Newsletter #83 — Three More Days!
June 1, 2024
Newsletter #83 — Three More Days!
Excited! — As you can imagine, I'm very excited that in just three more days, Exit Velocity will be published! And I hope that everyone who has ordered a book or two is likewise excited.
Catching Up with Other Titles — As reported in the previous newsletter, I discovered three new reviews on Amazon a few weeks ago. The first was for Jack and Larry, the second was for Sue Likes Blue, which I wrote forty (!!) years ago, in 1984. Here's what the reviewer had to say.
This was the first book I read as a child. It is a beautiful tale that brought me comfort throughout my childhood because it was the first book I learned to read. My inner child needed it now as an adult so I purchased a used copy and it being used brings me back to my joy of reading it once again. The tale follows a young girl who loves blue and goes on a quest to make everything in her life blue including food only to discover that blue is beautiful but it is okay for everything not to be that color. It is a short take and a great early reader for kids. It was my first introduction as a child that girls can like blue. I think it would be a great book for all ages that it is okay for not everything to be blue and that sometimes things come in all colors and shapes, making them more beautiful.
Love and Loss — Every once in a while I'm asked to write a testimonial for a fellow author's book. So far these have all been baseball books — but perhaps after Exit Velocity has been out for a year or so, I'll receive requests to write testimonials for political fiction. Or science fiction. Or parrot books. One never knows.
The book I was recently asked to read and blurb is Scott Longert's Love and Loss. This is a 172-page nonfiction book published by Ohio University Press. It's the story of Ray Chapman, star shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, roommate of Jack Graney, best friend of Tris Speaker, and probably the best shortstop in baseball during the 1910s. With his stats, he would have been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in later years (the Hall didn't exist in the 1910s).
But Ray's life was cut short by a submarine-ball pitcher, Carl Mays, who hit him in the head with a fastball on August 16, 1920. Ray Chapman died the next day. Love and Loss is a wonderful book. A smooth read, highly informative. It brings Chapman to life: I learned a lot more about him than I learned while writing Jack and Larry. The book will be published on September 3. You can preorder now.
Keywords — If you aren't an author it's possible that your life is free of keywords and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Keywords are a key (ha!) part of a book's metadata, and thus they're very important — you want readers to find your topic, your book, and your book's point of purchase immediately.
Furthermore, you want your book title to appear at or near the top of general searches for topics related to your book.
Exit Velocity, for example, is both political fiction and science fiction. Those two categories are too broad for any search that would bring up my exact title. Categories, however, aren't the same as keywords.
On Amazon each book is allowed seven keywords or keyword phrases. In order to determine what my best keywords are, I use the Publisher Rocket app created by Kindlepreneur. Way, way back in September BookBaby required that I come up with seven keywords for Exit Velocity. I remember spending a lot of time testing various phrases.
One of the seven keyword phrases I decided on was women fight back fiction. As you can infer, that could very well be a search term a shopper would use. According to Publisher Rocket the average monthly earnings of the top books in this category are $3,384. But before you get too excited, remember that this is the average of all monthly sales of the top twenty or so books in the category. One book could sell $10,000 a month (and many do), the others could sell $16 a month. There are approximately 375 searches for this category each month, which is not in the coveted 2,000-plus-searches-a-day category, but averages out to a little over ten searches a day.
The competitive score for women fight back fiction is 20. A competitive score of 1 is fantastic — it means that as soon as you list your book, it will most likely come up first in that category. A score of 20 does not mean your book will come up twentieth in the category. It means that, on a scale of 1-100, the 20 indicates how difficult it will be for you to win the number 1 spot in that category. Anything over 35 is considered medium-high difficulty, and anything over 70 is, like, forget about it.
Another of the seven keywords I worked long hours to find (hunting keywords is Very. Slow. and Very. Tedious.) is working class main character fiction. The monthly sales average $664, and there are about 280 searches a month for this category. The competitive score is 3. Now that's a great number! It's possible that Exit Velocity could earn the number 1 spot in that keyword search, which means that Exit Velocity would show up at the top of every one of those 280 searches. As you can imagine, the number one spot is very important: most searchers study the number one book, kind of glance at numbers two and three, and then maybe go on to another search. It goes without saying that they are more apt to purchase the number one book in that category than they are to purchase anything after the third-ranking book.
Bulletin: Between the day I started writing this newsletter and the next day, when I finished it, Exit Velocity moved into the number two spot for working class main character fiction in Kindle. That was when I noticed that the novel in the number one spot is free, so I'm not sure I will ever win the number one spot in this category because my novel will never be free.
When your book ranks number one on a keyword search Amazon pays attention and begins promoting your book in ways known only to them. Which means that your book will be seen by more shoppers and possibly move its way up in another one of your six remaining keyword categories.
Your mind is glazing over by now, I imagine. Mine certainly did back in September when I had to do this.
But in May I began retesting my keyword choices, to make sure they were still good choices. Another day of long, tedious work. But what I learned made me change two of my seven categories. The advice on keywords is that you should test them every month. Or at least one or two of them every month. I hope to be so busy promoting Exit Velocity that I probably won't test these again until September. And, for your sake, dear reader, I promise not to write about the topic again.
Parrot— In my June 1 blog I talk about how a parrot entered Exit Velocity.