This morning, after rolling out of bed on this 4th of July, I saw that my first novel had gotten its 100th review on Goodreads and its 66th review on Amazon. From the same person, and only 4 stars, nonetheless it was exciting to hit 100 on Goodreads. That is just one of many metrics that can describe my book’s success in the market.

So I thought I’d put together a quick summary of the various metrics my novel has hit. For those that have been following along for a while, it is taking what seems like forever to get my second novel out. It is an exciting time in our lives with kids going off to college, two kids starting high school, a new house, and a cool job. So my time to write in the last two years has been very limited.

In any event, here is a quick tally, which I found interesting…

*The #1 in the UK was exciting because that was a competitive market. The #1 in France not so much. That was more of a one-hit wonder because there are so few sales in that market.

More exciting to me was how long my novel stayed on the first page of Amazon’s Kindle page in response to searches for “Vietnam War”. It hung in there for almost a year. That is not a small market, and a year is a hell of a run. Though it rarely was #1 during that time, that it lasted so long on that page was very exciting. Screenshot below of one such instance…

That’s it… Now time to get to work on the family favorite: Chicken Nerds — cream cheese and peppercorni wrapped in marinated chicken tenderloins and then wrapped in bacon all held together with a few toothpicks and then thrown on the grill. Makes for an inferno, but damn good…

Enjoy your 4th!

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One of my daughters is a capable artist and headed to an undergraduate program in Medical Illustration soon. As an aside, she is getting smarter about posting her art to websites and beginning to think about how to charge for her work. I’ve recently had similar discussion with some other writers about how they price their novels. What is really being discussed here is “Penetration Pricing” vs. “Premium Pricing”. Based on my own experience, it sounds more complicated than you might first think, but it is really not that complex.

As a newbie writer, when I published my first novella, I priced it at $.99. It is only ~17K words, and I’m a newbie and started (like all of us) with zero reviews. In effect, what I was doing was “Penetration Pricing”: “Penetration strategies aim to attract buyers by offering lower prices on goods and services. While many new companies use this technique to draw attention away from their competition, penetration pricing does tend to result in an initial loss of income for the business. Over time, however, the increase in awareness can drive profits and help small businesses to stand out from the crowd. In the long run, after sufficiently penetrating a market, companies often wind up raising their prices to better reflect the state of their position within the market.” Quoted from this site.

Over time, as the reviews came in on my book and they were positive, and my “star rating” on Amazon was at 4.8 at one point, I raised the price to $1.49 (In two years I’ve only once run a promo and have never “pulsed” the price). In effect, after about 6 months, I switched to “Premium Pricing”: “With premium pricing, businesses set costs higher than their competitors. … Because customers need to perceive products as being worth the higher price tag, a business must work hard to create a value perception. Along with creating a high-quality product, owners should ensure their marketing efforts, the product’s packaging and the store’s décor all combine to support the premium price.”

Part of why I wanted to write about this was because I heard a comment recently that setting a high price on your Kindle book signals a work is of higher quality.

This is not true. Pricing alone does not establish a perception of quality. This may be obvious to some, but a surprising number of writers and artist (it seems from talking with my daughter) believe in the “Labor Theory of Value” when it comes to their work, though they probably don’t know this economic principle by that name. That is, they believe that they should charge a price and get paid in accordance with how much work they put into their art.

LTV is the core of the Marxist economic doctrine. Obviously it did not (Soviet Union) and does not work. Unfortunately you can put in a lot of work but create a substandard product.

In the case of figuring out your ebook pricing on Amazon, if you want to ramp your sales and charge a premium, I suggest you need at least 4 of the following:

• Your cover is award-winning quality
• Your blurb is knock-out brilliant
• At least 20 reviews (there is evidence that reviews don’t much matter until you have at least 20)
• You have a 4.5 “star rating” (or higher)
• You have multiple books and a loyal following

Of course, this discussion is divorced from traffic (the number of potential buyers who see a book on Amazon). To state the obvious, even if you have all these above, if you are not generating traffic to your book’s sales site on Amazon, your sales are going to be zero anyway. I’ve also written about generating traffic by optimizing your book’s keywords on Amazon. At any price, you need traffic — and lots of it — to ramp sales at any price.

Both Premium Pricing and Penetration Pricing are viable strategies for Amazon books, and how quickly one transitions from one to the other (or any of the other 4 strategies called out at the link) is dependent upon many things. But no matter the strategy, all the supporting pieces need to be in place for it to work.

Please share any other pricing experiences you have had, and what has worked best for you.

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In a recent blog, Neil Patel shared an article titled: “Modern Online Marketing Education: 18 Courses and Resources”. There are only a few blogs I follow closely, and Neil’s is one of them. I know of no one who provides so much value so clearly. In his most recent post, his intent is clear given the title. Too many writers don’t understand that their success has as much to do about marketing as it does about writing well. That is why most books published on Amazon never sell more than 20 copies. Writing blogs can help you write better, but you have to know who you are targeting to sell.

Neil’s blog caught my eye because last week I saw a discussion in an online writing workshop where someone said that marketing your book was about broadcasting broadly. This is a mistake.

I’m very much of the opinion that you want to do the exact opposite. Don’t go to silly extremes, of course, but having been in hi-tech marketing for 20 years, and having launched my first book almost a year ago, I can assure you that you want to be precise.

In fact, going back to Neil’s blog, take note of what he said at the start:

Core Courses

The courses in this section should be taken by every marketer. If you haven’t taken any of these or similar courses in the past, I recommend adding them to your list of courses to take.

1. Introduction to Marketing (University of British Columbia): Everyone needs to start somewhere, and this is the best place for marketers.

This is a very introductory course that will give you a general overview of marketing. It’s not very difficult, but it will make the gaps in your marketing knowledge obvious.

If you have a tough time clearly defining concepts such as market research and brand strategy, you should start here.

When I went to this site, I saw this description about the course content (I put portions in red for emphasis)

What you’ll learn

So the very first learning objective from the #1 course Neil listed is about customer segmentation. The second is about effectively targeting. Hint, hint!

Narrowly focusing is critical to success

When I published my novella through Amazon 11 months ago, I thought the title was clever and the keywords all encompassing. And I sold about 1 book a day. A couple weeks in, I began wondering why I could not sell more, and I became increasingly self-critical. I also did a lot of research (to include search engine behavior) and studied other books in my Amazon ‘category’.

As a result, though I could not change the title, the subtitle (and therefore, the cover) have gone through three iterations and have become ever more descriptive and precise, as did my keywords. Shortly after the most recent iteration, and after raising the price, the book climbed into several of Amazon’s top 10 lists.

My book was #1 out of ~5,000 books in its category for several weeks (four months later, it is still in the top 15 for that search).

I want to be clear — and to my point — these are not Amazon’s big bestseller lists, so there is no doubt that making it to the top 10 of these lists is a trivial feat compared to making it on to the New York Times bestseller list. But I would not have even made it to the top 1000 of any list until and unless I got precise and made clear to potential customers — and the Amazon search engine — exactly what my book is about.

Think about it as a consumer

When you go to Amazon, do you search for “romance”? I suspect you’re specific. For instance, “19th-century British romance” or perhaps, “American west cowboy romance”. Or if you prefer something futuristic, do you search for “sci-fi” or something such as “Sci-fi space marines” or “sci-fi first contact”. So in your marketing — which is you telling potential buyers about your product — be precise.

Target influential reviewers

Similarly, to find and engage influential reviewers that were credible to my narrowly defined target audience, I spent time carefully combing Amazon’s top 100 reviewers for people who I thought would be interested in my book and who had written reviews of very similar books. Then I wrote each of them personal, short letters politely asking them if they would review mine. A surprising percentage said yes, including Amazon’s #2 reviewer. Again, I was very narrowly focused and spoke to each of them personally. I’ve also written about exactly how I did this.

One of the hardest parts of marketing is understanding that the vast majority of people (consumers) will never have any interest in what you are selling. So get precise and talk to the minority that will be interested if you communicate clearly to them about what you are offering. That is your target market and if you win over even 10% of them you’ll have a bestseller.

Any other experiences? What examples of precise targeting have you used?

Please use the buttons below and to the right to share with another writer. Thanks!

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My first novel has been the #1 bestseller in its category in the UK, and it has made it into the top 10 of nine Amazon bestseller lists worldwide. My sense is that when most US authors post their book to Amazon, they don’t think twice about their overseas or international sales. This is a mistake because there are a lot of big markets outside the United States. You can fall further behind or you can ramp your sales. About 10% of my volume is now coming from non-US Amazon sites.

I have not translated my novella into any other languages, and I have spent less than $10 on advertising outside the United States. Here are a few things you can do in about an hour to help ramp your own international book sales…

First, make a decision to do it. Just paying attention to it will help you do better. As you obsess about how to ramp your sales outside the US, you will have some sudden “Ah ha!” moments and realize you have ways to help ramp your international sales. For instance, you might remember your old friend from college got a two-year expat assignment in the UK. You can ask her to write a review and post it on the Amazon UK site. Maybe you are going to be in Australia in a few months for a training event for your company. Why not spend an extra day and do a book signing in Sydney?

Second, ask Amazon to help. Let me be specific: Because I was thinking about it, I was staring at the UK site for my book a couple months ago wondering about what I can do to help ramp my sales via that site.  As I was doing so, I was aware that the editorial reviews I loaded in my US Amazon site via Author Central did not show up on the UK site, or any other non-US site. That is just the way it is.

Or is it?

What if I asked? So I sent Amazon a note asking them to copy the editorial reviews from my US site to my UK site. The email bounced around a few times, but eventually it got to the right person, and they did it. Wow. That was easy. And I saw a bump in sales as a result. I have just asked Amazon to add the “Editorial Review” content to 5 more of  their sites (not all Amazon sites worldwide support this feature).

Third, get your pricing right. Hint: It needs to end in “9”. When you set your book price on Amazon, for instance, $1.49, Amazon’s system will automatically default to a comparable price in other countries based on the exchange rate. For instance, in Europe, $1.49 might be 1.31 Euros. In Japan, an equivalent price might be 1.61 Japanese Yen. In Canada, your book might cost 1.93 Canadian. Those are all “bad” prices that will not help you sell your book.

The research is overwhelming that consumers are more likely to buy something that has a price that ends in “9”. There is even some evidence that people will buy more of a slightly higher-priced good as long as the last digit is “9”. For instance, in a large enough sample, a store will sell more of something priced at $1.59 than at $1.56 in carefully controlled experiments. It is just something about how we humans think. So don’t fight it. Instead, use it to your advantage.

Instead of letting Amazon set your price, you can override this default setting and establish your own prices. I suggest you go down to the next “9” from whatever number Amazon calculates. For instance, if you want a US$ price of 1.49, if Amazon concludes they would price your book at 1.31 Euros in Europe, manually set your price to 1.29. If Amazon wants to set it as 1.93 Candian in Canada, roll it back to 1.89 Canadian. Once you do this, you’ll actually sell more, so your sales rank will be higher, you’ll pocket more money, and you’ll eventually get more reviews.

Here is either a proof point or a really strange coincident about the importance of having your price end with a “9”: In over a year of it being available, I’ve never sold a copy of my book in Japan (I’ve not translated my book, so it is available only in English). Within 12 hours of me manually changing the price so it ended in a “9”, I sold my first copy in Japan. And because it is such a small market, that one sale propelled my book into the top 10 in its niche in Japan, so one more top 10 list I can claim, and the odds are that I will sell more now precisely because it is getting more visibility by being on the lists that Amazon shows to customers.

Fourth, consider using non-English keywords.

For instance, check out this screenshot from the German site for my novel:

Notice the word “Krieg”. That is German for “war”. My book is about the Vietnam War. My book is about the Vietnamkrieg. So I added “Vietnamkrieg” to my Amazon keywords. Again, a small sales bump, and at the time I took this screenshot my book was #10 on the bestseller list for “Vietnamkrieg” in Germany. Not bad!

So think about any powerful words in other languages you can add to your list of keywords. Of course, you can only load so many keywords in your Amazon metadata, but if there is a word that has high and relevant search volume in a large market, then consider adding it to your Amazon keyword list.

Fifth, let’s talk about my sales in five more countries…which I can’t explain:

France… #1

Canada… #2 (and #2,536 for all Kindle ebooks)

Australia… #2

Brazil…  #9

India… #9

How about that — I’ve broken into the top 10 of bestseller lists in the UK (screenshot at the top of the blog), Japan (screenshot a few lines up) France, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and India. Nice!

In these small markets, I have been averaging one to three books per month (in the UK it is more like 10 – 15 per month). Sometimes they come in little spurts, other times I won’t sell a thing for a month or more.

It is important to realize that you may never know why your book starts selling in a given country. But it won’t get any sales if your book is not available there. You will benefit from wide distribution even if there is no particular driver. Buyers could be expats or anyone else. You’ll never know. So when you set up your book via Amazon, unless you have a specific reason not to, I encourage you to enable it for sales in all possible countries (this also applies to CreateSpace).

Sixth, leverage local reviewers if you can. For example, one of the early reviewers of my book was an Australian, which he makes very clear in his screen name. Australia played a significant role in the Vietnam War, so when I saw this review come in, I took advantage of the fact that he was a self-identified Australian, so I added “Australia” as another of my keywords. Again, it was valuable space to give up, but I am gaining some sales from “down under” as a result and have made it to #3 on an Amazon list there.

Seventh, a few of the fields you load in your US Author Central site will be replicated to all Amazon sites worldwide. One that will be is the “About The Author” section. The more appealing you make yourself to an international community the better you will do internationally. For instance, if you used to live in France, and speak fluent French, you might throw in a line in French calling out to your friends there.

Eighth, ask your reviewers to post on other Amazon sites. Though I’ve only recently realized this was possible — by posting a review I wrote on someone else’s book on another of Amazon’s international sites — this seems like it could be to our benefit as writers. Yes, it is true that Amazon shows reviews from Amazon.COM on all sites, but they are listed below reviews that are posted to that site by natives of that region. My guess is that potential buyers are more responsive to reviews posted to their national site rather than those Amazon imports from other sites.

So when a reviewer wrote me the other day after posting a 5-star review, I thanked them and then asked them if they would be so kind as to post their review to two other international sites. …and they did.

Ninth, take advantage of the free advertising that Amazon gives you. Set up your reviewer name in Amazon as the author of your book. This way if someone reads one of your reviews – to include on international sites – and is interested in learning more about you, they will see that you are an author of a book. Odds are you are probably reviewing books from the genre in which you write, so you might pique their interest enough that they get to your sales page and buy your book.

Tenth, and last, take screenshots when your book makes it on to the top 100 of international sites. Obviously, some of these lists don’t have a lot of books on them, so selling only a few can land you in the top 100 or even top 10 of some bestseller lists, which is what has happened to my book in a few instances. You want these screenshots, though, for your own marketing and proof.

Remember that Amazon updates sales ranks frequently, as often as every hour. So when you do see that you have sold another book, don’t just smile about it, go to the bottom of your KDP page and see where the  sale came from. In the screen shot below, I narrowed the search to the last few days. You’ll see that I’ve highlighted a few sales in the UK and in Canada.

Once you see sales outside the US (or your home country), go to your “Bookshelf” on your KDP page, and then click on “view on  Amazon” (see screenshot below). When you do this, you’ll see a drop-down menu that lists all the Amazon sites worldwide at which your book is for sale. When you see a “Royalty” value other than “0.00”, click on these sales pages for your book to see how the ranking has changed as the result of your most recent sales. Sometimes (in my experience) it may take an hour or more for these pages to update, so you may have to come back a few times to see any changes. When you do see changes, take screenshots for your records when you see your sales in the top 100 (which is how I got the screenshots  I used above).

I’m not getting rich as an author (yet), and my international sales are just a fraction of my total. But it is real sales and real money and does increase my international exposure. It is also more “social proof” that my book is worth buying and reading, which helps get more sales. The best part? It was easy to do.

To summarize, with very little effort, I can honestly report (and show the screenshots as proof) that my first novel has made it into the top 100 of multiple Amazon bestseller lists worldwide, and it has made it into the top 10 of eight bestseller lists in seven countries (including two in the US).

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have seen any other tactics or techniques to help you ramp sales outside the US. And please share with other writers because we all need help ramping our sales!

The post 10 super easy tips to ramp your international book sales appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....