Let’s Get Visible, by David Gaughran
A couple of years ago I read David Gaughran’s book LET’S GET DIGITAL, which deal with the nuts and bolts of electronic self-publishing. The book had many useful tips and tidbits of information, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I started selling more ebooks after putting some of those tips into practice. So when I saw Mr. Gaughran had a new book dealing with ebook marketing, LET’S GET VISIBLE, I read it at once.
While DIGITAL dealt with the basics of self-publishing, VISIBLE is intended more for the veteran self-publisher, someone who has several books out. (For me, I’ll hit 40 ebooks next month.) Most of the book deals with the basics of how Amazon sells books – how the bestseller lists work, how the Popularity Lists work, the importance of selecting the right category for your ebooks, and so forth. This is all very useful information, since there are numerous myths about how Amazon’s sales rankings work. VISIBLE also offers good advice on using KDP Select, and how to best exploit free books and paid advertising.
I do wish more of the book dealt with promotion at sites other than Amazon – fully 84% of the book dealt with using marketing tactics on Amazon. That said, there’s a very good reason for that, since most self-publishers do most of their business over Amazon. For myself, I sold approximately 5,000 ebooks in April (I haven’t tabulated the final numbers yet), and of those 5,000, 50% were on Amazon US, 30% were on Amazon UK, about 12% were on Barnes & Noble, and the remaining 8% were scattered among Kobo, Sony, and the various international Amazon stores. So I suppose it makes sense that 84% of a book on ebook marketing would deal with Amazon.
But to sum up, LET’S GET VISIBLE is a good book on ebook marketing tactics. There’s a lot of bad pieces of advice floating out there, but LET’S GET VISIBLE is not one of them. If you’re brand new to self-publishing, I’d recommend starting with LET’S GET DIGITAL, but once you have a few books out, give LET’S GET VISIBLE a read.
-JM