Keyword Goldmine

My first novel ever (ebook version) is up for preorder. Hurray!

What I thought to be a relatively easy step in the process, turned out to open a whole new can of worms.

Keywords being one of them. One of the innocent looking questions Amazon wants to know in order to get your book published is what keywords you want to use. At first, I thought they meant which genre, but no. Keywords are something else. It turns out that keywords are the words Amazon (and apparently pretty much the whole Internet) uses for readers to connect with your books. In other words, the ‘words’ people search for when looking for a novel.

Okay, still not that hard, right? I write paranormal fantasy with a male/male romance, some overlap with urban fantasy etc etc. But when reading the fine print (yes Amazon does try to help you along) it said not to use words already used in your description, because they already use those. Okay, so I need other words…

I got stuck. Because what kind of words people use to search for books? Then I remembered in one of the many blogs, Facebook groups etc that keywords are a BIG thing, and that it’s very important to get it right because it could very well mean the difference between people finding your book and not. And note to self, if they can’t find you, they can’t buy you! After googling around on the know how’s of keywords, I stumbled upon the Kindlepreneur. I already mentioned the site I think, but it’s a very helpful site/youtube-channel on self-publishing on Amazon. After a quick look around, I came to one of his posts about keywords. Basically, there are two options.

  1. you go to Amazon.com anonymously type very slowly in the search field and see what Amazon auto fills in. It’s not foolproof, but it does give you an idea of what people have searched on before you came along. I tried, it, but it didn’t give me many useful results.
  2. The second tip he gave, turned out to be a goldmine. No really. Well, not literally of course, but you catch my drift. KWFinder.com.

What’s so special about KWFinder? It’s a site where you can enter any keyword and it will instantly spit out a whole list with related keywords. Kind of like a thesaurus for search words. Okay handy, but not that special. ( I can hear you think it, don’t deny!) True, but it does more. It also shows you how many times the keyword was searched for in the past month, on what kind of websites, the costs per click on that keyword, how many competitors per pay to click, a rating on how easy/difficult it is to run advertisements on and the list goes on. Oh, and it also lets you import said list with keywords closeby to spreadsheets etc, so you can easily save them. Now, I’m not that smart with ads yet (hell, I haven’t even begun to focus on that part yet, although I really should do so) but even I know how valuable this kind of information is. GOLD I tell you. GOLD!

I learned for instance that the keyword ‘m/m’ is far more popular than ‘gay’. That ‘LGBT’ is upcoming and trendy, but not so much in combination with ‘paranormal romance’. And that people tend to look almost two times more for ‘books’ than they are for ‘novels’. Interesting hm?

But it gets better. There’s also the First page results on Google search results (SERP) it tells you on white kind of sites people used those keywords. And that’s where I think the second biggest value lies. Because these are the sites my readers are searching on. Apart from the logical sites like Amazon, Goodreads and other major bookstores etc, I quickly realized there were also a lot of review blogs/sites on it, with a specific genre, opening a whole new world of possibilities and marketing chances. (see next post on that!)  

My next thought was: “Okay this looks too good to be true. The whole program/site looks way too smart. How much is this going to cost me?”

And there’s the beauty. It has a free account option that allows you to research up to five keywords per 24hrs for free. Yes, you read correctly. This goldmine is free to use for 5 searches a day.  

To be honest that is just fine with me. The amount of information I got from it was so huge that with the following up etc I don’t think I have time for more than those 5 searches a day.

So go check it out. NOW!

below is a screenshot of one of my searches, just to give you an impression of how a goldmine looks like when you stumble upon it.


Celebrating small successes

Today started off great. One of my ARC readers dropped me a line on Facebook saying she loved my novel and wanted to know if she could talk about it with her readers group on KU (Kindle Unlimited). Duh yes, you can! lol. I was over the moon, and after having a rough week with lots of insecurities concerning my writing (the copy ad thing for my trailer didn’t help much :/ ) I could really use this.

It also shows how even the little comments can have such a profound impact on our moods, and by extension, on our motivation.

I know, today I got lucky. (and I’m sooo grateful that was one of my first reactions) But I know some pretty harsh ones will follow sooner or later. People will always judge you, and there will always be people who won’t like what you write. You can’t please everyone. It’s a scary thing. Especially because I know I’ll take it hard and personal. Therefore I have decided to celebrate every small compliment and accomplishment. It’s a big deal. Even if this whole journey will fail, the novel a huge flop, at least this person today liked it. And that’s what I’ll take with me.

Book trailers and ad copy

Today we worked on my booktrailer. As I mentioned before, my brother is doing the whole technical side of it, and we got off to a flying start. Everything was goign great and then we got to the part where we had to add text…

Today we worked on my book trailer. As I mentioned before, my brother is doing the whole technical side of it, and we got off to a flying start. Everything was going great and then we got to the part where we had to add text…

Of course, I had thought about that part, even watched dozens of other book trailers as a reference and had pretty much thought I could wing this. After all, I have already written two 90K words novels, how hard could it be to write a few sentences. Okay, not entirely true; I also had a hard time writing my blurb. But that’s why I thought this would be a piece of cake, I already had my blurb, so my idea was to use that text for the trailer as well. Great idea! Except it didn’t work. It was waaaaay too long and wordy.

I tried shortening sentences and such, but the results were just ‘meh’.

Now, my brother hasn´t read my book but is rather opinionated about his likes and dislikes. And with every sentence my brain could come up with, I got thumps down. (accompanied by several expletives) “It doesn’t want me to buy this book!”, “It’s not funny.” etc etc. I can tell you, after several hours of this, my head was in the gutter, self-doubt crippling me even more with every comment thrown my way. I wrote an entire novel–a novel several beta, and proofreaders have read and liked. People tell me my writing is ‘witty’, ‘sharp humored’, ‘funny’. Why can’t I come up with a few one-liners when it counts?!

Frustrated, we closed up for the day, and it was back to the drawing board for me to come up with better texts. And then it hit me. I wasn’t writing a story. I was writing ad copy. And that’s a whole different ballgame, isn’t it? Though I can’t exactly put my finger on the differences, that doesn’t mean it’s the same. At least that’s what my mind is telling me. (read: reassuring me with) I feel stupid and scared I’ll never find the right words, the right note. So instead, I’ll try and clear my mind, and try again tomorrow with a clean slate. My novel wasn’t written in one go either.

ARC’s and Booksprout

Today I wanted to chat a little about Booksprout. I never heard of them before, to be honest, but many of my book loving friends did. For those of you that didn’t know about them either, I’ll explain.

It’s a site where writers can upload their ARC (Advance Reader Copy) and readers can download it (for free) in return for leaving a review.

If I read the site correctly, there are also options for promotions etc, and from what I’ve seen of it so far, it’s very well compatible with Amazon. Which helps me, since that’s where I’ll be publishing my books. (for now at least)

I’m not exactly sure on how it works, but apparently readers need to sign up (for free), can download a book (for free) and once done, they are obliged to leave a review on Booksprout, AND on the sites required by the author of said ARC. Then they also have to ‘prove’ they’ve done this by providing them with a link to their review. Booksprout helps to remind them by sending them 2x an email when the due date is nearing. Now, I’m not too sure what happens if they don’t do this, are they banned?

They have several plans, with different price tags to them, but they also have a free one. I’m going for the free one. It allows 20 ARC’s, which is hopefully going to result in some actual reviews. And who knows, if this really works out, I can always go for a paid plan later on. For now, let’s just see if, and how it works.

To see how it looks, check out my author page at Booksprout, and my ARC

Back to the matter of the back matter

My novel is written, painstakingly edited, front matter is added, and the whole thing is formatted the way I like it. I’m not going to say it was smooth sailing–because then I would be lying–, but adding the front matter at least was pretty easy. There’s a pretty strict guide as to what goes in it, in what order and how to do it. There are even pretty standard templates for your copyright pages etc. So it took me maybe an hour or so to add it to the main body of text and have it the way I liked. Easy.

I spent most of the night yesterday in doing some research. My house is an absolute mess now, due to me pulling out every book I own–loads it turned out–in order to see how others did it. The Professionals. I’ve probably stated this before, but I’m a huge believer in not trying to invent the wheel every time something comes up. There’s nothing wrong with looking at other books/authors etc to see how they did it. It works for them, maybe it could work for me too. (operative word being ‘could’. Never assume it works for you, just because it worked for someone else).

So after having done my research, I thought I’d just sit behind my laptop, crank it out and finish the job. Boy, was I wrong! It started out okay. I made the following list of things I wanted to include in it:

  • Call to attention > have them subscribe to my newsletter
  • ask for reviews
  • add excerpt for my next novel in the series
  • Thank my readers for reading it and buying it

I opened my document, eager to get started and finish this puppy when I found myself staring at an accusatory blinking cursor that didn’t move. As I stared at the blank screen, my mind was just as blank. What should come first? Where should I put it?

I told myself it would be alright, poured a cup of tea and started googling for answers. And then the weirdest thing appeared to have happened overnight. Yesterday, the internet was full of sites and blogs and articles about the importance of back matter, and today most of what I could find never even mentioned the ‘call to attention’ or ‘excerpts’! Where have they run off to?!

Two more cups of tea later and I decided to search for ‘call to attention for back matter’. This finally got me some hits that looked promising, but still only mentioned the parts you could include, nothing on the order etc. I confess, I got a bit frustrated at this point. For people who don’t know me, I’m kind of a stickler for rules. I like to do things ‘by the book’ (no pun intended). And, yes, we are Indie publishers, we can do whatever the hell we want! But to me, Indie publishing isn’t about doing what I want, it’s about creating the best novel I possibly can and see how far I can take it. It gives me an opportunity to have my baby published, see it in print, have a book with my name on it. And to me, that is to try and get it in the best shape I can. And the closest I can possibly get it to a ‘professionally’, trad published book. Some Indie writers might be offended by that, and I don’t mean it in a derogatory way, or think of self-publishing as any less than trad. publishing. But to me, trad publishing books are the standard I want to live up to. I aspire my books to be of that same level of professionalism. Because right now, I’m not. I’m an amateur. I’m learning fast, and work hard every day, but half of the time I have no clue as to what I’m doing. But I need a goal. Something to live up to. And if my readers can’t tell the difference between my book and that of a ‘professional’, I’m happy.

But anyway, back to the matter of the back matter. (again, no pun intended) I eventually learned that there are no specific rules on back matter as there are in front matter. At least not for fiction writers like me. (there are some rules when it comes to the order of things like afterwords, indexes, reference guides etc.)

After several hours of surfing the internet, I finally came to Diana Urban’s post on BookBub. The text itself didn’t have much new information, to be honest, but what I found REALLY helpful were the examples at the bottom. It gave me an idea of what to do, how to do it, and in what order.

After I had that figured out, it didn’t take much time to actually put the whole thing together. Sigh. And here I thought it would only take me an hour or so. 0.0

For those of you interested, here’s how my back matter ended up (wordpress screwed up my formatting and fonts etc, but you’ll get the idea at least. I left out the excerpt itself since it would be way too long otherwise:

————————————————————

Thank you for reading DINNER AT DAWN, I hope you enjoyed reading it, as much as I loved writing it. If you did, please consider….

–         taking a few minutes of your time to leave me a review. They make a huge difference for me.

–         staying in touch with me via my website, MariskaSlieker.com, or my Facebook page. I’d love to get to know you!

Silas’ story continues in the next novel in the Himura Saga, BREAKFAST AT DUSK, that is coming soon!

If you can’t wait for it to be published, turn the page for a sneak-peek!

NEXT PAGE>>  

Breakfast at Dusk

A Himura Saga novel

Sneak Peak

(Excerpt of 9 pages long)

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Why Back matter matters

First, a big hurray for me for finally finishing my first novel! YAY! The editing is finally done, the formatting is done for the front matter and the main body. (which took a while I can tell you)

But, there is more. (isn’t there always?) There is still the back matter to consider, and if you believe some sources, it could very well be the most important part of your book as a whole. Especially if you’re writing a series, like me. Because you don’t only want people to buy just one book. You want them to leave a review, spread the word about how amazing your book is, but most of all, you want them to sell your next book as well.

Okay, so what is back matter? Back matter is basicly everything that comes after ‘The End’. But the most important/helpful things are:

  • Call to action > ask them to leave a review/sign up for your newsletter/FB page etc
  • Cover of your next book
  • Excerpt, or fist chapter of your next book
  • other books written by you

In my case, I’m well on my way of finishing the final draft of the second book in the series. And I’m convinced it would be essential to get the info in the back matter of book 1. So instead of running to the printers and publish my book, I’m going to work on the excerpt and cover of book 2. Unfortunatly I don’t have a release date yet for that, so I can’t promote that, and I’m still debating if I should say “Coming in September” or just leave it as “Coming soon”.

Granted, you could always add info about a second book later, and publish first. This might even be the better option if it otherwise means you will have to push back your publishing date considerably. But in my case I think I can have it done within a few weeks, a month at most.

In case you don’t take my word on it, Bookbub did some data gathering of the results with authors who used this technique.

<img src=’https://insights.bookbub.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/using-back-matter-to-sell-more-books-bookbub.png’ alt=’Using Back Matter to Sell More Books’ width=’600px’ border=

Book trailers

Yesterday I was at this birthday party, yes it is important to socialize with real-life people every now and then too. My family asked how my book was going along and soon enough the topic went to the marketing side of it.

My sister-in-law had recently lost her job, and she was keen to think along. Nice, because we’re pretty much on the same page when it comes to taste. Long story short, she, and my brother suggested I make a video trailer for my novel. My sister-in-law, eager to start a new project now that she had so much free time, immediately jumped on it.

Let me explain first why this might actually be of a good quality. She studied music and still composes all sorts of music for fun. My brother has always been a wizard with computers and programming and has been making websites and such since he was a teenager. He immediately showed me some samples of what he could do, and I instantly fell in love. He’s throwing around big words like Afterfx and such, but I have no clue really what it is. So today he gave me a site with thousands of samples that he could then alter and do his thing with, so I could have an idea of the possibilities.

Now, almost 8 hours later, with blurry eyes from staring at a screen too long, cold, because I  forgot to turn on the heating, and more ideas in my head than I ever thought possible.

Not sure if this will actually work out, but if it does, I think this might be a great way of standing out from the rest. Let’s face it if you see a still photo and something moving, your eyes immediately go to the moving one first.

I’ll keep you guys posted of the proceedings!

Comparable Lists, and why every Indie writer should make one.

To take a break from the final round of editing on my novel, I watched some more presentations of the Women in Publishing Summit. Forgive me for forgetting the name of this astounding lady, but I do remember she was a best-selling novelist who self-published her book. Very successfully.

Apart from having a few tips on how to get the sales in order to receive the Holy Grail of writers, the title of ‘New York Times Bestselling author’, she also mentioned some great tips every author should know.

One of them was to make a ‘comp list’. (A quick ask around in several of my writer groups, I learned the full name was a Comparable List.) She said it was one of the most important, yet most skipped over, marketing tool self-publishing authors need.

At first, I was a bit skeptical, it sounded like a hell of a lot of work, and for what? But then she started to explain why it was so useful, especially for first-time authors who don’t have years of experience in the publishing world.

So, let me explain what it is first. A Comp list is basically a list/spreadsheet where you analyze your direct competition. Books that are so close to yours that it is safe to say that their readers are your readers and vice versa. Never mind that they may be well-published authors and sold a million copies, this is all about the book itself. Pick the 10 or 15 closest to yours.

These are the ones you’re going to take a VERY close look at. You can include as much or as little info as you want but in this case, more is better.

Think about the following:

  • Cover, title, author, publishing date
  • number of pages/words
  • blurb
  • main genre
  • subgenre
  • any keywords they have listed
  • price
  • ranking, number of reviews, average rating
  • number of ads, type of ads, places where the advertise
  • number of copies sold
  • author rank
  • launch strategy

Why would you go to all the trouble in finding this out? (if you can even find everything) Because you want to see how well you’re doing compared to them. Do your cover, blurb, title etc match theirs? What genres, sub-genres, and keywords do they use in their descriptions, listing, and advertisements. (you can use them yourself in your say your AMS) Their rankings can tell you a little more about how successful they are. You can ‘measure’ yourself against similar books. If you go for the Traditional publisher, they know all this, they know exactly what keywords to use in their ads, blurbs, and descriptions, but do you? I don’t. Not yet.

And the more the lady spoke about the benefits of such a list, the more it dawned on me that this is very valuable. You can basically copy what already proves to be working. I don’t mean literally, of course; your book is not the same, and readers might react different simply because they don’t know you yet. BUT, it’s a start. And like with every new adventure, you need to start somewhere. Why not start by looking at how the big boys play?

It’s suddenly a lot more tempting to roll up your sleeves for some bookshop browsing, eh? 😉

To help you along a little, I already made a template for myself that I’m more than willing to share for FREE with everyone that might think it helpful. (what can I say, I’m a nice girl. Most of the times) Do keep in mind that this is for my own novel, a Paranormal Romance, so you may not need all the columns I used, or you might want to add some more genre specific ones.

comp list templateDownload

Good luck, and feel free to share your comp lists, or suggestions for mine, in the comments. I’d love to see what you guys come up with!

Marketing Hocus-Pocus

After watching some more video’s form the Women in Publishing Summit, today’s main topic being marketing, I got relatively enthusiastic. Why? Because to me, marketing sounds expensive. And yes, things like Amazon ads (AMS) costs money, but you can control your budget, and it doesn’t take hundreds of dollars at a time to invest in.

Also, there are many things you can even do for free, well except your time and effort that is, that prove to be just as successful a marketing tool than paid ads.

One of the things that I took away from Angela J. Ford’s presentation was that she mentioned how she got a lot of readers and followers from giving away free short stories and other bonus material via Bookfunnel. Now Bookfunnel was already on my long (and ever-growing) list of things to research as it is mentioned from different sources as a great way to ‘publish’ free content, and how it is a great way to build a mailing list. Which is one of the other points she makes, that is very important for marketing your book.

Another one of her points is that series are selling well these days. (Yay, good for me!) There are several sources that mention you should sell series in what they call a ‘kick release’. It basically means that you release them one after the other in say within a month of each other. Of course, no one can write that fast, so you have to basically have them already written, hold them back until the last one is done, and then release them. But she is living proof that you don’t HAVE to do it that way. She writes three books a year (still pretty fast, but better doable than twelve) and manages just fine. One note of caution though at writing and selling series is that readers will most likely not buy a book 1 from a first-time author unless they know you finish the series. Meaning you shouldn’t get discouraged when your sales on your first book aren’t as high as you’d hoped it to be because people might be waiting until a series is done, or at least have the idea you’re committed and will finish it. Food for thought.

Also, more than one speaker adviced these three sources for further research on AMS

I’ll be sure to check all three of them out since the whole ad thing is like hocus pocus to me. Busy busy busy….

Anne Rainbow’s tips on editing

Here’s is one of the video’s I watched during the Women in Publishing summit. Anne is a very sweet, caring person, who helped me a lot with understanding the whole editing process. Although I admit I really LOVED editing my novel, she does bring out one of my worst fears; that my writing (and then I mean the technical part of writing, not the content) is not good enough.

Another thing that scares me is that she, like most video’s I watched during the summit, stresses how important it is to have your work professionally edited. The thing I’m struggling is the cost of that is no peanuts. I had a sample sent to an editor, granted this was before I edited it myself, but got a quote back for around USD 3100,=. (we are talking here about a manuscript of around 90.000 words)
That’s something that I don’t have laying around. My idea now is to have edit the heck out of it myself. (I did invest in a ProwritingAid premium account and read pretty much every book on editing and grammar I could get my hands on) and see where it will take me. It is after all my first book, and I don’t even know if people will like what I’m writing. And then if I made some money out of it, or manage to save some money, have it professionally edited later on. So far my beta readers didn’t mention bad editing or writing, even though I asked them specifically about it. 

Sigh. I thought I had ticked the ‘editing’ box already and decided on my course, but with video’s like this, and the solid arguments they make… I start doubting myself again.