How to find out more about your readers without having to ask
How to use simple online marketing techniques to find out more about the readers who buy your ebooks on the Kindle or the iPad, including where they are in the world and what else they’re interested in.
Get a clear picture of your readers with some simple data collection
Imagine the depth of information Amazon and Apple have about everyone who bought your ebook or even thought about buying it, including:
Their name
What they were searching for when they found your book
Whether they downloaded a sample
Where they are in the world
Whether they read your book
If they finished it
How long it took, including how long it took them to get round to reading the sample or the book itself
And on and on. All this information would be helpful to you in marketing your book, and none of it is information that Amazon will share with you, even though it would be mutually beneficial for you to become a better salesperson of your ebook.
As the author of an ebook, you’re in the online marketing business, which is why you should be reading books and blogs about online marketing as well as writing and self-publishing.
You can get some of this information about readers yourself
At its most basic, an ebook is just a long webpage, which is why people who format their Kindle books properly use HTML, the web language that your book will be written in whether you do it yourself or trust Smashwords or Amazon to convert it for you with their meatgrinders.
Because an ebook is really a webpage, you can use lots of the techniques online marketers use to find out more about your readers.
Two simple steps to finding out more about your readers
1. Persuade your readers to click from your book to a website, any website
An ebook is a webpage and an e-reader is a web browser. You can, therefore, include hyperlinks in your books to a website, whether it’s your own or someone else’s.
Links that I put in my books to persuade readers to click include:
Links to my other books
Links to my website to look at supplementary pictures (the graphs and charts from Not a Gold Rush – The Taleist Self-Publishing Survey, for instance)
Links to my website to sign up for my mailing list
If you plan to write more books but aren’t inviting readers to sign up for your mailing list, you’re crazy. Who is more likely to buy your next book than someone who is enjoying this one?
2. Use a link shortener
Long links like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0085M7KIU/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=taleist-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=B0085M7KIU are unattractive and impractical in services like Twitter.
That’s why there are hundreds of options for link shortening, perhaps the best known of which is bit.ly. You paste in your long link and get something elegant like: http://bit.ly/KQjdA0
Use the shortened link when creating the link in your Kindle (or other) ebook.
If you don’t know how to include a link in your book, it’s explained in How to Format Perfect Kindle Books.
What happens now
The way link shorteners like bit.ly work is simple. I use bit.ly in this example but you can use any shortener you like. I’ve even set up my own, l.taleist.com, which is what I use in my own ebooks.
The reader clicks a link that sends them to bit.ly, as in our example http://bit.ly/KQjdA0
The bit.ly server looks at the end of the link (KQjdA0), which is a unique code that was assigned to you when you pasted in the long link on the bit.ly server
The bit.ly server then redirects the reader to the long address associated in its database with that code
The reader arrives at the place they were expecting
The critical point is that the reader has to pass through the bit.ly server first, if only for the blink of an eye, before arriving at their final destination.
This means that bit.ly has the opportunity to collect information about them and to share it with you.
bit.ly graph showing where in the world readers were when they clicked one of my shortened links
You can see how many people clicked and where they were in the world when they did it.
Using this method it doesn’t matter what you link to from your book as long as you use a link shortener like bit.ly because you’re gathering your data from bit.ly in the middle, not the final destination.
What you can do with this information
This might not seem like a lot, but it’s more than you had already. Not only do you know where your readers are, you know what they’re clicking. That means you can find out things like:
What they’re interested in (might help you decide on your next book, especially if you write non-fiction)
Which of your books they go on to look at and perhaps buy after finishing the current book
I know from my data, for instance, that readers of Not a Gold Rush are more interested in In-Book Promotion, my book about using the Kindle’s built-in features to promote your book, than they are in How to Format Perfect Kindle Books or my book about riding the Indian Pacific train across Australia, Hot Silver.
If I wanted to put a prominent ad for one of my other books in Not a Gold Rush, I now know it would make sense for it to be for In-Book Promotion. And I’ll be able to see how successful the ad is by using the technique described in this post.
And it’ll help for advertising
I’ve said for a long time that advertising is the future of ebooks because it’s not going to be viable to write them for the low sales price that readers are coming to expect. And if you’re supplementing royalties with advertising, it’ll help to be able to tell advertisers how many people are clicking.
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