Newsletter #56 — Amazon Author Pages
April 1, 2023
Newsletter #56 — Amazon Author Pages
Amazon Revamps Author Page — Three months ago I received a notice from Amazon saying they had revamped their Author pages to give them a new look and, I hope, to help authors sell more books. For once authors had nothing to do: Amazon did it all.
One of the biggest pluses of the new look is that the Author page lists the most popular book for that author. For the last three months my most popular book has been Jack and Larry. I'm convinced that when shoppers see this, they think that perhaps they should buy the author's most popular book. (Please do!)
However, just yesterday Jack and Larry was replaced by Women at Play as my most popular book on Amazon. Not entirely sure what "most popular" means: perhaps simply the title that has sold more copies than the others that day. Or week. Or month. In any case, this is a nice feature to have, allowing browsing shoppers to look at my titles in a new way.
Ad Testing — A week or so after the revamped Author pages came out, I ran a small ad on BookBub, to test who was buying Jack and Larry — Middle Graders (their parents, actually), or Adults? Or both? It's a crossover book, for Ages 10-100, and I hear from ten-year-olds (nine-year-olds, even) and also from adults who have read it. My guess was that the ad I aimed at adults would sell more books than the ad I aimed at parents of Middle Graders. And I was right. The Adults ad outsold the Middle Grades ad 6-1. But I will continue to market to both groups, because I wrote the book with both groups in mind.
Fairfax and the Perfect Pumpkin — All my submissions of last September have come to naught. Not a single reply in regard to my Fairfax manuscript. Now I need to decide whether I want to self-publish this manuscript or let it go. It's for middle grades, and I've self-published two such books before (Jack and Larry, and Cookie the Cockatoo). But those were told in free verse and thus the pages looked light, with lots of white space. Fairfax is told in straight prose, and because early Middle Grades books usually contain art every few pages, I'm inclined to think it needs at least a black-and-white illustration at the head of each of the ten chapters in order to appeal to kids.
It's not that I don't want to collaborate with an illustrator — it's that finding one would take a lot of work. So as I continue with all my other writing activities, I will be considering what to do with Fairfax and the Perfect Pumpkin.
Up to Date — In My Writing Life: 12 I finally reach the present day!