The 14-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge
Day #10: How to Improve Your Book’s Profitability and Our Profit Challenge Recap
Brought to you by Bryan Cohen’s Author Ad School
Here’s What You’ll Learn Today
- The small and bigger changes you can make to try to improve your conversion rate
- A recap of the entire Ad Challenge and what comes next!
Fixing Marketing Mistakes
Anything is fair game when it comes to evaluating why readers aren’t buying your book when they make it to the book’s sales page. You either need to approach your book from a neutral perspective or try to get another person’s opinion on what they see when they arrive.
Another step in your process is looking at books that are selling well in your subgenre and “spotting the differences” between your book’s sales page and theirs.
Our eventual goal here is to try to tweak certain aspects of your sales page so that when you send future ad traffic to the book, you see better profit and stronger conversion. As I mentioned, this is a process, and it’s easier to start fresh with a new book or even relaunch the old book. However, if you’d like to tweak the existing book first, here are some ideas to try.
Start With These and Test
Subtitle: The subtitle can help both metadata and conversion, so make sure to include a trope and your subgenre.
Price: Finding a middle ground between 99 cents and the subgenre’s average price is essential, so make sure to look at your category’s top 100 bestselling indie authors for guidance.
Look Inside: Another free way to optimize your book is to make sure the sample cuts right to the action and has a strong intro to get readers excited to keep on reading.
First Line of Blurb: While your entire blurb can help with conversion, nailing the first line can help readers to “one-click” if genre, character, and stakes have been conveyed.
Back Matter: Fixing up the info after your story ends won’t help conversion, but it can improve profitability, so make sure to link to your next book on the same page that your story ends with a strong Call to Action (i.e. Click here to continue Aiden’s journey today!).
Better Blurb Tips
Less is more when it comes to a blurb, and my blurb-writing team at Best Page Forward has some tips on how to cut your blurb down to the essential.
Make sure each sentence has no more than one break (i.e. a comma or a semicolon), as this will help you avoid run-ons and trying to info dump.
Talk about no more than two characters by name, use archetypes for the rest (i.e. princess, hero, dastardly evil, etc.), and avoid mentioning any subplots.
Authors always worry about spoilers in a blurb, and you can leave out most of the final act of the story, but you still need to hint at the consequences with a big cliffhanger.
For nonfiction, worry less about sharing the entire table of contents in the blurb and more about expressing your expertise and showing transformational benefits (i.e. Learn the anti-debt tips you need to finally take that vacation.).
Next Level Changes
Tweaking your subtitle, price, look inside, and your blurb can be farmed out, but most of those tasks can be done over a weekend or two. It makes sense to try the basics first, run some more ads, and see if that has solved the issue. But if you have a conversion rate that’s much closer to 33.3 clicks to get a sale than it is to our magic 6-8 clicks, then you may want to consider bringing out the big guns.
In order to improve the book’s marketing on a much deeper level, you may need to get a new cover and a new edit. If you’re saying, “Bryan, if I’m going to do all of that, then I might as well just write a new book,” then I agree with you, and there’s nothing wrong with that direction, but let me give you some thoughts on how to improve these parts of your book marketing.
Affordable Cover Tips
Since book covers tend to have higher quality the more you spend, it can be a challenge to find a cover that converts more without breaking the bank, but here are a few things you can try to keep costs down.
In my opinion, the best option for getting a better cover in genre fiction is to find a designer in your subgenre who has occasional sales on premade covers. While you can’t customize these, they are often very high quality, and they’ll ensure that the book meets reader’s expectations for a cover for around $100 to $200.
If that isn’t in your budget, then you can try a discounted design service like GetCovers, but to get a strong design, you’ll need to do a lot of research and go through a lot of revisions to get it right.
You can also start saving money for this essential part of your author business to get a custom cover from a reputable designer (or an up-and-comer) with experience in your subgenre.
The Wild World of Editing
I recently spoke with two seven-figure Ad School students, and I hadn’t realized that one of the essential steps to their success was getting their earlier books re-edited. Better editing allowed them to get a better product. When they combined the improved book with a better cover, they were able to see their profit and conversion improve.
Software for copyediting has made some major leaps in the past few years and will save you some money over the real thing (but it will not be nearly as good as the real thing). However, if you write in genre fiction, there’s a case to be made to save up some cash for a fantastic developmental editor who knows your subgenre (this can’t be replaced by a machine).
It can be painful to admit that the writing may not be where it needs to be to succeed, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and learning to be an even better writer than you are today may help to cure those low sales blues.
Testing Conversion Again
Whether you’ve made some of the small tweaks or you’ve tried to bring in the big guns, you’ll want an “after” conversion number to go along with your “before” number.
After making the changes, you’ll run more Amazon Ads to try to get at least 100 additional clicks to see if your profit and conversion have improved from the earlier data. For instance, you may have had a 12.5 clicks to one sale conversion rate before tweaking your blurb and your subtitle and later find that your conversion has improved to 8 clicks to one sale (with some profitability to boot).
There are no guarantees that the improvements you’ve made will show up in the numbers, but even if they don’t, you’re doing the work to learn how to market your books better. Learning what converts and what doesn’t can make a huge difference in your overall sales for the rest of your career.
Growing Your Author Career
Success as an author isn’t random. The process of capitalizing on your most profitable books and elevating your current and future books to profitability takes time, effort, and a clear view of the data.
If I had to sum it all up, the general philosophy here is: bid low to maximize profit, double down on the books and series that work, improve the sales page of the books that lose money, and eventually focus 80% of your attention on the books with the best chance to succeed. It’s deceptively simple, but it’s going to require focused attention and hard work to make it all a reality.
There are no grand promises here with the Author Ad Profit Challenge, and there are no grand promises with year-round Author Ad School, but whether you stick with us or not, I hope you try to look at your future marketing and writing efforts in terms of Profit and Conversion.
If you aren’t profitable at the end of this Challenge, but you learn how to apply Profit and Conversion to your books going forward, then we are confident that you will see better results in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
Want to See How I Improve a Book’s Conversion Rate?
Be sure to watch the screen share at 12:06 to follow along with the visual portion of this lesson!
Challenge Recap
• Metadata like your book’s categories, keywords, and blurb can help your Auto Ads to serve better as long as the info you’ve provided is relevant to your book
• We recommend creating Sponsored Product Auto, Category, and Keyword Ads with a 34 or 39 cent bid, a $5 budget, and a Dynamic Bids Down Only bidding strategy
• You can use Publisher Rocket software or the BkLnk.com website to see what categories other books are in to give you ideas for the most relevant categories for your title
• Think about the types of phrases readers would type in on Amazon and the book titles and authors that are relevant to yours and use those keywords in your Sponsored Product Keyword Ads
• Using a free tool like Kindletrends Also Boughts Downloader can help you gather dozens of potential keyword options with a single click
• Pay close attention to your ad Impressions, Clicks, and Ad Spend, and don’t worry too much about other stats at this time
• To calculate your Profit, take your royalties from the KDP Dashboard and subtract your ad spend from the Ad Dashboard
• Whether or not you’ve logged a profit this month, we recommend continuing to create 5-10 new ads per week to try to gather the essential data of at least 100 clicks
• Conversion rate shows you how many clicks it takes to get a sale or a borrow, and you can improve this number and your profitability with a more relevant subtitle and price for your genre, as well as bigger changes like your blurb, cover, and editing
The Challenge Ends Shortly
Access to your 14-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge videos ends soon. At that time, the Challenge videos will come down as we move our support to the students of Author Ad School Unlimited.
Our dedicated support staff has loved taking care of you during this event, and we look forward to answering every single question in our groups for months to come. We’re really excited for our upcoming live Ad School classes: Finding Your Superfans, The Series Success Challenge, and Doubling Down with Data (and many, many more!).
If you would like to get ongoing support and access to these additional modules, then you’ll want to join Author Ad School Unlimited with a special bonus offer.
“My joining Ad School has changed the way I sell books, market them, write them, and price them. Overall, this has doubled my income over the last two years, and I hope and pray it may double over the next two, and the two after that.” – Six-figure author David Penny
How to Grow with Ad School
When you join Author Ad School, you’ll be welcomed into our community, and you’ll gain access to our calendar of events, including our Authors Learn Live events and Accelerator Live Q&A sessions related to every major video in the course.
You’ll also get every single question answered by our dedicated Author Ad Squad through our support groups, and you’ll have ongoing access to our kind, supportive, growth-mindset community.
If you’d like to join for as little as $249 for three months, you can click here and select Add to join the program instantly.
You can also get additional workshops with me and small group coaching sessions with our experts when you sign up for 6 or 12 months.
We’d love to have you in the program, and I hope to see you in there!
Day #10 Homework
- What do you think was the most important concept you learned during the Challenge?
- When will you be setting aside at least an hour to brainstorm your next steps and how to apply what you’ve learned? (You can share the date and time!)
- Put this date and time into your calendar and make sure to honor it so that you can practically use the lessons from this event
- You can answer these questions and confirm the time is in your calendar in a new post in the Facebook or Slack group with the hashtag #AdDay10 (and your own hashtag)
- We’d love for you to comment on two other posts and share some congrats with these authors for finishing the event
Thank you!
We know it’s not easy to do all of this work in a concentrated amount of time, but you crushed it, and we’re so incredibly proud of you. I hope that today’s homework helps you to think about the Challenge in a larger context while you prepare for the future of your author career.
A big thank you from the Ad Squad and the Wizards as well as me. This event wouldn’t be the same without your dedication and participation.
Have a wonderful rest of your day, and I look forward to seeing you soon!
Sincerely,
Bryan & the Team