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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Right. Hello, everybody! Welcome to day. 2 of crime writers week. We're gonna get started here in just a second but just to make sure that everything is working. If you can see and hear me. If you could just go ahead and put your name in the chat, and then what your favorite takeaway from yesterday from day one was.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Hi Lynn. Hi, Phil!

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Good to see you both.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Hi, Laurel! Hi, Susie!

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Hello, Lorenza!

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Roger missed yesterday because it's traveling. Amy's favorite yesterday was the puzzle.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Lynn has a renewed commitment to marketing.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Margot loved yesterday's plotting tips will enjoyed it all which is what we like to hear

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Hi! Don! Hi, Steven! Oh, lots of fans of the puzzle. It looks like Hi ava!

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Hello, Doug! Good to see you all

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: plotting tips, for everything was great, all amazing, and more fans of the puzzle loved it all, but the puzzle was the fate.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: I haven't caught. I haven't seen the puzzle session. I'll have to go check that one out after this.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So good to see you all. Okay, well, we will go ahead and get started, and then other folks can join us as we go. Sue. Welcome to your 1st live webinar. We're so happy to have you so we're going to begin today's session on strategizing a successful book launch after just a quick few housekeeping notes.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So first, st all of the replays are going to be added to the Hub page once they're finished processing by zoom this is typically by the next morning, sometimes it gets up a little bit faster. But it just depends on how quickly zoom and Youtube process everything.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So check the page in the next morning, and then all of the replays will be available on the community page for all members by June 20

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: 28. So you'll be able to watch them on the Hub page up until the 28, th and then at that point they'll be available for everyone. After the 28th in the community. Our sessions this week, Monday through Thursday are free for everyone to attend, and then Friday sessions are limited to premium and premium pro members. So if you have a paid pro ready subscription of any time kind. You can come to Friday session.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: If you upgrade your account by Friday morning. So any type of monthly yearly lifetime subscription. Then you can attend Friday sessions as well. And then, if you are a paid premium or premium pro subscriber, you'll get an email on Friday morning with instructions for attending the live sessions and viewing the replays. If you miss that for any reason, just send an email to Hello at providing aidcom, and we'll sort you out.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: And so if you have not upgraded yet, you are welcome to upgrade with a 15% off yearly premium or premium pro. Offer the code, for that is cw. 2024, and this offer ends on July 6.th So you can find out more on the hub. If you have any questions about that

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: and if you would like to continue talking about crime with the community, please feel free to join the community that we have with the providing it login again, the link to that is on the hub as well.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: And then a couple of reminders for this session. If you have questions for Ricardo as we go through, please use the QA. Box that'll help him keep track of everything and make sure he is ready to answer those at the end. And then you can use the chat to connect and discuss with other viewers. But again, if you have questions that you would like Ricardo to answer. Please pop those into the QA. Box in the center of your screen, as that will help us make sure that we can keep track of everything before the session is ready to begin. And the slides for this session, along with the replay, will be available on the hub.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So with that being said, I think we are ready to get started. I am so thrilled today to welcome Ricardo Fayette, who is one of the 4 founders of Readzi, which is a marketplace connecting authors to the world's top publishing talent, from editors to cover designers, book marketers or literary translators. Ricardo is the author of 2 books of marketing for Authors, how to market a book over, perform in a crowded Market, and Amazon ads

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: for authors. Unlock your full advertising potential. So welcome, Ricardo, I will turn it over to you.

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Ricardo Fayet: Thank you. Thanks for inviting me to participate in crime writers week. Thank you. Everyone who's turning into this session. And yeah, we're gonna be talking today about how to prepare for a successful book launch.

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Ricardo Fayet: So, as Hayley mentioned, I'm recortified. I'm 1 of the 4 founders of Ritzy.

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Ricardo Fayet: You've got my email address right here. So if there's any questions that I'm not able to answer at the end of the session, just drop me an email. And I'm always happy to answer any questions by email.

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Ricardo Fayet: If you don't know anything about reits, you were, basically a marketplace where you can come in and look for editors, copy editors, cover designers.

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Ricardo Fayet: ghost writers, marketers, translators, etc. That have been previously vetted and certified

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Ricardo Fayet: by us. So if you need to hire anyone throughout your writing and publishing journey is a place where you can come and look for those people.

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Ricardo Fayet: We also have a very cool writing tool that we don't talk enough about. In my opinion, that is 100% free.

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Ricardo Fayet: You can set writing goals in there. You can import your existing manuscript. You can plan and outline your novel using boards, notes a little bit like notion, and you can export afterwards to Epub and print ready. Pdf, so you can get files that you can then send straight to the retailers

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Ricardo Fayet: all that. As I mentioned, it's free, so give it a try. You can also use any kind of plugins in there, so you can use a prorating Plugin.

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Ricardo Fayet: for example, in their while you write as well. It's compatible with everything, and it's available from any device.

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Ricardo Fayet: So that's it about routine. Now let's talk about

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Ricardo Fayet: marketing and book launches in particular. What we're going to cover in this session

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Ricardo Fayet: is 1st what you need before you plan your launch. And this

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Ricardo Fayet: we're going to spend quite a bit of time on that, because it's for me it's the most important. It doesn't necessarily have to do with launches or even marketing specifically. But it is

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Ricardo Fayet: it? Yeah, it. It is the most important bit

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Ricardo Fayet: of any successful launch.

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Ricardo Fayet: Then we're going to go into the details of how to plan. Launch, how to play to the retailer algorithms. And then we're going to talk about how you can, you know, send readers

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Ricardo Fayet: to your book, page at launch through both inbound channels, so channels that you control and outbound channels

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Ricardo Fayet: that allow you to reach new readers. And finally, I'll talk a little bit about you know

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Ricardo Fayet: when and how it can make sense to outsource into higher professional help.

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Ricardo Fayet: So first, st before the book launch.

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Ricardo Fayet: this is a formula that I use a lot.

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Ricardo Fayet: You might have seen it before. If you've watched any of my presentations at conferences. I reuse it a lot, because for me it's the basis of how authors make money right from from writing and from book sales.

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Ricardo Fayet: The equation is made of 3 factors, traffic, conversion and variety.

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Ricardo Fayet: Traffic is what we tend to think of as marketing. We tend to, you know. Consider marketing. As how do I bring traffic to my book? Page? How do I get readers to discover my book? Right?

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Ricardo Fayet: That's only one small part of the equation. The next part is a conversion. Conversion is of all the people that I manage to bring to my book, page, or all all the people who pick up my book. You know, in a physical retailer

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Ricardo Fayet: how many of them actually end up buying it? Right?

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Ricardo Fayet: And the final factor is virality. Virality is a little bit hard to explain, but it's basically word of mouth. If

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Ricardo Fayet: a reader

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Ricardo Fayet: picks up my book, decides to buy it, reads it and loves it so much that they recommended to 3 readers 3 other friends, right? And each of these friends is then going to love it so much that they're going to recommend it to 3 other friends each. You can see how immediately sales start to Snowball, and at that point, when that happens as an author, the only thing you need to do is just sit back on your couch, relax and watch your Amazon rank go up and up, and up, and up and up and stay there because basically, readers are doing the marketing for you.

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Ricardo Fayet: That is the obviously the ideal case scenario, right? It very rarely happens. It only happens with breakout bestsellers the kind of you know, the best sellers that all the traditional publishers are after.

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Ricardo Fayet: and it's very rare. But it does happen, and that is obviously the

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Ricardo Fayet: easiest way to get to get sales and to nail your launch is to write a really really amazing book

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Ricardo Fayet: that readers in your niche in your audience are going to love so much that they're going to want to recommend it to other readers.

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Ricardo Fayet: So the best thing you can do to nearly book launch is to write that kind of book. Obviously this is not a talk on craft, so I can. I'm not going to give you tip tips on like, how to achieve that, how to write that perfect crime book that hits all the tropes, and that leaves readers wanting more and wanting to recommend it.

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Ricardo Fayet: But I do want to mention that this is the number one thing you can do. So.

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Ricardo Fayet: however much you're going to

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Ricardo Fayet: spend time and money on marketing, spend time and money on writing, on editing and on refining that manuscript. So it's really the best it can be, because it's going to make everything afterwards so much easier.

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Ricardo Fayet: Right? We're going to talk about like tactics, to bring people to your book, Page.

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Ricardo Fayet: and to buy your book. But

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Ricardo Fayet: if you manage to do that, and they don't enjoy your book, then all that effort is for nothing, and as soon as you have that one book that just connects with readers in a special way.

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Ricardo Fayet: everything becomes a lot easier. Facebook ads convert Amazonets convert. They do better. You get that read through. And that word of mouth afterwards, like.

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Ricardo Fayet: I've seen this happen time and again with the same working, with the same author on very, very different books, very different series, using the same tactics.

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Ricardo Fayet: one with one of the books. The tactics did nothing. We really struggled to get the book to sell in the 1st place, and with the other book, using the exact same tactics, the exact same channels, very similar copy.

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Ricardo Fayet: the book just sorted into rankings. So at the end of the day.

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Ricardo Fayet: The book is really the the number one differentiating factor, and we should where you should spend most of your efforts on

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Ricardo Fayet: that said, I'm not going to talk more about the variety element, because, again, this is not a talk on craft. It's not something that I can advise you on. But I'm going to talk a lot about the 2 previous factors, traffic and conversion.

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Ricardo Fayet: and even between traffic and conversion. Again, we tend to spend a lot of time thinking about traffic, like how to get readers to discover my book when we think about marketing. But I want you to be conscious of the fact that traffic is not necessarily more important than conversion, and I like to

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Ricardo Fayet: illustrated at this in in this way.

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Ricardo Fayet: Put yourself in the shoes of a giant retailer like Amazon. Right? You've got a captive audience of

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Ricardo Fayet: millions of readers in this case. You know

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Ricardo Fayet: this example. Here. They're self-help readers, right?

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Ricardo Fayet: And you want to recommend a book to them in an email.

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Ricardo Fayet: Right?

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Ricardo Fayet: You get the choice between 2 bucks. The 1st one has sold a hundred 1,000 copies in the last month.

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Ricardo Fayet: and a 1 out of 10 readers, viewing its page, purchased it, and the second one has sold 10,000 copies, but 2 out of 10 readers, viewing its page, purchased it

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Ricardo Fayet: as Amazon as a giant retailer. Which one would you pick to recommend in in an email?

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Ricardo Fayet: And the correct answer, here is the second one.

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Ricardo Fayet: because the 1st one, even though it sold a lot more copies, it has a lower conversion rate.

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Ricardo Fayet: And if you're Amazon, you have that corruptive audience. Right? You you have that audience of millions of readers to whom you're going to send that email. You don't have an issue with getting traffic. You're Amazon.

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Ricardo Fayet: What you care about is if I send that traffic to one book, how is it going to convert? How is it going to turn into sales, and you need to remember that retailers have the exact same goal as you do. They want to sell books. The retailers make money when they sell books to readers. You make money when you sell books to readers, so your interests are aligned.

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Ricardo Fayet: But the retailer obviously is going to be more inclined to promote the books that have the best conversion rate.

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Ricardo Fayet: Sales volume is important as well. You need to get a certain number of sales for retailers to notice you. But even more importantly, or at least just as importantly, the conversion rates

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Ricardo Fayet: needs to be as high as possible.

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Ricardo Fayet: because if they're going to send their traffic to your book. It needs to convert well to sales.

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Ricardo Fayet: So the 1st thing you need to do after writing that amazing book is to nail all your metadata, and in particular everything that is going to be displayed to readers on what I call the product pages. So here you've got an example of a product page of a Parnell women's fiction book

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Ricardo Fayet: on Amazon.

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Ricardo Fayet: Right? And we're going to go through it right through all the elements of that product page that you need to absolutely nail.

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Ricardo Fayet: And again, this is where probably at least 50% of your marketing times should be spent way ahead of the launch, thinking of every single one of those elements

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Ricardo Fayet: and refining them over time, so that when when you feel when launch time comes.

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Ricardo Fayet: they're as good as they can be. 1st one is the book, cover the book, cover, please

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Ricardo Fayet: little bit of a dual element in terms of both the traffic factor and the conversion factor.

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Ricardo Fayet: because people are not really going to click on your ads or promos

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Ricardo Fayet: or things like that if they're not attracted by the cover. So the cover is important to get the traffic in the 1st place. But then it's also important for the conversion element. People are going to look at your cover more closely and decide whether it's something that appeals to them that hits the right tropes right?

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Ricardo Fayet: For them. As a reader.

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Ricardo Fayet: So look at you know the the best selling books in in your crime sub genre.

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Ricardo Fayet: and see what they have in common. Right? What mood do they set? What do they all feature characters, or do they all feature the setting? Do they all have like a house with pines around them, for example?

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Ricardo Fayet: Or do they all have a gun

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Ricardo Fayet: things like that try to identify the things that they have in common, the color palettes that they have in common, and when you write your brief to a professional cover designer. I really really recommend hiring a professional cover designer for recover, then

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Ricardo Fayet: give them clear inspiration as to what that cover should look like.

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Ricardo Fayet: Then comes the book description. The number one thing a reader is going to do when they pick up your book in in a bookstore is like, turn it over after looking at the cover. This looks good, interesting. They're going to turn it over and read the back cover.

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Ricardo Fayet: If we're talking about online sales, the 1st thing they're gonna do when they land on that product page is read the product description right? Read what we tend to call the blurb in marketing jargon.

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Ricardo Fayet: and the 1st thing again we can do is a whole presentation just about blurbs which we don't have time for here. But I'm going to give you this quick tip. The 1st

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Ricardo Fayet: thing you need to start with, and a blurb is a hook. A hook is like one or 2 sentences, short, punchy.

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Ricardo Fayet: that immediately grab the reader's attention and tell them

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Ricardo Fayet: and attract the right reader's attention right? So they you. They need to

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Ricardo Fayet: show the troops of the book as well. So here we've got a woman starting over. So just with that short, it's punchy, and it tells me the genre, the genre. It's, you know, it's women's fiction. That's the definition of women's fiction.

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Ricardo Fayet: A new house with an unexpected twist. We get the paranormal element right there, plus a little bit of intrigue, and finally, a Cape wearing butler acting as a world's worst life coach.

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Ricardo Fayet: There's the humorous elements. There's again the paranormal elements. It gives us the the voice of the book, the tone of the book. It introduces a quirky, interesting character, such as those 3 sentences acts as a an amazing hook to attract the kind of audience that this author wants paranormal women's fiction authors? Readers, right?

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Ricardo Fayet: That's the kind of hook you want. Obviously, if you've got accolades like an amazing

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Ricardo Fayet: review from a well known outlet, or something like 1 million copies sold, or a U.S.A. To the best seller time, best seller, etc. You can use those as hooks as well for me. They probably not

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Ricardo Fayet: as effective unless they're really, really, really impressive.

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Ricardo Fayet: But you can use those as hooks as well. The hook should be obviously at the very top, bolded, or with some kind of headline formatting. So it stands out, and it should hook readers. It should grab readers, and then

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Ricardo Fayet: they should get into the blurb, and the blurb should give them enough information to want to start opening the book and reading it.

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Ricardo Fayet: What's the next things the reader is going to look at their product page the price and the formats right?

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Ricardo Fayet: There's obviously price is is a factor in in buying decisions.

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Ricardo Fayet: Prices have gone up for everything around the world, and they have gone up for books as well. That's actually good news you can't afford. You don't need to price your books at 0 99 anymore, 1, 99, 2, 99.

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Ricardo Fayet: This was a, I think, a 1st in series of 3 99

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Ricardo Fayet: and if you're launching a new book, if you're a relatively unknown author.

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Ricardo Fayet: or this is your 1st book in a new series or new genre. Then I would start at a relatively low price point 299, 399.

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Ricardo Fayet: However, if you're launching book 3. Book 4, book 5 in a series.

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Ricardo Fayet: the people who are going to buy that book are likely readers who've already read the other books in the series. Readers were already familiar with you, and who, like your books and you're writing enough to, you know, follow you through the series and follow your characters to the series at that point. They're what we call a captive audience, right?

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Ricardo Fayet: You. You won them over already, so they won't mind paying 1, 2, $3 extra. And now we're seeing more and more books 6, 7, 8, 9, and series launching at 59969979989, or even 9, 99. Right? So experiment with higher price points, especially on books that are

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Ricardo Fayet: further down in your series, and you can even experiment with a staircur what I call staircase pricing right? Book one at 2, 99, book 2 at 3, 99, book 3, at 4, 99, etc, etc. Right? You kind of raise by $1 every time. I

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Ricardo Fayet: most readers are not really going to notice.

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Ricardo Fayet: The the

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Ricardo Fayet: price difference of $1 between one book and the other industries.

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Ricardo Fayet: the formats is the other bit of that. Some readers still swear by prints.

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Ricardo Fayet: Some of them even sort by hardbacks.

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Ricardo Fayet: others

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Ricardo Fayet: will only read on their kindle, and others are fully converted to audio, so the more formats you have available, the more retailers will like you. And that's not just Amazon. It's like every retailer out there.

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Ricardo Fayet: obviously producing the audiobook is more expensive. So it's hard to launch with

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Ricardo Fayet: the the ebook version, the print version, and the audiobook version at the same time, if you can afford to do it.

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Ricardo Fayet: It's a really strong plus to launch with all 3 formats at the same time.

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Ricardo Fayet: If you can't, that's fine launch with the ebook paperback hardback.

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Ricardo Fayet: and that's already going to be much better than just ebook or just paperback.

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Ricardo Fayet: Right? It's there's almost no price difference in getting the you know the paper bag and the hard back out there as well. Your designer will need to, you know, do slightly different cover for the hardback than the paper bag, but

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Ricardo Fayet: not going to charge you a lot extra for that. And the benefit of having all these formats out there is definitely proven. So get as many formats out there as possible, ready for the launch.

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Ricardo Fayet: Next thing they're going to do. Once they know what format they want to buy. They're convinced by the price by the blurb, etc. They're going to look at reviews right? They're going to look at what other readers say about this book.

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Ricardo Fayet: There's both customer and editorial reviews. If you're not familiar with editorial reviews, they're an amazing

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Ricardo Fayet: an amazing section of the Amazon product page

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Ricardo Fayet: that you have control over. So when readers are scrolling down to get to the customer reviews, they 1st going to get to the section called editorial reviews, and you have control over that you can set those editorial reviews using Amazon author central, your Amazon author page.

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Ricardo Fayet: and you can put there in the editorial review section, whichever whatever you want like ideally. It's reserved for reviews from reputable outlets, but you can join, you can use it for

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Ricardo Fayet: for

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Ricardo Fayet: even customer reviews are particularly

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Ricardo Fayet: praising of your book. You can put them directly there in the editorial reviews. And finally, the last thing readers are going to look at is the the sample right. Some readers, before committing to buy the books. They're going to start reading the 1st few pages

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Ricardo Fayet: right? So the the the reading funnel is, I click, you know, on the cover. Pick up the book. I read the back cover, I read the blurb. If I'm interested and the price is good and the reviews are good. I open the book and I start reading.

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Ricardo Fayet: So you want to make sure that those opening pages obviously grab their reader

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Ricardo Fayet: to let them go, and the I the ideal scenario they get by the end of the sample, and they need to know what happens next, and the only way for them to do that is to buy the book right? If you get all those. If you nail all those elements.

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Ricardo Fayet: then it's going to be very, very easy to sell your books, and it's going to be very easy to launch your book and get a high ranking at launch.

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Ricardo Fayet: Because

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Ricardo Fayet: a great portion of the traffic that you're going to manage to get to your book. Page is going to end up buying the book.

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Ricardo Fayet: This is much harder than it sounds. And that's why I spent quite a bit of time on this slide.

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Ricardo Fayet: But it is, as I said.

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Ricardo Fayet: 50% of a successful launch at least goes in this in this product page. And all the decisions you're going to make there, and how you refine this. I'm going to take questions at the end of the presentation, by the way, so just put them in the Q. And A. Box, and I'll go through them at the end.

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Ricardo Fayet: Now we talked about like the the metadata that appears on the page. But when you publish your book on on retailers

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Ricardo Fayet: or distributors, there's you also have to enter Metadata. That does not necessarily appear to the readers, but that the readers are going to use on their end, and the back office to decide where and how to display your book.

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Ricardo Fayet: One of those elements is the retailer categories. So categories is basically how retailers organize their store by genres and subgenres.

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Ricardo Fayet: When you publish your book on Amazon. Now, whether an ebook or print.

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Ricardo Fayet: you are restricted, you have to choose 3 categories, book and performat.

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Ricardo Fayet: The great thing about that is that now, those categories that you can select when publishing your book, using Kdp mirror, the categories that readers can see on their ends in the store. So you can do a little bit of research as a reader. Right? You can just navigate through the store, click on those various categories, go into subcategories and sub sub categories. Look at the books that are there. And by doing this kind of research you select the 3 categories that you want to select right.

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Ricardo Fayet: If you've published a book in the past like a year from now or more back, then you could get your book listed in more than 3 categories by reaching out to Kdb's report.

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Ricardo Fayet: Your book is already. It's a it's an old release, right? It's part of your bucklift. If it's already in more than 3 categories.

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Ricardo Fayet: It's going to remain in more than 3 categories, right? But it's only gonna rank in 3. So yeah, that's that's a little change that Amazon introduced

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Ricardo Fayet: one tool that I recommend quite often for category research is publisher rocket. You might have chrome across it.

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Ricardo Fayet: It's not indispensable if you're just gonna publish your 1st book. But if you plan on really seeing multiple books, then I would definitely invest in it because it makes category research a lot easier. You can just kind of type in, for example, crime. And you can see all the categories and subcategories and crime mystery thriller.

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Ricardo Fayet: And you can view little charts like that about their the evolution of the top 30 rankings, the category growth, competitiveness, etc, etc. The percentage of like kind of unlimited books in that category.

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Ricardo Fayet: And all that. So it's really handy to do category research.

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Ricardo Fayet: The other element of met metadata. You want to pay attention to is the keywords or retailers will have a keyword system.

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Ricardo Fayet: Amazon has the most sophisticated one.

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Ricardo Fayet: and this is how the 7 keywords that you can enter on Amazon work.

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Ricardo Fayet: Basically, there are keyword boxes of

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Ricardo Fayet: I don't remember 90 characters, a hundred characters, some something like that or 80.

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Ricardo Fayet: And you can fill those boxes with not just one word, but as many words as you want within that character limit.

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Ricardo Fayet: And the way Amazon is going to use those keyword phrases is that Amazon is going to index your book in searches for any combination of the words included in your keyword phrase.

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Ricardo Fayet: What that means is that if I use the keyword

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Ricardo Fayet: mythical creature fantasy Dragon, for example, that keyword phrase, my buck is going to be indexed, which means it's going to show in search results. Not necessarily at the top. It's just going to show among the search results when people search for

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Ricardo Fayet: mythical creature fantasy Dragon. Very unlikely that people will search that, but if they do, my book will show there. But it's also going to show for mythical dragon mythical fantasy

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Ricardo Fayet: a drug and fantasy.

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Ricardo Fayet: mythical creature, mythical creature, fantasy, etc. So any combination of the words in that box

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Ricardo Fayet: Amazon will give will give a little boost

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Ricardo Fayet: in ranking

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Ricardo Fayet: 4 exact matches. So if you really want to rank for whatever reason, for I don't know

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Ricardo Fayet: espionage thriller, for example.

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Ricardo Fayet: maybe you could dedicate one of the 7 keyword boxes to just espionage thriller. Now, espionage thriller is a very

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Ricardo Fayet: competitive search. Obviously. So your best bet, if you really want to rank high for that is to work it into your title. Either your title, subtitle, or series title that's going to give you the best boost in terms of ranking. But

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Ricardo Fayet: if you don't want to put into your title, for whatever reason, then the next best thing you can do for the things you really really want to rank for is to dedicate one of your 7 Kdp keyword boxes to just that keyword with nothing else around it.

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Ricardo Fayet: How to find keyword ideas you've got.

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Ricardo Fayet: I think, 2 free options which are using the autocomplete bar on Amazon. So you can start searching for something on Amazon. You start here. The example, is regency historical, but you can search for espionage thriller

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Ricardo Fayet: or Noir, for example. And you see what the auto complete gives you.

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Ricardo Fayet: Second thing that I quite like is the sidebar tick categories on Amazon. They're harder to find now, so you need to search through the store a little bit if you don't manage to find them. Just drop me an email, and I can look them up for you.

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Ricardo Fayet: Sometimes you need to use a PBX. Sometimes you need to

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Ricardo Fayet: to use an incognito window. It's a little bit hit and miss, but they're little keyword little tick box categories like that in certain genres. I think there are some. Yeah, there are definitely some in crime in particular, cozy mystery

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Ricardo Fayet: for heroes and settings mostly, and themes.

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Ricardo Fayet: So, for example, in this case, if you were to publish a romantic thriller with

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Ricardo Fayet: a biker in there and you want, then you might want to include bikers in your 7 Kdp keywords, because that way you would, Amazon would automatically put you in the bikers category on all the romance categories. Basically.

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Ricardo Fayet: that's a little set for keywords.

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Ricardo Fayet: And finally, the last element of metadata I want you to think about are also bots

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Ricardo Fayet: now also bought.

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Ricardo Fayet: You don't entirely control them.

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Ricardo Fayet: but it is how Amazon and the other retailers as well. Kind of map books on the store.

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Ricardo Fayet: And they map where books fit in their marketplace, and how they decide which books to recommend to whom and how they do that is, basically, if a reader buys book A and then buys Book B, and that happens enough times.

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Ricardo Fayet: Then they're going to decide that book A and Book B are related because customers who bought this item book, A also bought book B, and inversely, customers who bought Book B also bought book a right? So these kind of also bought relationships is how Amazon and other retailers decide

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Ricardo Fayet: how books relate to each other.

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Ricardo Fayet: and this is what most of them base their their recommendations on. When you get an email from Amazon telling you

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Ricardo Fayet: you might also enjoy this box.

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Ricardo Fayet: It's because you bought a book recently. And they basically tell you, hey, these are the also bots of that book

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Ricardo Fayet: right now. Also, bots are not always displayed on Amazon.

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Ricardo Fayet: On other retailers they're never displayed, but they also use a similar system like that

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Ricardo Fayet: in

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Ricardo Fayet: in their admin, right in their back office same thing for Amazon. If they. If the also bots are not displayed on a particular product page, it doesn't necessarily mean that the book doesn't have also bots. As soon as a book gets sales it will have also bots. It just means that Amazon is not necessarily showing them for that book, but it's using them in the background.

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Ricardo Fayet: To inform their recommendations.

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Ricardo Fayet: Because of this, you really want to make sure that your also bots are relevant as relevant as possible.

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Ricardo Fayet: The worst thing that can happen to you is not

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Ricardo Fayet: launching a book and getting no sales. That's easy to fix. You. Start promoting it, or you change the blurb, or like.

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Ricardo Fayet: I mean, it's not easy to fix, but it's fixable right? It's relatively fixable.

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Ricardo Fayet: But what's can be worse is getting the wrong kind of sales. So, for example.

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Ricardo Fayet: you're launching this really cute cozy mystery with an illustrated cover there, and you have one of your best friends who's

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Ricardo Fayet: A super high selling

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Ricardo Fayet: espionage? Thriller author, right? So 2 drawings are quite different

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Ricardo Fayet: to do you a favor. Your friend just emails their whole list, saying, Hey, my friend released this really cute cousin Mystery, give it a try so suddenly.

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Ricardo Fayet: You're going to get this huge audience of espionage. Thriller readers who are going to buy your book as a favor, or based on the recommendation of your friend.

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Ricardo Fayet: And what's going to happen? Your also bots are going to populate with Espn's thriller box.

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Ricardo Fayet: and Amazon's going to say, this book that you're telling me is a cute quiz of mystery is actually an espionage thriller. So I'm going to start marketing it, since it's selling quite well to espionage thriller readers, right?

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Ricardo Fayet: And so Amazon might send an email or like display it to those kind of readers. And what's going to happen? They're not going to buy it right? Because

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Ricardo Fayet: it's not a book for them. It's not. They're not interested in in a cute cuisine mystery.

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Ricardo Fayet: And the worst thing that can happen is Amazon recommending your book and no one buying it, because at that point Amazon's just gonna pull the plug on recommending it right? Just like any normal person would do right. If

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Ricardo Fayet: you're trying to sell something and you push something, and no one buys it. You're probably not going to go back the same day the next day and push the same thing to the same people.

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Ricardo Fayet: You know it's not going to work right? So Amazon's definitely not going to do that. So that's why you want to take really good care of your also bots, and that's super important for the launch.

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Ricardo Fayet: You do not want to mess up your also bots at launch.

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Ricardo Fayet: So the all the tactics and the channels we're going to talk about now.

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Ricardo Fayet: They're going to be focused mostly on getting sales to the right kind of readers targeting the right kind of readers not going too broad, so that you don't mess up your also bots, and I'll also give you

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Ricardo Fayet: An extra tip for nailing your also bots before the launch towards the end of this presentation.

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Ricardo Fayet: Alright, that's it, for kind of you know what you need to take into account before the the book launch. I told you would spend a huge amount of time on that. But now we're going to go a little bit quicker.

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Ricardo Fayet: So the next thing you want to do is secure reviews at launch. The best way to do that, if you don't already have one is to build a street team. A street team is basically a group of readers who enter into a contract with you. You send them a free copy of your book, usually a month before the launch.

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Ricardo Fayet: and in exchange for receiving that free advance reader copy, they agree to post an honest review when you launch your book right?

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Ricardo Fayet: Where can you find those people usually among family and friends. But I'm going to stress this again. Family and friends who read books in your genre. You don't want your cousin, who only reads Romans to, you know.

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Ricardo Fayet: Read your espionage thriller, because

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Ricardo Fayet: our review from from that person's not going to make a big difference right? You want people who read books in your drawer, who can give you interesting feedback and give you

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Ricardo Fayet: good reviews.

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Ricardo Fayet: other places, Facebook communities of readers of new genre, social media, Amazon and goodreads, reviewer and reviewers in your Gen. Be careful when approaching those, because they tend to get a lot of approaches, but you can try

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Ricardo Fayet: other Endy or tripod buffers in Yoshura.

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Ricardo Fayet: That's the best kind of review you can get is from a successful author in your gen, obviously, it's not as simple as emailing them and saying, Hey, want to review my book? Usually they're going to say no, but it takes, you know, maybe approaching them at a conference building a relationship with them, etc.

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Ricardo Fayet: Or you can also use art sites. There's sites dedicated to getting you advanced.

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Ricardo Fayet: Reader, to getting your advanced reader copies into the hands of readers to get your reviews at launch. Some of them are book sprout, net galley, hidden gems, etc. A lot of those are booked

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Ricardo Fayet: weeks or months in advance, so

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Ricardo Fayet: take a look at those as soon as possible.

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Ricardo Fayet: And finally, here's a very simple strategy for getting reviews before you launch your book right

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Ricardo Fayet: when you put your book on pre-order on Amazon. Readers cannot review it because they cannot purchase it. It's on pre-order that so in Amazon's mind. Right they have. They don't have access to the book, so they cannot review it.

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Ricardo Fayet: However, what you can do is, 1st you set the ebook on preorder around one month prior to your book launch. Right? That's when you send out your advanced reader copies to your team of

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Ricardo Fayet: to your Street team.

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Ricardo Fayet: Then one week before the launch you, you launch the paperback one week before the ebook launch. You put the paperback, live right?

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Ricardo Fayet: Usually

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Ricardo Fayet: in crime fiction. You're not going to care as much about paperback sales as you do about ebook sales, so it's fine to put the paper back out one week early, and as soon as it's out, that paperback page which is live is going to sync with the ebook page that's on pre-order. And suddenly people will start being able to add reviews on your book, right? So they'll leave a review on the paperback. But that's linked to the ebook page. So as soon as the paperback is live. You ask your street team, your art team to review the paperback on Amazon.

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Ricardo Fayet: and the reviews are so going to start trickling in. And suddenly, you're going to launch your book one week later, with already a bunch of reviews on it which are going which are going to help a lot when it comes to promoting the book at launch.

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Ricardo Fayet: If, for whatever reason, you expect to sell a lot more copies in prints than an ebook, then you're just

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Ricardo Fayet: do the opposite right? You launch the ebook one week prior to the print book.

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Ricardo Fayet: We're going to talk about putting together a launch plan. So first, st you might be wondering about like, why do I even need a launch plan? I can just like launch the book and start sending traffic to it. But yeah, you can do that.

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Ricardo Fayet: But I kind of like this quote from Rachel Abbott, who was one of the very first, st and the authors to make it in the Uk. She was number one on Amazon dot code at Uk. And then she she signed with a publisher. I mean, she's hybrid. She's always been hybrid, I think.

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Ricardo Fayet: But I like this quote

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Ricardo Fayet: because it highlights the importance of a marketing plan. So, as I spent far too long from being completely unfocused.

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Ricardo Fayet: and it was only when I wrote a marketing plan with very specific aims and objectives that things started to happen. Suddenly people noticed my, but the chart. The tactics were working, and then it got to Number One in the kindle chart. It stayed there for 4 weeks.

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Ricardo Fayet: So 1st thing about this. That was an amazing book, right? You don't get to Number One and

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Ricardo Fayet: any country store on Amazon by with an average pop. You need an amazing book that's going to captivate the readers and your audience. That's a given. But also

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Ricardo Fayet: you need to market it right? You need to have a clear plan for marketing when you launch

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Ricardo Fayet: in particular and your marketing plan. One of the things you want to think about is how you to spread your activities ideally in your marketing plan. You want to list all the activities you're going to do at launch and even up to a week before launch.

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Ricardo Fayet: And you want to spread those activities to avoid a spike in sales

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Ricardo Fayet: spikes. You might have heard about this already, but retailers tend to hate spikes in sales, because for them. It looks

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Ricardo Fayet: it doesn't look normal, right?

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Ricardo Fayet: If you get a book that's selling 2, 3 copies a day. And suddenly in one day, Bob, it shoots up to 100, and then the next day it goes back to 2 to 3 copies a day.

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Ricardo Fayet: It just, it seems weird, right at best. It looks weird, and at worst it looks like you try to manipulate your rank right by getting a bunch of sales in the same day to try to get Trigg, the retailer, into thinking, hey, that book has a very high rank.

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Ricardo Fayet: So in both cases it's not going to help you right? So instead, what you want is to demonstrate to the retailer

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Ricardo Fayet: that you can sell a relatively high number of copies over a sustained period of time.

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Ricardo Fayet: So you want to have that kind of plateau of sales, or what we call sometimes the bell curve. Right you have. Maybe you launch your book. You have 50 sales on day, one, then 70, on day, 2, then 150 on day, 3, then 200 on day, 4,

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Ricardo Fayet: 300 and day 5. And then it goes back down again. That's

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Ricardo Fayet: an example, right of what a bell curve could look like. You want to aim for that?

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Ricardo Fayet: I would say in the beginning it's not as important.

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Ricardo Fayet: The number of total sales you cannot get is you can get is not necessarily as important as like getting a nice.

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Ricardo Fayet: Bell curve shape right?

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Ricardo Fayet: And you definitely want to avoid getting all those sales on day one and then nothing afterwards.

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Ricardo Fayet: So how can you, you know, achieve that. How can you make get a maximum amount of sales during a sustained period within the 1st 30 days of your launch cause? Yeah, I forgot to mention this, but most retailers are going to give you extra visibility for the 1st 30 days

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Ricardo Fayet: after your book is launched. Right.

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Ricardo Fayet: Some of them are going to give you extra visibility, for during the pre-order period, as well, like pre-orders, are going to be very important for wide retailers like Apple or Kobo on Amazon. Not as important.

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Ricardo Fayet: But all retailers will give your book extra visibility for the 1st 30 days after the launch. So you wanna concentrate as many sales as possible within those 1st 30 days. It doesn't really matter. They happen during the 1st week or second week or 3rd week.

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Ricardo Fayet: It's those 1st 30 days, that matter after that, like the following 30 days and the following 30 days. So 30, 60, 90 are kind of the thresholds as well, that can be important. But the 1st 30 are the most important ones, because your books are going to be eligible

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Ricardo Fayet: to show up in the new releases lists of all those retailers.

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Ricardo Fayet: So how do you get as many sales as possible at launch?

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Ricardo Fayet: My main tip is to offer a deal, especially if you're newer author, and you don't have an established

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Ricardo Fayet: presence, or an established list, or a captive audience of readers. Already

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Ricardo Fayet: a promotion

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Ricardo Fayet: price promotion is pretty simple. It's dropping your book to a discount price for set period of days and spreading it around the web.

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Ricardo Fayet: So price promotions to this day are still the best way to get traffic.

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Ricardo Fayet: They're not an automated way to get traffic right. It's you're not just going to get a bunch of readers to discover your book by just discounting it to 0 99, because a ton of people discount their books to 0 99 nowadays. This you could get away

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Ricardo Fayet: by doing just that right? Discounting your book and getting a ton of traffic back in

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Ricardo Fayet: 2010, 2012, right? Not anymore.

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Ricardo Fayet: There's a lot more competition. But it is still the best way to get traffic if you promote it, because it makes promoting the book a lot easier when it's discounted.

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Ricardo Fayet: Another side advantage is that your street team will be able to purchase the book at the discount. Right? Remember that your contract with your street team is I send you the book

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Ricardo Fayet: one month before launch in exchange for a review at launch. But if they really really like you, and your book is at 0 99 at launch. They might actually buy the book 0 99, right? And they like you as an author. They like you enough to be among your street team. So it might do you the favor of buying that copy at 0 99. And what happens if they buy it? It's not just that you're gonna earn a little bit of money. It's that suddenly the review is going to be a verified review, which is a little bit more important on Amazon, right. So it can be a trick also to get verified reviews at launch

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Ricardo Fayet: price promos work even better if you're going to, unless you're bulk and cannot select, and it's going to be available and can. Unlimited.

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Ricardo Fayet: simple reason for that is, if your book is in kennel limited, a portion of your income is going to come from. Page reads, those page reads are unaffected by the price. Whether your book is free, 0 99,

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Ricardo Fayet: 2, 99, or 9 99, you're going to earn the same amount when people borrow it and read it through kind of unlimited right. So as soon as a portion of your income comes from, can you? The price doesn't matter as much.

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Ricardo Fayet: And another reason why it's important is that

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Ricardo Fayet: for an an algorithmic reason, I'm not going to go into. But basically price promotions where you get a lot of downloads or a lot of sales at low price points

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Ricardo Fayet: kind of work. Well, to boost your Ku visibility. So your the visibility of your book to kind of limited readers.

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Ricardo Fayet: And finally, the last thing that I like about price promotions is that they allow you to boost sales across your entire series. And I'm going to illustrate that now.

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Ricardo Fayet: So if you write in series, and you should write in series, because it is by far the best way to make full time income as an author.

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Ricardo Fayet: Then you might have seen this kind of trickle down effect right? Which is, you launch book one so suddenly. You get a bunch of sales book one because you launch it. You promoted. You're excited, etc. Over time. The launch. The sales go down for book one, because the you know the launches over, excitement is over, etc. But suddenly you launch book to book 2

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Ricardo Fayet: shoots up right? Gets a bunch of sales excitement. But what happens as well? Book one shoots up as well, because by promoting book 2 by talking about book 2. You're at the same time getting readers and new readers in who haven't read Book one, and they're like, Oh, this looks really good. But I'm gonna grab book 1 first, st because I want to read book one to be able to read this book right?

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Ricardo Fayet: So usually, when you have a new release. It boosts

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Ricardo Fayet: the entire catalog up to that point in the series. So you get this kind of trickledown effect. Obviously the graphs are not going to look exactly like that right?

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Ricardo Fayet: But

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Ricardo Fayet: you get the idea of the trickle-down effect.

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Ricardo Fayet: Now, what can you do with price promotions? You can maximize this trickle-down effect. So, for example, if you're launching Book 3 in a series, what you can do is

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Ricardo Fayet: you put book one free and book 2 at 0 99. That's what we call an aggressive price. Promo, right? And you launch book 3.

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Ricardo Fayet: What happens when you do that?

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Ricardo Fayet: You maximize the visibility. That not only book 3 that's launching is going to get, but also book one because it gets a free promo and Book 2, because it gets a discount promo. You can book promo sites for book one and book 2, and you really sites for Book 3. You can run ads and send them to your series page where people are going to buy the gonna be able to buy the 1st 3 books in the series for just

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Ricardo Fayet: the price of book 3 plus 0 99. Right? So if you launch Book 3 at

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Ricardo Fayet: 3, 99, they're going to be able to buy the 1st 3 books for just 4, 98, for example, great deal. Great bargain. They can just one click, all 3 of them.

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Ricardo Fayet: So there's a ton of like promo opportunities that come as a result of doing that. And it's a great way to maximize that trickle down effect and to raise the visibility of all your books in the series when you launch a new book in that.

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Ricardo Fayet: Now, obviously, as I said, during promos, is not a guaranteed way to get people to discover your book just because you lower its price. Does that mean that people are gonna suddenly appear on a book page no, or Amazon is suddenly going to display it more prominently. You know, you also need to drive traffic. You need to send readers to that promo. You need to tell readers, hey, this book is discounted, check it out.

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Ricardo Fayet: How do you do that?

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Ricardo Fayet: 2 kind of channels, 2 types of channels you can use inbound channels and outbound channels.

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Ricardo Fayet: So the 1st and most well-known inbound channel you have at your disposal is your mail and best.

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Ricardo Fayet: If you don't have a mailing list yet, because you're new author. Don't worry about it too much.

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Ricardo Fayet: Just focus on building your Arc team your street team for now, and but make sure that you have a call to sign up to your mailing list at the end of your 1st book. Right?

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Ricardo Fayet: Ideally, you would want to have a reader Magnet at the end of that 1st book with a welcome automation. A reader magnet is basically a piece of content that you offer for free in exchange for people sign up to your mail list something that works really well at the end of a book, for example, is a bonus epilogue.

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Ricardo Fayet: right?

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Ricardo Fayet: Or

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Ricardo Fayet: a novella, or short story or a character back story something like that. But

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Ricardo Fayet: if it, you're going to display it at the end of the book, epilogues work really really well, because readers are already invested in the story, and they want to know what happens next.

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Ricardo Fayet: if you already have a mailing list right of a certain size.

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Ricardo Fayet: Then that's your best tool that you can use at launch, because it's readers who actively want to hear about your new releases. So you definitely want to let them know when you have a new release. Right? It's the 1st thing you want to do. Now, little

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Ricardo Fayet: Caveat, about that is that if you have a big list of like 5,000 people or more.

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Ricardo Fayet: You probably don't want to email all of them on the day of the launch.

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Ricardo Fayet: because otherwise you're gonna get. You're basically burning through that bullet in just one date. And you're gonna get that spike right? 5,000 people in your newsletter. Maybe

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Ricardo Fayet: let's say 500 of them are just going to buy the book. That's 500 sales on day one. It's going to be hard to match that on day 2 without

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Ricardo Fayet: something as strong as a newsletter to send right? So what you can do is like, split your new, your new release allowance email, half your list on day, one half your list on day 2, or like 1 3rd day, 1, 1 3rd day, 2, 1, 33, etc.

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Ricardo Fayet: Right. Another thing I could definitely encourage you to do is to resend your launch announcements to non openers. So

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Ricardo Fayet: if you use meal light or convertkit, which are the 2 main email marketing systems I recommend, or any other famous one out there, like active campaign, constant contact, etc.

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Ricardo Fayet: They will tell you which readers have not opened your email, and you can just create a new campaign just for them.

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Ricardo Fayet: It's not perfect, right? The open, the open rate thing. Some people will have opened your book, your email, and they will get a second one.

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Ricardo Fayet: Tough luck! It's not the end of the world, right? Some of them are going to complain. Hey, I got this email twice.

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Ricardo Fayet: Well, if you don't want to get this email twice, just and subscribe right, it's it's fine. You can disrupt a few people with that.

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Ricardo Fayet: But the the effect of doing that is that basically you maximize the effect of your of your mailing list, and you get more sales, maybe even a week after a special trick you can use that some authors do is using a different email marketing system for the second email. For, for example, you use mail or light for the 1st one and convert kit for the second one.

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Ricardo Fayet: because different marketing email marketing systems will have different deliverability rates, and so some of them will be better at getting into certain readers inboxes versus others. Right? But that's like a really really advanced thing.

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Ricardo Fayet: Other inbound channels. You can leverage anywhere where you have a captive audience of your readers, a reader group on Facebook, your social media pages. If you have followers on bookbup make sure to send them a new release alert for your followers. That's free.

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Ricardo Fayet: or you can run ads through Facebook or bookbub for retargeting your readers or your followers right?

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Ricardo Fayet: Any and all of these techniques are great. To make sure that everyone who's read your books in the past is becomes aware that you have a new release. You want to maximize the number of people who already know about you who know about this new release.

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Ricardo Fayet: And obviously you want to schedule those announcements so that they don't hold up in the 1st day and create a spike. But spread those over.

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Ricardo Fayet: Now. Obviously, you don't just want to

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Ricardo Fayet: reach the people who already know about you. That's sort of the easy bit.

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Ricardo Fayet: You also want to reach new readers.

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Ricardo Fayet: So how do you do that you use that price? Promotion that we're talking about right price promotion. So great advantage is that they allow you to use what we call price promotion sites. You might have heard of them already. Free Book, C. Bargain, booksey.

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Ricardo Fayet: red Feather Romans. All these are important are sights of written word media.

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Ricardo Fayet: Hello, books. Also a written word media site. Now Robin reads the 1st librarian book, Sense Pixel, Living Book, Bob, etc. Bookbub is the most famous one you can.

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Ricardo Fayet: You can try to get a book, but new release for less. They don't work as well, obviously at the

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Ricardo Fayet: book, but future deals. But yeah.

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Ricardo Fayet: they they do still work a little bit. You might not make your money back. But that's yeah.

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Ricardo Fayet: Like we could do an entire presentation just to book up.

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Ricardo Fayet: But I definitely recommend you checking out this list of book promo services that we have on Ritzy.

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Ricardo Fayet: And just

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Ricardo Fayet: book a bunch of them for the promotion of your price promotion.

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Ricardo Fayet: Another channel. You can use Meta advertising

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Ricardo Fayet: right running ads on Facebook and Instagram that still works. There's a bunch of authors leaving out there that it doesn't work. Usually when it doesn't work for an author, it's because they haven't nailed everything we've talked about before. They cover

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Ricardo Fayet: the blur, the reviews, all of that.

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Ricardo Fayet: I'm not going to talk about Facebook ads in depth, but I'm going to leave you with 4 courses that I can recommend. The 1st one is the ads. For author scores from Lawrence of publishing, you know, the former mark Mark Dawson's self-publishing formula, one

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Ricardo Fayet: Nicholas Eric has a great free course on Facebook ads as well.

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Ricardo Fayet: Sky Warren has a great author ads. Intensive course for romance authors in particular, but you can.

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Ricardo Fayet: as a crime author, you can learn a ton from romance. Authors like they're usually ahead of the game, so you can learn what you can learn from them and imitate what they're doing. And then Matthew J. Holmes also has a cool course on Facebook ads, which he teaches slightly different concepts to the Martian course, out of all these Nicholas Eric's 1 is free. So I would encourage you to start there.

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Ricardo Fayet: Read some books, maybe on Facebook ads. And if you want to learn. Learn more, then grab one of these courses. You'll get the slides and you can click on those Logos to access the course pages.

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Ricardo Fayet: Another great channel is Amazon ads

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Ricardo Fayet: sponsored products ads in particular. Those answered themselves sort of seamlessly through the store, so they're a great way to get a bit of sales at launch. I have an entire book on just Amazon ads. So I've put some advice on this slide. I'm not going to read to you now.

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Ricardo Fayet: But you can read it afterwards, or you can grab the book it. You can find it on a rates. Any retailer you just search for Amazon. As for authors, and you're gonna find the book there. I just updated it last week with

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Ricardo Fayet: with a 2024 version with. Like, yeah, the most up to date. Info you're gonna find on the topic.

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Ricardo Fayet: Other potential channels you can use.

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Ricardo Fayet: That's up to you. Newsletter swaps book ads. Influencer marketing Tiktok, you know, in-person events, selling your book physically, or any other creative ideas you might have. There's a ton of ways to really to spread the word about your book. And again, that's not really the hardest part. The hardest part is nailing everything we talked about before in terms of the product page and the metadata.

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Ricardo Fayet: And finally, you put the whole plan together right?

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Ricardo Fayet: So this is what kind of a marketing plan could look like for a new release of book 3 in the series. So that's the kind of case scenario where we're launching. Book 3. And we discount book one and book 2. So the 1st day I email half of my landlord list. The second day I email the second half of my landlord list. And the 3rd day I posted my Facebook reader group

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Ricardo Fayet: right? And on day 5, I use a different email marketing system to email all the non openers. So that kind of covers my

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Ricardo Fayet: inbound part. And through all that I also run bookbub and meta ads

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Ricardo Fayet: to my existing audience, I do retargeting. And I do daily Tiktok videos because I have a bit of an audience on Tiktok as well, so that covers my existing audience right? And then I do outbound marketing to reach a new audience.

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Ricardo Fayet: relying mostly on price promo sites. So I book Ruben reads for book one on day, one. Then I book

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Ricardo Fayet: free book C for book, one on day 2. Then I book a bargain book C for book 2 on day, 3, etc, etc. And then I put some. I organize some newsletter swaps with other authors as well. Newsletter swaps are a great way to, you know. Collaborate with other authors and get sales. It's like

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Ricardo Fayet: I know another author and my niece, who?

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Ricardo Fayet: Who's writing, you know, similar, whose books are similar to mine. So I'm going to tell him.

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Ricardo Fayet: you promote my new release in an email to your audience, and when you have a new release I will promote your new release in one of my emails.

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Ricardo Fayet: It's really common to do that. The effectiveness of it depends on hike. How organic and authentic the recommendation is. If it's an author who is always blasting their

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Ricardo Fayet: they're subscribers with like new releases from other authors in their genre. Their recommendation

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Ricardo Fayet: drops a little bit in terms of value. Right? But if it's someone who only rarely recommends other books by other authors, then that recommendation is going to hold a lot of value.

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Ricardo Fayet: And finally, I'm going to run metal and bookbub ads to the series bake. This is kind of a simplified version. What it looks like in generally it's in a spreadsheet, and it looks a little bit like that. At least that's how I create

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Ricardo Fayet: marketing plans for some of the authors I've worked with.

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Ricardo Fayet: but it can take the form that you want. It can be notion, or in wherever place you want to create that the

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Ricardo Fayet: basics of it, or you just want to know exactly what you're going to do on each day so that you can. You know.

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Ricardo Fayet: when you take your cup of coffee in the morning you look at. Okay. I'm going to do exactly this. Today I'm running. I've got a robin reads Promo. I need to tweak my ads, and I need to send a new release announcement. For example.

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Ricardo Fayet: Now, can you outsource some of this.

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Ricardo Fayet: yes, you can find people. We're gonna do some of these things like they can. You can find people to help you with your author website or your marketing plan. In particular, we've got people on Reci who specialize on just that creating marketing plans for authors. Usually, you know, it's gonna range between 1,000 $3,000 per release, depending on how much info goes in the marketing plan.

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Ricardo Fayet: how much time they spend implementing, how much they help you implement it, etc.

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Ricardo Fayet: But the one thing I really want you think about before you outsource is this little matrix here?

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Ricardo Fayet: You've got 2 factors in the matrix, whether you're good at that activity and whether you enjoy doing it. So, for example.

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Ricardo Fayet: if you're good at Facebook ads, and you enjoy doing. Facebook ads do not outsource it right?

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Ricardo Fayet: You're good at it. You enjoy doing it. No point in outsourcing.

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Ricardo Fayet: If you are not good. For example at Amazon ads. But you enjoy doing it. Consider learning.

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Ricardo Fayet: Consider taking a course. You enjoy doing it right? So you can get better

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Ricardo Fayet: by learning, and you will enjoy the learning process, probably because that's something you enjoy, right pay for a course or for a consultant. Like most people who are successful out there they will be happy to consult for you. You tell them I'll I'm happy to pay for your time, if you just like.

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Ricardo Fayet: Do a call with me on like Amazon Ad.

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Ricardo Fayet: if you're good at something, but you don't enjoy doing it.

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Ricardo Fayet: That's a tricky situation. I recommend. Start doing it for budget reasons. But watch for burnout, because if you're good at something, but you don't enjoy doing it, you might end up burning out doing that right. So outsource when you have the means to do it, and since you're good at it, you can train also a personal assistant to take over.

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Ricardo Fayet: and finally, the number one reason to outsource something is when you're not good at it, and you don't enjoy doing it.

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Ricardo Fayet: If, for example, you hate Facebook ads, and you are not good at Facebook ads. But you know that you need to run Facebook ads for whatever reason, hire someone that's like clear case for hiring someone.

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Ricardo Fayet: Where can you find people

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Ricardo Fayet: we've got marketers on Reti. We've got over 25 marketers on there, some of them specialize in advertising, others advertise and specialize in marketing strategy, others in like metadata and writing blurbs. You can search for exactly what you want on there.

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Ricardo Fayet: And finally, you've got this free book that I have out there called How To Market, a book which goes over a lot of concepts

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Ricardo Fayet: that I have had barely time to touch on in this presentation, so feel free to grab a free copy out there. You've got this link again. You'll have the slides. You'll be able to click on this link

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Ricardo Fayet: and grab the book. Otherwise you search on any retailer for how to market a book, and since I put that exact keyword in my title, then you will

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Ricardo Fayet: find it pretty high in the search results hopefully.

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Ricardo Fayet: And that's it. Thanks for your attention. I'm going to try to get as quickly as possible through a few of the questions, but I only have 5 min. So

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Ricardo Fayet: anything that I don't answer. You've got my email there and email me.

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Ricardo Fayet: So 1st question is for audio format. If I priced at $0 as it is in the slide, how much does an author make on every purchase copy? I'm not sure how you priced it

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Ricardo Fayet: at $0. But if you priced

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Ricardo Fayet: any product at $0 and you're not making money unless there's some sort of boring scheme behind there. But yeah, I would need more context on that

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Ricardo Fayet: at launch. Is it helpful to ask my support circle to buy my books along with another one in the same genre at the same time, so that I can increase my also boats in the right genre. I mean, if you have friends who are happy to do that.

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Ricardo Fayet: But even so, I would say

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Ricardo Fayet: one book, or like one book, correspondence, is really not going to be enough to move the needle in terms of also bots, because if your friend has bought 10 romance books

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Ricardo Fayet: in the past month and you get them to buy one prime book along with yours

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Ricardo Fayet: that you're still gonna end up with Romans also bought in there.

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Ricardo Fayet: Chelsea. Or take. I've heard that verified purchase reviews are more valid on Amazon. Yes, absolutely. They're more valid on Amazon in the sense that they will appear higher than non verified reviews. So in the beginning, when your book launches. You cannot really get verified reviews until people buy your book and review it right?

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Ricardo Fayet: So the reviews you're going to get in the beginning from your R. Teams are going to be nonverified unless

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Ricardo Fayet: they buy the book because it's discounted and they leave a verified review. But that doesn't matter, because when you launch, you don't have verified reviews, right? So the non verified reviews are gonna show up at the top. Then when the verified reviews start coming in, start trickling in. They're gonna bury down the non verified reviews.

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Ricardo Fayet: But that doesn't matter, because at that point you've got verified reviews right? So I wouldn't matter too much about the verified thing.

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Ricardo Fayet: Now, a question from Ty. Is it better to self-publish and strategically market for sales before approaching one of the Big 5 publishers.

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Ricardo Fayet: No, if your goal is to reach one of the Big 5 publishers, the the still, the best way to do it

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Ricardo Fayet: is to try to land a literary agent with an original work like something that is not published.

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Ricardo Fayet: and try to get that agent to then pitch your work, your book to publishers.

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Ricardo Fayet: The alternative is to self publish, sell hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies, and then publishers will take notice. But at that point, once you've sold hundreds of thousands or millions of copies on your own.

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Ricardo Fayet: Why would you want to go to a big 5 publisher? You can get a print deal with them. You can do some things with them. They're starting to be more accommodating around that.

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Ricardo Fayet: But even so, like.

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Ricardo Fayet: I would say, if your number one goal is to get a big 5 publisher.

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Ricardo Fayet: There's a traditional publishing route for that. And still the best one.

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Ricardo Fayet: Yeah.

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Ricardo Fayet: how can you get and print the slides for this. Another session, I mean. Haley will answer that, but I've sent over those slides so you should get them, I think, in the Hub you should be able to find them in the Hub. Can you find agents on Riti? We have a directory of literary agents. So if you Google literary agents, Riti will. You'll find our directory that's curated. It's not our literary agents. They don't work for it. It's just, you know. An online directory of literary agents.

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Ricardo Fayet: but you'll have to contact them directly through their agency through the website and following their submission guidelines. Right? We do not facilitate

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Ricardo Fayet: connections with literary agents. Is it worth to set up a book by profile? Absolutely.

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Ricardo Fayet: absolutely. You. You don't pay any money to do that right. It's free. You should definitely claim your Amazon author profile and your bookbook profile at the very least. Right?

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Ricardo Fayet: You're gonna start getting some folders on Bubba, even if you do nothing on there. And you.

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Ricardo Fayet: They're going to be alerted every time you release something. Right? So claim your but profile for sure.

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Ricardo Fayet: When I hit the tab to join the community, I mean, yeah, any questions with, Ricci site, just drop me an email or email support@ritzy.com. And and we'll sort you out.

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Ricardo Fayet: I promote my books on the local weekly markets. People come up to me every week implementing me on my books and say quite probably how they pass the book onto their mother friend. Yeah, that's amazing.

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Ricardo Fayet: How they pass the book onto their mother, friend, neighbor, etc.

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Ricardo Fayet: This is frustrating.

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Ricardo Fayet: Well, I would. I wouldn't say it's frustrating like this is discoverability. Basically, you get your books and hands of readers. It's the same thing as giving away books for free doing a free promo on Amazon.

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Ricardo Fayet: You're getting books in the hands of readers for free

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Ricardo Fayet: sure, some of them could have bought your book, but

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Ricardo Fayet: at the end of the day.

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Ricardo Fayet: You're getting more people to know about you out there, and that's only positive, in my opinion. And also it can get reviews from those people, so you can tell. You can tell them. Well, make sure they leave me a review on Amazon. Right? It's the least they can do if they got you put for free

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Ricardo Fayet: when launching the 1st book, how long should one run the price? Promotion a month to usually press? Promos are run for one week. Right? You can run it for more. If you're in Kendall Limited, you can use what we call a Kdp countdown deal or a free promo. Those are 5 days or 7 days.

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Ricardo Fayet: So that's usually the length of press promotion. You can run it for longer. But in that case you kind of dilute the value if you're able to get a very high level sales during 2 weeks or a whole month.

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Ricardo Fayet: Great. But usually you have, like enough marketing power to for it to last a week. Not necessarily a lot more than that

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Ricardo Fayet: last question I'm going to be able to take is I promote my new books on the local radio stations. Okay, gets you a lot of sales. Well, anyone else drop me an email.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Great. Thank you so much, Ricardo. This was so great. I know there were a couple of questions about the slides. We'll put them up on the hub with the replay after this. So you'll be able to see that as soon as the replay processes and go back and access all this amazing information. And thank you again, Ricardo and Readzi, for joining us today, and thank you everyone for coming

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: bye everyone. We'll see you at the next session.