this is people can nominate and support, but the thread is centralized around promoting campaigns and talking shop, not just 'nominate me...no nominate ME' posts.Not RecommendedThunderclap - This is just like headtalker, except the minimum required is for 100 people to sign up. I would recommend it, except there is plain and simply a better option out there already. If you are considering using this, then just use Headtalker instead.

Hopefully some of this information was helpful for you in making up your mind about what to do with your Kindle Scout campaign. I'll keep updating it with new options and add new services as I find them. If I missed any that you want me to test out or mention then link them in the comments below. If/when I run more campaigns I'll make sure to test them out and add them to the list!

Let me know in the comments if you agree/disagree with my assessments and what your experience has been with some of these programs. Also, check out my Kindle Scout Guidebook for more information about the basics of running a campaign and for more tips and tricks not mentioned here!

I also have an indepth look at the Hot & Trending list and how pageviews work in the guidebook, so that might help you understand better how those work.

What comes next?

Now I'm turning to new projects. Will I put more books on Kindle Scout? Most likely. Who knows what the future holds, but keep an eye on my blog (or join my newsletter) to see what is next in my world!

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