You should bear in mind how long it takes people to read your entire book. If you have a short book, you might send an email out after a day or two, but if your book is long you may ask for that review after a week or two.
As far as the technical process, I have some step-by-step PDFs that will walk you through setting up your email system and integrating it into your book. If you enter your email in the form at the beginning of this book, I’ll mail them to you.
Amazon's Best Reviewers
Amazon treats reviewers like gladiators in an arena. Every single product on Amazon is ranked, but so are all of the reviewers. There are loads of professional reviewers.
If you get to the top echelon of reviewers, Amazon has an elite program. They send these respected reviews LOADS of cool stuff for free. The main program is called Vine Voice. These people get tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in free stuff, all because their reviews are trusted and respected.
Trust is the foundation of the reviewer algorithm. When someone leaves a review, other people can say it was helpful or not helpful. If you write a million reviews but consistently get downvoted, your reviewer rank will be terrible.
The quality of reviews is more important than anything else. Most people trying to move up the ranks are glad to review Kindle books to beef up their score. You can look at the top thousand reviewers directly on Amazon. Most of them have their email address listed because they like free stuff.
Find a reviewer who mostly leaves positive reviews and has reviewed a book similar to yours. Email them explaining that you saw they reviewed a similar book, and you would be honored to send them a complimentary copy of your book in exchange for an honest review.
These reviews are worth more because they are imbued with more trust. A review from a top 100 reviewer holds a lot of weight with Amazon and will also increase your sales numbers.
There are ways to automate this process using software, and I can show you how to do that on my site.
Goodreads
Goodreads is the social media platform for people who love books. Amazon now owns it. On this platform, you can find groups of readers who love getting free books and leaving reviews. This is an excellent way to find people that prefer a particular format. There are groups of people who just love free audiobooks.
Sending out loads of free copies of your book is a great way to get that initial momentum when you are a new author and don’t have any following. The more time you spend on Goodreads, the more you will get dialed into the mood of the culture.
Do NOT post your book in inappropriate groups appealing for reviews. That is unacceptable over there. Only post your book in groups or threads where they are looking for books to review.
Friends and Family
Most books and courses on Kindle out there advise you to turn to friends and family for reviews. This is a risky proposition and a total waste of time. If twenty people close to you promise to leave a review, at best one of them will bother to do it.
You will have your feelings hurt, and it becomes awkward all around. You start to think that you’re the only one this has happened to. Everyone else has a great social circle, but you were cursed with terrible friends.
But it’s simply not true. The people who teach their audience to depend on friends and family are the worst. They are letting you down.
This book assumes that you have no social media following, friends or family to leave you reviews. If you can get a family member to leave an honest review after reading your book, that’s great. But that is not where you should be directing your energy.
Reviews for Copies
People love free books, and there are several amazing platforms where you can post your book to find these people. This system is pretty simple. You post your book and say that you will give away a certain number of reviews. The only contingency is honest feedback from people after they have read your book.
Some of these systems are free, and some charge a listing fee. Depending on your budget you can work your way up the cost tree.
Book Country
This is a great platform to use before your book goes live. You can post early versions of your book and ask for readers and reviewers. This platform is built around helping writers with honest feedback. The more active you are in the community, the more reviews you can generate.
The platform offers to handle your book publishing for you, but don’t waste your time with that. You already know how to do it on your own, so there’s no reason to burn your hard-earned money.
Once you’ve gotten a load of reviews from the platform and are ready to launch, you can take your book down. You don’t want a free version of your book competing with Amazon’s paid version. When your book goes live, message your reviewers and ask them to copy and paste their reviews onto your book listing page.
LibraryThing
This website is a Goodreads alternative that isn’t owned by Amazon (yet). It is a great place for authors and readers to connect. They have a wonderful contest program that they call Early Reviewers and Member Giveaway. You can run a contest and give away a few copies of your book to the winners. In your entry form, state that you would like a review in exchange for a free copy of the book.
They don’t have to leave the review on Amazon to be a part of the program. Many people will leave reviews for your book on LibraryThing, Goodreads, social media and their blogs. All of these are wonderful, and you can use Amazon Author Central to add the best reviews to your listing page. You can also ask these excellent reviewers to copy and paste their review to Amazon.
The people on this site take their reviews very seriously, and they will give you fantastic feedback. If they find problems with your book and can’t give it a positive review, they usually email you with a list of reasons they felt your writing was bad. It can be upsetting, but this feedback is solid gold.
If this happens to you with one of your books, assess the value of the critique. If they are on to something, take the time to update and improve your book. I like to run a giveaway here while my book is in pre-launch; this gives me time to fix any errors that come in and improve my book before it hits the general public.
NetGalley
NetGalley is a great platform where you can list a book for a short promotion. Usually, campaigns are run in groups of six books. You can find other authors running group promotions all the time. You pay around thirty bucks to have one of your books listed for a month.
People on NetGalley are all ranked based on their reviews. If someone tries to score a bunch of books without leaving reviews, their score drops and they are kicked off the platform.
The reviews you get from this platform are mixed in my experience. You will get a lot more traction here with fiction books than with non-fiction.
On my last campaign, I received the main review I used on that book’s listing page. The lady left an eloquent and sophisticated review that warmed my heart. A later review compared me to a cult leader who eventually poisoned all of his followers with Kool-Aid; that review I chose not to share on my book listing page. You can’t please everyone.
If you want to jump on a NetGalley promotion and want to find other authors to team up with, reply to one of my emails and I’ll let you know. I’ll also try to post some up-to-date links on where I find authors to team up with on my blog.
More Techniques
These techniques are just the tip of the iceberg, but they should be enough to get you started. As you will see when we plan out your launch, we want at least ten solid reviews before we run your book through the promotion cycle. Twenty reviews are even better, and completely achievable if you implement each of these techniques.
I have loads more methods for getting reviews that I share on my website. I’m always looking for new ways to connect with my readers and adapt to the changing online landscape. I continually test new methods to improve my book marketing, and once I confirm they work, I release them to my loyal customers and reader
s.
25
Generating Hordes of Traffic with Kindle Select
Amazon does not want you selling books in other bookstores. To motivate you to choose exclusivity in your publishing, Amazon has put together several very powerful reward programs.
Kindle Select is the program you join when you promise not to sell your book on any other platform. This only includes the digital version. You can sell your paperback version anywhere you like. Since most other digital platforms represent less than ten percent of the market, it’s worth staying exclusive with Amazon.
The first benefit of joining this program is Kindle Unlimited. This program often generates up to forty percent of my monthly revenue. It’s a significant income boost. I use this program as a publisher and also a consumer. The program is perfect for me.
For the consumer, it’s a monthly subscription service for $9.99 a month. It turns Amazon into a buffet. Instead of paying for every book you read, you simply pay that one monthly fee. You can hold up to ten books at a time on your Kindle, and as you finish them you can return books and grab new ones. As someone who reads thirty books a month, this program is perfect for me.
As a publisher, you can get paid for a customer that didn’t pay you directly. Amazon tracks a massive budget every month for this program. The total purse is more than ten million dollars every month. They take the total income from Kindle Select customers to generate that purse value. Then Amazon calculates the total number of pages read across the platform. You get paid a percentage of the total purse based on your book page reads.
If that math sounds complicated, expect to get page $.005 per page read. That might not sound like much, but those numbers can add up. A one-hundred-page book will pay you fifty cents in royalties for a Kindle Unlimited read. If your book is 99 cents, you only get about thirty cents if the customer buys your book.
Many authors price their books high just to encourage readers to choose Kindle Unlimited. The platform used to pay on a different scale, but sneaky marketers were gaming the previous system. Writing longer books is now rewarded, and as someone who always shoots past his word count, I’m happy to be rewarded.
Promotional Days
As a member of Kindle Select, you can place your book on promotion five days out of every ninety. These promotional days are crucial to pushing your book up the rankings and getting noticed.
You can run a free day promotion or a countdown deal. A countdown deal puts your price onto a calendar and visitors can see that the price will soon rise again. You get a nice little timer on the page to create a sense of urgency. There are some advanced ways to use this type of promotion once your book is launched to rebuild momentum, but for the initial launch you will use the free promotion instead.
You can set up a day where your book will be free for twenty-four hours. It’s very important to remember that all of Amazon runs on the Pacific Timezone. Never forget that or you will mess up some crucial timings with your promotions.
You don’t have to use your days consecutively, and I never use all five in a cycle. For your initial launch promotion, you will use a promotion of 1-2 days and no more. If you run a five-day promotion, you burn up all your free days in one shot and your promotion will lose momentum. It’s better to get ten thousand downloads in one day than two thousand downloads a day five times in a row.
Planning a Day
You want to wait until you have at least ten solid verified reviews on Amazon before you start planning a promotion day. I prefer to have at least twenty, but ten is workable.
Go into your Kindle dashboard and go to the promotions section. Choose your type of promotion and select a day from the little calendar that pops up. Once you click to confirm, your day is locked in.
Depending on your market, different days of the week might appeal to you. I think people base their favorite days to promote based on superstition. Some people swear by Tuesdays, and other will only run a promotion on Thursdays. I can’t tell you the perfect day of the week because any day will work in my experience. I do prefer weekdays to weekends, but that’s simply a personal preference.
The Announcement
Choose your promotion day at least a week in advance, but two is better if you can manage it.
Once you have your day selected there are dozens of websites that you need to notify. There are websites, newsletters, Facebook groups, and Twitter accounts all built around getting people deals on Kindle.
A customer will sign up for one of these platforms, and each day they will get notified about the best discounted books that day. Some groups want to know when books are on sale, and others only want to know about free books.
These sites come and go all the time. It’s impossible to maintain an up-to-date list of the best places to announce your promotion. I will put a list on my website and try to update it continually, but you will always encounter new sites. If you run into one that isn’t on my list, please feel free to email me about it.
There are two ways to let these sites know about your upcoming promotion. You can manually fill in the forms on each website. This process will take you about two to three hours. You can also get one of your kids or an assistant to do it.
The other option is to use a piece of software. There are a few solutions out there that do this, and each one works in a different way. Some of these tools are completely automated, and others just autofill the forms for you to speed up the process. I tend to use the slower tool because it does a better job of submitting, but it does cost $29 a promotion now. It used to be $15, but they raised their rates recently.
I think that’s a little steep if I’m being honest. You will get more total downloads if you submit to sites manually, but I’ll post links to the software options at ServeNoMaster.com/orbit.
For your first launch, every single download will count; I recommend you submit manually.
Turbocharge
For most of this process, I believe in saving every penny possible. I hope you appreciate that I’ve gone the extra mile to show you how to do each step for free. This entire process assumes that you have no following or social media presence.
The first promotion is how you kickstart your book out onto the world stage and start building your list. We have been saving as much money as possible because promotion day is the key to everything.
This is the one part of the cycle where I’ll spend a load of money.
Some services charge a premium to tell their list your book is free. They cost anywhere from thirty to three hundred dollars, depending on how many eyeballs they can drive to your page.
If you have a marketing budget, this is where you want to spend it. I want to be totally transparent with you about each step in the book launch process. Every time I launch a book, I use a different set of services. Some services that were great six months ago burn out their lists by selling promotions to horrible books. I get on as many of their customer feeds as possible. I want to see what kind of books they are recommending to their audience.
As some services weaken, new ones pop up that are simply amazing. This fluctuation means you have to stay on the pulse of the Amazon game. If you visit my site, I’ll keep you updated on what services I’m testing and the kind of results they generate.
Before you spend a penny, analyze if you even need to. If you have followed my system up to this point, posted your book cover on my Facebook wall and gotten the seal of approval from me, and then manually announced your promotional day to every site you find, you will generate around three to five thousand downloads on your promotional day.
For many categories, this is enough downloads to be number one. You only need to be number one in your category to launch your momentum.
If you are going after a tougher category like business books or fiction, then you will need to buy some traffic for your promotion. Some spaces are so competitive that you need huge numbers to generate enough momentum.
If you are launching a romance book, you need to go
for the biggest traffic sources you can afford. Romance is so competitive on Amazon that you can get fifteen thousand downloads, and your book might not break the top one hundred.
Romance is a unique kettle of fish on Amazon, and requires a different long-term strategy. Romance is the most popular category on Amazon, but it also has the smallest number of subcategories. Last time I checked, there were around ten romance subcategories. You can sell one hundred paid units of your book in a single day and not even break the top 100 books in your category list.
For a super competitive niche, the best move is to make your first book free and then wait until you have a few more books in the series ready to start running promotions. That is when your books get profitable. You still want to run a very similar promotion; you just wait until you have the follow-up books to be revenue generators.
26
Anatomy of a Launch
Nobody knows who you are. You are a zero in your new niche. You have no friends. But that’s about to change if you follow this very simple formula.
I don’t use a list to push my books up the ranking on Amazon. I use my books on Amazon to build my lists. This system allows me to break into any niche I want and establish a presence. It will do the same for you.
First, you are in pre-launch. During this phase you are writing and editing the book, generating the book cover and seeking out a few pre-launch reviews. Getting reviews at this point can be tough if your book is only done a week before you want to launch it.
Breaking Orbit: How to Write, Publish and Launch Your First Bestseller on Amazon Without a Mailing List, Blog or Social Media Following (Serve No Master Book 4) Page 11
