Hey there and welcome to the Nonfiction Authors Podcast. I'm Carla King, your host and this week enjoy a flash from the past that is still as relevant today as it was then. It's a conversation between Stephanie Chandler and me about how to make sure your book launches to five star reviews. So I hope you enjoy it and learn a lot from it. You can find the transcript, show notes, links, and other resources as always at nonfictionauthorsassociation.com.
Stephanie Chandler:Hey everyone. Welcome to our interview series for the Nonficton Authors Association. Today's event is with Carla King, and we're going to be talking about how to launch your book with five star reviews. I'm your host, Stephanie Chandler of the Nonfiction Authors Association. If you're new to us. In addition to event recordings, our community members receive exclusive templates, checklists, and other content released weekly media leads sent out by email every Friday, access to our active member community on Facebook, discounts off our year round nonfiction book awards program, and our nonfiction writers conference events, which are conducted entirely online and discounts with our awesome partners. Including Lulu, Findaway Voices, Office Depot, IngramSpark, and more. We would love for you to join us oover at nonfictionauthorsassociation.com. And now I'm thrilled to introduce our guest and longtime friend of NFAA. Carla King is the founder of Self-Publishing Boot Camp, a series of educational books and workshops that help independent authors publish their books. She's a frequent speaker at writing conferences, a consultant and industry advisor, a former technical writer and avid adventure traveler. Carla Self-published her first book in 1995 and in 2005 started helping other authors by teaching, blogging and speaking on the topic. Since then, she's reviewed hundreds of products geared to the independent author. Those reviews are the basis for her Consumer's Guide to Publishing tools and services, a free, constantly updated resource for the community. Hey Carla, thanks so much for joining me today.
Carla King:Stephanie. It's great to join you. For I think our fourth talk for your NFAA.
Stephanie Chandler:Is it our fourth? Oh my gosh.
Carla King:Yeah, I just looked it up. It's four. I've been talking with you about geeky stuff for many years now.
Stephanie Chandler:I love that you do geeky stuff because I geek out on technology too and you're one that actually takes time to test all this stuff and learn about the tools. You're always a great wealth of resources.
Carla King:Thanks. Yes. It's an obsession.
Stephanie Chandler:Yeah, clearly. And it's an awesome one. And we actually. Are talking about this topic today, because I saw that you wrote a blog post on the topic of launching your book to five star reviews, and I thought it was brilliant. And you list several steps to getting your book ready to launch. The first is to place your book on the correct virtual shelf. What does that mean?
Carla King:We're all used to going to certain bookstores and looking through the shelves there. And it's no different online. People look for your book on a certain shelf that they frequent and you should know what that shelf is. And surprisingly, many authors, especially who are independently publishing, completely skip that step. But it's so important. All you have to do is go to Amazon Advanced Search. Actually, in one of my courses, I go through a spreadsheet that helps authors find the books that are like theirs, right? And look at the covers to make sure that your cover fits in. You don't want a reader coming to your book on the virtual shelf where they're used to looking for the books that they like to read and looking at the cover and saying, oh no, that doesn't look like a book That I would read, right? That's a huge mistake authors make is to make their foot covers look different. You want to copy the look and feel of the popular books, figure out which ones are bestsellers, and go find those authors who are writing those books. Look at their websites and start following them on social media. Just fit in and know your tribe and make sure that you're finding your readers by getting your book in the right place on Amazon and all the other bookstores.
Stephanie Chandler:I would think categories are a big part of that. And I think this is a topic a lot of authors aren't aware of with Amazon, that there's, we have a lot more control over categories than we think. Can you talk about that briefly? Sure. And on other sites they're BISAC codes and categories is simply Amazon's take on BISAC codes. Oh, we're getting geeky with terms already, but that is the shelf, right? Non-fiction business women in business accounting the fitness and health and, which niche are you? Going to own to paraphrase the name of one of your books, right? Drill down and find that bookshelf or niche in the category that attracts people who are using Amazon's search engine or another bookstore's search engine. Those are called keywords. So if I say I want a book that shows me what fitness routines at home, What's a good example? Maybe like a diabetes cookbook.
Carla King:That would be great. Yeah. Recipes for diabetics, right? You want to explore what the search results that come up and be like the bestselling books.
Stephanie Chandler:And find out what categories are listed in, right?
Carla King:So if you go down the page on Amazon, right? On each book, you go down the page and you see the publisher, right? The date it was published, the pricing, and all that. Below that, you can see what categories they're in and what ranking they're in, right? They might be 312 in one sub-category and 5 in another sub-category. Amazon is the best place to find the stuff because their search engine is so good. So it doesn't matter if you're uploading your book to Kobo or another online store, but Amazon just has this great search tool, Amazon Advanced search that you can use to find the books like yours and figure out what those categories are. And so you want to look for about 10 books like yours that are selling well And look at where they're doing well, where you can compete better. Some people play with the categories. They try and become a best seller in a very little used category and game the system. And there are a lot of blog posts on how to do this, and I don't really recommend that. Sure you can go for that bestseller sticker, but it's not good practice for the long term. But for the short term, it might be good. But man, this is such a complicated topic. I have a whole class that lasts an hour on that, and it just goes on and on.
Stephanie Chandler:Yeah, and echo that. I'm not a big fan of gaming, the Amazon bestseller system. And where I was going with the category thing is that, it's important to figure out what categories and subcategories your book should be listed in so that you can ask Amazon to add your book to those categories, because I think a lot of authors don't realize that you can actually reach out to Amazon's support and they will add your book to up to 10 categories. You're right. And thanks for mentioning that because when you're uploading your book, you only get to assign a couple of categories after it's published you can add more for sure. And I would recommend keeping track of that every couple of months. Looking back at your book and seeing if you need to change categories. Absolutely. That's a great suggestion, Carla. So you also recommend that authors work with beta readers, which is, I, I had my first experience with beta readers with my last book launch, and I loved the entire process for a whole bunch of reasons. Tell us why you recommend Beta Readers and what they are for those who aren't familiar, maybe.
Carla King:Yeah. What they are the early readers of your book. So if you are publishing in a niche, you're probably publishing to solve a problem so you probably have some people that you're helping. So use those people to test your book, to make sure that you're reaching your audience. These are just early readers. And make sure that your asking them the right questions too. I use a tool called Betabooks.co. They allow you to upload your chapters, your whole book to an online system where you can ask readers to give you feedback. So it's really important to ask for the right feedback, right? So make sure that you're not asking, make sure that they're not copy editing the book, right? To say, okay, am I addressing your problem in this chapter? What are you understanding? What aren't you understanding? Are you interested if you're writing memoir or other creative non-fiction, you might be asking are you still engaged in the story? Do you like the characters? But if you're looking for recipes for diabetics, you're going to ask a whole nother set of questions, right? Are these recipes easy to follow? Am I providing enough technical information on sugar levels and all of that? When you have engaged beta readers, engaged early readers and they start to feel really invested in your book, like they're helping you write the book, right? So when your book is launched, they're going to be completely engaged. These are the people that you can leverage to become part of your street team to get those five star reviews on the site. So make sure to acknowledge them, keep them engaged. Thank them on social media. Use your acknowledgements page. To thank the best of the best beta readers. I had about 10 really good ones. I don't know how many be readers. Did you have beta readers or did you have a street team for that book. Your latest self-publishing book.
Stephanie Chandler:Yeah. I had, I invited Beta readers. My goal was to get a hundred, I had 300. And I accepted'em all except one who didn't look legit. And then I didn't want editorial feedback, but I ended up getting it and I was glad I did. It actually made a big difference and realizing we actually needed another couple rounds of editing, and so the whole process turned out to be really helpful from that perspective. And then like you said, they were the first people to post reviews. And then two things that surprised me with that. One was that many of them went and bought the book when it launched, even though they didn't have to. They bought the book and showed their support, and I thought that was amazing. And it really touched me. And the other thing I really enjoyed about Beta readers was just having that personal connection with my readers and getting to know them and appreciate them and learning many of them had been reading my books for years, I didn't know that. So I just found the whole process really personally rewarding as well, just. Beyond the fact that I got so many wonderful reviews. And by the way, Carla, your review of that book is still the most highly rated review on Amazon. It's the first review they show when you go to the book page.
Carla King:Oh, that's great. Yeah. And you know what? I did buy the book because I, I want to support you and I, and we often do this to support each other in our totally community, in our tribe. And I wanted it to be an Amazon confirmed buyer review. So if I hadn't purchased it, my review of your book would've been buried, probably.
Stephanie Chandler:Yeah. And I greatly appreciate that and in fact, you had the greatest headline too, you said, I put my highlighter away and it, I just thought that was a great headline for the review. So Beta readers, every book I ever do from now on, I will leverage and invite beta readers to participate.
Carla King:And it's up to you when you invite them in. I write memoir as well as how to, and it's scary to invite people into an early early read of a memoir. It's a very personal book and you know there's mistakes everywhere and you're maybe revealing too much kind of scary things about your life and your thoughts and, but I still think it's worth the risk to go earlier than you're comfortable with because you get so much amazing feedback from people who often say, wow, you know what you said, I'd be scared to say it, but I so identify with it. Which is what you're going for when you're doing creative nonfiction and memoir.
Stephanie Chandler:Absolutely. That's wonderful advice and yeah, it's getting outta your comfort zone, especially when you're writing memoir. It really is. So next up you talk about cultivating relationships with bloggers and other influencers. Tell us what you mean by that.
Carla King:Yeah influencers are people who have a large audience themselves. And in the market research step number one you've identified bestselling authors in your niche. Now I want to think of those people as competitors. I think of them as peers, right? And it's always awesome when you can co-market your books together or create anthologies together. But first you have to cultivate that relationship, which means following them going to their website, getting their freebie joining their mailing list commenting on their social media posts and not. This is the social media rule of thirds, right? Don't walk in the room saying, Hey, I'm an author. I have a book. Look at my book. Treat it like a party. Enter listen, connect with people and then later when people start being curious about those brilliant comments that you're making and they say, what do you do? You could say, oh, I'm writing a book on this. The more relationships you cultivate with these influencers, the greater your reach when they become a friend, a part of your tribe, like both of us have our, we would be called influencers and I'm an influencer also in the adventure travel industry, and I get hit hard all the time by travel writers who have new books who want me to spread the word, but most of the time they just push their book at me and say, Hey, Will you help me publicize it? So I'm like, I don't even know you. In fact, I don't even reply. But some people do it right. They really make friends. They are very interested and interesting and I've seen the formula and it's a good one.
Stephanie Chandler:Yeah, and I had a note on here about personal relationships because you know, you and I have become friends over many years of being side by side at San Francisco Writers' Conference and other writers' events. And once you have a personal relationship with somebody, you're far more likely to want to support each other when you like each other and know each other and you're not just out for please promote me promote me. I love that you say that because I think if you can find a way to form a relationship and also make it a two way exchange I'll, I'll feature you on my blog if you feature me on yours, those types of things or interview each other for your programs.
Carla King:That's right. Exactly.
Stephanie Chandler:So Carla, you also talk about the importance of having a high converting website. What do you mean by that?
Carla King:Yeah, so I was working with an author just last week and I looked at her website. She's writing she's got a few books a series that's coming out, but her website has, it's so busy. There's so much to do on her website. You can go read all of her blog posts. She's got a little travel company. She hooks to videos and she has an email signup form at the bottom of her homepage. I was like, oh my gosh this is the example of a very low converting website because people get so busy. If they're interested in her topic, they get so busy watching the videos and reading the blog posts that they never see the email offer. So I'm working with her to create a giveaway that people want; an ethical bribe we call it. And put the email sign up on the front of the page, at the top of the page. Get rid of all those menu items and have a home and an about and a blog menu item. Create a landing page, which is a page that doesn't even have those menu items on. The only thing you can do is put your email address in to get the freebie that you want and that's called a landing page. But you can make your website high converting just by- I mean on CarlaKing.com, my front page has three places to sign up for my email list. I felt bad I've developed it over the years I felt bad because I do have blog posts and podcasts and all this information, but really I want to give people I want to give people my book. I want to give them the free chapter of my book about travels in America. And then I have another sign up for travels through China, and then another one for I think women in motorcycling, women who want to choose a beginner motorcycle. And it seems like a lot, but I have to say I've surveyed people and they're not irritated by it. And I even have those irritating popups now. You think they're irritating? But how many times do you end up putting your email address in those popups?
Stephanie Chandler:Yeah, I love valuable lead magnets, so great reports, videos, content, things that people want to sign up for. I think every author needs one of those. That's a great tip, Carla.
Carla King:Yeah, so basically your website. Every piece of content you publish should have a, an offer like on your blog, oh, do you want more about this? Sign up for my newsletter. I talk about this all the time. Get the free report, it's not irritating if it's at the bottom of your blog post. I use a tool called ConvertKit. What do you use? AWeber? MailChimp.
Stephanie Chandler:It's ConstantContact for many years.
Carla King:Yes. ConstantContact. These tools, email marketing, newsletter tools, make it very easy to create a little sign up area on the, and you can add it to your HTML, and this is very cheap. If you don't, if you don't have web skills, you can easily find somebody to do this kind of thing for about under a hundred dollars easily.
Stephanie Chandler:For sure. It is something else we've done. We create bonus downloads and reports, every couple of months. And so we finally created a whole page called freebies, and we list all of these different free reports, and that page alone generates about 50 new signups a week just from because there's so much to choose from. Yeah. But, and that's not even including our existing subscribers who get the free reports and we're keeping them engaged. So I'm a huge fan of free content, give them your best content. This is how we build our followings. So Carla, I get a lot of questions about whether or not we should be setting up pre-orders. What are some of the advantages of doing that?
Carla King:Pre-orders one thing, it solves this irritating problem of releasing a book using IngramSpark. You hit that publish button and it takes a while for your book to be populated. At Amazon, at Barnes and Noble. At Kobo, right? So your book is launched and it's not going out on the same day actually, because of this population problem so your book, when you set up pre-orders, your book actually will be launched on the same date at all retailers. Pre-orders help your super fans review the book first. Those super fans that you cultivated before, your beta readers are much more likely to reserve a pre-order. And in fact, did I reserve a pre-order of your book? Did you do it?
Stephanie Chandler:We did. And you probably did.
Carla King:Yeah. I'm pretty sure I did because I wanted to give you that review on the first day and, help you do that. And I think you you did the whole pre-order thing, right? The whole beta reader thing, right? You had a list of your beta readers and you reminded them when the book was coming out. You thanked them for all the awesome input. It just made us feel really good about our participation in your book, and it really made it feel like we helped a lot, which I know we did because I've had similar experiences. And that's a huge one. The other thing is that on iBooks and Kobo, all the orders that you accumulate before your launch date are credited toward your first day's sales rank. So Amazon doesn't do this, but iBooks and Kobo does this, so you can be a best seller status on launch day at iBooks and Kobo. That's pretty cool. So unfortunately Amazon doesn't do that, but iBooks is not insignificant. Kobo doesn't have the reach that iBooks does, and of course neither has the reach, Amazon does, but the Apple community is a very enthusiastic.I think it's great for that.
Stephanie Chandler:Yeah. And Amazon's still tabulating those pre-sales and we found that we were ending up in hot new releases lists in our categories during the pre-sale, which was a nice bonus that we weren't really anticipating. And again, you and I share that belief that those, one day bestseller campaigns are really worth nothing but if you can maintain your position in the top 10 or 20 of a category for an ongoing period of time, the value in that is the visibility and the sales lead to more sales. So it's not about being able to say, my book was the best seller. It's about showing up in those lists so that other people buy the book.
Carla King:And when you are ranked highly you show up in those lists at the bottom of books like yours. It says, people who bought this book also like this, or people who, this book also like that book. So Amazon has a great recommendation engine and it's automatically generated so Yeah, keeping your book high all the time and not just one day is definitely the best way to go.
Stephanie Chandler:Awesome. And the other point is that Amazon won't accept reviews until the book is officially live, right?
Carla King:Yeah. Yeah. That's so frustrating, isn't it?
Stephanie Chandler:So to bring all this home, the point of this is that if you have those early readers and the day your book is live, if they've had early access, and especially if they pre-ordered it, they can be your first reviews and they can show up as verified reviews if they purchased it, right?
Carla King:Yes, exactly. And I use a tool called BookFunnel to give my book away. In ebook format and digital format, PDF, MOBI, and EPUB to get people excited about the book and so that they digitally in whatever format they want. And oftentimes they love that, but they want the print book as well so they go elsewhere to Amazon or another retailer for the print book. And I love BookFunnel because it allows you to nudge, it automatically nudges your readers who haven't downloaded the book yet. It's got a lot of great features and it's not very expensive.
Stephanie Chandler:Yeah, it's an awesome tool, BookFunnel. I've seen lots of you authors using that. Carla, any final tips? I think this was so helpful.
Carla King:Thanks. Yeah, final tips. I just, I really want people to do their market research and competitive analysis and fit into their niche. So doing that first step or even going back and making the corrections that you need to fit into your niche is fine because you can change your book cover without changing your ISBN. So if it's late to start, you can go back and do your market research and increase sales listen to your beta readers. Really create your community and connect with the peers and pump each other up, create a giveaway with an anthology and marketing that. You can do that by giving your book away for free, creating the anthology, using Amazon KDP Select, which I don't recommend going exclusive with Amazon except for these free anthology type giveaways that promote a whole subset of authors. And what's the last one? Oh, get rid of that clutter on your homepage and just you can even replace your homepage with a landing page with a promise of a free ebook and more information coming down the line. I've recommended many of my authors to just, archive their website for now and replace it with a single landing page with a single purpose, and that has worked very well. That's it. Yeah. Those are my best tips.
Stephanie Chandler:Great info, Carla, tell us where our listeners can connect with you online and what services you offer.
Carla King:Okay. I have a coaching business for authors who want to independently publish. And I love creating courses, so I've got a big course on how to do the kinds of things that we talked about and everything self-publishing related including setting up your publishing business. And if you're a nonfiction author, you might have a business that you're attaching your book to. If you don't, I can help you do that. And those are at SelfPubBootCamp.com.
Stephanie Chandler:Thank you for that, Carla, and thanks for your time today. This was a really interesting conversation.
Carla King:Thank you Stephanie. It's always great to be here.
Stephanie Chandler:It's always fun to chat with you. And thank you to all of our listeners for joining us today. We conduct these interviews every Wednesday, you can check our schedule of events online at nonfictionwritersconference.com, or excuse me, nonfictionauthorsassociation.com or sign up for our mailing list, ticket notifications and maybe download one of our free reports. And that's it, we're wrapped for today. I hope you all have a wonderful day.