E-Book Success is Not as Easy as 1-2-3
On your path to e-book sales, there are many obstacles to overcome. For the longest time, my prime obstacle to achieving consistent sales was getting book reviews. Maybe you can understand that. Thanks to a fairly new platform called Pubby, that obstacle is now crumbling in my wake, thank the good Lord.
I covered Pubby in the previous post, so here I’m only going to update it real quick and add some new discoveries to help you discover its benefits.
After enjoying the initial 10 day free trial, I then paid for a month of Pubby Pro, $24.99. Of the 4 monthly options, this was the only one of value to me. It allows you to submit up to 10 books on the platform. In just under 3 weeks, I’ve submitted 6 books and received a total of 18 reviews: 13 Five Star and 5 Four Star reviews.
When clicking the Get Reviewed button, you can also pay an extra 300 snaps to receive what Pubby calls 5 Star Rating Protection. If you hit this, Pubby will search for readers most likely (based on their reviews and genres) to give your book a 5 star rating.
I did this for a book where I had one review, a 4 star bugger, hoping to boost its overall rating. This option takes a smidge longer, but it seems to work. After waiting an extra few days, my book was picked up, read, and 5 Star reviewed.
You’ll have to read and review more books if you want enough snaps to keep doing this, but it seems a useful option if you have a book that consistently earns 4 stars and you wish to boost it a bit.
By God’s grace and the wonderful gifts of readers on Pubby, 2 of my books have received consistent 5 star ratings, W.A.N.D. and Lotteryman, without using this extra rating protection. So perhaps it depends on your book?
Two points you should know before signing up for Pubby subscription:
- Pubby seems to be a fairly new platform, and not many people are yet aware of it, so it’s slim pickings here, folks. You’ll have to review some ‘clearly new’ writers to earn snaps. And because the membership has not yet grown to huge numbers, it occasionally requires extra time for your submitted book to be picked up. (My books are usually picked up by a reader within 24 hours of submitting to be reviewed.)
- Membership can be a mite costly for any writer wishing to receive reviews for more than 2 books.
The good news is, once you’ve received reviews, and Amazon posts them a few days later, they remain online—and your profile, reviews and submitted books remain in storage on the Pubby site, even if you leave it! So if you run low on dough, and need it for food and toilet paper, you can close out your subscription month and return later when you have some more moula, and all your info is still there!
Now for the nitty-gritty hard truth.
Your next obstacle is even tougher, believe it or not. After an initial boost in sales, even with a few reviews, your books might not sell. Furthermore, even with a few reviews and AMS ad campaigns running, you still might not make sales enough to keep you in coffee.
As I am a ‘working writer’, meaning one who is learning this along with his fellow indie authors/editors/publishers, I will be updating when I have successful updates to share.
It worked for reviews. I’m finally earning them, for every book I submit to Pubby, and mostly excellent, blessed reviews they are. Not a pro, but finally I’m not an amateur in this indie area either.
Concerning ad campaigns, I am currently in the learning stage. You need to excel in 3 areas to succeed with your ad campaigns:
- Impressions
- Clicks (or click-through-rate)
- Conversions
If you’re not getting many impressions—meaning thousands over the first 10 days—then you don’t have enough keywords and key phrases. Don’t forget to include author names as keywords. Most of my clicks have come from these Search Terms.
Use comparable authors as keywords!
If you are getting impressions aplenty but not many clicks, then readers probably aren’t appreciating your book cover or Ad Copy.
In the ‘sponsored products’ line on Amazon, I noticed that my W.A.N.D. cover, though decent, stood out as very different looking. So I created a new one, conforming to the look of other YA fantasy book covers. Hate conforming!
Now I’m getting a snotload of impressions and plenty of clicks.
That’s 2 more obstacles down on this one’s journey to sales!
Unfortunately, I’m not converting these clickers into buyers once they reach my book page. This is not good, as it not only means no sales, but it costs me every time someone clicks my ad and goes to my book page.
If you have encountered this issue, pros like Kindlepreneur suggest the problem lies with your book description. I edited this for W.A.N.D. and, after recently altering my book cover, I am now waiting to see if the sales will start trickling in like the initial run.
Do check out Kindlepreneur’s free video covering this issue, here.
CONCLUSION:
If you’re current obstacle is getting book reviews, I would suggest hooking up with Pubby. It’s a sure, financially doable step. Get the free 10 day trial, and then pick your subscription method based on your needs. If you only have 1 or 2 books that need reviewing, do the $12.99 Personal sub monthly fee. It’s worth it. Use the following code to get 15% off your first month!
https://pubby.co/?invite=3430
A few facts concerning book reviews:
- Readers (potential customers) are unlikely to buy a book with no reviews
- Readers might buy a book with a few reviews
- Readers are likely to buy a book with more than 10 reviews, if they like the genre, book cover, and description
The more I learn, the more I share, and if you are a fellow indie struggler, I hope you’ve found some useful tidbit here today. Never lose your hope. Now go get those reviews you’ve earned!
