Guest Expert: Aggie Villanueva

A common misconception is that smartphone users can browse websites as easily as computers. Most mobile users will not browse your website, and it’s because they cannot browse it successfully. Everything on the web is made for viewing on computers, not in any way created to be browsed by mobile devices.

Most of the time a smartphone user on your site can’t even perform the simple task of signing up for your newsletter, viewing a video or listening to an audio message because computer programing languages so often cannot be read by smartphones. But apps are designed specifically for mobile devices.

This is why we see the statistics climb drastically in the graph below. The graph tracks how smartphone users chose to browse apps over websites. In only 1½ years more mobile phone time is spent browsing apps than attempting to navigate the problematic Web.

Credits: Analytics from Flurry, http://www.flurry.com/.

Internet Sites Impossible to Read & Navigate With Smartphones

If you don’t have one, borrow someone’s smartphone and use it to go to your internet site or any favorite site. You’ll see you have to stretch the page to make it large enough to read the text. This will give you a tiny cut-out section of the page. In order to read you must scroll to the right and read what shows, then scroll to the right again and read, and then scroll to the right…ad nauseam.

And when you’ve finished that left to right section you must scroll down, adjusting until it goes only to the next sentence after the ones you just read and repeat the process again and again and again.

And THEN you must scroll up and down and left and right to find the menu to click and go to another page. Not to mention the pains taken in order to find your sidebar with all its vital information and links. It’s frustrating and so time consuming most smartphone users will not bother.

Smartphones Incompatible With Web Programming Languages

Impossible web navigation is just one aspect that makes smartphones incapable or browsing internet sites successfully. Most of the time a smartphone user on your site can’t even perform the simple, but vital, task of signing up for your newsletter, viewing a video or listening to an audio message, because many programing languages cannot be read by mobile devices. But apps are designed specifically for mobile devices. They keep it simple for the small screen and its internet limitations. Conversely apps aren’t straddled with the limitations of websites.

Placing your app in the Apps Marketplace is the best way to effectively market to those who exclusively use their smartphones rather than computers. And that’s a trend to pay attention to; more and more people with smartphones don’t even use a computer these days.
 

Graph credits: Analytics from mobiThinking http://mobithinking.mobi/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats#mobilepageviews

What if My Site Has a Mobile Friendly Plug-in?

There’s still not much hope that mobile device users will browse your site when you slap on a plug-in that claims to make it mobile friendly, unless you pay big bucks for it to be done by an individual programmer(s). The free and inexpensive ones are fairly ineffective in my experience.

But I try to always prepare as much as possible on all fronts. I use the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin for my company site, Promotion a la Carte. But no matter how I configure the few settings available, it insists on showing every hidden page/post and other items that have no place in a menu, making it an unreadable string of text. And that’s the first thing seen. So mobile visitors are utterly confused as to what my company is and what I sell, even though my site is mobile registered and supposedly mobile friendly.

For this reason, I’ve had my programmer create a Promotion a la Carte app which is linked to my app, just as purchasing my books is linked in my app.

If you have any further questions, please check out the remaining articles, or leave them in the comment section below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you wish to know more about Aggie Villanueva and her company check out this page.

Published at Thomas Nelson before age 30, award-winning author Aggie Villanueva is now a self-published fiction & nonfiction author at Amazon/Kindle with The Rewritten Word, Rightfully Mine and Amazon Categories Create Best Sellers, all of which reached bestseller in multiple categories shortly after release. Aggie founded Promotion á la Carte, author promotional services and 6 months later was voted #2 at Preditors & Editors in the Promotion category, and then #4 in 2011. She teaches author promotion across the Web. My Book Marketing Systems is her sister company that saves authors $100s – $1,000s, allowing them entry into the  mobile market of billions. She is also an award-winning critically acclaimed photographic artist represented by galleries nationwide, including Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ. Contact Villanueva at aggie@promotionalacarte.com.

Notable blog posts, articles and happenings on the web this week:

• Joanna Penn has put together a quick summary of Mark Coker’s ebook – ‘The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success’. The book is worth a quick read and the best part is that it is currently available free. Download the PDF version here.
• Microsoft has committed to invest 605 Million dollars in Barnes and Noble’s Nook venture in a bid to capture a share of the fast growing ebook (and Amazon Kindle) market.
• Fantasy writer Ed Robertson has been comparing the Amazon Kindle ranks of ” tons and tons of different books on different browsers” to fathom the mind of Amazon’s algorithm. His initial discoveries led him to believe that Amazon maintained 3 different versions of a given list. In a subsequent blog post, Ed draws the conclusion that even though there is just one list, Amazon’s algorithm is now weighting free sales differently than before causing the end of the “3-day-post- free-promotion-sales-bump”. There’s also a stimulating discussion on this topic happening on Kindleboards with a number of Indie authors proposing that they get out of the Kindle Select program.
• Data geek and author Phoenix Sullivan has also done a piece about Amazon’s mysteries and even provided sales numbers on her various books.
• Talking of Kindle free days, author Judy Powell has had success by giving away her book for free. In this interview with BookBuzzr she covers her experiences as she rode up the charts on Amazon .

Today we’re pleased to present an interview with best-selling author Judy Powell. Judy came on to our radar when she recently subscribed for a BookBuzzr Author Pro Plus account. We were able to connect with her and request her to do this interview.

Judy Powell is a writer and marketing consultant who lives in Ontario, Canada. Her works are diverse, featuring romance novels set in Jamaica, Chicago and New York, a historical novel focusing on Jamaican culture and history, and non-fiction essays which have appeared in anthologies.

Judy’s Caribbean romance, Hot Summer, placed second in the Toronto Romance Writers Contemporary Romance Competition which had entries from countries around the world. Her literary novel, Coffee, Cream and Curry, was awarded the silver medal in the Jamaica Creative Writing Competition.

But before we go on we want you to take a good look at the screenshot below. Notice that Judy’s book Hot Summer is ranked #7 and #9 (as on April 24, 2012) in two different categories. Now visualize your book breaking in to the top 10 on an Amazon list. Enjoy that feeling for a few moments.

Done? Now let’s move on to the interview and get Judy to spill her secrets

Thank you Judy. We’re delighted to have you on the BookBuzzr blog.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m very happy to be here.

Tell us a little about your background that is not covered in the introductory bio above.

One of the things that people find strange about me (at least my brothers do) is that I love to study. I have a BA in International Business/ Foreign Languages and 4 Master’s degrees – in Spanish, Marketing, Literature and Creative Writing. I’m currently researching schools to apply for a degree in Psychology. Immediately after writing, I love learning. Anything. It’s not unusual for me to relax with the Oxford English Dictionary. I’ve read through it twice already. Okay, so I’m a nerd. I admit it : )

How did you feel when your book broke into the top 10 lists on Amazon? Did you go out and celebrate?

I was absolutely overjoyed. I took a screen shot of it and saved it for future gloating. Actually, Hot Summer was also on the top 100 list for Contemporary Romance from mid-January to mid-March so I had a good run. The highest it hit was #1 in Multicultural, #4 in Contemporary Romance and #47 in the entire Kindle store. These things go in cycles, though. You do a promotion and hit it big and then others promote and move up so you slide lower. That’s when you have to ramp things up and promote again. I’ll be pushing Hot Summer for the month of May in an effort to get it back on the Contemporary Romance chart.

What is the writing process you follow? Is there a routine that you’d like to share with us?

I’m up at 4 a.m. every day, even on weekends, and I write long-hand in a notebook until 7:00 a.m. when I have to get ready for the work day and get my son off to school. I then record what I wrote using the sound recorder on my laptop, I email it to a friend of mine who types it then he sends it back to me once I’ve finished the book. This process may seem convoluted but it works best for me because I don’t type very fast. I capture my thoughts much more quickly when I write on paper. By having my friend do the typing I accomplish two things – I don’t waste time typing what I already wrote and my friend pushes me for more material. If he runs out of things to type he immediately calls and harasses me until I send him more pages. It is very motivating when you have someone calling you at all hours of the day (and night), demanding, “Where are my pages?”

Who is your target audience and how do you connect with them?

My target audience is primarily lovers of contemporary romance novels, of which maybe 80% – 90% are women. I do have some male fans who have given me great feedback and have told me they love the story. What I find is that the people who enjoy my novels most are those who are more open to settings which are outside of the USA and enjoy learning about other cultures. Part of the novel is set in Jamaica and quite a few readers have emailed me to say they love the colorful images of the setting and the fact that the story incorporates the local color and culture. Some who have had the opportunity to visit the country tell me the story brings back great memories. Others tell me I have piqued their curiosity and they would now like to get to know the islands of the Caribbean. I love to set my stories in tropical settings which can be so romantic.

How do you market your books? Are there any tips that you’d like to give to our author community?

I would love to share my marketing tips. I sincerely hope it will help other authors to be successful.

For my print books I focus a lot on reaching my audience directly. After the distributor gets the books into the retail chain stores I make direct contact with as many of them as possible within my region and set up book signings where I hand out bookmarks and candy. However, I also attend a lot of events connected with the Caribbean, which is the setting for my story. I sell far more books at the events than I do in the stores. For example, at an Air Jamaica Day event I sold almost 100 copies of Hot Summer while at my best in-store book signing event I sold around 20 copies. In Canada we have a lot of cultural festivals between May and August (we have to capitalise on the few warm months) and I attend several of them to do book signings – outdoor Jerk Festivals, in-door cultural festivals, plays and concerts. I’m also asked to speak at local libraries, which is great because I earn money from the speaking fee they pay, plus they allow me to sell my books to the attendees.

I launched Hot Summer as an e-book back in September 2011 and have found even greater sales success through Amazon.com than I have ever done through selling print books. In my first month I made $12 from Amazon sales, in my second month also $12, in my third $84 then in December 2011 I ran a free promotion through the Amazon Select Program and made $ 856 for Christmas. Not bad, I thought. In January 2012 I gave my book away again and over 30,000 people downloaded free copies. One might think this is a bad thing. Not so. When the book went back to regular price after 2 days, it shot up the charts and that’s when it hit #47 in the overall store, selling over 1,000 copies in a single day. Needless to say, January was an excellent month for me and my month’s sales moved from hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars.

I mention all of this to illustrate the importance of using all the tools available to you. If you have books in the Amazon Kindle store then the free promotion is a tool that allows you greater visibility on the ‘also bought’ lists of other related books. With that added publicity people are better able to find you and try your book. It is important to promote your freebie days by making announcements on Facebook, Twitter and by advising websites or blogs so that the book can be announced to as many people as possible. The more free downloads you get, chances are the more successful your book will be after the promotion.

Another strategy I use for my e-books is to solicit feature on blogs and websites that reach my target audience. I am always open to doing guest posts and interviews because every bit of publicity counts. I also place ads (selectively) on websites frequented by lovers of fiction in general and contemporary romance in particular.

Twitter, Facebook or Blogging – which is your favourite platform to connect with your audience and why?

I believe blogging is the most effective of the three platforms. I do not have a blog myself but I do guests posts on several other blogs. I’m featured on at least 5 – 6 blogs each month. I do have a Twitter account but I am still learning about how to use this more effectively. With Facebook I find I’m reaching my friends rather than new people. I would therefore recommend putting blogging at the top of this list.

How do you deal with negative reviews on Amazon?

When you decide to put your work out to the world you have to be prepared for both positive and negative reviews. You have to have really thick skin. I must warn authors that when you give your book away in the free promotion you will find several people downloading because it is free without even reading the product description or checking out the sample to see what the book is about. Then, once they start reading, they find that this is not a book that appeals to them. This sometimes results in a negative review and sometimes comments that really sting. However, the key is to take both the good and the bad in stride. I read all the reviews, take all the comments into consideration and may even act on some of them. The beauty of e-books is that they’re dynamic – they can be changed at any time. If I receive a comment that makes sense I go back and edit the manuscript to improve it for future readers. However, I never respond to reviews, whether good or bad. What I decided to do, though, is to put a note in the back of my book asking the reader to like my book or do a review if he/she enjoyed the read. I’ve had so many people e-mail me directly to say they love my book but it is the hardest thing to get them to say the same thing on Amazon.

You priced your book at the standard Indie author price of $.99. Was there a strategy behind that price or were you just going with the flow?

For me, pricing is dynamic as well. I used a promotional price of $ 0.99 for Hot Summer for a period in order to get new readers to give it a try. However, it is a full-length novel at almost 300 pages so I think the regular price of $ 2.99 is reasonable. I have seen authors change their price from $0.99 to $ 2.99 to $4.99 depending on the nature of the book and the nature of their market. I don’t intend to price higher than the $ 2.99 price point. I think that’s a reasonable place for me to be with this particular work.

Would you like to share any book marketing tips with the BookBuzzr author community.

Yes, most definitely. I will share what has worked for me in the hope that it will be of benefit to others:

1. Have an attractive cover that is appealing to your target audience.
2. Have a title that sets the mood for your story and attracts readers.
3. Create a great blurb/ product description that draws the reader in. Have a hook.
4. Make sure you’ve written the best story you can and edit it so there are no typos to distract or annoy. When doing self-editing I read my entire book backwards (not word by word but sentence by sentence, as in last sentence first then second-to-last sentence and so on). This takes me out of the story flow and allows me to pick up missing words, typos, etc.
5. Pay attention to your first line, your first paragraph and your first chapter. This is what the reader sees when she checks out the book sample. Make sure that these draw the reader in.
6. Get as many positive reviews posted as you can. Solicit comments from reviewers, provide free copies to fans who will read and comment on your work (by the way, I gave away 100 copies of my book in December in an effort to get reviews; did not get a single one; be selective in who you give review copies).
7. Do promotions – giveaways if you are with the Kindle Select Program, blog tours, interviews and features on websites, etc.
8. Write in a series if you can. I write books under other names in other genres and for one of my series my second book hit the best seller chart in its category with absolutely no promotion except that it was mentioned in the back of book 1 in the series.
9. Set up a website or a blog page where people can learn more about you. My website is www.judypowell.com. Readers can feel free to visit me there. There’s a ‘contact me’ page where you can ask me questions directly, if you wish.

I hope this helps. Much success to everyone!

Vikram Narayan is the founder of BookBuzzr Book Marketing Technologies. (Twitter – @bookbuzzrCEO ) Vikram is a graduate from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to starting BookBuzzr, Vikram founded another software company that has been successfully serving clients from all over the world since 2001. When he is not dreaming up ways to help authors accelerate their earnings and book sales, Vikram spends his time playing the guitar, practicing Aikido and spending time with his family.

Have you ever wished that your book broke into a best seller list on Amazon?

Aggie Villanueva has written a book that gives you tips and ideas to use the categories feature on Amazon in order to break into a best seller list. We reached out to Aggie in order to get her to share some of her learning with the BookBuzzr author community.

The interview follows:

Hello Aggie! Can you tell us a little about yourself?

Hello Vikram. Thank you so much for having me. I am so enjoying this little virtual visit.

My writing related bio is easy because it’s below, so I’ll tell you a little about the other part of myself! And thank you for asking.

I’m a baby boomer who quit school at 15 to run away and “change the world.” I didn’t do it – Imagine that! I got caught up in the hippie drug culture which negated the hippie ideals that drew me out to begin with. It’s a common coming of age story for the 60s.

A few of my major influences were the Black Panthers (pre violence philosophy), the Freedom Riders, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou freeing all caged songbirds, Malcolm X, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and President Kennedy for sending in the troops to enforce civil rights and founding the Peace Corp. But most of all, my grandparents who raised me, humble Baptist preachers who lived what they preached.

I’m also a photographer. I was dubbed the Grandma Moses of the American Southwest, but last summer I moved from New Mexico to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Maybe I’ve now become the Grandma Moses of the South rather than Southwest?! Either way, I’m honoured by the moniker, and can’t wait to aim my lens at this southern mountain beauty.

What’s the story behind your latest book – ‘Amazon Categories Create Best Sellers’? Is it really that easy to become a best-selling book?

Well, of course we all know the first step is to write a quality manuscript on every level through editing and publication. And we all know that’s as easy as sweating blood onto virtual paper for several months and then paying editorial professionals to wring us out. BUT, once that shining book is in hand, it really is often just a matter of what I call “working Amazon.” And the first step is to understand what they offer and simply utilize it.

Amazon has created an ingenious free publicity machine with one purpose in mind – to sell books. And if your book is listed there, their automated system will work for you too, if you just pay the system a little attention. Amazon wisely structured the site for auto-promotion, promotion and more promotion applied to each and every book without bias.

Many are unaware of the tendrils of intertwined opportunity extending from your sales page to your target audiences. And those lead to more and those lead to more and…you get the picture. But you must put a little effort into identifying your audience. Amazon pretty much does everything else on auto-pilot.

I would never presume even slight understanding of the workings of their automated algorithmic tendrils, but my experience there points to this: everything is based on the important thread of tightly targeting your audience.

Amazon knows that. Booksellers all claim to know that. But Amazon.com is the only site I’m familiar with that actually implements it into an automated system that goes far beyond tallying bestsellers, it permeates layer upon layer of interconnected promotion, advertising, direct email marketing and more. You’d spend 100s of thousands of dollars to purchase what Amazon offers for free.

In my book, through the eyes of this fellow writer (and I’m no techie genius or legal authority) I show how categories are set up to nudge your book toward category bestselling status if you choose them wisely. You’ll also start to see the connections between all their other layers of promotion. Amazon also offers numerous top 100 lists, and I touch on several of them you can use to target your audience. Everything in Amazon’s system seems to come full circle back to tightly targeting your audience.

What is the single biggest mistake that authors make when it comes to promoting their books on Amazon?

The biggest mistake is to publish a book to Amazon and Kindle and just let it sit there waiting for sales. Sales that will probably never come if you continue to do nothing.

Amazon is much more than just their own spot-on branding as the world’s largest bookstore. Being so huge it’s easy to mistakenly trust customers will flock to your sales page. If you don’t utilize their system then Amazon is just the world’s largest bookstore. What a waste if that’s all they do for your book when they could be making it a bestseller.

What are some of the activities that authors should not do in order to avoid being banned or blacklisted by Amazon?

It does seem to be easy to get in trouble with The Giant doesn’t it, even though you’re innocent?

For the last year or more book reviews disappearing has been a big controversy in the writer’s world because those reviews are a vital element in Amazon’s publicity system. Many times legitimate efforts at writing and/or receiving reviews are attacked by Amazon. They’ve deleted thousands for no reason, or for mistaken reasons, and refuse to reinstate them.

And many have been deleted because of unwitting violations. It seems to be an over-reaction to the illegitimate use of reviews by the unscrupulous, but Amazon hasn’t commented publically so we can only guess. And as usual, the innocent are the ones to suffer.

I am by no means schooled in copyright law or any legal matters, but something I’ve found that I think shocks authors new to Amazon is also something contrary to the way it is everywhere else; when you write (or receive) a book review on Amazon, you have no rights to it. They own it completely.

I know some authors who simply reprinted an Amazon review in an online press release, and Amazon threatened to pull the books from its “shelves.”

There are a few obvious violations here (but commonly unknown to authors). Let me state again that I’m not a lawyer; this is my opinion drawn from studying their help files. The first violation I see here is that the review was reprinted without permission, and permission is already denied in black and white at Amazon.

Possible workaround: Quote from your book’s review on Amazon using only the excerpts you would use according to the Fair Use laws. Or call Amazon each time you want to quote them and ask how you might do that legally.

The second violation I see was that the press release, naturally, contained promotional URLs. That’s the whole purpose of a press release. So when Amazon’s ‘bots ferreted out the press release it was tagged in violation to the rule that no reviews could contain promotional URLs. There may be more violations I’m unaware of.

I delve further into this in the book. But I must stress that these are just my studied opinions. You’d have to talk with Amazon to confirm your own questions. Whether my opinions are drawn correctly or not, the result is the same – wrongful restriction/termination/deletion of well-meaning authors and reviewers. For further insight, I enjoy reading the articles at The Big River Review, Ethical Standards & Reviews on Amazon.com.

What are some simple steps that authors can take to improve their book’s rank on Amazon and improve sales?

Simply changing your categories to more tightly target your audience is the first step. But it’s a vital one. Some authors I’ve worked with checked to discover there were no categories attached at all to their print books. This happened to me too.

Without attached categories you aren’t even eligible to be tallied for a bestseller or any of Amazon’s top-100 lists. This alone could account for the fact that your book is not a bestseller many times over. You can change or attach categories in your Author Central account.

You can also try and rally your readers to write an honest review of your book on Amazon. Large numbers of high ranking reviews is the only way to rank in the Top Rated list. This is my favorite because this list is reader’s choice. You don’t have to outsell anyone to top the list, but inclusion, especially in the top 20, nearly guarantees sales. Readers really do frequent this list.

There are more top-100 lists and ways to utilize them touched on in the book, and more to be covered in my upcoming books. But don’t wait around for me to write about it. Crawl all over your sales page and study what each section is all about. You just might be rewarded with a bestseller or two or three…

You are also a BookBuzzr subscriber. Which is your favourite BookBuzzr technology and why?

That’s a hard choice, but I have to choose the games, specifically QuickQuiz. I created one called What Do Authors Really Know About Amazon.com, and I think I’m hooked.

I want to find time to study up a bit more. Just in the short time I spent creating some Amazon trivia questions I started to grasp the promotional possibilities of games.

I know. I know. I’ve never played online games so I’m the ONLY one in the world who’s just discovering gaming’s potential. But I really think you’ve outdone yourselves at BookBuzzr with this one. Kudos.

Where can users go to get more info about your book and your services?

This is the companion site for Amazon Categories Create Best Sellers. The site has many sections exclusive to my readers – fun, additional information and prizes. With a password provided in the book you can enter on-going contests, learn from growing lists of articles, video tutorials, and interviews. I’ll be occasionally hosting marketing experts you can talk to via the discussions and comment boxes, and post your own questions. My favourite offering is the long list of URLs from throughout the book on Recommendations pages, a rich source of information about author promotion. Subscribe to be kept informed.

Authors wanting help with their book promotion can get it at my company, Promotion a la Carte, and My Book Marketing Systems will launch you into the mobile marketing arena affordably and with a growing list of products. For free education on all aspects of book promotion subscribe to Promotion a la Carte Blog. We often offer subscriber freebies so check it out.

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More than you ever wanted to know about Aggie

Aah summer!

Rolling waves. Warm sands. Tall cool drinks. And a great book to read!

Inspired by such a vision, we’ve created a new landing page widget theme which you can use for your book this summer. And judging by the fact that several authors have installed the theme on their blogs and websites even before we made this announcement it seems that this theme will be liked by many authors.

Check out the ‘Summer’ theme below:

How this theme can help you sell more books: 

As you may know, a landing page widget is designed to catch the attention of your site or blog visitors  and get them to take a specific action (such as buying your book or signing up for your Facebook page.) Here’s how this new theme from BookBuzzr can help you sell more books:

- It positions your book as a “summer read” in the minds of your readers

- Gives a clear & clutter-free call to action

- Makes your site or blog look more professional and creative

How you can customize this landing page theme for your book:

Apart from your book title and cover image, a landing page widget from BookBuzzr has two parts:

1. Your message
2. Your call to action

Vikram Narayan is the founder of BookBuzzr Book Marketing Technologies. (Twitter – @bookbuzzrCEO ) Vikram is a graduate from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to starting BookBuzzr, Vikram founded another software company that has been successfully serving clients from all over the world since 2001. When he is not dreaming up ways to help authors accelerate their earnings and book sales, Vikram spends his time playing the guitar, practicing Aikido and spending time with his family.

Notable blog posts, articles and happenings on the web:

• Beverly Akerman has written an inspiring and instructive article about how to become an ebook sensation in the Globe and Mail.
  
• Scott Turow, president of the Author’s Guild went on CBC News and discussed Amazon’s strategy of selling bestselling e-books at a loss to tie-up a 90% share of the e-book market. This 8 minute video is worth watching to get a handle on the kind of threat that Amazon poses to the future of the publishing industry.
• Chris Robley wrote a great blog post providing tips to authors about using Pinterest to effectively market their books.
• Steve Piacante recounted his experience spending $2,000 at Book Expo America (does not offer information about the results of the investment though)
•  Lin Lacombe has done a useful guest piece on Joel Friedlander’s blog about how to shine if you ever get a chance to be on a radio interview. Her ideas would work well in a podcast interview situation also.
• The Hunger Games Fan Festival entered the last week and is scheduled to end on April 30th.
• The number of subscribed authors on BookBuzzr reached 8,000!

Vikram Narayan is the founder of BookBuzzr Book Marketing Technologies. (Twitter – @bookbuzzrCEO ) Vikram is a graduate from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to starting BookBuzzr, Vikram founded another software company that has been successfully serving clients from all over the world since 2001. When he is not dreaming up ways to help authors accelerate their earnings and book sales, Vikram spends his time playing the guitar, practicing Aikido and spending time with his family.

A few days ago, I received an email from Shelley Hitz that went something like this:

“Congratulations! You’ve earned $ today.”

Upon opening the contents, I learned that we’d earned about $20. Granted that the amount is not large. But it was still exciting since we seemed to have earned this money rather mysteriously. Upon digging into my own brain further, I remembered that I’d signed up BookBuzzr as an affiliate for Shelley Hitz‘s website.

Now I’ve got two goals:

1. I want to explore this whole concept of affiliate selling further

2. I want the BookBuzzr author community to also profit from this seemingly easy method of making money online.

I learned from Shelley’s affiliate manager – Heather that they have a spring celebration going on. Each of the affiliates can review one of Shelley’s products and host a give-away. So I opted to review a relevant e-book titled 31 Day Guide to Making Money as an Affiliate (affiliate link.)

This book is a 31 day workbook with activities for each day. It starts with the very basics such as choosing a niche, domain name, a web host and an auto-responder. It then moves on to some really valuable and actionable suggestions including:

• Creating landing pages that work
• Attracting traffic to your blog
• Optimizing content for search engines
• Using social media to drive targeted traffic
• Building a profitable sales funnel

I love the fact that the emphasis in this book is on taking action with very little theorizing.

This book is definitely useful if you’d like to understand how affiliate marketing works.

Free E-Book Give-away Worth $20: 

Now as part of their spring celebration which ends on 30th April, Shelley’s team is giving away one copy of their e-book. To get a copy, you simply need to leave a message at the end of this blog post and one lucky winner (drawn randomly on my trusty excel spreadsheet) will walk away with a free copy of this e-book.

Go ahead and hope your spring brings you lots of opportunities for profit as an affiliate marketer!

Vikram Narayan is the founder of BookBuzzr Book Marketing Technologies. (Twitter – @bookbuzzrCEO ) Vikram is a graduate from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to starting BookBuzzr, Vikram founded another software company that has been successfully serving clients from all over the world since 2001. When he is not dreaming up ways to help authors accelerate their earnings and book sales, Vikram spends his time playing the guitar, practicing Aikido and spending time with his family.

So you’ve written your magnum opus and you want the world to beat a path to your door. You’ve heard so much about Google Ads and decide to try it for your book. This article shows you how.

First a Warning: 

Running Google Ads is an activity that is fairly involved. If you don’t know what you are doing, you could land up spending a significant amount of money with little to show for it. I once ran a campaign with advice and help from experts for an online yoga course that I had co-created and spent over $2,000 before realizing that the campaign was not working. So be careful or get the help of a professional. Use this article simply as a method to understand what is involved in running Google Ads. Also, please don’t draw the conclusion that I’m recommending that you run Google ads. With all these things in mind, let’s get started!

Understand Why You Are Running an Ad Campaign on Google: 

Ask yourself why you are running ads on Google. Is it to help with your book launch and perhaps break into a best seller list on Amazon? Is it to help build up a mailing list of users? Or is it simply to make money by selling more books? Whatever the reason, it is important for you to be clear about why you want to run ads. As Lewis Carroll said, “If you don’t know where you are going, every road will take you there.”

Do the Math:

The idea behind every campaign is simple. To get more dollars than you are putting into the campaign. In other words, if you are spending $100 on ads, ideally you want to get at least $101 for the campaign to make financial sense. With this in mind, ask yourself a few questions:

• How much is the cost of my book? What is the proportion of money I make with each book I sell after paying my publisher, my agent and Amazon?
• What percentage of my visitors do I expect to purchase my book (the “conversion rate”)?
• What is the cost of running ads to bring in one person to my book page?

Fix a Budget:

Even before you run the experiment with Google ads, set up a budget. Know how much you are going to spend and set your expectations for the ad campaign realistically.

Have a Landing Page Ready

A landing page is where your visitor lands when she clicks on an ad. There is evidence to support the argument that a landing page with a single call to action (such as “Buy the Book” or “Sign-up for my Newsletter“) is better than a busy page with too many things for the visitor to do.

When visitors click on your ad, think about where you want to take them. Do you want to take them to a specific blog post (where you talk about your new book) or a page on your author site. Make sure that the place where your visitors arrive after clicking on the ad is clear, well thought-out and most important, has a call to action as described above. You may even want to experiment with one of the BookBuzzr Landing Page Widgets.

Decide What Kind of Google Ads You Want to Run:

Google lets you run ads on its search pages when people run a search for a specific term or on its set of partner sites (they call it the Google Display Network … these are blogs and other websites that have content that targets specific readers.)

Choose the Keywords and Setup the Ad

Keywords are words or phrases that your target audience may use when searching. For example, let’s say you’ve written a book that appeals to readers of the Hunger Games trilogy. You might want to run an ad that targets people who search for “Katniss” (one of the main characters in the Hunger Games.)

The thing about Google ads is that you bid for keywords. And in a twist to the concept of a normal auction, the winning bidder pays the amount equal to the next lowest bid. This is a variant of what auction industry insiders refer to as a Vickrey auction. In the example above, let’s say you bid 10 cents for the Katniss keyword. Somebody else may have bid 8 cents and may lose in the auction. You will ultimately be charged 8 cents and not 10 cents.

Google also lets you do all kinds of targeting to ensure that the right kind of person sees your ad. In this example, you may want to set it up such that ads are shown only to women of a particular age group and from a particular geographic location.

You can then state the specific message on your ad. This part is usually a real challenge since you need to match economy of words with enough clarity to communicate the message to the potential visitor. It is best if you create an advertisement for each phrase in your campaign.

BookBuzzr’s Case Study

We ran a small test campaign on Google for the Hunger Games Fan Festival which we conducted on Freado. We did this mainly because we’d received a free advertising coupon from Google and took it as an opportunity to test the efficacy of Google ads. This was how our ad looked (and yes … we were too lazy to take our own advice and created just one ad for all of the keywords that we ran

We tested with a bunch of keywords such as Hunger Games Trilogy, Peeta, Katniss etc. In the beginning, we set it for the default values suggested by Google which was approximately 70 cents per click. Further, these keywords were not working for us (i.e. the people who were clicking on the keywords were not performing the desired activities when they came to Freado.com.) Later, one of our team members went in and played around with the bids for each of the keywords and in the end our cost came down to approximately 35 cents per click. The other big learning was that specific keywords such as Katniss or Peeta worked better than general keywords such as Hunger Games.

Since the entire campaign was essentially a free trial of Google ads for us we did not feel the pinch. Had we been paying real money, we would have wanted to spend a lot less than 35 cents per click to be really satisfied and recommend this to others.

Conclusion

Running Google Ads is a fairly intense activity that is significantly complicated, requires a hands on approach and can sometimes be risky. It is also way more expensive than trying to use alternative options such as a BookBuzzr Author Pro Plus account.

Google Ads may work if you have a fairly high priced book with a high conversion ratio. Else, you may want to take a look at other options including advertising on sites such as Freado and GoodReads that are frequented by readers. We’ll examine these options in the coming days.

The BookBuzzr Author Community Would Love to Hear Your Comments

If you have used Google Ads in the past or know of somebody who has, please jump in and let us know in the comments section.

Vikram Narayan is the founder of BookBuzzr Book Marketing Technologies. (Twitter – @bookbuzzrCEO ) Vikram is a graduate from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to starting BookBuzzr, Vikram founded another software company that has been successfully serving clients from all over the world since 2001. When he is not dreaming up ways to help authors accelerate their earnings and book sales, Vikram spends his time playing the guitar, practicing Aikido and spending time with his family.

Notable blog posts, articles and happenings on the web:

1. The London Book Fair was held this week and a fair amount of Twitter activity with the hash tag #lbf12 was evident.  Some interesting  presentations are available online such as this one from Hot Key Books – a publisher of YA books.

2. Aggie Villanueva released a new book  titled Amazon Categories Created Best Sellers which I reviewed a few days ago. The book went straight to the best seller lists in both its listed categories. Congrats Aggie … the proof of your system working is demonstrated by the success of your book!

3. Jordan Stratford and his collaborators have managed to get over 2,000 backers and pledges over $70,000 on Kickstarter.com for their proposed children’s book.  In their words, “This is a pro-math, pro-science, pro-history and pro-literature adventure novel for and about girls, who use their education to solve problems and catch a jewel thief.”

4. And Mark Coker wrote up a piece for CNN defending the agency pricing model. Titled, “A dark day for the future of books”, the article delves into the recent DOJ case against Apple and five other large book publishers.

Vikram Narayan is the founder of BookBuzzr Book Marketing Technologies. (Twitter – @bookbuzzrCEO ) Vikram is a graduate from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to starting BookBuzzr, Vikram founded another software company that has been successfully serving clients from all over the world since 2001. When he is not dreaming up ways to help authors accelerate their earnings and book sales, Vikram spends his time playing the guitar, practicing Aikido and spending time with his family.

One of the best parts of my job is that I get to review books in the publishing business. Recently, I got a book review opportunity from Aggie Villanueva – an award-winning bestselling fiction & non-fiction author, author publicist, and mobile apps marketer.

This short 43 page book is titled Amazon Categories Create Best Sellers comes bundled with access to a companion site where Aggie provides persistent links to a variety of bonus articles, contests, and recommendation lists.

Aggie’s first how-to book held at least two Amazon bestseller categories steady for its first sixteen months and Aggie draws lessons from this success to help other authors.

This book changes your perspective of Amazon from that of an online book store to that of an author publicity machine … a machine if used correctly will market you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Further, there is evidence to show that once you make it to a category best seller list, Amazon’s bots will push your book out through various built-in promotions such as Top Rated and their recommended lists: Customers Who Bought/Viewed this Item Also Bought/Viewed.

And, according to Aggie, making it to the top of category best seller lists is easier than it appears at first glance. She even clues us in to other top-100 author lists where you can make it to the top of the ranks even without selling a single copy!

Amazon.com like its namesake – is a large, unfathomable, murky river with many secrets and many treasures. This book shines a light on one such secret – using the categories function on Amazon to create best sellers. This little book is essential reading for authors … even those who hate Amazon!

Check out Aggie’s lighthearted, animated trailer. Amazon Categories Create Best Sellers Book Trailer

Vikram Narayan is the founder of BookBuzzr Book Marketing Technologies. (Twitter – @bookbuzzrCEO ) Vikram is a graduate from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to starting BookBuzzr, Vikram founded another software company that has been successfully serving clients from all over the world since 2001. When he is not dreaming up ways to help authors accelerate their earnings and book sales, Vikram spends his time playing the guitar, practicing Aikido and spending time with his family.