Tag: Marketing (Page 2 of 5)

Reason #37: Amazon.com Reviewers Don’t Like You

/ Mike Nappa

A Marketing Team reason for rejection

Here’s a dirty little secret: Acquisition editors, agents, marketers, and salespeople all read Amazon.com reviews.

We do it to gauge if what you’re telling us about yourself and your publishing history is accurate, or at least believable. We do it to see what supposedly impartial book buyers think about you and your writing. We check to see if you’re engaging readers to the point where they feel they must talk about your work. And we do it to see if there’s a general consensus among readers about your writing.

If an author sends me a proposal and mentions that he or she has previously published or self-published, I take a peek at Amazon. Consider it the publishing equivalent of Googling a blind date. I check first to see how many reviews your book has. If you’ve got 10 or more reviews on a single book, that’s more than the average, so I’m impressed. Next I check the star-ratings on your books. I’m typically looking for how many people rated your book a “5,” how many rated it a “4,” and if anyone rated it a “1.”

I’m hoping you’ve got mostly 4s and 5s in your star-ratings, but I’ll be honest, I also like it if you have a 1-star rating in there. I like to see if that 1-star hater is complaining about your writing skill (not good) or if that person simply disliked your opinions to the point that he or she was provoked to respond (actually a good thing, because it means your writing evokes emotion).

For instance, one of my authors once received a blistering critique of a suspense novel on Amazon.com. The reviewer admitted he’d been hooked by the story and read about halfway into the book before becoming offended that my author had mentioned God. And that was the basis of his “1” rating—he didn’t like religious people and had been unhappy to discover my author was religious. My author was disappointed by the critique; I thought it was a great commentary on the effectiveness of her writing. The guy hates religious people…yet her writing was such that he read half her book anyway!

Now, what if your books are consistently getting “3” ratings on Amazon? Or if readers find your work cheesy or poorly written? Or worse yet, if your previous books aren’t attracting any reviews? Well, that’s a different story. That tells me people aren’t terribly interested in your work, and my response is always the same: Rejection by reason of Amazon.com reviews.

What You Can Do About It

1. Monitor your books on Amazon.com

Pay attention to what’s going on in the reviews section of your books’ listings on Amazon.com. If you’re getting particularly good reader reviews on a book, don’t be afraid to quote them in your next proposal. Or at the very least, point the acquisitions editor to them on Amazon and suggest that he or she share them with the marketing team.

This is especially important if you’ve self-published in order to get your writing career jumpstarted. A self-published book with no reviews, or with poor reviews, is death for traditional publishing opportunities. An unpopular self-published book is proof to me that, despite your intense desire to succeed, you just don’t have what it takes to be successful in “real-world” publishing.

If, while monitoring your titles on Amazon, you discover that you’re getting too many bad reviews, or very few reviews at all, then move on to suggestion #2 below.

2. Enlist your family, friends, and others to influence Amazon.com reviewer ratings.

The problem with Amazon.com reviews is that they are easily manipulated. All it takes is a dozen or so friends to tip the balance in your favor. Do editors and marketers know that? Sure we do. Are we going to contact each of the reviewers of your book to ask if they’re your friends and family members? Not likely. So go ahead and take advantage of this flaw and use it to bolster your online reputation.

Enlist people you know (who also like you!) to post positive reviews on Amazon.com. You can’t pay them, but you can give them a free copy of your book and offer eternal gratitude and smiles every time you see them. Encourage friends to be honest, but not over-the-top in their reviews. For instance, hyperbole like “This is the best book since the Bible!” probably will be ignored. But if your friend is complimentary and identifies a few specific things that are highlights of your book, well, that looks good to a marketing decision-maker.

If you feel confident about the quality of your book, you might also contact some of the Amazon Top 100 Reviewers (accessible in the “People” section of the site) and ask permission to send them a copy of it. These are people who love books, and who’ve earned a reputation for reading lots of them, so often they’ll be happy to get yours. If your book gets a positive review from a Top 100 Reviewer, that’s also something worth mentioning to an editor in your next proposal. A word of warning though, if you’re not absolutely confident of your content, don’t send it to an Amazon Top 100 Reviewers. These folks aren’t shy about posting negative reviews if they think a book deserves it.

3. Write great books that get great reviews on Amazon.com

This is the best way to influence Amazon.com reviews—and by extension, influence the way a marketer or an editor will approach your next book. So, you know, you could just do this and let everything else take care of itself. I’m just sayin’.

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #38: You Have No Online Presence

/ Mike Nappa

A Marketing Team reason for rejection

OK, let’s look at some of the numbers:

• There are 195 million active internet users in the United States.

• Americans rate the internet as the #1 “most essential” media source in their lives—ranking it higher than TV, radio, or newspapers.

• An eye-popping 77% of Americans (nearly 4 out of 5 people) go online to buy books.

• More Americans buy books online than buy books at Target, Wal Mart, Sam’s Club, B.J’s, and Costco combined.

• The number 1 place in the world where Americans buy books: Online.

And you’re telling me you don’t have the time or interest to set up an online presence for yourself? Seriously?

Just last month I got a proposal from a college student telling me how she’d published her first book right out of high school and now she was ready for fame and glory with her second novel. I was curious, so I did what any guy does before a blind date.

I Googled her.

Nothing.

No author website, no blog profile, no Facebook page, no promos or reviews for her first book, no author interviews, no book excerpts, no chat room transcripts, nothing. The only thing I did find was that her first book was in the Amazon.com catalog—and (no surprise) it ranked an abysmal 2,481,729 in sales on that site.

The fact that she is anonymous online is killing this girl’s chances at publication. My Marketing VP already assumes that any new author is just another unknown who is unworthy of his support. How can I argue on this girl’s behalf when a simple Google search confirms his dour pre-supposition about her? I just can’t.

“Mike,” you say to me, “there’s too much online. It’s too demanding—and too confusing. It moves so fast, and I just don’t have time to keep up. I just want to write books. Isn’t that what’s really important anyway?”

Look, you must understand something: My Marketing VP doesn’t give a flying fig about whether or not you’re too busy or too old or too whatever to get yourself out there in the online world. All she cares about is that you are where book buyers are. And guess what? They’re online.

Remember, once you decided to become a “professional” writer—someone who actually makes money from stringing words together—you also decided to pursue being a public figure. And if you’re not able to be seen online? Well, you’d probably better stick to amateur status.

What You Can Do About It

1. Do the basics online.

At an absolute minimum, every aspiring author needs a website or blog profile page to showcase his or her ambition. This is both your billboard and your “Yellow Pages” ad on the Internet.

When you send me a book proposal, I expect to be able to find out everything I want to know about you simply by typing your name into a search engine. In fact, I may quote some of what I find out about you online to my Marketing VP when we talk about your book. Do you really want someone else’s random thoughts about you to dictate that conversation? Of course not.

So take charge of your online presence. Create a website or a blog profile that communicates everything great about you and your writing…and do it now.

2. Find a friend to handle your online presence.

If you really are too busy, or too intimidated, or “too old” to start up your own author presence on the web, then you’d better find someone to do it for you. You can hire someone, but most often the best route is simply to find an internet savvy friend or family member and ask that person to set something up for you. With the abundance of online tools already out there, it’s fairly easy to put up a bare-bones web page or blog profile, and anyone with regular internet experience probably already knows what needs to be done.

So get help, and get a good author showcase for yourself out into the world of cyberspace…and do it now.

3. Grow up. If you’re still pouting about this online requirement for publishing success, well stop it. This is the 21^st century, and in this publishing climate, an internet presence is mandatory for authors. So grow up and get yourself online…today.

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #39: Your Internet Presence Is Shoddy and Unprofessional

/ Mike Nappa

A Marketing Team reason for rejection

Now that I’ve badgered you into getting yourself online (see Reason #38), I do want you to know that there are dangers involved. If you treat your internet presence as an afterthought or as something that can just be thrown together and subsequently forgotten, well, you take a pretty big risk.

You see, your presence on the web is your claim to credibility. It’s your business card. It’s your customer promise. It’s your product brochure. It’s your company catalog, your product samples, your magazine advertisement, your author billboard—everything that makes you look attractive as an author. And it’s accessible to anyone. If you allow your internet presence to be poorly displayed, you’ll make it easy for your book proposal to be rejected.

Look at it this way. Let’s say you are hiring for an executive position at your company. You read two resumes and think they both look strong, so you invite both these candidates in for an interview.

The first candidate comes in dressed like she belongs in your company—professional, clean, stylish, and ready to interact with customers. She’s energetic, attentive, and presents an intelligent, confident manner. The second candidate comes to the interview wearing a stained, ratty old T-shirt and sweatpants that say “Juicy” across the butt. She’s obviously hung-over, red-eyed, slack-jawed and distracted, barely able to muster responses to the questions you ask.

Assuming the qualifications on their resumes are equal, which applicant are you going to hire?

That’s the way I’m looking at your book proposal—comparing it to the other “applicants” for publication. When I and my Marketing VP check you out online, you’ll have a much better shot if we see an author who looks like the first candidate above instead of one who can’t seem to get her “Juicy” sweatpants through the wash cycle.

What You Can Do About It

1. Guard your reputation online.

Remember, the internet is forever. Anything you post online is accessible—even after you take it down (thanks to the wonders of caching).

This is great news if you are taking charge of your internet presence, because you can pretty much dictate what people read or see about you online. If the majority of what’s there is all praiseworthy and relevant, you’re in great shape. No matter when or where I look online, I’m going to see a consistent message that communicates your credibility, authority, and publish-ability—something that reinforces a positive opinion of you in the marketing circles at my company.

Ah, but if you are lackadaisical about your internet presence, of if you allow incomplete or incorrect information about yourself to languish happily online, then you’re setting yourself up for failure. And the hard part is that you may not even know why you are failing. After all, my rejection letter to you isn’t going to say, “Your web presence was weak, so we’ve opted not to publish your book.” But that may indeed be the actual reason for rejection.

2. Don’t ignore your Amazon.com AuthorCentral page.

If you’ve published anything at all, you’ve got to keep your Author Page on Amazon.com looking current and professional. In fact, I have two authors who just use that Amazon Author Page as the landing spot for their web domain names.

You see, every author listed in the Amazon.com catalog automatically has an Author Page created for them and kept on the site. If you ignore that page, Amazon enters just a few automatic entries—some books you published, a call for information, and a blanked-out photo indicating no current picture is available. This is represents you poorly, and should be corrected.

Once you register, you control things like: which of your books are listed with your profile (and yes, Amazon often makes mistakes in this area), your author bio, your author photo, listings of your author events planned, promo videos, and even an author blog you can update regularly.

Why is this important? Well, 66% of online book buyers spend their book money at Amazon.com. You do the math.

3. Point me toward your best side.

If you’ve taken care to manage your internet presence, then don’t take chances on my random search engine results. In your proposal, be sure to tell me I can discover more detailed information about you online. List your blog site, or the url for your Amazon Author Page, or the address to your bio on your website. Then, my Marketing VP and I will both go there first when we’re checking you out online.

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #40: You Are Not Engaged / Poorly Engaged In Social Media

/ Mike Nappa

A Marketing Team reason for rejection

In 2008, barely one quarter of Americans aged 12 to adult were participating in social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn. A scant two years later that number had doubled to 48%. What’s more, among people ages 12 to 34, more than two-thirds maintained a personal profile page on one or more of the social networking sites, and more than half (51%) of people ages 35-44 also did the same.

What that means from a marketing perspective is sudden, direct access to millions and millions of Americans through social media. What that means from the perspective of an aspiring author is that you have a stay-at-home method for broadening your author platform.

Of course this is a fine line to walk, as we all hate supposed Facebook “Friends” whose only real purpose is to relentlessly promote whatever it is they’re selling (cheap, handmade jewelry anyone?). At the same time, if you can generate a decent following on social media, that’s going to make an impact when I’m discussing your marketing potential with my team.

In fact, one of the publishers I work with recently sent out a letter to all of their authors asking them to invest time and effort in cultivating their social media activity. Why? Because a strong social network presence can actually influence the exposure—and subsequently, the sales—of a book.

Which brings us to another interesting point on this topic:

Because social media has become such a marketing force in the book publishing industry, we’re all there. In fact, in many places, a social network presence is actually part of the job description for an editor or marketing manager. Do you want to connect with editors? Find out what marketing team members value? Discover what publicists are promoting at present? You’ve got access. Just find us on Facebook or LinkedIn or someplace like that.

This world has never been more open than it is today, so go ahead and take advantage of that.

What You Can Do About It

1. Choose one of the “Big 3” and concentrate on building a following there.

At present there are three “big” players in the social network arena, and then a bunch of smaller ones. The three immediately recognizable social networks are Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and LinkedIn.com. (TikTok and YouTube are also forces, but since they require video I’ve excluded them.) All three of these social networks have their strengths and weaknesses, and unique audiences, so you’ll want to check them all out before choosing where to focus your efforts.

Once you’ve picked your favorite of the “Big 3,” then get busy populating your profile on that site, and work diligently to build up your following there. Because you could easily spend 8 hours a day doing that, set yourself a manageable goal for social media investment. Some authors will commit 30 minutes each workday to that; others may want to dedicate only an hour a week. Find out what works best for you, and then stick to it. After a year or so, you should see significant results in your platform-building efforts.

2. Read up on social networking strategies.

Fortunately, although social networks are a recent innovation, they are no longer “new.” That means you can hit your local library or your local bookstore and find several practical reference books to help you master the effective strategies for using these networks to your advantage. Here are a few that I’d recommend:

• Social Networking Spaces: From Facebook to Twitter and Everything In Between by Todd Kelsey

• Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day by Dave Evans

• The Facebook Era by Clara Shih

• Twitter Power 2.0 by Joel Comm

3. Enjoy yourself.

Some people (like me) look at social network marketing as a chore. Other people (like my family members) see social networking as fun, and a great way to keep connected with modern America. I will tell you from experience that you’ll like this task much more if you allow yourself to view it from the perspective of leisure fun instead of a constant “to do” list.

So go ahead and enjoy yourself while you’re building your social network platform. Take time to wander into interesting diversions, to smell the apps, so to speak. If you’re going to do it anyway, you might as well find a way to like what you do, right?

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #41: Your Title Stinks

/ Mike Nappa

A Marketing Team reason for rejection

If you bought this book off the shelf in your local bookstore, chances are good you followed this process when making your purchase decision:

You saw the words 77 Reasons Why Your Last Book Was Rejected (and how to be sure it won’t happen again!), and that made you curious enough to read the back cover of the book.
You read the back cover, and that made you curious enough to check out the table of contents.
You skimmed the table of contents, and that made you curious enough to read part of the introduction.
You read part of the introduction, and that made you want to read the rest of the book.
Since you can’t realistically read an entire book inside a bookstore, you decided to pay a few bucks and take the book home to read at your leisure.

Sounds pretty simple, right?

It’s actually a finely-tuned manipulation of your decision-making process, honed by decades of publishing trial and error. When we create the marketing materials for a book, we know the typical reader—whether buying in-store, online, or somewhere else—will almost always follow this sequence.

Guess what? If we fail to arouse a reader’s interest in step 1 above—in the title package (title and subtitle)—we wipe out all our fantastic efforts in steps 2-5. Wasted.

Worse yet? We lose the sale.

Now, put on your Marketing VP hat and re-read that list above. Do you see the high importance of a superb title and subtitle combo for your book?

Yes, of course, 90% of the time the title you give your book in the proposal stage is going to change before it actually hits bookstore shelves. (With so much that depends on it, do you really think my marketing team is going to let a silly old author title a book without input from them?) But that’s irrelevant in the initial publish/don’t publish decision.

What’s relevant is whether or not the title package you provided the editor is strong enough to make the Marketing VP think, “Hey, this is something that’ll get people curious enough to find out more…”

What You Can Do About It

1. Secretly title your book, “Look Inside!”

When you boil it all down, every book title has only one purpose: To get the potential buyer to look inside.

If you can make that happen, and if what’s inside (your content) is valuable to that reader, you’ll make a lot of money writing books. Think about it: more than half of the American book buying public (52%) admits that they “judge a book by its cover,”—the centerpiece of which is that simple little title/subtitle combo. No wonder this matters so much to a Marketing VP!

So, when making the working title and subtitle for your book, don’t choose a boring sentence or phrase that merely explains what your book is about. Instead, focus on how your target reader benefits from your book, and ask “What will make this person ‘Look Inside’?”

2. Make a promise. Evoke emotion.

These are the basic elements of a compelling title for any book. Ignore them at your own risk (or at the risk that my Marketing VP will ignore your book in return).

First, you’ve got to make a promise, either spoken or unspoken, to the reader. This is the great “benefit” that your book will give to anyone who reads your book. (If you don’t understand what that means, go back and re-read Reason #34 earlier in this book.) For example, the promise of this book you hold in your hands is clearly given up front: You’ll discover why editors reject books and how to make them stop rejecting yours. You see it, right?

Second, evoke a significant emotion in the reader. This is where you make the potential book buyer want your book. A suspense novelist, for instance, will want a title that evokes the thrill of being frightened (hence the term “thrillers”). A business writer will want a title that makes just the right amount of greed tingle inside a reader. And this book’s title package (ideally) evoked an emotion of hope or enthusiasm in you.

If you can create titles that make a significant promise and evoke a desired emotion in readers, you are well on your way to winning over my Marketing VP. So, you know, good on you!

3. Avoid confusion in a title, unless it’s deliberate.

If you grab a bite to eat at the Saturn Café in Santa Cruz, California, and at some point need to visit the restroom, you’ll be greeted by two doors. One door is labeled “Us.” The other is labeled “Them.” It’ll be up to you to decide which of those doors leads to the men’s room and which leads to the women’s. That kind of ambiguous titling capitalizes on turning a reader’s expectations into something unexpected. It’s clever, deliberate, and attention-grabbing. A good thing.

Ah, but if you want to visit whorepresents.com on the Internet, it’ll be up to you to decide whether that’s a porn site called “Whore Presents” or a business database site called “Who Represents.” That kind of ambiguous titling is accidental, confusing, and for many, reason enough to give up on the product. A bad thing.

So when it comes time to title your book, pay attention to potential misinterpretations and mistaken impressions. Take care to avoid anything that might confuse the reader or cause someone to misunderstand what your book is about. After all, no reader wants to be led into the “Us” restroom when everything she really needs is in “Them.”

Looking for more? Check out these links: