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9 Things All Author Websites Need to Have

If your author website is nothing more than a static business card, you’re missing a huge opportunity to connect with fans and sell more books. Your site should be a marketing tool that serves as the hub of all your online activity, from blogging to selling books to participating in social media.

But your author website doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, it should be simple to navigate. While building your platform is important, it should be easy for fans to consume and for you to maintain. Your most important job is writing and selling books, not stressing about your website. So let’s review the most important elements you need to include, and the best practices for each element.

1. Your published books

Your website is a useful sales tool, and should include a page listing all of your published books with links to buy each of them. Here are some best practices to follow:

Link to your book page in your top navigation so it’s easy for visitors to find, no matter where they are on your site.

Show your book covers to spark recognition later when a reader is browsing BookBub’s latest deals or a retailer’s search results page.

Include a quick synopsis and/or a blurb about each book.

Include links to multiple retailers so visitors can easily find your book wherever they shop. Bella Andre includes links to each retailer next to each book on her books page:

2. Your newest or upcoming release

Feature your newest release on your homepage so fans can easily find your latest work. If you have a book coming out in a matter of weeks, you can feature this instead. Consider including blurbs instead of a one-paragraph synopsis. Dan Brown’s website does a great job of doing this:

3. A way to subscribe to your updates

The biggest missed opportunity on most author websites is that they don’t let people sign up to receive updates. Collecting email addresses lets you build relationships with people who specified that they want to hear from you.

These are your biggest fans — the people most likely to forward your updates to their friends, attend your events, or buy your book as soon as it’s available for pre-order. This is so much more meaningful than a Twitter follow or a Facebook like, yet many authors spend more time fussing over their social media presence than optimizing their websites.

Here are some reasonably priced email service providers that make it easy to add sign up forms to your website and send emails to your subscribers:

MailChimp

AWeber

Mad Mimi

Campaign Monitor

Once you’re ready to add your form:

Keep fields to a minimum. Email and first name should be sufficient.

Place this form on your homepage and your blog sidebar, preferably above-the-fold (meaning, don’t make people scroll down the page to find it).

Make it clear what people are signing up for. Will they receive a monthly newsletter, updates about your newest releases, or will this mean subscribing to your blog?

Optional: Offer something enticing to drive more signups, such as a free chapter of an upcoming release or a chance to win an autographed book.

Julie James has a great subscribe form on her homepage.

4. A way to contact you

Many authors make it difficult for people to find their contact information. However, sometimes media, agents, or publishers will want to get in touch with you about something specific you won’t want to miss out on.

Don’t make them hunt down your email address! Here’s what to do instead:

Include a “Contact” link in your top navigation so it’s easy to find.

If you’re wary to publish your email address on your website for fear spammers will scrape the address and wreck havoc, use a simple contact form instead.

If you’d prefer to use an email address, turn it into a mailto hyperlink, include an image of your address instead of text, or use the format yourname [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

If you have a literary agent, include his or her contact information as well.

If your literary agent or assistant manages your fan mail, include clear directions on who readers should contact instead.

Lauren Weisberger has an excellent contact page in which she has a contact form, a subscription form, her team’s contact info, and information for readers seeking an autograph:

5. Links to social media

Social media is an important element of any author’s platform. It’s a way for your readers to have a conversation with you, rather than sending fan mail into a dark abyss. So make it easy for fans to find you on social media. Here are a few ideas for where to place icons linking to each of your social media profiles:

Your header, opposite your logo.

The left side of your website’s navigation bar, if space allows.

Your blog’s sidebar.

Your site’s footer.

Cassandra Clare includes her social media icons in her site’s header, just under the top navigation:

You should also make it easy for readers to share content from your website on their social media profiles. AddThis and ShareThis are two easy-to-install options for social sharing buttons.

6. A list of upcoming events

Include a page that lists upcoming events you’re attending, so fans can save the date for anything local. Here are some things you can include:

Book readings and signings

Speaking engagements

Panels or conferences you’ll be attending

Workshops you’ll be hosting

Live broadcast interviews

Any other media coverage

Gillian Flynn has a “News & Events” page on which she’s posted events for the next few months:

7. A blog to showcase your personality

Your most important job is to write your next book, so starting a blog doesn’t mean you need to update it weekly or even monthly. But your fans will love insights into your personality and your writing process, and anything you post is fodder for your next email to subscribers.

When brainstorming your next blog post, remember who your audience is: your readers. For example, instead of spinning a post about your writing process as “tips for fellow authors,” make it more of a “behind the scenes look” that readers of your books would enjoy.

Once you add more content to your blog, make sure to include these items in your sidebar:

A subscription form: give readers a way to subscribe to updates.

Popular posts: give readers a way to easily find your most popular content.

Recent posts: if your readers find an individual blog post, they can easily see other posts they might be interested in.

Archive: make it easy for readers to scan through your old posts and find the topics they’re interested in.

8. Simple navigation

Your website should make it easy for fans, media, or editors to find exactly what they’re looking for within seconds. From what we���ve already covered, your top navigation should include:

About: this links to your author page

Books: this links to the page in which you list all of your books

Contact: this links to your contact page

Events: this links to your upcoming events

Blog: this links to your blog

Anything else is optional. You’ll see tons of author websites with other types of content, such as media kits, videos, news, press, writing, extras, FAQ, galleries, links, and so on. Don’t let that overwhelm you! Stick with what you need, and feel free to add more later if you’re so inclined.

9. A clean design

White space is your friend. Your site should look clean, modern, friendly, and uncluttered. The last thing you want is a site with Comic Sans font and 90s style design where every square inch is covered with waving animated GIF flags and marquee text.

Here are some best practices to remember:

Choose a simple color palette. Less is more, so when you use a bold color for buttons or links, it stands out on the page.

Avoid pushy media. Auto-playing music or videos is annoying, and many visitors will instantly click the back button.

Avoid dense blocks of text. Use section headers, numbers, and bullet points to break up large pieces of content.

Make it look good on mobile. 25% of all web searches are conducted on a mobile device, so you don’t want to ignore one-fourth of your audience.

Make it easy to hop around. Keep your navigation near the top of the page.

Not sure how to start building out a website? Considering hiring a freelancer? We have plenty of tips — subscribe to this blog and we’ll email you when we publish posts on these topics!

Have we left anything out? Share your ideas in the comments below — we’d love to hear from you!

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10 Simple Marketing Tools Every Author Should Know About

Marketing books online can be a time-consuming task for authors and publishers alike, especially these days when there’s so much noise online. Not only do you need to break through the clutter, but you need to make sense of it yourself so you can keep up with the latest trends. Fortunately, there are tools available that will let you add more creativity to your book marketing and save you time without a huge learning curve.

Here are some free tools that will make your life a little easier:

1. Canva

If you’re building a platform online, that means creating a blog and social media profiles. People share content more frequently if it includes visuals — and social media posts that include images are more likely go viral. In fact, tweets with pic.twitter.com images are 94% more likely to be retweeted. But most authors are not graphic designers. It can be incredibly time consuming to create fancy images from scratch.

That’s where Canva can help. You can search from a library of images, backgrounds, layouts, and fun fonts to quickly drag-and-drop a unique design. They have templates for Facebook posts, presentations, posters, blog graphics, and more… even Kindle covers! That’s right – you can design your own book covers in Canva.

2. Pay with a tweet

If you’re giving away a free chapter on your website, you might ask site visitors to enter an email address in exchange for this chapter. Why not mix it up and have people pay with a tweet instead? This lets you use word of mouth as currency, which can be more valuable than collecting a single email address.

Pay with a Tweet automatically gives people access to your content once they tweet or post about it on Facebook, getting your book more exposure. It’s really easy to use, and is free for up to two campaigns as long as you only enable Twitter and Facebook sharing.

3. Click to Tweet

Click to Tweet is a free service that lets you add ready-made tweets to any online asset via a short URL or hyperlinked text. Upon clicking this link, Twitter spins up a tweet using your copy, and the user can customize the text if he or she would like before tweeting it out to the world. Click here to see an example of this in action!

There are so many places you can add these Click to Tweet links:

At the end of each of your blog posts.

At the end of a free chapter excerpt.

In the header of your email newsletter.

In your email signature.

Below any announcement you make online.

4. Playbuzz

Polls can be an important part of your social media strategy. They can help you get:

Free feedback on anything. Ask for fans’ opinions on your cover design, character names, book trailer, and so on.

Inspiration for your next book. Learn more about your biggest fans and what sort of books they might be interested in reading next.

Fodder for your next blog post. Ask your fans something, and then write a post about the results.

PlayBuzz is a free polling tool that lets you embed your poll directly on your website or on a blog post, and there’s no limit to the amount of responses you can get. The embedded poll also comes with a social sharing button so fans can recruit their friends to answer your poll question as well.

5. Facebook Groups

You’ve probably heard a lot about creating a Facebook page for your author brand, but Facebook groups can be even more valuable, depending on your marketing goals. While Facebook’s algorithm notoriously hides most of your posts from fans unless you pay, you can reach group members without worrying about this algorithm. You can even create a new group for each of your books. Within your group, you can:

Encourage members to discuss your book.

Host live author Q&A sessions.

Host contests and giveaways.

Post exclusive content about your sequel or the next book in your series.

6. TweetDeck

Twitter is an important part of your online platform, but it can be incredibly time consuming. Ideally you should be able to manage your presence on Twitter in 10–15 minutes per day. But using the Twitter website or mobile app won’t be enough to get the job done quickly.

TweetDeck is a free app that makes Twitter much easier to manage. You can install it on your desktop or use it as a browser extension. Here are just some of the ways TweetDeck will make your Twitter promotion much easier:

Save searches for your name or books so you can monitor the conversation or reply to questions that crop up.

Easily create and manage lists so you can monitor fellow authors, loyal readers, editors, and agents without sifting through your main Twitter feed.

View multiple streams, search results, and lists in one view.

Schedule tweets in advance so you don’t constantly have to check in.

7. PickFu

A great cover design, title, and blurb copy can have a major impact on sales. So it’s important to easily test these elements prior to your book’s release so you can sell the most possible copies.

PickFu makes it incredibly easy for authors to test their book covers, titles, and blurbs. You can get results quickly since PickFu has an established testing audience, and survey respondents need to say why they made the selection they did — this way, you’ll know they didn’t arbitrarily choose one design over the other.

Here’s an example cover design test for Simply Austen:

See the results of this test on PickFu.

PickFu isn’t free — you can purchase polls a la carte for $20, and you’ll get 50 max responses per poll. Or you can pay $49 (three polls) or $99 (seven polls) per month, depending on how many responses you want per poll.

8. Spoken.ly

Inspirational quotes are popular social media updates. With Spoken.ly, you can easily turn quotes into shareable images. Don’t stop at inspirational quotes – easily create a bunch of images from your own books, or use this tool to cross-promote books from fellow authors.

9. Feedly

An important thing to remember about social media marketing is that you shouldn’t be entirely self-promotional. If every one of your tweets or Facebook updates is about yourself and your own books, people won’t keep following you unless they’re the most loyal of fans. The 80/20 rule is a good rule to stick by: 80% of your tweets should be helpful or entertaining to your followers, and the other 20% can be self-promotional.

But it can be hard to get ideas for what original content to post next, aside from retweeting or sharing other people’s posts. That’s where Feedly comes in. It’s an RSS aggregator tool that lets you read all of your favorite blogs and online publications in one place. You can quickly scan your list of new posts each morning and choose the best ones to share with your followers. Then use TweetDeck to schedule these posts throughout the day.

10. Trello

Between writing your next book and marketing your published books, you’re probably extremely busy. Trello can help you manage your different to-do lists in a visual way. It’s a free time management tool that we use here at BookBub to track everything from our blog post ideas and personal to-do lists to development and design sprints.

Trello is also a handy time management tool for authors. I set up a personal Trello board to keep track of my writing and personal brand marketing activities all in one view. This not only helps me prioritize my tasks outside my day-job, but also helps me feel a sense of accomplishment when I look at my “Done” column. Here’s what my personal board looks like:

What are your favorite simple marketing tools you’d recommend to authors? Let us know in the comments below!

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9 Ways Publishers Can Build Active Author Communities

An author’s career is fraught with emotional ups and downs, but the author community is a hugely supportive bunch. Indie authors often band together by participating in forums, forming writing groups, cross-promoting each other’s work, or even collaborating on multi-author box sets.

For traditionally published authors, connecting with “pub siblings” is valuable not only to authors, but also to publishers housing their books. Some publishers, like HarperCollins and Bloomsbury Spark, are great about connecting their authors, as there are many benefits to fostering a community:

Cross-promotion. When authors connect, they can help each other market their books using strategies like exchanging blurbs, participating in joint book signings, or hosting group giveaways.

Marketing insights. These days, it’s imperative for authors to help market their own books even when they’re traditionally published. But most authors are writers first, not marketers. Instead of making them go it alone, publishers can make it easy for their authors to get support from each other by having their top marketers share effective tactics and ideas with the rest of the group.

Idea exchange. Whether brainstorming manuscript ideas, plot points, or PR strategies, connecting authors will let them feed off each other’s creative energy.

Writing help. Authors often seek new critique partners and beta readers. By bringing authors together who are willing to critique for each other, publishers can improve the quality of manuscripts they receive.

Word of mouth. Authors can help spread the word about fellow authors’ releases on their social media channels, helping them reach a wider audience and build a fan base of their own.

Some imprints do more than others to connect their authors. Here are some specific things any publisher can do to foster a thriving author community:

1. Host a private online discussion forum

There are several fantastic forums out there for writers, including Kboards and Absolute Write. But authors also appreciate having even more private communities where they can discuss marketing strategy, seek writing advice, and collaborate with others who have similar publishing goals.

For example, Bloomsbury Spark, home to Jenny Kaczorowksi’s young adult books, hosts a private Facebook group for its authors. “Because it’s private,” says Jenny, “we can talk about things that aren’t public yet – share covers, announce deals. We strategize as an imprint, with a strong sense that we all succeed together. The private forum fosters both a sense of ‘we’re in this together’ and that secret club feeling.”

Private forums are easy to set up. Here are some free forum creation tools:

Facebook groups

vBulletin

Simple Machines

Vanilla Forums

2. Create joint online author platforms

There are so many creative ways to generate buzz for books online, from running contests and giveaways to hosting collaborative blogs promising access to exclusive author Q&A sessions.

For example, The Jewels of Historical Romance is a website and Facebook group of 1.5K members that 12 romance authors created. They cross-promote each other’s books, hold monthly joint giveaways and contests, and announce new releases. It’s a free and creative way for each author to reach not only their own fans, but also eleven other authors’ fans.

Publishers can use similar tactics to let authors of specific genres combine forces and access a wider audience. This can be more valuable than encouraging authors to create individual fan pages, which are inherently self-promotional and difficult to build from the ground up. Groups with cross-promotional posts seem more organic, which can be more appealing to fans.

3. Facilitate author blurbs

Blurbs from well-known authors can help newer authors gain traction. They assure readers of the high quality of a new book. When readers see an author they love vetting another book, they’re more confident they’ll love this new book, too. But it can be hard for new authors to get busy big-name authors to agree to read their books, let alone their emails (simply because they get so many).

Publishers can help by soliciting endorsements from their own big-name authors. While there’s no guarantee the authors will agree, they’ll be more likely to respond to a publisher’s request for a blurb than one from someone they’ve never heard of. Connecting the two authors can be mutually beneficial as well, since the veteran will get brand exposure on a new book.

4. Host private events at big book conferences

Many authors make the trek out to big book conferences like BEA, so it’s a great opportunity to get everyone in the same room. Publishers can host an exclusive party or dinner one of the nights of the conference just for publishing house employees and authors.  According to young adult author Lindsay Cummings, Greenwillow, an imprint of HarperCollins, treats authors to a team dinner at certain conferences. “That was a nice way to get to know the other ‘siblings.’”

This is a great opportunity for a publisher’s authors to meet each other in person and organically establish valuable relationships they’ll cherish (and profit from, should cross-promotional opportunities arise) for years to come.

5. Run themed promotions

Many imprints focus on specific genres, so they’re likely home to books with similar themes. For example, if an imprint is releasing three historical fiction fantasy books featuring fae, they can introduce the authors and coordinate several different types of marketing campaigns.

Here are just a few examples of opportunities for themed promotions:

Run a coordinated price promotion over consecutive days or weeks.

Publish a themed blog post and giveaway on the imprint’s blog.

Host a Twitter party and create a themed hashtag to promote the three books.

Sponsor a panel at a book conference at which the three authors discuss how fae historical fiction are the next big thing in fantasy.

The possibilities are endless, but packaging these books promotionally essentially triples each book’s audience, since each book will gain exposure across the other two authors’ platforms.

6. Organize blog tours

A blog tour is a coordinated effort in which an author makes “tour stops” at relevant blogs around the time of a new book release. These “stops” can be any of the following:

Interviews

Q&As

Book reviews

Guest post

A combination of any of the above

While most tour stops are usually book review sites, many authors have their own blogs on which they often review books in their genre. Publishers can maintain a list of authors willing to host blog tour stops for specific genres. Once an author has a new release coming up, the publisher can reach out to these authors. This can be an imprint-exclusive blog tour, or part of a bigger blog tour strategy.

7. Coordinate joint book signings

Book signings, while not as prevalent as they once were, are still a great way to generate buzz in local communities. If publishers have three authors living in New England, it would be beneficial to all three authors to coordinate a Northeast book signing tour. Not only will the authors have guaranteed company along the way, but again, publishers will be tripling brand exposure by introducing fans of one author to the other two authors.

8. Organize panels at book conferences

Speaking on panels at book conferences is a sure way to gain exposure, whether to readers at consumer conferences or fellow authors at writing conferences. It also lets authors connect with and learn from their co-panelists. Panels can be less intimidating to authors who don’t feel comfortable speaking in front of large audiences, and it also helps authors gain exposure to fans who originally came to hear a different author speak.

9. Create an author mentor program

A publishing house is an author’s employer, and it could invest in its authors’ careers by launching a mentor program where well-established brand authors are paired with debut authors to offer advice, ideas, and camaraderie. Like companies in many other industries, creating a collaborative and supportive culture at a publishing house will likely improve employees’ morale and skill sets, not to mention helping authors become more effective writers and marketers.

There’s no doubt that when fostering author communities, authors and publishers both benefit from the experience. If you’re a traditionally published author who’s not feeling the love, share this post with your publisher and get the conversation going. It’s never too late to start a simple Facebook group or host a gathering at the next big conference!

Publishers, how have you helped foster a community for your authors? And authors, how have your publishers connected you with imprint siblings? What ideas do you have for how publishers can create author communities? Let us know in the comments below!

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How to Know If Your Book Marketing Campaigns Made You Money

In today’s publishing landscape, authors and publishers alike need to know how to market themselves and their books to stand out from the hundreds of thousands of books published each year. And most marketing isn’t free. But those who can figure out which marketing campaigns yield the best results, not just which yield the highest volume of sales, will ultimately sell more books because they’ll make smarter marketing decisions.

When you run book marketing campaigns, it’s important to measure your results so you know what worked and what didn’t. Crunching numbers might not be as fun as writing your next masterpiece, but wasting money on campaigns that don’t work isn’t fun either.

Knowing how many books you sold isn’t enough.

Let’s say you’re an indie author and you ran two marketing campaigns for your ebook on two different websites, each of them garnering 500 book sales.

Woohoo! You sold 1,000 books in total. Let’s say your retailer royalty rate is 70%. At $2.99 per book, after your retailer takes its 30% cut, that leaves you with $2,093. Not too shabby! Each campaign led to $1,046.50 in profit, since they each equally sold 500 books.

Wait a minute. At first glance, it looks like those campaigns performed equally well. However, one of those campaigns cost you $600, and the other cost you $1,000.

The $1,000 campaign didn’t do so well, did it? You didn’t lose money on the campaign, but after all that effort, it only made you $46.50. The $600 campaign netted you $446.50 in profit (the amount earned by campaign minus amount spent on campaign). You’d be better off running two of those $600 campaigns next time.

If that’s still confusing, don’t worry. We’re going to break it down even further.

How to figure out how much money you made.

Before we dive in, download our Author ROI calculator. This simple spreadsheet will let you easily figure out whether or not you made money from each of your marketing campaigns.

DOWNLOAD THE AUTHOR ROI CALCULATOR HERE.

Here is the information you’ll need to add to the spreadsheet for each marketing campaign:

Campaign Cost: How much did your marketing campaign cost?

Books Sold: How many books did you sell as a result of running this campaign?

Book Price: How much did your book cost when you ran your campaign?

Royalty Rate: What was your author royalty rate? For indie authors, this could be anywhere from 35% to 70% or even higher. For publishers, subtract the total royalty rate, including the cut paid to retailers and authors (if applicable).

That’s it! Once you provide this information, the spreadsheet will tell you:

Total Revenue: How much money your book made in total. (Books Sold × Book Price)

Author Revenue: How much your book made after your publisher and/or retailer took its cut. For publishers, this is how much you made after subtracting all costs, including any retailer and author payouts. (Total Sales × Royalty Rate)

Author Profit: How much money you made when you subtract the cost of the marketing campaign. (Author Revenue − Campaign Cost)

ROI: Your return on investment. ([Author Revenue − Campaign Cost]/Campaign Cost)

What is Return on Investment (ROI)?

Aside from the Author Profit column (which is very exciting), the ROI column is the best indicator of your marketing campaign’s success. ROI is expressed as a percentage – the higher your ROI, the better your marketing campaign performed.

A positive ROI means you made money on your campaign.

An ROI of 0% means you broke even.

A negative ROI means you lost money on your campaign.

Mathematically speaking, this is how it’s calculated:

In book speak, this is how it’s calculated:

In the future, when you’re running marketing campaigns, those with a positive ROI are worth running again. Those with a negative ROI probably aren’t worth your money and time. Now you’re well-equipped to make smarter marketing decisions. If you have any questions, please let us know in the comments below!

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How to Easily Test Your Book Cover Design to Sell More Books

Think people don’t judge books by their covers? Think again. Despite the shift to digital, your book cover still matters – it’s the first thing potential readers see when browsing an Amazon search results page, skimming their Facebook feed, or reading their BookBub daily deals email.

A great cover design can have a major impact on your sales numbers. For example, romance writer R.L. Mathewson went from selling five or six copies per day of her novel, Playing for Keeps, to over 1,000 per day by updating her cover design.

Like everything else in publishing, cover designs are incredibly subjective. Elements like the image, font face, featured characters, and colors all impact the emotional reaction potential readers might have.

With so much at stake, why hedge your bets on one design without testing it first? Use data to choose your cover design by testing two variations against each other before release day. This strategy can help both independent authors and big publishing houses increase sales.

How should you design your two variations?

If you’re releasing a new book, you’ll need to create two variations at once. But what should you change in each design?

Option 1: Test drastically different designs

You can make your two designs dramatically different. This may be more expensive if you’re outsourcing your cover design.

See the results of this test on PickFu.

Option 2: Test incrementally different designs

You can also focus on just one variable of your design to test:

Font face

Font size (of the title and/or author name)

Images

Color scheme

Characters included (for example: male vs. female or proper attire vs. scantily clad)

See the results of this test on PickFu.

If you’re refreshing the design of a book in your backlist, you can test your new cover against the original before re-releasing it. This diminishes the risk of decreasing sales if your new cover resonates less with potential readers than the original cover.

How can you test for your cover design?

There are different methods for testing your design:

Qualitative: Poll your audience to find out which of two covers they like better. This is a subjective approach because respondents see both variations.

Quantitative: Split A/B test your design with equal segments of your audience. Results are based on raw data (e.g., the number of clicks) and performance results.

Ideally you’ll use both polling and A/B testing as part of your testing strategy. Let’s dive into some of these testing methods.

Option 1: Use polling software like PickFu

PickFu makes it incredibly easy for authors to test their book covers and titles. You can get results quickly since PickFu has an established testing audience, and survey respondents need to say why they made the selection they did — this way, you’ll know they didn’t arbitrarily choose one design over the other.

Here’s an example of cover design test for A Shock to Your System:

See the results of this test on PickFu.

Here are some of the reasons why 76% of respondents chose version A:

PickFu isn’t free — you can purchase polls a la carte for $20, and you’ll get 50 max responses per poll. Or you can pay $49 (three polls) or $99 (seven polls) per month, depending on how many responses you want per poll.

Option 2: Run a poll on your website or blog

You can also run a simple poll by using free tools like PlayBuzz. PlayBuzz lets you embed your poll directly on your website or on a blog post, and there’s no limit to the amount of responses you can get. However, you have to rely on your own network to get responses. This is a plus if you have an established audience because you’ll get responses from the people most likely to purchase your book. However, it could take longer to get results. Fortunately, PlayBuzz makes it easy to share your poll on social media sites so you get more traction.

Respondents can also see the results of your poll immediately after voting, which is fun. There are plenty of other free or inexpensive polling and survey tools out there, including SurveyMonkey and FanPop.

Option 3: Run a Facebook ad campaign

While Google Adwords is a great way to test book titles, Facebook ads are a great way to split A/B test your cover design because you can include an image. You can also get results for as little as $30.

Creating an ad on Facebook is pretty simple. Choose the ad objective “Send people to your website.” If your book has already been released, use your Amazon page as your landing page. If it hasn’t been released, create a page on your website where visitors can sign up for a notification when your book is available to order.

Next, choose the demographics to target. For example, if you’re a Young Adult author, you can target females aged 15–19 who speak English and have specified “reading” as an interest.

Finally, upload multiple images. The recommended image size is 1200 x 628 pixels. If you upload a standard portrait book cover image, only a portion of your cover will appear in the ad.

Note: These are test ads created to show you what these would look like!

Each image will become its own ad where you can track clicks separately. The variation with the most clicks will be your winner.

Option 4: Run an A/B Test Email Campaign

Do you have a list of people who have signed up to receive email updates from you, or subscribers to your author blog? If so, send them a split A/B test email to promote your book. If your book has been released, link to your Amazon page. If not, link to a page where people can opt in to get notified when the book is released.

The emails should be identical except for the cover image – variation A should include one cover design, and variation B should include the other. The variation with the highest click-through rate will be your winner.

Here are some reasonably priced email service providers that make it easy to run split A/B test email campaigns:

Mailchimp

AWeber

Campaign Monitor

Option 5: Display different versions on bookstore displays

Berkley, a Penguin imprint, created dueling covers for the novel Virgin. They printed two different books with unique ISBN numbers. One of the covers was edgier than the other, and instead of speculating which design people would respond to, they let data decide.

While the edgier version of a woman appealed more to men and some booksellers, Penguin’s Facebook audience reacted better to the subdued rose V design. One bookseller even opted to purchase both variations, and let the customers decide.

Of course, you can get creative with how you test your cover design. What are some tactics you’ve used to test your cover design, or ideas you have to share? Let us know in the comments below!

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How I Sold 130x More Books with a BookBub & Countdown Promo

This is a guest post from bestselling hybrid author Cheryl Kaye Tardif, author of How I Made Over $42,000 in 1 Month Selling My Kindle eBooks.

As a bestselling suspense author who has been indie published since 2003, I’ve learned being flexible and adapting to change is key to being successful in this industry.

I only sold 26 copies of my standalone thriller Submerged across Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk during the first 27 days of October 2014. After running a combination BookBub and Kindle Countdown Deal promotion, I sold 3,421 copies. That’s a whopping 130x increase.

Today I’ll share my process and stats from this BookBub promotion to show how advertising on book sites can increase sales.

Step 1: Selected a book

I chose to promote my book Submerged based on the following criteria:

It has sold well in the past.

It had never been on BookBub before.

It hadn’t been priced at $0.99 for many months.

It has tie-ins to my #1 bestseller, Children of the Fog.

When I run a promotion for one title, there is always a strong possibility that some of my other titles will see an increase in sales, too.

Step 2: Coordinated promotion with a countdown deal

I decided to run a BookBub/Countdown combination promo because Countdown deals get extra exposure from Amazon, give you a higher royalty (70%), and they create a bit more excitement.

However, I would only run this promo if BookBub accepted Submerged (they'd turned it down numerous times in the past), so first I pitched my book to BookBub and let them know my dates were flexible, but requested a date close to the end of the month — payday. I did not book any other ads until after I secured a BookBub promo date.

Step 3: Determined timing and pricing

Once my BookBub ad was secured, I used that date as Day 1 of my Countdown promo for both Amazon US and UK. I used all seven days because it can take a few days to build momentum and get into the overall Top 100 on Amazon, and I wanted to stay there as long as possible.

My promo for Submerged was set for October 28 - November 3. I’ve had more success running promos during a payday — the 15th and 30th of every month.

I priced Submerged at $0.99 as this title had only been on sale for $0.99 once before, and that was eight months earlier.

Step 4: Purchased ad space

I purchased ads on a variety of other book sites as part of a coordinated online marketing effort. I paid a total of $1,214 for 22 ads. Four of the 22 ads were free.

Step 5: Created social media content

To generate excitement and get my readers and fans involved, I scheduled tweets for every few hours each day and posted updates to my Facebook pages. I also used screenshots to show fans when I made the top lists and where my book stood in relation to big-name authors.

Results of my BookBub/Countdown promotion:

During the first three days of my promotion, Submerged made Amazon's Top 100 overall bestseller list. This was the first time I made the Top 100 overall on the first day of a promo. 

Afterward, it remained in the Top 1,000 for a week and in the Top 5,000 for almost two weeks. Submerged also made Amazon.com’s Top 100 Movers & Shakers list, which provided extra exposure.

I sold 3,421 copies of Submerged on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk during my promo and the 14 days afterward.*

Days 1—4 (October 28—31): 2,421 copies sold.

Days 5—12 (November 1—7): ~500 copies sold.

Days 13—22 (November 8—17): ~500 copies sold.

Three of my other titles’ sales increased approximately 50% during and after the time Submerged was on the Countdown deal.

I earned $1,633 for Submerged sales in October. The majority of that income was generated during the last 4 days of October.*

I earned $4,633 for Submerged sales during my BookBub/Countdown promo and the two weeks that followed. I averaged a royalty of $1.36 per sale. From the $4,633 earned during this promo from one title, I paid $1,214 for 22 ads, which left a $3,419 profit.

My takeaway: Running a BookBub promotion with a select Countdown deal works! I will do this again… and again.

P.S.: If BookBub turns one of your books down, try, try again!

*Sales data includes Countdown sales or post-Countdown sales plus KOLL and KU.

Cheryl Kaye Tardif is an international bestselling author of suspense, and is both traditionally and indie published. She is best known for her gripping mysteries and thrillers, including Children of the Fog, which has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. She is also the owner of Imajin Books, a hybrid publishing company that publishes international authors. You can follow her on Twitter at @cherylktardif.

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Recap: BookBub's First Live Q&A

When we first announced on the KBoards Writers’ Cafe that we were going to host a live online Q&A, authors seemed pretty enthusiastic -- though some worried that the traffic would overwhelm the whole KBoards site! 445 posts and over 12,000 views later, we thankfully managed to avoid overloading any servers, but we definitely did go through much of our office’s coffee supply.

In this blog post, we’re going to recap some of the most popular topics so that anyone who missed the Q&A or wants a quick peek at the highlights can find them easily! We got an amazing range of questions and feedback from the many authors who joined the conversation. Check out our answers to some FAQs below:

Where will you be expanding internationally next?

Carlyn from BookBub: We just expanded to Canada last week!! And we're certainly hoping to expand to more English-speaking markets over the course of this year. Right now we're thinking about Australia, India, and South Africa.

Can you offer more specific feedback when a book isn’t selected?

Craig from BookBub: Hi guys, I'll give this one a try. We do actually give specific rejections for each of our basic guidelines. If your book is too short, you'll get a rejection that says this is too short. If the pricing doesn't work, we'll tell you. If we're out of space, we'll send you an email that says we're too booked, please resubmit in one week. And if we've accepted your book but we don't have any openings during the dates you picked, we'll send you an email offering you a different date!

Where it gets complicated is for the books we don't pick that do meet our minimums. SO much of the editorial process is based on timing because the editors compare all submissions in a given category to pick the best fits for our readers. Sometimes there are a lot of submissions for one category and very few spots open, driving up the standards for that category and forcing us to pass on books that we might take in four weeks, which is why we always encourage resubmissions. At other times we have spots open and can schedule the books we think are the best fit for readers' current tastes, which we track based on historical performance of promotions we've run. Reader tastes change! Books about chihuahuas might be all the rage now, but books about golden retrievers might be all the rage in a couple weeks. We can't predict these changes, so we do want to see the books that aren't a good fit now in the future, when they might be a better fit!

One more thing—we get 700-1,000 submissions a week and there are FOUR people responding to every single submission. I promise we're doing our best :D

Do you have plans to feature shorter works, such as novellas?

The Q&A was really helpful for us too! For example, we discovered that a lot of our authors would love to find a way to promote shorter works than we’re currently able to feature in the email, and we got some great suggestions as to how we could do that—such as featuring novellas as free books or starting short-fiction specific categories—which we’re taking back to the team to discuss.

Should I resubmit for a different category if I’m not selected for my first choice?

Katie from BookBub: Hey Lorena! There seems to be a lot of confusion about this, which is totally understandable. The categories you guys select on submission forms are actually just suggested categories. Our editors will consider the title for whichever genre they think it would work best in, so submitting for different categories or multiple categories won't actually impact their decision. IF you are open to running in another category, it is helpful for us to know that in the submission in case the editors think it will work better elsewhere (you can just throw that in the comments section). Otherwise we'll just ask you if you're ok running to a different list!

What genres are you considering adding as new categories?

Katie from BookBub: We just recently launched two new categories: Parenting and True Crime, and we have a couple more nonfiction categories we're currently testing (History and Business). We hope to launch those soon as long as the testing goes well!

How do customer and editorial reviews factor in the editors’ decision process?

Mel from BookBub: Hello Rue! When our editors are evaluating a submission, book reviews fall into two different camps: reader reviews and critical reviews. As we mentioned earlier, the editorial team checks out Amazon and Goodreads to get a sense of a book's platform (number of authentic reviews, average star rating, etc.). In terms of critical reviews, the editors are looking to see if a book has been positively reviewed by established publications and/or credible authors that we know our subscribers enjoy.

Looking at the big picture, I'd say reader reviews oftentimes better inform the editorial team's decision, unless your title has been reviewed by a big publication like The New York Times (although that's not to say it has to be!).

What should I put in the “Additional Comments” section of my submission?

Sonja from BookBub: Hey there! Excellent question. We could definitely do a better job of explaining what's useful to put in the additional comments section. The editors will read a book's product page VERY carefully, so there is no need to include awards, editorial reviews, endorsements, and other information that's already on that page in the Comments section of your submission. However, if there's some new information that you haven't yet added to the product page, that's a great thing to mention in your comments section. Also, if your dates are generally flexible but there are a couple dates that don't work for you, that's something you might want to mention as well. Hope that helps clarify!

Will you promote audiobooks in the future?

Craig from BookBub: Hi Mark, I love audiobooks and would personally love a way to get audiobooks without paying an arm and a leg ;)

The problem for us (BookBub us) is that audiobooks aren't discounted in the same way as ebooks. It happens, but it's rare to see deeply discounted audiobooks unless the purchase/download is part of a trial for a subscription service. We don't want our readers accidentally signing up for a subscription service that they don't want!

We have been asking about audiobooks in the surveys, but this has been just to get a sense of whether or not our indie author friends have audiobooks and where/how they're distributed.

TL;DR—there is a lot of figuring to do before we could make this happen.

Would BookBub ever consider promoting new releases?

Katie from BookBub: Hey Teresa! Thanks so much for your feedback. We're very happy to hear you've had successful BB promos in the past :D.

We're also happy to hear about all the interest in featuring new releases. It's not something we're going to introduce into the existing email in the near future, but I promise we're working on other ways to help you guys get new books out there! Stay tuned.

What does the BookBub team like to read?

Mel from BookBub: I'll jump in here! Personally, I'm a huge fan of nonfiction. And I studied Latin American literature as an undergrad, so I'd be remiss if I didn't mention some of my favorite LA authors: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Borges, and Junot Diaz.

Katie and I were both super psyched about the launch of our True Crime list (in fact, I think you'll find a copy of a book we recently featured on BookBub -- Why We Love Serial Killers—on both of our Kindle homepages ;) ). The team also gets together once a month for a book club. We always read a recent BookBub title -- last month, our pick was In the Garden of Beasts!

These are just a few of the hundreds of questions we answered, so please feel free to check out the entire thread here on KBoards! Thanks again to KBoards and to everyone who participated!

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BookBub's First Live Q&A

Join us this week for a live question and answer session in the KBoards Writers’ Cafe! On February 3rd and 4th (tomorrow and Wednesday) from 10am-5pm EST, members of the BookBub Partners team will be chatting with the KBoards author community about all things BookBub.

Want to join the conversation? Just create a KBoards account and bookmark the announcement thread found here.

You can also follow @BookBubPartners on Twitter for updates from the Q&A.

Hope to see you there!

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BookBub Launches in Canada

Just a few months after our expansion to the UK, we’ve added another region to our growing list of options for subscribers and partners: Canada!

With more than 150,000 local subscribers after just a few weeks, the Canadian edition of BookBub has already proven very popular. Authors and publishers will now have the option to include Canada in any future BookBub submissions. If your title is selected for a promotion, the total cost will include the corresponding fee for each region included in the deal. You can find a breakdown of pricing by region here.

* Please note that our six month policy does still apply across regions, so if you’ve run a BookBub promotion in any country in the past six months, you'll need to wait six months before submitting that title again. 

Submit your title for a BookBub promotion here!

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7 Tips for Creating a Successful Book Cover

A guest post from graphic designer Matt Tanner. 

Whether you like it or not, your cover is the face of your book, and you will be judged by it. You’ve put a great deal of work and thought into your book, and your cover should reflect that effort. After all of your planning, plotting, and editing is done, the last thing you want to do is to send your book out into the world with a bad cover to die a slow, unnoticed death. 

Still, creating a book cover is a difficult, even perplexing job. Even seasoned book designers can make missteps with difficult texts. Here are some tips to help you along:

There are a lot of genres: cozy mystery, hardboiled mystery, space opera, epic fantasy, literary fiction. Each has its own demands. It’s good to start by looking at other books that are roughly similar to yours and ask yourself a few questions. Does your book cover have a similar feel? Will it attract the right audience? Does it fit within the genre without getting lost? 

Let Your Type Lead the Way

Typefaces tell readers a great deal about a book, often more than they realize. The right font can make a cover, just as the wrong one can break it. Is the title set in 60-point Trajan or Trade Gothic? Chances are it’s a thriller or a detective mystery. Both title and author name are set in letter-spaced 18-point Gotham? It’s probably a literary novel — or maybe a biography. Papyrus? Unless you’ve written a cozy mystery set in a card shop, avoid Papyrus at all costs. 

Don’t Be Afraid to Stand Out

Whether your work is literary or hews close to the rules of a specific genre, you know your book is unique. With genre fiction in particular, the urge to stick to templated designs can be strong, and that approach isn’t wholly without merit: It lets readers know exactly what to expect from the text. But such covers risk getting lost in a sea of similar-looking titles. Readers who feel passionately about a specific genre may pick up your book on whim, but it’s unlikely to find a broader audience. 

If your book is as unique as you feel it is, have faith that readers will find it even without a bare-chested model depicting your hero and a Photoshopped dragon representing his magical companion. By foregoing clichés, you may find a wider readership than you expected. 

Sometimes Less Is More

A cover that’s overly busy or has too many design elements can overwhelm a potential reader, but a single iconic image can in some cases convey the idea behind your book, and communicating that idea may be more telling than merely depicting a character or setting. 

But Sometimes Less Is Just Less

A strong, singular image can carry the right kind of book to glory, but without the right context or a clever title to play against, that photograph of a colander or a burning match will only leave readers scratching their heads. So before you commit to a cover featuring just the type and a pair of cufflinks, take a moment to decide whether such minimalist imagery suits your text. 

Invest in Art

When it comes to cover art, you get what you pay for. Fonts and stock images can cost money, but the money you spend on licensing fonts and photography serves to make your book more polished and professional. Commissioning custom illustration or lettering is an excellent, if expensive, way to achieve a cover that stands out. 

Low-end, royalty-free art of the sort sold by Shutterstock or iStock is meant primarily for advertising and made to be adapted to as many purposes as possible, which means it can also come across as generic or even dull. For a bit more money, the right solution for your cover may be found at a site that specializes in photographs for book covers, like Trevillion or Arcangel. If you’re looking for something classier, try a site that specializes in fine art photography, like Gallery Stock. And of course…

When in Doubt, Hire a Professional

It may just be that in addition to being an excellent writer you are also a talented designer. Or perhaps your babysitter is an extraordinary artist at home in all media. That, however, is rarely the case. Becoming a great graphic designer takes years of experience, and moreover, book cover design is its own specialization. The kid down the street who made your website may have no clue when it comes to creating a book. The best way to guarantee that your book is represented properly is to rely on someone who knows what works visually in the marketplace and has the ability and experience to create the right cover. Start by looking for names on the backs of books in the same genre as yours whose covers you admire. Once you’ve collected a few names, Google the designers and have a look at their portfolios. 

A professionally designed book cover can cost upwards of $1,500 (in addition to licenses for any stock art featured in the design). That may sound steep, but it’s small change compared to the time and energy you’ve surely committed to creating your text. A couple thousand dollars can be a small price to pay to assure that your hard work doesn’t immediately fade into oblivion. 

A note: Most designers who rely on freelance work have been stiffed once or twice and may be hesitant to work for new clients they don't know. A good way to assuage that fear is to offer the designer half her agreed fee upfront. 

Matt Tanner is a Georgia-raised writer and graphic designer. He lives in Providence, RI. Samples of his work are available at matt-tanner.com. 

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Should You Self-Publish? 5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Taking the Plunge

A guest post from USA Today bestselling author, Claire Cook.

  A quote from one of my books, which is always popping up somewhere on the Internet, turned out to be great advice for my own career: "If Plan A doesn't work, the alphabet has 25 more letters (204 if you're in Japan!)."

I wrote my first novel in my minivan in the parking lot outside my daughter's swim practice when I was 45. At 50, I walked the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere of the movie adaptation of my most well-known novel, Must Love Dogs, starring Diane Lane and John Cusack.

For a long time, Plan A worked for me. I was one of the lucky authors. I was published by a series of big New York publishers that believed in my books, helped me make them better, and put serious marketing muscle behind them. I had multi-book contracts. I was sent on a book tour and published in both hardcover and paperback.

And then my career stalled out. The traditional publishing world, which had nurtured me so well, didn't seem to be able to get it moving again. So long story short, I eventually decided that rather than hang around and whine about it, I'd move on to Plan B: self-publishing.

  Do you have a better option? I now think of my years as a traditionally published author as the best internship ever. I kept my ears open and learned from the pros. I internalized the voices of several fabulous editors and had time to figure out who I am as a writer. If you're just starting out and you can get in the traditional door, it will enhance your skills as well as give you street cred, so my advice would be to go for it. If those doors don't open for you, shake it off and move on to Plan B. As I meet more and more self-published authors who have built their careers from scratch, I'm both humbled and inspired by them, but also really grateful that I didn't have to do it myself.

Have you done your homework? I spent at least a year and a half researching the self-publishing world before I jumped in, and because things change so quickly, I continue to invest lots of time keeping up. (It helps that I'm fascinated by all the twists and turns!) So Google everything you can find. Join indie author groups like the Writers Café at KBoards and the self-publishing loops on Yahoo. Read this blog. Sign up for updates at JaneFriedman.com and The Passive Voice. The more you know, the better your chances for success.

What do you bring to the table? At this writing, I own eight of my books — five backlist novels and three new releases. I have 21,000 followers on Twitter, 16,000 on my Facebook author page, and a mailing list of 25,000. I share these numbers not to discourage you, but to make the point that while writing is first and foremost a quality game, it's also a quantity game. Every time I release a new book, the sales of the other books I own start to increase, too. And my loyal, wonderful readers, the ones I've been collecting, reader by reader, since my swim mom days, essentially give me the gift of my career. If you have one book and no following, it's important to recognize that, while it can absolutely be done, you'll have a steeper climb ahead of you.

Do you have an entrepreneurial spirit? I love all the new tech skills I've learned, everything from formatting to the ins and outs of uploading books at various vendors. I'm crazy excited that I can now control price and promotion — even apply for my own BookBub ads! At every phase of the self-publishing journey, you have to choose whether to spend the time learning the skills you need to do it yourself or to spend the money to hire someone who already has those skills. But even if you hire out, the buck stops with you. I'm tenacious. When I make a mistake, I learn from it and see it as an opportunity to do it right the next time, and best of all, as a self-publisher I have the power to fix it myself. I put on my blinders and rise above all the negativity that's out there, which can sometimes be the biggest challenge of all.

Is it all about the writing for you? Several books ago, a surprised new editor said to me, "Wow, it's still all about the writing for you, isn't it?" Absolutely. And the day it isn't, the day I've lost that passion, I hope I have the good sense to go find something else I can love just as much as I've loved writing books. I put my heart and soul into every book I write, and I try to become a better writer with each one. My readers know that, to the best of my ability, I will never let them down.

  Wherever you are in your writing journey, I wish you much joy and success. And if you come up with a Plan C that I haven't thought of, I'd love to hear about it!

  Claire Cook is the USA Today bestselling author of thirteen books and a sought after reinvention speaker. She has reinvented herself once again by turning Must Love Dogs into a three-book series (and counting!) as well as writing her first nonfiction book, Never Too Late: Your Roadmap to Reinvention (without getting lost along the way). Read excerpts, find book club questions, and sign up for Claire's newsletter at ClaireCook.com, and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.

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6 Tips for Social Media Success

These days, it seems that everyone’s busy crafting his or her next witty Tweet, spending hours creating the perfect Pinterest board, or selecting the right filter for an Instagram post.

With so many social media platforms at your disposable, having an active online presence has never been more important for an author. A traditional website with an email sign-up page just isn’t enough when you have dozens of other potential ways to connect and engage with your readers online.

Using social media successfully requires experimentation, time, and strategy. So how can authors maximize these tools?

  1) Which platform is right for you?

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, Snapchat… the list goes on and on. New social media platforms are cropping up left and right at an alarming speed, so how do you select the one that’s right for you? The two most important things to consider are who you want to connect with and how you want to connect.

Are you looking to engage with a younger reader base? Your best bet might be Snapchat, where a majority of users are between the ages of 13 and 25.

Do your novels appeal to a largely female audience? Give Pinterest a shot, where 80% of users are women.

Are you especially gifted at writing 140 character messages? Try Twitter.

  2) Craft a personal voice/brand

It’s impossible to meet all of your readers face-to-face, but social media helps you establish a more personal connection between you and your audience. Use this opportunity to craft and hone your public brand.

This is your chance to be personal. Play with your tone and infuse it with personality until you’ve settled on a voice that feels right. Get creative!

  3) Use your platform

One of the most important things to keep in mind about social media tools is their value as communication platforms. Twitter, Facebook, and the like help you establish a direct line of contact between you and your readers so that you can share important and valuable information.

Use that megaphone! Broadcast your new release dates, let them know about your next book signing, host an online Q&A, or tell them about your next BookBub feature.

Remember: Your readers are interacting with you on social media in the hopes of getting exclusive updates, so be that source and provide them with fresh and current news.

  4) Engage with your followers

Once you’ve amassed a loyal following, it’s important to engage with your fans, not bombard them with a one-sided stream of tweets or Facebook posts. As with any relationship, this is a two-way street.

Your interactions should mirror your audience’s activity: Follow your supporters back, like their photos, retweet, repost, and engage with them in the comments section.

And, most importantly, thank them. Your fans are your most valuable asset, so let them know how much you appreciate them. Offer a free preview for your next novel once you’ve reached a certain amount of followers. Send a free copy of your book to the first 10 people who like your post. Write a direct message to a particularly loyal fan. Be inventive with your thank yous.

  5) Content, Content, Content

It’s easy to get stuck in a self-promotional rut, but in reality as much as 80% of your focus online should be on creating original, non-promotional posts. This is your currency. This is where your value lies. No matter the platform, it’s your job to present your audience with interesting and eye-catching content. But what’s going to drive someone to click on your post? To comment? To share?

Unfortunately, there is no tried and true formula. What’s popular and trending now will likely be replaced with a new viral video by dinnertime.

Because the virtual space is in a constant state of fluctuation, you have to adapt just as quickly. Experimentation is key. Add photos to your tweets. Use imaginative hashtags on Instagram. Upload a video with your next Facebook post.

But most importantly, tell a story that resonates with your audience.

  6) Track your progress!

Most social media platforms have built-in analytics tools, which makes it easy to measure growth and activity. See how many followers you gain in a week, keep count of likes, and track shares. Set daily, weekly, and monthly goals for yourself and analyze which posts get you closer to achieving those targets. You’ll start to see trends -- maybe photos drive more shares on Twitter or posing questions on Facebook increases engagement -- that will help you maximize your posts’ impact in the future.

  The relationship between an author and his/her readers is becoming more and more important in the new publishing landscape, for self-published and traditionally published authors alike. Whatever your social media expertise, challenge yourself to take a step forward in building your author brand this year. We’ll continue to post about this topic in the weeks to come, so please let us know what you’d like to hear more about!

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8 New Year's Resolutions for Every Author

Welcome to the New Year, BookBub Partners! Last year was an exciting one for us here at BookBub, thanks in large part to the fantastic books many of you featured with us. But we have big plans for the year ahead, too. While we were thinking about our own resolutions for 2015, we asked some of our author partners about theirs. Below, we’ve collected 8 great areas for any author to focus on this year.

1) Set measurable goals

Once you know exactly what you want out of the year, it’s a lot easier to tackle those goals. So start by making a list of your top priorities for the next 12 months. Do you want to focus on selling your backlist or growing your newsletter subscribers? Do you want to land an agent or self-publish your first book?

Make sure your goals are measurable, too. “Increase sales” isn’t very specific, while “sell 10,000 books” is something you can use to track your success over the course of the year. Being an author can feel overwhelming, but narrowing down and specifying your aspirations will help you prioritize and focus on what matters most.

2) Stick to a realistic schedule

Determine when you do your best writing: maybe it’s early in the morning or with your afternoon coffee or late at night after the world’s gone to bed. Declare that as your writing time, build it into your daily schedule, and keep it sacred.

Make sure to pick a time each day to work on secondary goals as well. We’ll talk about setting these goals in the next point, but scheduling time for answering emails, responding to readers, social media, networking, etc. will turn these important tasks into habits. Plus, tackling them daily helps keep everything manageable.  

3) Market your work

At least a few of the goals you set in Resolution #1 should fall into that secondary, “non-writing” bucket that will help you actually sell your books. Make these tough but achievable, and ensure they’re measurable.

For example, if you’re planning a new release this year, reach out to 5 book bloggers and ask if they’d be interested in reviewing your book. Band together with fellow authors in your genre and organize blog tours, giveaways, and twitter parties to boost each other's audiences. Try a price promotion and submit your deal to BookBub!

There are endless ways to market your books. Take this year to make a list of a few you want to try and use the time you set aside each day for non-writing goals to tackle them strategically. 

4) Participate in social media

For many writers, blogging, tweeting, pinning, and instagramming are the most terrifying parts of being an author. But social media doesn’t have to be hard and it can be hugely beneficial. Go back to resolution #1 and start small: decide exactly where you want to focus this year. Do you want to aim for one tweet each day? A blog post every week? 1,000 Facebook fans? Opening a Pinterest account?

Start 2015 off on the right social media foot by checking these quick tips off your list. Then figure out where you are and what goals will help you get to the next level.

Twitter:

Follow other writers and industry figures in your genre.

Make a list of hashtags they use to incorporate into future tweets.

Facebook:

Join a group devoted to writers in your genre.

Friend any fellow authors and industry figures you haven’t yet connected with.

Blog:

Make sure your website is up to date and professional (and keep it that way).

Make sure links to retailers are easy to find.

5) Network

Networking is a skill professionals in virtually every industry need — even writing! Many people view writing as a solitary activity, but it can take a village to create a book. By connecting with other authors you like and respect, you’ll be able to use your contacts to find great agents, editors, cover designers, critique partners, and more. So set a goal to connect with 1 or 5 or 10 new people each week — through writers groups, conferences, social media, etc. — and by the end of the year you’ll find your network has expanded exponentially.  

6) Present yourself professionally

Don’t judge a book by its cover is an oft-quoted and routinely ignored piece of good advice for book buyers. Readers do judge books by their covers, and also by their descriptions, for that matter. Use the new year to take a fresh look at both and make sure they are professional and enticing.

If you haven’t already, declare 2015 the year you’ll hire a professional to create your book cover or buy a pre-made cover design. Also objectively review your book description. If you think it could be better, hire a publicist to write the copy.  

7) Write every day

Remember that you’re in this because you love to write. A new book is the best way to sell more books, and it’s what you really want to be doing. Write when you want to write, write when you’re stuck, write when you should be sleeping (don’t forget to sleep though). It doesn’t have to be a thousand words a day; it just has to be something. 

8)   Take time for yourself

This is the most important resolution you’ll make this year. Remember that you’re a writer, not a machine. Take breaks. Drink some wine. Go out with your friends. And when you hit your milestones — when you publish your book, when you see your new cover, when you achieve a secondary goal — celebrate! Don’t spend the night staring at your sales rankings on Amazon. Go see a movie. Eat some cake. Pour a glass of champagne. You deserve it.

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BookBub by the Numbers in 2014

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BookBub Trends: Family Secrets

Every family has its secrets — sometimes small ones, like which sibling broke the living room lamp, and sometimes ones that conceal entire years of history. The discovery of these hidden truths can change not only a person’s perception of the past, but their very sense of self.

Identity

Everyone struggles with their identity: who they are, where they came from, and what type of person they want to be.

In many of these books, a person must search for their sense of self after discovering a shocking fact about themselves or their family. You’re supposed to know family better than you know anyone else, and when that turns out to be untrue, identity falls on uneasy ground.

This is a popular plot point in several BookBub books: In Coming to Rosemont, a woman discovers her husband led a double life, while in Thought I Knew You, a husband disappears only to leave his wife scrambling to decipher his secrets. A Family Affair follows a woman who learns the shocking truth that her father had a second family she never knew about. And the list goes on.

Generations

Our survey data shows that the majority of BookBub subscribers are married with children out of the house — in other words, they’re readers used to dealing with generations both older and younger than themselves. And many of these books focus on long-held secrets that span decades. Sometimes they’re revealed in person, while in other cases they’re delivered by an old artifact, like a journal. Whatever the situation, the old generation is linked to the new — a connection that stands the test of time.

We’ve seen these generational threads in some of our bestselling books, like The Girl Who Came Home, where a woman who sailed on the Titanic shares a secret with her great-granddaughter. In The Hidden Child, the protagonist discovers a Nazi medal among her late mother’s possessions, and in The Winter Lodge, a woman finds a treasure that once belonged to her grandfather.

Not only do these stories span generations, but they also touch on memorable moments in the past, and likely hit home with BookBub readers who have family members that have experienced similar situations.

Family and Going Home

Stories of familial connections have always struck a strong chord with BookBub’s audience, whether in the kinship between cousins or in a parent-child relationship. When wound together and complicated by secrets, these links often become even more difficult to navigate, lending extra intensity to the narrative. Many times the rapport between characters is already developed, and the outing of a new secret forces this relationship to be reexamined.

BookBub readers have responded particularly well to these themes of connection. Some notable examples include The Wishing Thread, where three sisters with secrets of their own inherit a magical yarn shop, and Maine, in which three generations of family gather at a summer home while being forced to face their pasts.

Not all secrets are the same, either in these books or in the many others that share this theme. But in all cases, the stories pull people in: Readers want to discover the truth and how it’s shared, what its fallout is, and how people move on from there. After all, BookBub readers consistently show a strong affinity to mysteries, and what's a more intriguing enigma than the secrets of your own family?

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How Engaged Are Readers in Your Genre?

Sales differ significantly across BookBub categories. But how much is that variation due to simple differences in subscriber counts vs. discrepancies in reader engagement?

We can start to answer this question by examining how average purchase rates — or the percentage of BookBub subscribers in a given genre who buy a title — vary by category. A higher purchase rate means that readers are generally more engaged, while a lower one suggests that subscribers in that category might buy fewer books on a per reader basis, even if the raw sales numbers are higher.

What we’ve found is that while BookBub readers are active across all our lists, average purchase rates vary quite a bit. In particular, many of our smaller categories — for example, LGBT and African-American Interest — have extremely engaged subscribers. This suggests that while these genres might attract a smaller base of total users, they also tend to be more targeted lists and consequently draw more active readers.

On the other hand, many of our largest categories have lower average engagement rates. This makes sense — in addition to fervent fans, there are likely many more casual readers of a genre like mysteries than there are of more niche categories. An even more extreme example of this is our Bestsellers list; people might broadly like bestselling books, but it’s more difficult for any one title to appeal to everyone’s interests. On the opposite side of the spectrum, many of our romance genres have been subdivided into more targeted categories, raising activity levels on a per subscriber basis.

Other factors associated with list size, such as how long the category has existed on our site and how many books we feature in it each day, can contribute to engagement as well. New BookBub users in particular tend to be the most active, helping many of our more recent category additions benefit from higher average purchase rates.

Many of you probably won’t be surprised to hear that Erotic Romance seems to buck all trends, being one of our older, larger categories and consistently one of our most engaged!

To continue our investigation, we also looked at the correlation between click-through rates and conversion rates. For example, it could be that readers in some categories click on fewer books in their daily email, but are generally more likely to buy a title once they reach its product page. Or the two trends could go hand in hand — less engaged subscribers might also be less likely to buy once they click on a book.

What we found was that many of the genres with lower overall activity actually have very high conversion rates. Mysteries, for instance, had one of the best averages, even though its purchase rate was on the lower end of the spectrum. The chart below, which compares each category’s average CTR with its average conversion rate, illustrates the lack of correlation between these two metrics:

Regardless of their relative performance, there are a large number of very enthusiastic readers in every BookBub category, and most genres with slightly lower purchase rates still drive thousands of sales for the average promotion. But along with data on things like subscriber counts and raw sales, it illustrates that no two BookBub genres are exactly alike, and that list size is far from the only determinant of reader behavior.

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Free vs. Discounted: How BookBub’s Selection Rates Vary

The short answer is that while the difference isn’t overwhelming, our editors are able to select a higher percentage of free books than discounted ones. Over the last six weeks, the selection rate for a free book was around 24 percent, while our editors could only choose around 18 percent of non-free ones. This means that, on average, the odds of a book being selected went up by around a third if you submitted it for a free promotion.

A number of factors explain why free titles are more likely to be accepted by our editors.

For one, we receive far fewer submissions for free books. While we generally feature more discounted titles in our email each day, the volume of requests for those deals means that we need to turn away even more great books that we would otherwise love to feature. Our editors always avoid picking titles that they don’t think would be good fits for BookBub readers, but the lower number of free submissions means they’re often able to take a chance on books with smaller platforms in those spots.

However, this breakdown also varies significantly by category. For example, because we receive relatively few free Historical Fiction submissions, the selection rate is significantly higher for free Historical titles than the average across all our lists. On the other end of the spectrum, it’s much harder to get a spot in a category like Fantasy, where we receive multiple submissions for free books every day.

And since we have to be careful not to overwhelm our readers with too many deals, subscriber demand in each category also influences these numbers. For instance, there are some lists where we can only feature a book or two per week, forcing our editors to be much more selective than they would otherwise want to be.

As a result, deal price is only one factor among many that can influence selection rates, and submitting for a free or discounted promotion doesn’t make or break your chances of getting a BookBub spot. But because it is something our editors consider, we always recommend submitting at the most competitive price that aligns with your marketing goals. And if you haven’t been selected for a discounted promotion, it could be worth trying for a free one if you’re open to it!

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