Welcome to the very first edition of News From The AuthorVerse! In this free newsletter, you’ll get advice every week from authors who have been in the trenches and our takes on important events that occurred this week concerning authors. If you find them valuable, please share this newsletter with someone you know would benefit from it.
This article contains a few links to our own stuff, because we honestly could not find someone out there who does these particular things better than us.
Highly-Recommended Books Sell Forever
Whether you’re an author who has just published your first book, or an author with several books under your belt, you doubtless want the same thing: book sales. And lots of them. Writing for its own sake can be cathartic and rewarding, but if you want to build a lasting business from your books, you need readers who buy them.
Getting potential readers to discover your book is not the hardest part. If you’ve ever run an advertising campaign on Amazon, you’ll know you can get thousands of impressions before a single person clicks on your book. Thousands of visitors may have discovered your book existed, but they clearly aren’t interested in reading your book. Reader interest matters far more than eyeballs on your book. For as long as books have existed, recommendations have been the most effective way of stoking interest and building a reputation for your book.
Take The Art of War, an internationally famous work that is thousands of years old. Its reputation and impressive sales numbers have been built on the back of generations of people recommending this book using war as a proxy for many pursuits in life. Its terse, didactic style is unique and compelling. My very own copy of The Art of War, purchased from a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Los Angeles sits next to me as I write this. I own this book because multiple people had recommended it to me as a “classic” over the years. Frankly, most of the books I buy and read come from recommendations of all kinds. I’m especially weak to “the classics”.
If you think about what “classics” really are, it quickly becomes obvious how important recommendations are. A “classic” is a book that is both extremely old and still remembered fondly by plenty of people who are still alive. Many of these books’ authors died long ago, but their work lives on because people still recommend them to this day. Whether that book is The Count of Monte Cristo or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, none of these books would still be bought today if their enthusiastic readers weren’t still talking about them. The most highly-recommended books are classics, and there isn’t a classic which isn’t highly-recommended.
From that, we can conclude that if you want to sell a lot of books, you need to get a lot of recommendations. It really is that simple. However, not all recommendations are created equal. Some forms are more effective than others.
The effectiveness of each form of recommendation can be represented as a tier list:
Tiers of Recommendations
Tier 1 - Best
These recommendations are the best you can get. Focus most of your energy on getting more of these, if you can.
Personal Recommendations
This is a recommendation from someone you know very well, trust, and respect. When they recommend a book to you, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to go out and buy it, even if it takes you a while to read it. They might even buy it for you. The recommendation carries even more weight if it’s a non-fiction book meant to help you out. Think of a self-help book like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
These are people like:
a close friend
a family member you don’t hate
your boyfriend
your wife
a mentor
This is the best kind of recommendation you can get. For one thing, it means that someone likes your book enough to recommend it to people they care a lot about. With any luck, the person they recommend your book to will become a convert themselves. This is how books propagate themselves.
What makes personal recommendations so powerful is that they are genuine, and that is the exact reason they can’t be bought. At least, not in the same way you can purchase advertising spots. Rather, personal recommendations should be encouraged. When a reader buys your book, you could give them the opportunity to gift a copy to a friend or loved one, free of charge. For the reader, not taking advantage of this opportunity feels like a waste.
Think about how you could encourage people to recommend your book. You could include a page at the back of your book directly addressing the reader and asking them to recommend it to people they think would benefit from it. That should be the bare minimum, and a lot of authors already do it. Giving readers a free copy to gift to one of their friends is simply a more effective form of encouragement. It doesn’t earn you a sale, but you only give each reader a single copy. Chances are, there’s more than one person they might want to recommend the book to. In this case, you can further encourage existing readers to purchase a gift copy of your book at a discount.
Personal recommendations are the best type of recommendations to get, so you should do everything you can to encourage them.
Tier 2 - Great
These recommendations are great to get and it’s well worth investing time in getting more of them, though they can be tricky to engineer.
Community Recommendations
These recommendations are typically more indirect than personal recommendations, but because they come from a community or organization you belong to, these recommendations also have a lot of weight.
Perhaps the best and most enduring example of community book recommendations are in churches. Every member of the church will be strongly recommended to read the Holy Bible, and that recommendation carries a lot of weight. There are other religious books by church members, perhaps a pastor, which might be recommended too. As a community, church members read and learn the text of the Bible together.
There are plenty other examples of communities and organizations where book recommendations will come from, though:
a book club
your workplace (typically, you’ll be recommended a management book)
a High School English class
While it would be great to have your book recommended in these contexts, your book typically already needs to have a reputation and some level of prestige before most communities would consider recommending it en masse. It’s a difficult type of recommendation to encourage in the early days, but it’s the sort of thing that’s likely to happen naturally over time.
Online Influencers (blogs, YouTubers, & other creators)
“Influencer” is a term so broad it’s almost unhelpful. Any person who has the ear of more than two people could qualify as an “influencer”. For the purposes of this section, however, an influencer should have an audience of at least 5,000 people. These are people you would really benefit from building relationships with.
There are influencers of all stripes on the internet. In the “bookish” community, the two types that stand out the most are bloggers and YouTubers. You’ll find your blogger influencers writing about their favorite books, community events, or doling out writing advice. Many are authors themselves. YouTubers are much the same, but they communicate through video rather than text.
Some of these people have a large following. If they came out with an article or video recommending your book, a good chunk of that traffic would be sent your way. That’s why it’s valuable to build a relationship with these influencers. You could pay for an advertising spot in their usual content (YouTubers are particularly amenable to sponsorships), or if you think they would be interested, you could send them a free copy of your book, perhaps asking for a review. This works especially well if it’s a pre-release copy, as that carries exclusivity.
The second method is much harder to pull off, but if the influencer is interested, you will get a genuine recommendation, which carries far more weight.
Tier 3 - Good
These recommendations aren’t as great as Tier 2 & Tier 1 recommendations, but they are still good to get. They are also much easier to obtain than higher tier recommendations. It doesn’t require a great deal of time to earn them, so absolutely consider pursuing them.
Visibility Through Bestseller Lists
Bestseller lists are highly coveted by authors everywhere. When a book does earn a spot on one of these lists, the author gets to put a badge on their cover. Readers interested in the best-selling books will find new books to read on these lists.
If your book earns bestseller status on Amazon, it will sometimes get a bright orange badge on top that readers “#1 Bestseller“. It helps your book stand out in searches, and affects the recommendation algorithm. If your book is #1 in a category, it will be listed at the very top of that category, so it leads to better discovery.
The best part about Bestseller status is that it shows readers are already interested in your book, so it signals to potential readers that it’s worth getting interested in.
Bestseller status has its place when combined with other types of recommendations but is not enough on its own.
There are many options out there for running bestseller campaigns to get onto these lists, and we offer our own here.
Reviews
There are two types of reviews worth getting. The first type of reviews you should absolutely encourage are those that appear on your book’s page on Amazon. These are reader reviews everyone will see when they inspect your book. These recommendations won’t help more people find your book, but it will help convince them once they’re on the page. They are still valuable, though, because they contribute to your book’s overall rating, which does show up in the search results, and a high number of reviews indicates a certain level of prestige.
The second type of reviews are those which appear on external sites. These reviews have the potential to funnel traffic your way; particularly if the reviewer has a big audience. Take Merphy Napier, for example, a YouTuber with over 100,000 subscribers. There are a lot of readers who actually discover and get interested in books based on what she has to say about them. This has some overlap with the Influencer section above.
If you want more Amazon reviews for your book, you should encourage readers to write a review on the last page of your book. However, do not ask your friends or family to leave Amazon reviews for your book. Amazon treats these as fraudulent reviews and will be very harsh on you if they catch you doing this. They only want real reviews from real readers on their site. If you collect your readers’ email address (which you should!), consider scheduling an email two weeks after purchase asking them to leave a review for your book. Over time, you should build up a good number of reviews as more people read your book. If you want even more reviews more quickly, consider joining our Book Review Club.
Tier 4 - OK
Still worth doing, but you need to think carefully about how.
Advertising
Advertising at its worst can be very unconvincing, but it is another form of recommendation. As the old adage goes, “self-praise is no recommendation.“ And that is true - for bad advertising. Good advertising doesn’t extol your own virtues; it informs people what you can do for them. Advertising is the most expensive way to acquire new readers, but good advertising is undeniably effective. It’s also easy to measure performance. You can set an advertising budget for the month and see how many purchases you get, and adjust it for the next month.
However, it’s also really easy to lose a lot of money on advertising without getting anywhere, so you need to be smart about how you do it. You need to monitor it closely. If an ad stops performing well, kill it and move on.
Amazon Advertising is the easiest way to reach a lot of readers already on Amazon very quickly. Advertising on Facebook can also work very well depending on the subject matter of your book. If you can film a short video, advertising on YouTube can work very well too!
It’s not a personal recommendation, but with any luck, advertising will reel in a few passionate readers who can’t help but personally recommend your book.
Make it easy for people to share your book!
You know the types of recommendations you’re looking for now, but you also need to make it easy for people to share your book. The best way to do this is to have your own page with the option to purchase the book directly from you. Different people from different countries with different devices buy books differently. You might intuitively believe that Amazon, the biggest online book site in the world, is the best place to send potential readers, but it isn’t. A lot of people do buy from Amazon, but it’s not the best place to send them first.
That’s because Amazon is actually several different “marketplaces”. People from the UK buy from amazon.co.uk, while people from Japan buy from amazon.co.jp. Americans buy from amazon.com. If it’s a Kindle book, people who aren’t from America can’t even buy the book on amazon.com. If your potential readers are all from the same country as you, then you can send them to the same site…but if you have an international reach, you need to be a bit smarter about how you go about this.
The easiest way is to have your own page with links to all of the Amazon marketplaces and let the user choose which marketplace to go to. But not everybody buys from Amazon. If a person is from the Middle East, they can’t buy from Amazon because they don’t have a marketplace for them. There are some people who hate Amazon and refuse to buy from them. Then there are the Apple users who only buy from Apple services like Apple Books.
Just think about how many purchases you might miss out on from people who can’t buy your book the way you expect them to.
The best thing you can do is have all of these links in one place and send all your readers to this one page. This was a problem we have been well aware of for many years. We used to do all of this manually for every book we published, and it was a ton of work. If you only have one book, it might be worth it.
What we do now is plug the book into our bookstore and let it collect all the links for us. In 10 minutes, we have one nice-looking sales page with as many places to buy from as possible. It looks like this.
The page automatically detects which country the visitor is from and shows them the appropriate Amazon Marketplace link so they don’t need to think about it.
You can add your own book to our bookstore and let us do all the work for you too. It’s totally free. Just go here and paste your ASIN in: https://sellmybook.app/page/checkbook
Highly-Recommended Books Sell Forever
No matter how good or important your book is, if it doesn’t get recommended, it won’t sell. It won’t be remembered. It’s the books that people continue to recommend, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, that become classics and live on forever.
