Training #330 – Hot Seats with Erin Moore

This week, we tried something new! Jay was traveling so the excellent Erin Moore from our support desk filled in and offered her own expertise, and for our hot seats we tested out unmuting participants so they could chat back and forth with us rather than relying on the questions box.

We also started with a little Amazon Advertising news, with two big announcements in the last week. First, as of July 1, Amazon now only reports sales based on the exact books being advertised. Previously, if you advertised a Kindle book, but sold a paperback book (or vice versa) then it would all be reported as a sale and contribute to the ACOS value. Now, if you advertise a Kindle book, you only see sales of the Kindle edition made from somebody clicking on your ad. It will make the ACOS value a little more relevant, but still won't be a full picture of the sales that you are actually making due to your advertising.

The second announcement, which was made last night, is that they are reporting a little more of the sales information, as you can now view the KENP page reads that occur within 14 days of somebody clicking on your ad. It can take up to a week or two for the page reads to be reported (as somebody may be reading with their device offline) and the page reads are reported on the day that they happened and not on the day that your ad was clicked on, but it can at least give us a partial indication of an up-to-now invisible part of our advertising results.

We also covered:

• Paul Huth's question about what sequence to use the Book Rocket System in
• Irma Bermudez's question about selling a book through Clickbank and Amazon
• Sharon Lang's question about where to find the Book Rocket System
• Cynthia Lauder's question about getting reviews, who can leave them, and verified purchases
• A hot seat for Richard Prygodzicz's children's book manuscript for 4-7 year olds
• Joy Saunderson's question about free giveaways to get people onto her newsletter list, compiling multiple books into a single edition, and UK versus US spelling and whether she should create different editions of her books
• Mary's question about what kind of free giveaways we can give readers to signup for our newsletter lists
• Ann Pashak's hot seat for her Fit Girls cozy mystery series rebranding efforts
• Laura Davis's question about using Private Label Rights (PLR) to create books for Amazon
• Joaritza Noriega's questions about using an editor, promotional pages in a board book, purchasing ISBNs in bulk, and creating an LLC for your author business
• Richard Prygodzicz's question about how to upload books to different territories through KDP
• Paul Huth's question about a good blog platform for a kid's book author
• Sean Topps' question about using a pseudonym and when a pen name makes sense
• Pam Ragland's question about where to find the recordings