Jacqueline Ward's Blog, page 15

Kindle Scout: the final week

I’ve been running a Kindle Scout campaign for three weeks now. The first two weeks were great, with plenty of time in ‘hot and trending’. But week 3…

Week three was both difficult and focusing. I’d exhausted all my personal contacts and had to urgently think up new strategies. I haven’t connected my day job with my writing job so far, but after discussing this with some screenwriting friends, I LinkedIn and promoted my Kindle Scout bid, along with my published novel. I’m glad I did this now as work colleagues have reached out and accepted my creative work.

I also explored the world of Headtalker and Thunderclap, free crowdsourcing apps that extend the reach of your message. I’d already tweeted and facebooked a lot, and this required even more convincing (this time strangers not friends and colleagues) to nominate.

The stats were steady with a bit of a dip midweek.

I won’t really know if it’s worked until this last week. Fingers crossed and, obviously, if you haven’t nominated Random Acts of Unkindness, PLEASE do! Please feel free to share the link on all your social networking too.

As always, the most important part of this is the book. If it’s good enough, along with my demonstration of pushing myself out of my comfort zone and marketing this campaign for all I’m worth, it may get selected. Either way, this project has meant a lot to me right from the start, and Jan and Bessy’s stories will remain with me forever.

I’d like to thank everyone who nominated. I’ve been overwhelmed by the love for Random Acts of Unkindness and the good news is that everyone who nominated will find out if it is accepted by email in about two weeks time (slightly scary)! If it’s accepted, you’ll all get a free electronic copy.

So onwards into the final week with a final push  see you on the other side!

 

 

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Day 15 update – half way through Kindle Scout

So I’m half way through and I’ve had an accelerated learning experience over the past two weeks! Kindle Scout makes you evaluate exactly what you know about social networking against what tools are out there.

It also makes you evaluate how comfortable you are with the process. Self publishing has had a bashing this week in a scathing article from Ros Barber which was countered with a better toned article by Rachel Abbott. My personal opinion is that I absolutely abhor literary snobbery and everything it encapsulates. As in every other area of life, people should be able to choose what they do and how they do it without bullying and unpleasantness. But that’s for another blog post on another day.

I am extremely comfortable with self publishing, but I’m not so comfortable with marketing. I know how to market, but the part I don’t like so much is the ‘cold call’ – in this case having to make the approach to ask for nominations.

So I’ve moved out of my comfort zone and I’ve done it. I’ve Fiverred. I’ve PeoplePerHoured. I’ve Hootsuited. I’ve even Thunderclapped. All these things are new skills that I can take forward if I don’t get chosen for Kindle Scout and I self publish Random Acts of Unkindness.

Has it worked?

After the initial boost on the first two days of my campaign, I have seen an upward trend in page views. Not dramatic numbers, I was at 698 page views today, but the upward trend tells me that my audience is growing as intended.

The peaks roughly translate into my marketing campaigns.

The other really fantastic thing about this process is that I have been able to ask their authors involved. In Kindle Scout about their experiences. My worries were many and varied: are any UK authors selected? Or any UK based books selected? Are any authors without series or big backlists selected? How many nominations is enough?

I guess I’ll have to wait and see. With fifteen more days to go, I’ll have to be super-inventive with my marketing and hope that my book is good enough. That’s about all I can do.

EXCEPT ask you good people to nominate my book. You can find it here at Kindle Scout. 

 

 

 

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Kindle Scout day 10 update – social networking

It’s day ten in the Kindle Scout house and things got a little bit crazy when I realised that I would have to move out of my comfort zone. The first week was a ‘getting to know you’ experience where, for most of the week, I languished in ‘hot and trending’.

I uploaded my novel on a Thursday, so for the first weekend it was visible on the front page of Kindle Scout and both new and hot, and my friends were responding to my pleas to nominate. As my novel disappeared from the front page it disappeared from hot and trending. Additionally, other authors with new campaigns and last day campaigns became visible.

This made me think about my marketing. I’ve never been shy, but asking for nominations was difficult. It was also a wonderful experience as many of my friends backed the campaign and shared my posts. I really thought about how I could reach people and investigated and subsequebtly learned how to use the following:

Hootsuite

Facebook Ads

Thunderclap

Personal messages to friends who I though could help

Designing a dedicated branding banner for all social networks

The problem was that it made me feel bad. Why would people want to nominate my novel? Was the offer of a free copy if I was published by Kindle Press enough? It was driving mad ( and still is a bit now!) Marketing for Kindle Scout is full out campaigning, with no opportunity left untaken, including approaching strangers.

All these things worked to an extent by raising page views. The nominations system is still a complex mystery, being partly dependent on other people’s nominations as well as your own and the timing of campaign starts and ends. Even so, Random Acts of Unkindness entered ‘hot and trending’ for 10 hours on day 9.

I started to explore what other Kindle Scout authors were doing to market their campaign, and found out that many of them had extensive back catalogues and others were dedicating every waking minute to it by tweeting all the time and producing podcasts. I’ve also read blogs of those authors who have been successful on Kindle Scout, trying to glean information on their techniques.

It’s what i suspected. Network for all you are worth in case nominations and page views do count and remember that the final decision rests with the Amazon editors. My traffic stats are pretty stable, with 45% still coming from Kindle Scout pages, and 55% from my own social networking. Page views at 542 and 72/240 hours hot and trending.

I’ve learnt a lot this week. I keep reminding myself that nominations are not the only reason Amazon chooses a novel for publication, but it must help. Almost two weeks in and I’m constantly looking for ways to publicise my campaign and being overwhelmed by the generosity of the friends I’ve asked to share my message so a big THANK YOU!

If you haven’t nominated Random Acts of Unkindness I’d be very grateful if you did. You can do that here

More updates at day 15 – half way through my Kindle Scout adventure!

 

 

 

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Kindle Scout day 5 update – Hot and Trending?

After submitting my novel to Kindle Scout five days ago I’ve been stepping up social networking. My Facebook friends have been brilliant at spreading the word about my campaign, so a huge thank you to them!

Random Acts of Unkindness was ‘hot and trending’ for the first three days, but imagine my horror when I opened Kindle Scout on day 4 and it wasn’t!

‘Hot and trending’ appears to be an algorithm of how many nominations you receive, although Amazon doesn’t give you that information, just the number of page views. There’s a statistic on the campaign page which indicates how much traffic to the page comes from external sources (your social networking) and how much from Kindle Scout traffic (other scouts who nominate your novel). There is also a list of sources – you can see how successful your Twitter and Facebook Campaigns are.

Like Amazon rankings, ‘hot and trending’ is impacted by the relative position of other novel campaigns and those on their ‘last day’ often have a surge that can affect the other ratings, as do new entries.

It’s important to understand this relative positioning is largely out of your control and to plan your social networking campaign across the whole thirty days – make a plan for when your novel falls out of ‘hot and trending’ to boost it.

Additionally, other writers who have completed the thirty days mention that the nominations are not the only factor in selection and that all submissions are evaluated by an editor. It is inferred that nominations and subsequent ‘hot and trending’ places get the attention of editors, but other writers have stated that this is not necessarily the case.

So it isn’t a race or a competition, but it is compelling to make sure that your novel is ‘hot and trending’. It’s also a lesson in effective social networking.

I’ll reveal my strategy in my next blog post but, for now, it’s back to checking my Kindle Scout page stats!

You can nominate here https://t.co/qqrZyEwPGD  – thank you!

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Kindle Scout Launch Day for Random Acts of Unkindness

So today is launch day. Kindle Scout has sent me an email telling me that I need to share the campaign link with all my friends and ask me to nominate Random Acts of Unkindness.

I’m guessing that the aim is to get enough nominations in order to become ‘hot and trending’. This will push Random Acts of Unkindness to the slide bar at the bottom of the screen, raising visibility to people who are browsing.

I asked all my friends to nominate and by lunchtime this was happening. I was hot! You can nominate Random Acts of Unkindness here 

I set up my Twitter and Facebook networking and soon realised that, with 29 days of the campaign left, I’d better start thinking of some new ways to get nominations!

Watch this space….

 

 

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