Writing By The Seat Of My Pants

Every indie author comes to the point in their career where they’re going to have to secure book reviews and from what I’ve observed, not many of us are good at it.  Despite what you may have heard there are reviewers that are totally disgusted with the treatment they’ve received from indie authors and have in turn, stopped reviewing indie books.

There is an amount of professionalism that is required of us remember, we’re not only authors but we’re publicists and PR managers which require a certain type of skill.  We need to not only know how to pitch but also what to do once we get the green light.  This article is more about preparing for success and maintaining that success once the dust settles on your book launch.

Get Their Name & Genre Right

A sci-fi reviewer doesn’t want to read a romance novel so read their submissions guidelines carefully.  Also, do your best to address your request to the right person if it’s a multi-reviewer site.  People like it when you use their name otherwise, your email or message comes off as automated or spammy.  Sorry but Dude What’s Up, or Dear Reviewer, isn’t going to cut it.

Give Them Time

Reviewers need time, and that can mean months before they can get to your book.  The bigger the reviewer, the more time they’re going to need.  Unless you’re willing pay them for a rush job, just wait your turn.

Be Gracious 

Send personalized thank you emails and offer to help them in the future if they ever need it.  That can mean anything from a retweet or recommendation.  Yes, even if they trashed your book, you still should thank them for a free, honest review.  It’s a bitter pill to swallow but reviews aren’t about your ego, they’re about promoting your book and every book has bad reviews.

Follow Them on Social Media & Give Them a Shout-Out

Just about everyone these days appreciate free promotion. With all the noise on the internet, something like a social media post or shout out in a blog post is really nice.

Promote, Promote, Promote

If you got a newsletter, make a mention of this reviewer even if it’s brief.  Don’t just promote stuff you’re doing, promote their stuff as well like giveaways and interesting conversations.  Authors are always complaining about not knowing what to post about on social media and this is a way to remedy that.  Also, bloggers are constantly complaining about authors not acknowledging them during a promo.

Stay in Touch

Keep this person in your network and make sure to nurture the relationship by sharing their content and sending them things that will interest them.  Keep supporting them remember, it’s not easy being a reviewer, some of them are harassed online and even threatened.  It’s common sense but people respond to kindness and often ignore those they see as panhandlers.

In Closing…

You’d be surprised at how people skip over these important points when engaging a book reviewer.  There are many blog and social media posts rebuking authors who just ask, ask, and ask but offer nothing in return.  Do yourself a favor and don’t be that author!

In my last post I talked about the basics of SEO keywords and today, I’ll briefly go over the dos and don’ts of where and when to use them. SEO can help book sales by positioning a book in a clear and concise manner for readers to find easily. It can also hurt, an author when used improperly causing the search engines to actually downgrade a book. In fact, just a few years ago, a retailer took down all self-published books from their website causing an uproar.

But before I go there, I still need to address the issue of sloth.

Keywords The Lazy Way

In my last post, I showed you how to find keywords on Amazon and Goodreads. However, if you are short on time, or just don’t want to bother, there are several pieces of software that claim they can take the hassle out of keyword searches. One is called, Kindle Spy and the other, KD Suite, both claim they can find out what other bestselling authors are doing so you can spy on what they’re doing right. The software can cost anywhere from $47 to $97 (U.S.).

None of the authors I’ve seen have anything special to report after using these types of software. They do what they promise, they save time but there is a question about accuracy. One author who used Kindle Spy claimed to have spied on herself and was surprised to see the software reported that she was selling 6 times more than she actually was. There was also suspicion about that software possibly counting free books as sales.

 

Where Do We Use These Keywords?

After you find the keywords that fit your book best, it’s time to start putting them in the title or subtitle of your book. I highly advise at least putting keywords in a subtitle even if it’s not in your original plan to have a subtitle. This let’s readers know exactly what they’re getting when they click buy.  For example, in my vampire novel Eternal Bond I did this:

 

As you can see, I told readers it was a vampire novel series in the subtitle just so they know exactly what they are getting.  It worked very well on Wattpad.

A Warning About Keyword Stuffing

But you don’t have to stop there, keywords can be used on social media as well.  For example on Twitter, hashtags, help people connect to the topics they’re interested in.   The best way to get visible and possibly go viral is to use keywords so people can find you.

 

Now on the flipside, sites like Twitter and Instagram encourage users to not put more than a few hashtags per post.  It’s considered unsightly and douchey by some.  Remember it’s nice to have keywords but use them sparingly even on social media.

 

Under No Circumstance Should You Try Black Hat SEO

As you may have already guessed there were some authors who were not honest when listing their book’s genre.  In fact, several authors have been busted in the past listing their books under the incorrect categories intentionally because those were the hottest genres at the time. This is why Amazon allows readers to report books incorrectly labeled and will even recategorize a book if the mood strikes them.

This all came after an incident called, Erotica Gate where erotic books were allegedly mislabeled and put in the children’s section of the online store. Though the allegations were never proven, that didn’t stop several retailers such as Kobo, Amazon and WH Smith from taking down thousands of indie books in response to this story.

Methods where products are intentionally manipulated (misrepresented) to gain visibility from a search engine is called: Black Hat SEO. Remember retailers, and social media sites all have search engines and they all have rules regarding how to use their sites. Violate those rules and you’ll find your book demoted or banned from their site.

Back to our story, after the Erotica Gate incident, several retailers changed their rules about category listings and keyword usage in order to improve metadata. This was a positive change for readers but it came at a price—literally.

In Closing…

SEO has become a powerful aide when promoting blogs posts, or books because if readers can’t find  what they’re looking for, they can’t read it. Also, SEO can help you gain visibility on sites like Wattpad and Twitter so it would be to your benefit to learn a little about it in order to position your work for success.

Here’s a small sample from my upcoming book “Social Media Hacks No One Tells You About.”  It includes celebrities, cheating and public scorn, I hope you enjoy it.

These days you can buy just about anything online like fake book reviews, fake girl friends and yes, even fake social media followers.  There are multiple online businesses that promise to help people look popular online and increase the number of their social media followers.  Their prices range from a cheap $10 for 5,000 Facebook followers to $300 for 10,000 Facebook followers.  These tactics are appealing for those who are lazy or for people who want instant fans but there’s no way to fake popularity no matter how hard you try.  Let me prove it to you…

According to a Forbes article celebrities like Shakira, Lady Gaga and even President Obama were called out on their inflated Twitter following when it was noticed that many of the same accounts were following famous people, which had little or no activity on them outside of just following people.  It was presumed these were fake accounts from a hired service but no one involved anticipated being discovered.

You see someone created an app that can go through a person’s Twitter account and tally up all the fake or suspect accounts.  Since that time several websites offer this service for free and for today’s lesson, I’ll be using one called Twitter Audit to prove a point.  But before I do that, let’s see how this service works.

According to the online site Twitter Audit, “Each audit takes a random sample of 5000 Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.”

Excerpt taken from: https://www.twitteraudit.com (Scroll to bottom of page)

So I decided to use Twitter Audit and see if anything had changed with pop star Shakira’s Twitter account which was featured in the Forbes article.

I typed in her user name and according to Twitter Audit 64% of Shakira’s Twitter followers are fake.  Now let’s take those numbers and put them into perspective:  As of Aug 19^th 2015, Shakira had a following of 32,686,984 on Twitter and of those 20,919,699.76 were fake.  To break it down even further as to how many people that is, keep in mind there are only 19.75 million people living in the state of New York.  Yes, Shakira can populate the entire state of New York with her fake Twitter followers!

Now do I believe Shakira was directly involved in this scandal, no.  However I do believe her PR team was involved and they were desperately trying to build their client’s social media account by any means necessary.  Sadly they chose to use a technique known as black hat SEO.  It’s the process of artificially inflating web visibility either for social media accounts, websites, or blogs using unethical techniques.  Now granted, if websites like Twitter find out what you’ve been up to, they won’t throw you in the slammer.  However they can delete any ill gotten followers, or retweets, they can even ban you if it suits them.  Keep in mind, when you sign up for an online account, there are rules called Terms of Service, or TOS, and it would be wise to adhere to those rules if you want to do business, on a particular site.

Case in Point

According to The Daily Dot, Sony/BMG and Universal Music were stripped of two billion views on their Youtube accounts.  No, you did not read that wrong, I said billion with a B.  They violated Youtube’s TOS by hiring a service that uses bots to click on pages and artificially increases views for their clients.  So keep in mind social media websites like Youtube can and will clean house when they see someone abusing their platform.

Author See, Author Do

Since it seems that everyone and their mother is doing this, some authors mistakenly believe there is nothing wrong with “faking it till they make it”, and are risking credibility in order to create artificial buzz over their books.  Several years ago, author John Locke was one of those exposed by a New York Times journalist doing a story on businesses providing fake reviews on Amazon.  To add insult to injury, Mr. Locke was outed by the very person he paid to supply the reviews!  Later on several retailers had to give refunds to customers who had purchased Mr. Locke’s book on self-publishing.  Ouch!

Mr. Locke was probably trying to get the Amazon algorithms to work for him.  According to many, if you get enough reviews, Amazon will start promoting your book for you.  But as you see, things didn’t go according to plan.

Why Are You Bringing This Up?

As you spend more and more time on social media you may be approached by these services and you need to know the facts.  Keep in mind there are services which are legitimate and can help you boost your social media following using various methods like advertising, cross promotional groups, and even helping you with content creation.  However, they don’t guarantee a specific amount of followers let alone any engagement.  Though it may be tempting to cheat the system in order to look popular, it isn’t worth it.  Besides aren’t real followers better than fake ones?  Like most things, social media takes time and effort.  You can’t create a bond with readers overnight so don’t waste your money on services that can’t deliver what you really need.

 

For the past two weeks I’ve been talking about affiliate marketing for authors. I shared several of the most popular online affiliate sites and today, I’m going to share more affiliate resources but this time, they will be more writing and book related. I also talk about how to find those hidden opportunities.

So let’s get started…

Where to Look

If you’re an indie author, and looking for an advertiser to partner with it makes sense to look for businesses within your industry. There are publishers, retailers, and online schools that are looking for access to an interested audience, and if you can provide that, you stand to make money.

Publishers

• CreateSpace
• Penguin Random House
• Simon & Schuster
• Harlequin
• Harper Collins
• HCI (Health Communications Inc.) Books
• F+W
• O’Reilly
• Chronicle Books

Retailers

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Kobo
• Smashwords
• Book Baby
• IndieBound
• Audible
• Apple iTunes

Software

• Scrivener
• Grammarly
• Final Draft
• Writer Store:  They also sell books, and courses.

eCourses

• Udemy
• Lynda.com
• Ed2Go.com
• Lumosity

Pitching Direct

Though there are many businesses that have affiliate programs, there are some that don’t publicly announce it. This could mean hidden opportunities for an authorpreneur willing to do the research and who has the bravery to pitch. If you think major corporations are the only ones to approach think again, there are authors with books, and eCourses who would love to hear from you. There are also publishers and agents with seminars and workshops who are desperate to sell tickets to their events.

Now before I go on, most pitches fail because they’re terrible so here are a few tips to help you with your pitch letter.

Tips:

1.  You have to contact the right people.
2. You need to answer the question: “What’s in it for them?”
3.  You’ll have to give them proof that you can reach the people they’re targeting and are a good match for their product.
4. Describe how you’ll market their product to your audience.
5. Give them several ways to contact you.

Keep in mind even if you do everything right, there is still a possibility that they may pass and that’s fine. You can easily pitch their competition instead, because that’s how business works.

I hope you found this post helpful, stick around next week because this series continues with Part 4: Advertising. If you missed the last two parts of the series check them out here:

• Affiliate Marketing for Indie Authors Part 1: The Basics
• Affiliate Marketing for Indie Authors Part 2 Rules & Expectations