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 Digital Book World Discoverability and Marketing RecapPosted by Sara Ramsey Oct 10 2012, 12:01 am in Amazon, ebooks, Facebook, Marketing, Sara Ramsey, Twitter I attended the Digital Book World Discoverability and Marketing conference in NYC two weeks ago, and I wanted to share my key takeaways with all of you. The conference was geared toward publishing professionals – marketers, publicists, and all the people responsible for launching ebooks and getting them discovered by readers. There were very, very few authors in the audience; I know Bob Mayer was there, and a few authors gave programs during the session, but this was truly a marketing conference. I’m kind of a geek for marketing (even though I also secretly despise it), so I found myself loving/hating all of it – but your mileage my vary, of course! These are the most interesting insights/tidbits I heard during the conference…if you want more detail on anything, leave a comment and I’ll see whether my notes are helpful: 1) If you take nothing else away from this post, know this: the importance of mobile (smartphone/tablet) browsing is increasing dramatically. The head of industry for publishing at Google shared some Google search stats, and the eyepopping one was that in 2010, 93% of Google queries came from computers; now, it’s 72% and still dropping fast, with those other 28% of searches coming from mobile. Mobile search is only going to continue to grow. What this means for authors: you must make sure that your website looks great on smartphones. For me, my website traffic in the last month (1943 unique visitors / 2571 total visits) was 41.9% on mobile devices – the iPad was 50% of my mobile traffic, iPhone was ~25%, and a variety of Android phones and Kindle/ereader tablets made up the rest. If someone is reading your book on a mobile device and searches your website to learn more, you want them to see a great website optimized for smartphones. This means *no Flash* (flash doesn’t work on iPads), quick loading, etc. Test your site on mobile devices, and if you don’t like how it looks, work with your web designer to fix it. 2) Your Amazon book page is like your book’s homepage on the web. We heard from Jon Fine, the Director of Author/Publisher Relations at Amazon, and his main point was that when someone searches for your book on Google or other search engines, they’re almost certain to see the Amazon page for your book at the top of the search results. You want that page to be as good as possible, with reviews, product descriptions, etc., and a robust author page that gives as much information as possible about your works. What this means for authors: do as much as you can with Author Central. You may not be able to control your product descriptions (often the publisher is responsible for this), but you can do a lot on Author Central – regularly update your bio, add videos, add your Twitter feed, add your blog feed, etc. You can also add extras about the book through Shelfari (Amazon’s Goodreads competitor), which show up on the product page for your book. Just a little bit of effort on Author Central can make your presence more robust, which helps you show up higher in search results. 3) Email marketing is a bigger sales driver than any social media platform. Jessica Best from Emfluence Marketing said that for every $1 she spends on email marketing, they drive $28 in revenue. I don’t think that these stats are perfectly accurate for authors maintaining their own email lists – but purely from a time/money spent perspective, my (very infrequent) newsletter is more valuable than anything I’ve done on Facebook, Twitter, etc. It costs some amount of money every month to maintain a mailing list through a mailing list manager like Mailchimp or Constant Comment – but the people who sign up for your mailing list are interested in what you have to say, and you can use Mailchimp to track how many people open it, make sure that it looks good on smartphone mail clients before sending it out, and see how many people subscribe/unsubscribe every month. What this means for authors: build your email list. Facebook or Twitter could go away tomorrow, but if you own your mailing list, you can always reach your biggest fans. Key caveat: do it ethically! Don’t violate CAN-SPAM law (or public opinion) by adding people without their permission. But I make joining my email list a key way to enter my contests, and I can track to see how many of those people stick around when I send out my next newsletter. I also have a link to sign up to my mailing list in my ebooks – this is easier to do if you’re self published, but it should be obvious how to sign up for your newsletter as soon as someone hits your site. Use something like Mailchimp or Constant Comment, which will help to make sure you don’t break CAN-SPAM law and also help you track stats. 4) Get a few metrics you can measure consistently and act upon – and then track them. Angela Tribelli from HarperCollins spoke about the importance of metrics, which I totally agree with. But it seems that most authors (and I’m guilty of this myself) obsess over their Amazon sales rank but don’t track anything else. Instead, you can track things that you can actually impact – visits to your website, newsletter signups, Twitter follows, Facebook likes, contest entries, etc. Then, if you do a blog tour, for example, you can see whether there’s any increase in averages for those stats in the days/weeks after the tour – if you don’t see any lift beyond your average, it might tell you not to do a blog tour again. What this means for authors: pick your stats, track them, but don’t obsess. Daily tracking of things like Twitter or Facebook likely isn’t helpful. Instead, you can pick a day of the week or a day of the month, write down all your stats, and ignore them until the next time you need to track them. For me, this helps to decide whether to invest money in a giveaway, whether to spend more time on Twitter, whether to spend money promoting a post on Facebook, etc. This can also be helpful for showing publishers that you’ve built a platform – if you’re able to show steady growth and things you’ve done to grow your platform, this could theoretically help to get a deal. 5) Final thoughts: the jury is still out for me, but I’m starting to believe that it’s less important to do blog tours before a release and more important to spend that time making sure that your profiles and information on all the major platforms are thoroughly updated and have as much info as possible about your latest books. Obviously your website is key to this – your website should always be updated, even if you don’t treat it like a blog. But your Author Central page, Goodreads and Shelfari profiles, Facebook, Twitter, and any other outreach methods you use should be updated regularly so that search results are accurate. The primary goal is to make sure that anyone searching for you or your books finds out how to buy them! The secondary goal, with the help of a good web designer, is to figure out how to get your own site or book higher into the general search results for terms like ‘regency romance’ or ‘best contemporary romance’ – that’s a much harder nut to crack, but it’s worth thinking about. But I’m not an expert, and I would love to hear what you think – what’s worked for you, what hasn’t, and where you’re focusing your efforts. I’m looking forward to your comments! 34 Responses to “Digital Book World Discoverability and Marketing Recap”Leave a Reply |
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Wow, Sara! This is incredibly informative and TOTALLY TERRIFYING!!!
[imagine me using hillbilly voice]: Guess I need to get me a smart phone….
Hahaha. I finally got a smartphone about 6 months ago. Yeah–a little behind the times.
Just checked out my website on it, and it actually looks decent. Yay for wordpress templates.
Thanks for all the awesome info, Sara.
I’ve had a smartphone for ages, but I have come to seriously resent it. I can’t imagine parting with it now because I’ve become so reliant on maps and on being able to search for food when I’m out and about – but I spend way too much time on it. It’s a blessing and a curse.
But you don’t have to get a smartphone! Just ask someone with a smartphone to check your site
I should also mention that ‘smartphone’ is too inclusive – iPhones and Androids have different browsers (just like Safari is different from Chrome), so if you’re being truly anal about this, you should check on a bunch of phones. I don’t bother with that, though – although now I’m thinking I should. But I did tweak my site based on how it looked on the iPad, since I’m getting ~25% of my traffic from iPads.
Hey Sara,
This was very helpful, and confirmed a few things I’ve discovered in teh school of hard knocks. I totally agree with the notion that if an author is going to focus on building one thing, it should be her mailing list. I took that approach at the beginning, and now my mailing list is twice as large as the number of twitter followers or facebook likes, I diligently send out a newsletter using Constant Contact every month, and I make it easy for my readers to share that newsletter with their friends. Every time I send out a newsletter, I see an immediate bump in activity on my facebook page, and I always get a bunch of new people signing up for the newsletter.
One other thing I”ve discovered is that if you treat social media as something that’s fun to do, instead of a chore, then you’re more likely to build followers. So on twitter, I’ve given up trying to reach readers, I just use it as a way to connect with other authors — to be social if you will — and the number of followers has grown as a result. The dirty secret is that these people are not readers, but my publisher doesn’t care so long as they see that I’m building followers on twitter. So folks shouldn’t be terriified of this stuff. I will sit down and write for a while — an hour or so — then get up, stretch my legs, and send a few tweets. Then it’s back to the writing. So, really, I’m not spending much time, and I stopped obsessing about trying to reach readers. So my advice on all that social stuff, is to relax and just be . . . social.
And save your real efforts for building the mailing list.
Great tips Hope! I too am more intimate with my newsletter followers, but didn’t put in a huge effort to build the list–just assuming people who were interested would sign up. But I’m finding that not very many people are online all the time for social media whereas EVERYONE has an e-mail account that they check. Readers want to know when you have a new release and the easiest way to do that is through a newsletter.
This is great advice, Hope! I think that treating social like a social experience (rather than an opportunity to flog your books to anyone who will listen) is so important – and so much more fun for the author. My view is that if you’re having fun, it’s obvious to readers, and since reading a book is almost like choosing to hang out with an author for a few hours, you want to be someone people want to hang out with. If all you’re doing on social media is tweeting about your book, does it make you someone people want to spend time with? Probably not.
But I’m glad to hear the newsletter strategy has worked for you – thanks for sharing!
Okay, Hope, this will be on our discussion list at dinner tomorrow night.
Wow, Sara, this is great info. Thanks for sharing!
i think I struggle the most with this area. I’m not good at “buy my book” so I feel really awkward when I try to force myself down people’s throats. I’ve decided other than sharing my writing news as I would any other job, I’m not going to constantly feel pressured to put myself out there.
These suggestions feel right up my alley. Liz Bemis (aka The Wizard) is working on a new spiffy website for me and is adding a newsletter/mailing list feature which I hope will help me in regards to getting the word out to the people who actually want to hear the word. I did go into author central and add my twitter feed and double checked what i had up there
I need to pay closer attention to some of this stuff, so thanks for the tips
Liz, I’m just going to come out and say it – I think you’re awesome on Twitter
I personally don’t think that the ‘buy my book’ tweets are effective anyway; I love seeing tweets from my favorite authors in the day/week that they have a new release, but if they’re still tweeting multiple times a day about the same book months/years later, it starts to irritate me. And I’ll confess that I’ve been spending less time on twitter because it has been getting under my skin recently – probably because it’s turned into an unholy mix of political rants and self-promo. At least after the election half of that will be gone, so I think I’ll be happier 
But I think just being yourself on social media and tweeting about writing/life makes total sense. Good luck with the new website!
Thanks Sara for the write-up! I’ll definitely have to test out how my new website looks.
You’re welcome! Not to add another thing to your to-do list – I’m sure the twins and the writing are enough right now
Thanks for this checklist, Sara. Your tips are confirming that e-mailing lists and author newsletters are where we all need to put out efforts. THanks for the call to action!
Good luck! Of course, I’m sure this guidance will change in six months
But I guess I’m sold on email lists because I control them – whereas Twitter, FB, etc. are at the mercy of those platforms. For example, since my posts on FB only reach a fraction of my followers (unless I pay to promote them), I’m missing out on some interactions – and I have a feeling that will become increasingly common. Email is much more predictable!
Great tips. Thank you, Sara! I know I need to pay more attention to building my mailing list, but it always seems to slide to the bottom of my to-do list. Always a million must do promo tasks, never enough time…
Yeah…I’m really glad I did it a year ago, before I had any books out. And as much as I preach the email gospel, I don’t send out a newsletter more than once every couple of months
Me too! There’s never enough time in the day and that task always slips to the bottom of my to-do list.
Great tips, Sara!
Sara, thank you for reporting back to us. I really wanted to attend the DBW conference, but just couldn’t swing it time or money wise, so I really appreciate the recap. I may have to hire a publicist to teach me how to do Facebook promotions to build my e-mail list.
I’m on the fence about whether I would go again – the conference itself was super expensive, and it was definitely not geared toward writers. I was fortunate because I could stay with a friend while I was in NYC; if I had to pay for a hotel in addition to the conference/flight, it would have been prohibitively expensive. But, I learned some really interesting stuff, so going again would depend on the speaker lineup and how comfortable I’m feeling with the discoverability stuff.
One thought, though – I don’t know if I would hire a publicist to figure out FB marketing. I hired a publicist at the beginning of my launch, and she was very nice and had some good ideas, but she did nothing on the FB side and I don’t think hiring her was a good investment (or, it was a good investment for thinking about my marketing plan, but what she put out didn’t gain enough sales to recoup the cost of hiring her). It would probably be cheaper to throw $10 or $20 or $50 at some FB ads and see whether you like the results, if you’re comfortable with trial and error
This is fabulous information, Sara! I agree that things like blog tours and such don’t do much for book sales. Right now I’m taking the ‘write the next book’ approach and trying to figure out the best way to maximize my writing time to increase my output.
I love what you said about mailing lists too. I think that’s 100% on the money. My question is this: for people who don’t write fast and who don’t have a lot of new release news, etc., what do you write in your newsletters? I never know, which is why I’m not using mine effectively. I guess it comes from feeling like I’m boring and figuring that people don’t want to hear about my mundane life.
I don’t write fast and I haven’t had a new release since April – and I don’t send out a newsletter every month for precisely that reason. I sent out an email at the end of June with a summer giveaway (gift cards and ARCs of my next book), in which I also announced that I would be at RWA and Readers and Ritas – short and sweet. I also sent out an email in mid-September with another giveaway and a sneak peek of the first two chapters of my next book. I don’t think it’s good to let more than three months go by without emailing the list, but I don’t have anything worth saying once a month right now. Basically my strategy is to email only when I have a new release, or do a giveaway to buy their goodwill
It’s working so far – I’ve had very few unsubscribers, and I think I would lose people if I sent an email with nothing substantive to say.
How many straws does it take to break the camel’s back? All this stuff terrifies me, adding to an already onerous work load, yet I thank you; more knowledge to add to my limited store. This is a writer’s reality in today’s market, and pretending it isn’t won’t make it go away. What I fear is the pure scope of it will discourage some excellent writers, yet today’s young people are so comfortable with social media and having their electronic leashes attached to their persons, I may worry for naught. I still don’t own a smart phone and don’t see one in my immediate future, but the times they are a-changin’, and it may come down to necessity.
One thing that I didn’t say in my post, but that I also believe in – it’s just as important to make a list of what you will *not* do as it is to worry about all the things you should do. No one can do absolutely every marketing strategy, unless they have infinite time (or infinite money to pay an army of people to do it for them). So, if there are things you don’t find appealing, or that don’t work for you, or that simply suck more time than you are willing to give, acknowledge that you won’t do it and let it go. I think focusing on three areas and doing them well is way more valuable than dabbling in fifty things.
For me, my list of things I won’t do right now are:
- book trailers. No time, no inclination to do it myself, no reason to believe that spending thousands to make one will ever pay off.
- group blogs. Rubies and Duchesses aside, of course
But while I love writing blogs, I can’t handle getting more email on any more lists, and group blogs require coordination that I simply can’t stress over right now.
- blog tours. When my next book comes out, I’ll contact a few blogs that I have a good relationship with and offer to do a post – but I’m not going to do 20 or 30 guest blogs ever again. I think they helped me gain visibility – but the stress isn’t worth it. And as you all know, I’m a West Coast late riser – which makes responding to comments challenging
- stress over Facebook. I try to post there a couple of times a week, but I hate it for personal reasons and am not going to spend a lot of time building a strategy there. I know I’m in the minority on this, but c’est la vie.
If something stresses you out, don’t do it! Just write the best books you can write. Besides, word of mouth is still a bigger driver of sales than anything else – FB/twitter can be great for interacting with readers you already have and turning them into megafans who will tell their friends about you, but you’re better off investing your time in writing than you are in trying to attract strangers on social media
Great information, Sara! I had been wondering about the effectiveness of a blog tour. I did that for the first release, limited it for the second, and I’m not sure it’s the best use of my time and energy in the future. Tidbit #1 was especially interesting, and I’ll have to work on that.
I’ve also been working on the Newsletter bit, and have set up a quarterly newsletter. Just released the second issue. I’ve just been sending out an email with news and other bits of info, but I wondered about what programs people use, the best way to manage a list, etc. Any additional info on that?
Thanks!!
I don’t recall anyone mentioning specific mailing list management tools at the conference (other than ones that cost thousands of dollars – this was geared at Big 6 publishers). But the two that I keep hearing about are MailChimp and Constant Contact. I *love* MailChimp – I think it’s intuitive and easy to use, and I like their slightly snarky help center and the profusion of monkeys/chimps on their site
Name aside, they are really robust and sophisticated.
MailChimp is also affordable. They have a free model that allows for <2000 subscribers and <12000 emails sent/month (so if you have 1000 subscribers, you could send 12 campaigns a month). But you miss out on the functionality of 'inbox inspector' and 'delivery doctor' – tools that show you how your email will look on the top email clients and whether it will get through spam filters at the top ISPs. I ended up paying to have this, and am up to a number of subscribers that costs me $30/mo – but I still think it's more than worth it. The biggest benefit is that I can see after I send out an email how many people open it, how many clicked on links in the email, which links were most popular (good for seeing whether ppl were going to Amazon, Nook, ARE, etc)…lots of data, which I obviously love
Constant Contact is great too, though, from people I know who've used it. If you have specific questions about MailChimp, let me know in a comment or email me – I'm happy to help!
Oh, wow, this is awesome info, Sara. Thank you. I’ll definitely be looking into MailChimp (and I love monkeys LOL). The ability to check the number of people opening the mail and clicking what links is priceless. Thanks, again!
Ok, several other commenters have started with “Wow,” and I’m going to echo them. Wow, Sara, this was helpful!
Two of my big takeaways:
1. make sure your web presence works for the smaller screens of iPhones and other mobile devices.
2. The client email list looks *very* productive (ethically and legally used, of course!)
How very cool of you to share all this great info from the conference–and it sounds like it was a really smart move to attend this conference. THANK YOU!!
You’re welcome! The conference was fun, albeit somewhat overwhelming – I basically left with a list of things to do, which is both inspiring and scary. I like lists, though, so I’m a happy camper
Sara, Great info. Sounds like this was a great conference to attend. Thank you so much for taking notes and sharing them with us. I’m sure, after some more thought, I’m going to have a zillion questions, so I might be back. WINK
It was fun! Come on back – as you should all know by now, I’m much more an afternoon/night person
Thank you for this. It’s good for me to see the stats and hear what other people say.
Thanks so much for this, Sara. I’d never even given a thought to how websites might appear on the screens of smaller devices.
And I know I’ve been neglecting the Author Central area, so I need to get on that.
Thanks again!
Wonderful post, Sara. I second the recommendation for MailChimp. My list is small right now, but I know they’re people who truly want to hear from me (when I have news worthy of a mailing
).
You mentioned this: “…you must make sure that your website looks great on smartphones.” This sounds like it would be a good Ruby post all its own! I have a new smartphone and love it, but I don’t know what’s considered good for website design for a small screen. I can zoom in and out on the phone, so I haven’t really thought about the design aspect before…
Thanks for sharing this invaluable info, Sara! I am slightly alarmed by the rise of mobile searches, though, but only because my newly revamped site’s header is wonky on iPhone. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why. It comes out perfectly on all browsers on Macs, PCs, iPad, Kindle Touch. Very perplexing!