Episode 061 - Google Play with Brian Rathbone
January 12, 2021
Brian Rathbone discusses the opportunities offered by Google Play, including the ability to reach global markets that are underserved by other platforms, the ability to link content together—for example, linking an ebook box set with the component works and benefiting from earned metadata, or ratings and reviews, of the component works. He also discusses his premium pricing approach, and how that plays out on the Google Play platform.
Brian Rathbone is a horse trainer turned author and creator of The World of Godsland fantasy series, the most recent of which is THE SEVENTH MAGIC. He is also the author of the Sam Flock novels, a paranormal adventure series that begins with LURE.
"Google has worked for me is they're a totally different market than most of the retailers I work with otherwise. Amazon, my market tends to be the US, the UK, Canada, Australia. In Google, a lot of my market is in South Africa, is in India, is in other parts of Europe. And I'm finding that a lot of it ties back to Android market and the fact that is proliferating and the Google Play Store is installed on all of those Android devices." --Brian Rathbone
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast, today my guest is Brian Rathbone. Hey Brian, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Brian: I'm doing great. How are you today?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ... Brian Rathbone is a horse trainer turned author and creator of THE WORLD OF GODSLAND fantasy series, the most recent of which is THE SEVENTH MAGIC. He's also the author of the Sam Flock novels, a paranormal adventure series that begins with LURE.
[00:00:25] And we're going to be talking today about Google Play. And as I often joke on the podcast, listeners can probably tell what's top of mind for me based on the guests I invite onto the podcast, and Google Play is something that I've been really bullish on, but really haven't had a good idea of how to act on. And I was especially bullish about it after I talked with Joanna Penn on Episode 54 about FUTURIST TRENDS WE CAN PREPARE FOR NOW, we talked a little bit about Google Play, not so much as a futurist topic, but as a current topic that's going to keep getting bigger and bigger in the future.
[00:01:00] And so Brian, who I think is one of the experts of Google Play outside Google, was kind enough to agree to talk with us about this. And so, Brian, in order to give our listeners a little bit more information, both on your books and maybe a little bit of background on Google Play, can you describe your history with the platform and how it has evolved over time?
[00:01:21] Brian: Absolutely. So I've got a nine-book series and I publish works for others. A lot of that started back early in the self-publishing days. Back before the Kindle, I was publishing on Mobipocket and I had a wide mindset from the onset that of my publishing. So as soon as I saw that Google had a publishing platform, I joined, and it was a somewhat painful process early on. It was not very user-friendly and many things about the effort were kind of subpar. And for awhile, like some of the other retailers that I have my books on, I published them there, I hoped something would happen and not really a whole lot happened.
[00:02:06] But I think what has worked for me on Google Play over the years has been consistency of just not pulling the content off and going and doing other things. I really left my content in wide distribution throughout my publishing career. And that has worked to my favor because some things about being successful on the platform have been somewhat serendipitous. They're not things you can engineer today. And there are things that continue to benefit me going into the future, and the example of that is earned metadata, ratings and reviews. There was a period of time when Google was extremely aggressive about getting their users to rate and review content. And during that time, my content was extremely popular, and I got a lot of ratings and reviews and those helped me a lot.
[00:02:59] Also leading into the way that Google has worked for me is they're a totally different market than most of the retailers I work with otherwise. Amazon, my market tends to be the US, the UK, Canada, Australia. In Google, a lot of my market is in South Africa, is in India, is in other parts of Europe. And I'm finding that a lot of it ties back to Android market and the fact that is proliferating and the Google Play Store is installed on all of those Android devices.
[00:03:33] Matty: I was just listening to a Creative Penn podcast episode this morning, and I think that the statistic that she quoted is that Apple has the vast market share of mobile devices in the US and UK, and I'm sure other places as well, but for the rest of the world, it's 70% Android, 30% more or less iPhone. So yeah, a huge pool of users that you don't want to overlook. ...
[00:00:06] Brian: I'm doing great. How are you today?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ... Brian Rathbone is a horse trainer turned author and creator of THE WORLD OF GODSLAND fantasy series, the most recent of which is THE SEVENTH MAGIC. He's also the author of the Sam Flock novels, a paranormal adventure series that begins with LURE.
[00:00:25] And we're going to be talking today about Google Play. And as I often joke on the podcast, listeners can probably tell what's top of mind for me based on the guests I invite onto the podcast, and Google Play is something that I've been really bullish on, but really haven't had a good idea of how to act on. And I was especially bullish about it after I talked with Joanna Penn on Episode 54 about FUTURIST TRENDS WE CAN PREPARE FOR NOW, we talked a little bit about Google Play, not so much as a futurist topic, but as a current topic that's going to keep getting bigger and bigger in the future.
[00:01:00] And so Brian, who I think is one of the experts of Google Play outside Google, was kind enough to agree to talk with us about this. And so, Brian, in order to give our listeners a little bit more information, both on your books and maybe a little bit of background on Google Play, can you describe your history with the platform and how it has evolved over time?
[00:01:21] Brian: Absolutely. So I've got a nine-book series and I publish works for others. A lot of that started back early in the self-publishing days. Back before the Kindle, I was publishing on Mobipocket and I had a wide mindset from the onset that of my publishing. So as soon as I saw that Google had a publishing platform, I joined, and it was a somewhat painful process early on. It was not very user-friendly and many things about the effort were kind of subpar. And for awhile, like some of the other retailers that I have my books on, I published them there, I hoped something would happen and not really a whole lot happened.
[00:02:06] But I think what has worked for me on Google Play over the years has been consistency of just not pulling the content off and going and doing other things. I really left my content in wide distribution throughout my publishing career. And that has worked to my favor because some things about being successful on the platform have been somewhat serendipitous. They're not things you can engineer today. And there are things that continue to benefit me going into the future, and the example of that is earned metadata, ratings and reviews. There was a period of time when Google was extremely aggressive about getting their users to rate and review content. And during that time, my content was extremely popular, and I got a lot of ratings and reviews and those helped me a lot.
[00:02:59] Also leading into the way that Google has worked for me is they're a totally different market than most of the retailers I work with otherwise. Amazon, my market tends to be the US, the UK, Canada, Australia. In Google, a lot of my market is in South Africa, is in India, is in other parts of Europe. And I'm finding that a lot of it ties back to Android market and the fact that is proliferating and the Google Play Store is installed on all of those Android devices.
[00:03:33] Matty: I was just listening to a Creative Penn podcast episode this morning, and I think that the statistic that she quoted is that Apple has the vast market share of mobile devices in the US and UK, and I'm sure other places as well, but for the rest of the world, it's 70% Android, 30% more or less iPhone. So yeah, a huge pool of users that you don't want to overlook. ...
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[00:04:00] Brian: Exactly. In both of those cases, Apple being another market that you don't want to overlook. But in the Google Play case, Android is making its own and Chrome OS for that. And Google's talking about open sourcing or making their Chrome OS able to run an older devices like OPCs and turn them into the equivalent of a Chromebook. That has the Google Play Store on it, and that would allow PCs to have access to all the content on the Google Play Store as if it were an Android device. So that market just continues to get larger. And I have just found that being there consistently, understanding some things about it, helps.
[00:04:41] Part of the background about me is that in between being a horse trainer and an author, I've been a technology guy for most of my career. It's only been about, let's see, 2005, I started writing novels, 2008 I started publishing them, 2014 I went full time writing fiction for a couple of years. I released three books in 2016, all three flopped. Not because they were bad novels, but algorithmically I picked the wrong time to release three novels. And I've paid for that.
[00:05:12] And I've been doing a lot of technology work since, but the technology work, understanding a lot of how the internet works, how search engines work in particular, how Google works as a search engine in particular, has been helpful for me because when I look at the Google Play Store, what I see is a search engine. And the rules of any retailer for me are, if a buyer goes to the store and wants to buy a book, like I write young adult epic fantasy, they should be able to find my book by just clicking or by typing in a generic search -- fantasy, dragon, young adult, epic, any of those types of things. If you can't find your content in one of those two ways, your sales are going to reflect it. And so if you can manage to get to where your content is displayed prominently for the right searches, then that's what tends to drive traffic and sales.
[00:06:12] And Google Play for me is the place where I can find a lot of readers, give them an opportunity to try my content. And it's a relatively small percentage that goes on to buy the other content, but they buy all of it usually and they pay a premium for it. That's part of my long-term marketing model is I do use a free series starter, I do have permafrees, and I have driven a lot of traffic to those over the years. And they're designed to encourage the reader to go onto the next book. And it allows me to get past the original problem I had when I started publishing that nobody knew who I was and nobody was willing to drop $20 on a trilogy just on the chance that they were going to like it. That was how I originally packaged my books. I eventually broke that trilogy out into three books, changed the pricing so that you could try the first one for 99 cents, and then go on and pay $7.99 or $8.99 for the ebook. And that worked much better.
[00:07:08] And then in October of 2011, Amazon decided on their own to make one of my eBooks free, the first book in the series free. And they were paying me for every download. That was back at a time where every one they gave away, I got 35 cents. So it was a really good weekend. And afterwards my other books sold much better. And so it taught me a lesson there, and there are upsides and downsides to the permafree market, but I'm in a particularly good place for it. One, because I don't do a lot of releases. I haven't written any books in a while. It's kind of hard as a writer, but I've been doing a lot of my marketing on my back list.
[00:07:45] Matty: I wanted to get back to something you had said earlier about being a technologist, and that is that it sounds like you gained some benefits from being an early adopter of Google Play, through what you were saying about them being very aggressive about soliciting ratings and reviews. But I think a lot of people got turned off by Google Play and maybe still are turned off by Google Play because I think early on, it was, as you had referenced, very awkward to to get onto the platform. I don't know that we need to recap the pain, but do you agree that it's much easier now, just from the point of view of uploading your books?
[00:08:18] Brian: Absolutely. They've made leaps and bounds and this year, in particular this summer, they showed quite a focus on redoing the interface. Although there've been quite a few iterations over the year and for the most part they got better and better with every iteration. I feel like it's gotten easier and plus there were some of the things that as a technologist, that even though it wasn't easier, were actually nicer. The ability to export Onyx data, to export all your titles to CSV. They're probably the more difficult way to do it if you only have a few titles, but those things actually remain and remain benefits of that platform.
[00:08:56] Google also has the benefit of user delegation, which is something I wish other retailers would allow us to do because many of us that are in the market need help. With a third-party, a virtual assistant, somebody else logging into account. And with Google, you can just go in and say, okay, I want to give this person access to my bookshelf or my bookshelf and my reports. I use that quite a bit because I ended up managing multiple companies through my Google Play interface and I don't have to open up a bunch of different browsers and log into different accounts as I do with most of the other retail interfaces. So it's gotten much easier.
[00:09:30] They've improved not only the usability of it, but what they're gathering in the way that they build it. For example, the related ISBNs are something I use a lot that are fairly misunderstood. And that's something that I don't see other retailers doing quite as effectively. And so an example of why you would use the related ISBNs and how that's beneficial is I have all these individual books, have lots of ratings. And when I put out the box sets, the box set has no ratings, and the algorithm just hid them. That's not the good book, the good book's the one with all the ratings. Well, as soon as I went into the related ISBNs and said, this book contains these books, and the algorithm said, Oh, okay. There's, several thousand reviews across those books, I'm going to apply those to this and the search algorithm. And all of a sudden it went to the top and sales that's the title I was hoping to focus on and sales went well, because it was a premium title.
[00:10:23] I like premium price points on Google as well. I don't want to discount all of my books. It's not where I sell cheaply. And it's actually an interesting dichotomy between that and selling on other platforms where discounted books sell better. I actually find that a free book to start and an expensive book afterwards has worked best for me.
[00:10:47] Matty: And when you're talking about expensive, give us an idea of the prices you're charging for your books on Google.
[00:10:52] Brian: Well, it just changed. It used to be $19.99 I was charging for what I consider my money collectors the book, the third book in the trilogy. In my first trilogy, I have the first two books free, and the third book was $19.99. And the reason I had it priced that way is because we get discounted down to $9.99. But Google recently changed their pricing policies and at that point I just lowered it to $9.99. And mostly that's just a reasonable price point for a novel, in my opinion, especially when you've gotten a couple of them free.
[00:11:24] And that gives me the flexibility to change prices, run sales, gather a lot of metadata on the first two. I just learned as a writer that my first book didn't hook as well as the second. And so when I changed to the first book free and the second book free, my conversion rate improved. And so I just raised the price of the third book as to what I used to charge for book two.
[00:11:50] Matty: You don't get dinged for a price over $9.99 on Google Play, correct? You were discounting it for other reasons than a change in royalties as you would have suffered on Amazon. Is that correct?
[00:12:00] Brian: Yeah, there's no getting dinged, it's just they no longer do the discounting like they used to. For a lot of authors and publishers, the discounting was troublesome. It had a bit of a random aspect to it. I would calculate how much they were going to mark it down and I would mark my books up so that my price would be same as a retailer that was price matching because that's where a lot of the problems for me came in.
[00:12:23] It wasn't necessarily that X, Y, or Z, Apple or Google would penalize me for going above 99, but another retailer would and they're price matching and I'd ended up in these price matching battles. Sometimes if I lowered the price of my title not using a promo tool, if I just lowered a book to 99 cents, then when I went to raise it back up, Apple and Google and Amazon were all price matching each other. It wouldn't let me raise my price back up.
[00:12:51] So those sorts of things were a little bit of a challenge, but it's all gotten better and easier over the years. I think Google's change makes sense for most people. It wasn't a big advantage for me, but I just changed my prices to be in line with everybody else's and I maybe lost a little bit of a tactical advantage I had before, but, hey, that's just the nature of people is you go with what works today and when it stops working, you better have been working on figuring out the next thing that you're going to do.
[00:13:19] But in general, my practices of trying to work with retailers to figure out what they want and what they need, give it to them so that they can show my content to the reader without me having to pay them -- that's always been my strategy and Google's been the one for me.
[00:13:36] The other big advantage it has is the amount of time it takes for changes you make in your metadata to show up in the results is very short in comparison to other retailers. Some retailers, I make changes in my metadata, it doesn't seem to have any effect at all. Or if it does, it's long term and I never really know when it took. The fact that I can't really say, Oh, okay, I did this and then the results were that. Google it's a bit more immediate. If you make changes to your meta data today, you should be able to go in tomorrow or the next day, somewhere around 24, 48 hours. And let's say you're targeting search results. That'd be my biggest advice. First thing you should do, if you haven't already optimize your titles for the common search phrases in your genre. And this is where a lot of people get tripped up is they just try to think of that list off the top of their head, and that's not the way to go in my opinion. What you want to do is go to the retailer and start typing in terms related to what you're selling and seeing what gets dropped down and suggest it.
[00:14:37] Matty: If someone has done that on Amazon, do they need to redo it on Google?
[00:14:41] Brian: Absolutely. It's retailer specific. And it really has a fairly big impact and it's the kind of thing, you can do it wrong. You can do it in a way that you go overboard and keyword stuffing and all the things that if you've been around the technology world and that people would get yelled at for doing on their website, you get penalized by Google for doing -- keyword stuffing and going overboard to the extent that you're trying to manipulate things -- you'll eventually get your fingers smacked. My rule is find a happy medium between giving the reader what they need, the search algorithm what it needs, and make it all look nice. And at every point be as useful to the reader as possible. If you follow that and it's intended to make the retailer money -- you're not trying to drive traffic off the retailer to somebody else -- if you do all of those things, it tends to work well and people don't tend to get their feelings hurt one way or another, and you don't tend to get whacked either by an algorithm or by somebody who looks to go, Oh, you're not supposed to be doing that.
[00:15:47] One of the ways I do it is I go in, I search for those common search terms. Who's showing up at the top? Why? Why are they showing up at the top? Sometimes you can look at the book that's showing up at the top and it has two reviews, it was released three years ago, and there's books underneath of it that had a thousand reviews or new release. Why is that book showing up when they're not? And a lot of times if you start pulling up the product pages, you'll notice, Oh, look, this keyword phrase that I searched for is the very first thing in their description.
[00:16:18] Matty: Are there examples you can give for your own books whereas a keyword was successful on Amazon but not <on Google Play>?
[00:16:24] Brian: Fantasy. If you type in fantasy, epic fantasy, dragon, any of those terms, my books are going to show up in some cases in a very dominant fashion. And you'll notice a big difference between where my audio books show up versus where my eBooks show up. My eBooks are not going to show up at the top of the list all the time, but the audio books will. And it's a much less competitive market on Google Play to sell audio books. And eBooks happen to be a really good tool to sell audio books. That's one of the things I've been taking advantage of is having my audio books in wide distribution, having them available on all these different retailers and knowing that the metadata that's associated with my ebook can be used by the algorithm to apply additional metadata to my audio book. So I want to make sure that they're linked, because I'm publishing them through different interfaces.
[00:17:26] I like to go direct, and Google traditionally has not worked really well with distributors. I don't mean that as a knock to them, I particularly liked them focusing on having authors come directly to their platform. But distributing to Google Play through a distributor is traditionally not the best way to go. If you can tolerate the interface, and these days, it's pretty nice and no reason not to, it's best to go direct.
[00:17:50] Matty: Yeah. I go through Draft2Digital for everything else, but I do go direct to Google Play for my e-books. Do you go direct to Google Play for your audio books?
[00:18:00] Brian: I wish I could. I've been begging for that. I think they're working on it. But it's not available yet for folks at my size level. I don't think I have enough content.
[00:18:11] I know they have programs, and they have ways to do it, but I think I don't yet meet their threshold. And what I'm hoping is that they're working on a little bit better I'm going to say self-service type of interface where the threshold is a little lower. I think that's what's going to happen based on things I've heard through the grapevine.
[00:18:30] But for right now, I use Findaway and I'm very happy with it. I've had really good experiences with them, and I've had some challenges along the way. I don't love everything about it. I'm not jumping up and down and say do everything on Findaway because in general distributors, even ones I really liked like Draft2Digital and Findaway, they have some issues when it comes to one-size-fits-all metadata.
[00:18:53] The one thing I'm unhappy with about Findaway's distribution to Google Play right now is the metadata, your description is they strip out all of the formatting. All the rich text comes out and that's important to know because sometimes they strip out line endings or the formatting that was like an H2 kind has an inherent line ending, and if you take it out, all of a sudden, your text gets all mushed together and there's no more endings. So it's important to, after you published from Findaway to Google Play, go look at the metadata specifically for the audio book, just to make sure it looks as good as it can with all the rich text stripped down.
[00:19:33] Matty: There's actually another episode that I'm going to provide a link to in the show notes, which was Episode 42, Joshua Tallent was on talking about metadata. So if people are intrigued by our metadata conversation, they can go to that episode for more information.
[00:19:47] Could you just briefly describe when you say going wide via audio, it's slightly different than when people talk about going wide with eBooks. Can you talk about what you mean by that?
[00:19:57] Brian: Yes. AndI started out audio mostly with ACX years ago. I had an audio publisher originally that took my audio books to Audible, and then I went with ACX and I did PFH where I paid per finished hour of audio outside of the ACX system. I did those first six inside the ACX system, but I paid for the audio and then I had three books at the end that I did a royalty share on. I wouldn't do that again because the contract term is too long and now I have three books that I can't distribute outside of Amazon, iTunes, and Audible.
[00:20:36] So right now, once I got to the point that the other distributors were coming up in the audio realm, and really most of it revolved around Findaway because I think Authors Republic used Findaway. Findaway was really the audio distributor that caught my eye as the mover and shaker in the market and kind of the one to go to. AndI was able to get the first six moved to non-exclusive on ACX. So I basically moved them from exclusive to non-exclusive because I own the rights and I was able to do that. And my term was up and those were the earlier years of ACX and I didn't have as much trouble with them.
[00:21:15] The last three, I'm probably just going to have to wait out the seven years and just pay my narrator and do all these other things that are going to be required of me. And it's fine. I knew what I was taking on when I did that, but the world has changed and I wouldn't do that today because it took away my options of my last three books in that series are not on Google Play.
[00:21:34] I'm very sad about that. All of my Google Play listeners, I'm sorry. I will fix it as soon as I possibly can. But I can't, I'm legally prevented from doing that. And it was the right thing to do at the time because I didn't have the money to pay for it. So in the absence of the funds, that was the way to get it done. And now I'm just paying a bit of a price for that because the world did change.
[00:21:57] And so I went to Findaway with my titles. Now I have six non-exclusive titles, and I'm trying to distribute these audio books everywhere that will distribute audio books. And I'm also trying to promote them in every area that will allow me to put up some audio or a video, YouTube SoundCloud, things like that.
[00:22:21] I think one of the missing opportunities, for example YouTube is a Google owned property and it links in some ways back to Google Play from a number of different ways. So I use YouTube to promote my Google Play products. I'm a bit more generic than others. At some point, people have to pick a retailer that they want to focus on. And many of them pick Amazon for obvious reasons. I did that for a portion of my career. And it had a wonderful effect in certain years and a terrible effect in others. At this point in my career, I focus a lot on Google and a lot of it comes from the analytics I'm doing in my reports. I write software that pulls in all my sales reports and I can look at it and it's plain as day, I'm picking up the most new readership on Google and I'm doing it without having to pay them. They pay me.
[00:23:13] Matty: I definitely want to get back to that, but there's one step in the process of actually getting a book up on Google Play that I want to hit first. I didn't see the earlier version of the Google Play user interface because I was put off by it, but I've now got my books loaded to Google Play. It was very easy to do, but the one thing that was intimidating is you can price in, I don't know, at least dozens, if not hundreds of different currencies. How do you choose which of those currencies you're going to enter? And then do you know what the ramifications are down the road if you fail to enter a certain currency?
[00:23:45] Brian: That is a can of worms that I have looked at across the room and thought, nope, don't want anything to do with that. I just stick with one price. And I let the system do the currency conversion based on the current conversion rate and apply that for me. So for my purposes, it hasn't been something that I've dealt with in the past few years.
[00:24:07] I know that because just the way technology works, we've had this ability to mess with those prices for a long time, and there were times that I did that. The longer you've had your account, the longer you've had books up there, the more likely you are up for an audit of your stuff. Somebody mentioned this the other day and I haven't even gone in and look at it, but there's a nice way to export an Excel spreadsheet with all of that information and to just take a look to make sure that the none of your products are out there without price.
[00:24:38] Matty: Is that what the audit is looking for?
[00:24:41] Brian: Anything, anything weird. And I find I do this with Findaway. I do this with all of my Smashwords. You just end up with feature creep crud in the database where the interface got updated, but your records for your stuff never got updated. It's the same kind of thing. I'm sure people who use Findaway a lot know what I'm talking about. It's like when you go to Findaway and you update a book and you see the list of distributors, and for some reason, the list of distributors changes and you didn't do anything. And you ask yourself at that point, am I now just updating my list of distributors when I hit update or was it somehow done in the background for me and I'm just now having it sync up my record?
[00:25:22] But one way or another, if I hadn't come and done that, was I not available on that retailer? Something that I do -- I've been doing this for long enough that I have a lot of this kind of stuff at 50 titles to deal with over all of them. And the more I go back through them and we're like, Oh shoot, I didn't do the thing. I was, oh yeah, I didn't fill that out. What was I thinking? And I just find that the longer you've been doing it, the more titles you have, with the pricing in particular being an issue, that's been evolving on Google. the audit's probably useful to make sure you're not leaking money.
[00:25:58] I've helped a number of people do things on Google. There was one author I was working with. I said, Hey, book one of your trilogy's up and book three of your trilogy's up, but everybody's complaining where's book two. And he kept saying, Oh no, it's up there. And we went back four or five times and I finally said , no, no , no, not on Google Books, but Google Play Books. They had book one on book three.
[00:26:19] So especially if your sales are not going well or anything like that, it's a good idea to look. I like to keep a good eye on my data anyway, and that's something I've been working on writing software for. And I feel for everybody out there struggling with spreadsheets because it's difficult to do. And Google was always a challenging one, but they've improved their reporting lately enough that I think even at a glance, you can go to the dashboard and get an idea of what your books are doing.
[00:26:47] Matty: There is one tip I wanted to share about the international pricing, because what I did is there was a finite list, 10 or so for Amazon and for Draft2Digital, of countries that they're distributing to, and then what I did is I found an author that was in more or less the same genre, more or less the same level of well-known-ness, and who I knew had incentive to be monitoring their prices in the different platforms and intentionally putting in a price for each of those markets that was not just a conversion because Australia, for example, has higher tolerance for high book prices than Mexico, for example, let's say. And so I kept a record of what all those were and most of them were overlapped between Draft2Digital and Amazon. Draft2Digital had a few more than Amazon did.
[00:27:39] And then I also factored in things like the fact that I think I was publishing a book on Amazon UK for 9.99, but I realized that Amazon will deliver a print book for free if it's 10 pounds or over. So I just added a penny because that would mean that people who are ordering it could get it delivered free. SoI was tweaking them there.
[00:28:02] And then when I went to Google Play, I just entered the prices that I already had. And I didn't bother going into the many , many, many other currencies. So I don't want people to be put off either by our discussion about auditing or by my comment about the complexities of pricing, because they're only going to be complex if you want them to be. You can take up a much simpler approach in order to gain the benefits of Google Play.
[00:28:26] Brian: I would agree with that. And it is a wise thing to look at existing examples. And I think that what you just said is another example of what I was talking about is if you're curious about something and you feel like , well, I wish I understood more about it, go look at existing examples of what other people in similar or more successful or less successful and look at it and go, why? What is it about that one? Sometimes it's cover art. Sometimes it's just missing the market. Sometimes it's pricing. But that's where the longer I do this, the more I realize sometimes I get lazy and I get in a hurry and I'm not as thorough in my metadata as I should've been. And every time I go back, I find something to improve. So I very much am not a set it and forget it metadata guy. I like to go back and look for opportunities to improve. And sometimes it works to my benefit and sometimes it doesn't do much at all, that's been my practice.
[00:29:26] Matty: Just working through this chronologically from the point of view of the author, are there promotions that are available to people who are going to Google Play that they should be aware of? Google Play-sponsored promotions or other promotions that are only available to people on Google Play?
[00:29:41] Brian: It's not like some of the other retailers where they have a promo tab in their dashboard. They actually do have a promo tab on their dashboard, but it's a way of you doing price promotions for a limited time where you essentially commit to that timeframe so that the algorithm and or merchandisers can look at that and say, Oh, okay, there's a sale that's going on and this product's going to be on sale during that time. But I haven't really found it to be as much human intervention as some of the other retailers.
[00:30:14] For example, I go and I study Google Play's web interface -- it's a little different than the one on the app on the phone or on the tablet. It has the most information on a full-size desktop web browser. And if I just go to science fiction and fantasy, which is my realm, there are a list of predefined things that are illustrated there. So it'd be like epic sagas and military sci-fi. Those are their most visible promo slots.
[00:30:48] And my experience has been getting into those slots is mostly about doing something the algorithm liked, doing something that the code recognized. Sometimes it is a price change, a change in the metadata. Changing the book linking, something along those lines, something changing is usually the trigger is been my experience
[00:31:15] Matty: And for pricing, is it necessarily the price going down?
[00:31:21] Brian: The opposite, actually. It seems to me that Google likes to sell books. And they don't mind giving them away, but the end of the day they want to make money. So they're generally wanting to promote the ones that, from me looking at the outside in at their algorithm, that are popular, well-rated, have good reviews, and are going to generate revenue.
[00:31:41] And so when you maybe run a discount promo for awhile and it does well when you flip it back to full price, that's when it'll show up on one of those top pages. And so it's not full-proof, you can't do it like clockwork. I wish I could. But anecdotally, that's my best perception of how it's worked over the years.
[00:32:05] Now they've got that promotions tool that allows you to mark your product down for a predetermined amount of time. And when you do that, the biggest difference from just going in and changing your price is you'll actually notice in the interface, it'll show your original price, slash, and then your sale price. So there are some advantages to using that and I'm actually going to start using that tool because just historically, I've just always gone in and changed my prices. I want to change it for a month. I'll go in and I'll just take my price for a month and I'll come back and I'll change it back.
[00:32:38] And that's worked well for me, but I've watched some of the other authors I'm working with use the promo tools, and I think that with the work that Google has been doing, I would advise people to try those promo pricing tools. I suspect the algorithm's going to look favorably on tool on books that use those and really with my discussions of this, limited as they've been with folks at Google, I think they lean more towards the algorithm than human beings coming in and going, Oh, okay. We're going to feature this person's books.
[00:33:10] Matty: Yeah. You would think Google would be all about algorithms.
[00:33:14] Brian: Yeah. I always like talking to algorithms. That's what I do. And I'm talking with the Google metadata.
[00:33:20] Matty: Let's assume now the person's gotten their books loaded to Google Play and they're taking advantage of the promotions and so on. I think the whole Google Play thing is great, but their reporting is abysmal. And coincidentally, between the time that you and I talked about having this conversation and today, they announced an improvement and I was like, Oh, isn't this good timing? It was just like a couple of days ago. And I looked and it looks pretty much the same to me. So am I just looking at the wrong place or is their reporting horrible? And if it is, is there a way around that?
[00:33:54] Brian: Reporting has historically been one of their weaknesses. They've improved it in that there's now an at-a-glance in the home tab, not the sales and analytics tab. So if you go up to the home tab, at the bottom, it'll show you your top selling book and you can flip last 30 days tell you your last 30 days earnings and which ones were your top earners. So there are some at-a-glance features that are in there that are better.
[00:34:24] The other thing that improved probably three or four months ago was it used to be that the only report you could get was the sales summary report. And that one did not convert the currency back to US dollar or your payment currency. But they added the sales transaction report, which includes the raw transaction data for all of your transactions. And it does convert them into US dollars. So in some ways it's a lot easier to work with.
[00:34:54] In other ways, when you have a lot of downloads, it's a lot harder to work with, but at least it does not force us to convert the currencies. So from that aspect, that just the average person who wants to download a report in Excel and do some quick sums and look at it, grab the transaction report and work on that. Because at least that will not force you to deal with every currency individually. I started writing software years ago, specifically around Google Play and translating those currencies, andit's something I still work on today, but I was pretty happy to see them come out with that report that did the currency conversion, because no matter how much you guess the currency conversion rate at the time that they determine the payout, you're going to be wrong. So I prefer accurate numbers over fuzzy guesswork. And so I think it keeps improving.
[00:35:45] Personally biased because I've been developing software in this market. It's not on sale yet, but I have been developing software around the sales tracking because personally as a publisher, I just found it painful to deal with all the things for reports and all of the different retailers. And then as a publisher, I pay other authors, so having to split up the royalties was really ridiculously painful if you had to convert the currency.
[00:36:10] So I see those as major improvements. But if you really weren't paying attention and didn't go click the drop down box and switch to the different report, you might not even see that. I would keep an eye on what reports are showing up in their drop-downs. They don't tend to make huge announcements about it. And I would check your home tab. One of the other things about the way we do things on the internet is sometimes when we put out new stuff, we roll it out to users in phases andyour account may not have received it yet, so you'll see that a lot. They call it continuous improvement and deployment. It's when you deploy something new, you're like, all right, I'm going to deploy it out to 5% of users and see how much this stuff it breaks before I give it to everybody. So it may be that it'll show up soon.
[00:36:51] Matty: What I was seeing is that the couple of stats they had, they were presenting as percentages, and all my stats were a hundred percent. So it was like number of your books that are live: a hundred percent! This is really not helpful.
[00:37:05] Brian: That is on the analytics tab. Only some users would get the bar chart that shows your monthly earnings. There are some folks that just wouldn't show up for. And I'm not terribly ashamed to admit that I've broken numbers of retail reporting interfaces, mostly because I do a lot of free downloads and just, that's not what they're expecting when they build their interfaces. And I have several retailers that I'm lucky if I can download the sales report because all of our online charts just fail.
[00:37:35] And so I think there's a little bit of a challenge with all that on a number of retailers, but Google traditionally has struggled around their reporting. They've put a lot of effort into it this year, so I'm just going to encourage them to keep going in the direction they're going, because it is definitely getting a lot better.
[00:37:54] Matty: Are there other things based on conversations you might have with folks at Google Play or news stories you follow, what do you think is coming up in the news for Google Play?
[00:38:05] Brian: A lot of uncertainty ahead. When I turn over the magic eight ball, it says beware antitrust laws. Google's going to have a tough year. I look at Google Play and specifically Google Play Books as a side business. It's one of the downsides, it's not their main business. It can get downplayed at times. If they're looking to make cuts, that might be one of the areas where they don't put as much effort into it. But when I look at the writing on the wall and I look at the fact that they've hired multiple people around Google Play and Google Play Books in particular, they've made a bunch of changes to the interface.
[00:38:45] Writing's on the wall. I think they'll end up doing direct audio distribution. I think they're going to end up doing a lot more podcast distribution. And I think podcasting is one of the best ways to promote audio books. You want listeners, market to listeners. And for me, I'm all in. I expect good things. But I also, as a technologist and looking at the industry, I can see a couple of things that might be barriers coming up as well that might dampen the effort. Because really it's been my experience that when Google decides they want to sell a lot of books, they have the ability to do it. But if they decide not to focus on it, it can shut off.
[00:39:27] I've had months that are 10 to 12 time multiple of my average. That doesn't tend to happen to me a lot on other retailers. I tend to be fairly steady, but with Google, there's been a few times over the years, we're up two or three months where all of a sudden I go from, where I am to ten or 12 times multiple. And the only thing I can trace back to it -- BookBub free book deals, yes. But metadata changes really. The biggest one, I don't know what I did in March of 2018, but I made the algorithm to happy. It just had three months of joy. And I've just have been trying to reproduce that ever since.
[00:40:04] Matty: Can you share what percentage of your book sales come from Google Play versus other platforms you're on?
[00:40:10] Brian: Yes. And so traditionally, full history, it's about 30% of my sales come from Google Play and probably 55 to 60% came from Amazon. Now 35% of my sales come from Google Play eBooks. 25% of my sales come from Google Play audio books via Findaway. Amazon is number five at 17% of my sales. And that's not because I'm so much better than other retailers on Amazon, I have ignored my books over on Amazon for a while. We had a bad breakup and I should probably go back and pay more attention to it now.
[00:40:52] Matty: Have a makeup. Makeup with Amazon.
[00:40:55] Brian: I should certainly make up with them professionally. It would probably be a good idea. But, it was something that I think those have gone down. But it was an intentional thing to diversify. And now I look at it and I'm probably a little Google heavy. I love me some Google, but I probably should re-diversify again. I'm looking at iTunes, I'm looking at Barnes and Noble and looking at Kobo, especially now with the audio book direct to Kobo, those sorts of things, seeing those kinds of things.
[00:41:20] That's for me has been what's kept me alive as a publisher. All these years watching all the different stuff going on and identifying an opportunity when it comes up. And as much as I love Google, I'll sell books where people will sell my books and where readers want them.
[00:41:36] I'm seeing a lot of action around apps these days. And that's interesting because you go to the app store or the the Google Play Store and now you can download these different reading apps through Google Play. They're still monetizing it. They're still selling eBooks, but they're not necessarily selling them through Google Play. And so there's a lot of interesting things going on there.
[00:42:00] I also noticed that Google's going to make a lot of people mad and I think there's going to be a lot of people get upset about artificial intelligence narration audio book sales. I think that's coming. In some ways I'm a supporter of it. In some ways I look a little crossways at it, and it all depends on how it's implemented. I love my voice artists. I love working with voice artists to produce human-narrated audio books because they bring so much character to the work, but they're expensive and it can be a hurdle. And I see that as one of the things that that whole audio market, I'd watch that.
[00:42:37] Matty: Yeah, that was actually another topic in the episode with Joanna Penn, 54, that I mentioned that I've been trying to get an audio book of my two non-fiction books done for just an embarrassingly long amount of time. And I was asking her, is it worth it? How long do I have to wait before I can just plug it into an algorithm? And her recommendation was, especially if you're doing it yourself, which is free at least from a financial point of view, do that. And then when the AI-generated audio is good enough, to do that too. And then you have really two independent offerings. You have the inexpensive AI-generated offering, and then you have the premium human-generated offering. And I think that makes a lot of sense.
[00:43:18] Brian: And I would add to that if you're doing fiction, audio drama is a separate art form. Podcast novel is a separate art form. So I have podcasts versions of my novels that I read myself, and those are free for the first three books, but then I had the professionally narrated editions that I sell, and I have videos that use the narration. And I'm going to be working on doing some new videos with those.
[00:43:46] And I'm very much open to the AI read, partially because I use it myself. Not so much today, but there was a period for a couple of years where I was doing a lot of traveling and I had books that I wanted to read that weren't available in audio books. So I would load them as a PDF on my Android device and have it read it to me. And that was better than not being able to experience it. So did it have its limitations? Oh yeah. Was the pronunciation annoying? Yup. And that's what they're trying to address with AI and they're going to get better and better and better at it. They're probably still going to have trouble reading my books -- fantasy, I'll throw them off one way or the other. They're not pronouncing that, right. Nope.
[00:44:30] Matty: Whenever there's a fantasy author on and I use Descript for automated transcription creation, I just know that I'm going to be doing a boatload of edits because all the odd names, no transcription software is going to be able to get that.
[00:44:44] Matty: Well, Brian, thank you so much for sharing that information. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you, your work, and your books online.
[00:44:55] Brian: Probably the easiest place to find me is at Brianrathbone.com and on Twitter I'm at Brian Rathbone. I tell a few too many bad dragon jokes over there, so if you don't get enough, definitely come over and visit us there. But yeah, those are probably two of the best places to find me.
[00:45:15] Brian: And Google Play, actually. If you want to go on Google Play, I've got free audio books and free books. You should really check that out. Search fantasy. You'll find me.
[00:45:22] Matty: The first place people should go after this conversation. Thank you.
[00:45:26] Brian: Thanks everybody. Have a great day.
[00:04:41] Part of the background about me is that in between being a horse trainer and an author, I've been a technology guy for most of my career. It's only been about, let's see, 2005, I started writing novels, 2008 I started publishing them, 2014 I went full time writing fiction for a couple of years. I released three books in 2016, all three flopped. Not because they were bad novels, but algorithmically I picked the wrong time to release three novels. And I've paid for that.
[00:05:12] And I've been doing a lot of technology work since, but the technology work, understanding a lot of how the internet works, how search engines work in particular, how Google works as a search engine in particular, has been helpful for me because when I look at the Google Play Store, what I see is a search engine. And the rules of any retailer for me are, if a buyer goes to the store and wants to buy a book, like I write young adult epic fantasy, they should be able to find my book by just clicking or by typing in a generic search -- fantasy, dragon, young adult, epic, any of those types of things. If you can't find your content in one of those two ways, your sales are going to reflect it. And so if you can manage to get to where your content is displayed prominently for the right searches, then that's what tends to drive traffic and sales.
[00:06:12] And Google Play for me is the place where I can find a lot of readers, give them an opportunity to try my content. And it's a relatively small percentage that goes on to buy the other content, but they buy all of it usually and they pay a premium for it. That's part of my long-term marketing model is I do use a free series starter, I do have permafrees, and I have driven a lot of traffic to those over the years. And they're designed to encourage the reader to go onto the next book. And it allows me to get past the original problem I had when I started publishing that nobody knew who I was and nobody was willing to drop $20 on a trilogy just on the chance that they were going to like it. That was how I originally packaged my books. I eventually broke that trilogy out into three books, changed the pricing so that you could try the first one for 99 cents, and then go on and pay $7.99 or $8.99 for the ebook. And that worked much better.
[00:07:08] And then in October of 2011, Amazon decided on their own to make one of my eBooks free, the first book in the series free. And they were paying me for every download. That was back at a time where every one they gave away, I got 35 cents. So it was a really good weekend. And afterwards my other books sold much better. And so it taught me a lesson there, and there are upsides and downsides to the permafree market, but I'm in a particularly good place for it. One, because I don't do a lot of releases. I haven't written any books in a while. It's kind of hard as a writer, but I've been doing a lot of my marketing on my back list.
[00:07:45] Matty: I wanted to get back to something you had said earlier about being a technologist, and that is that it sounds like you gained some benefits from being an early adopter of Google Play, through what you were saying about them being very aggressive about soliciting ratings and reviews. But I think a lot of people got turned off by Google Play and maybe still are turned off by Google Play because I think early on, it was, as you had referenced, very awkward to to get onto the platform. I don't know that we need to recap the pain, but do you agree that it's much easier now, just from the point of view of uploading your books?
[00:08:18] Brian: Absolutely. They've made leaps and bounds and this year, in particular this summer, they showed quite a focus on redoing the interface. Although there've been quite a few iterations over the year and for the most part they got better and better with every iteration. I feel like it's gotten easier and plus there were some of the things that as a technologist, that even though it wasn't easier, were actually nicer. The ability to export Onyx data, to export all your titles to CSV. They're probably the more difficult way to do it if you only have a few titles, but those things actually remain and remain benefits of that platform.
[00:08:56] Google also has the benefit of user delegation, which is something I wish other retailers would allow us to do because many of us that are in the market need help. With a third-party, a virtual assistant, somebody else logging into account. And with Google, you can just go in and say, okay, I want to give this person access to my bookshelf or my bookshelf and my reports. I use that quite a bit because I ended up managing multiple companies through my Google Play interface and I don't have to open up a bunch of different browsers and log into different accounts as I do with most of the other retail interfaces. So it's gotten much easier.
[00:09:30] They've improved not only the usability of it, but what they're gathering in the way that they build it. For example, the related ISBNs are something I use a lot that are fairly misunderstood. And that's something that I don't see other retailers doing quite as effectively. And so an example of why you would use the related ISBNs and how that's beneficial is I have all these individual books, have lots of ratings. And when I put out the box sets, the box set has no ratings, and the algorithm just hid them. That's not the good book, the good book's the one with all the ratings. Well, as soon as I went into the related ISBNs and said, this book contains these books, and the algorithm said, Oh, okay. There's, several thousand reviews across those books, I'm going to apply those to this and the search algorithm. And all of a sudden it went to the top and sales that's the title I was hoping to focus on and sales went well, because it was a premium title.
[00:10:23] I like premium price points on Google as well. I don't want to discount all of my books. It's not where I sell cheaply. And it's actually an interesting dichotomy between that and selling on other platforms where discounted books sell better. I actually find that a free book to start and an expensive book afterwards has worked best for me.
[00:10:47] Matty: And when you're talking about expensive, give us an idea of the prices you're charging for your books on Google.
[00:10:52] Brian: Well, it just changed. It used to be $19.99 I was charging for what I consider my money collectors the book, the third book in the trilogy. In my first trilogy, I have the first two books free, and the third book was $19.99. And the reason I had it priced that way is because we get discounted down to $9.99. But Google recently changed their pricing policies and at that point I just lowered it to $9.99. And mostly that's just a reasonable price point for a novel, in my opinion, especially when you've gotten a couple of them free.
[00:11:24] And that gives me the flexibility to change prices, run sales, gather a lot of metadata on the first two. I just learned as a writer that my first book didn't hook as well as the second. And so when I changed to the first book free and the second book free, my conversion rate improved. And so I just raised the price of the third book as to what I used to charge for book two.
[00:11:50] Matty: You don't get dinged for a price over $9.99 on Google Play, correct? You were discounting it for other reasons than a change in royalties as you would have suffered on Amazon. Is that correct?
[00:12:00] Brian: Yeah, there's no getting dinged, it's just they no longer do the discounting like they used to. For a lot of authors and publishers, the discounting was troublesome. It had a bit of a random aspect to it. I would calculate how much they were going to mark it down and I would mark my books up so that my price would be same as a retailer that was price matching because that's where a lot of the problems for me came in.
[00:12:23] It wasn't necessarily that X, Y, or Z, Apple or Google would penalize me for going above 99, but another retailer would and they're price matching and I'd ended up in these price matching battles. Sometimes if I lowered the price of my title not using a promo tool, if I just lowered a book to 99 cents, then when I went to raise it back up, Apple and Google and Amazon were all price matching each other. It wouldn't let me raise my price back up.
[00:12:51] So those sorts of things were a little bit of a challenge, but it's all gotten better and easier over the years. I think Google's change makes sense for most people. It wasn't a big advantage for me, but I just changed my prices to be in line with everybody else's and I maybe lost a little bit of a tactical advantage I had before, but, hey, that's just the nature of people is you go with what works today and when it stops working, you better have been working on figuring out the next thing that you're going to do.
[00:13:19] But in general, my practices of trying to work with retailers to figure out what they want and what they need, give it to them so that they can show my content to the reader without me having to pay them -- that's always been my strategy and Google's been the one for me.
[00:13:36] The other big advantage it has is the amount of time it takes for changes you make in your metadata to show up in the results is very short in comparison to other retailers. Some retailers, I make changes in my metadata, it doesn't seem to have any effect at all. Or if it does, it's long term and I never really know when it took. The fact that I can't really say, Oh, okay, I did this and then the results were that. Google it's a bit more immediate. If you make changes to your meta data today, you should be able to go in tomorrow or the next day, somewhere around 24, 48 hours. And let's say you're targeting search results. That'd be my biggest advice. First thing you should do, if you haven't already optimize your titles for the common search phrases in your genre. And this is where a lot of people get tripped up is they just try to think of that list off the top of their head, and that's not the way to go in my opinion. What you want to do is go to the retailer and start typing in terms related to what you're selling and seeing what gets dropped down and suggest it.
[00:14:37] Matty: If someone has done that on Amazon, do they need to redo it on Google?
[00:14:41] Brian: Absolutely. It's retailer specific. And it really has a fairly big impact and it's the kind of thing, you can do it wrong. You can do it in a way that you go overboard and keyword stuffing and all the things that if you've been around the technology world and that people would get yelled at for doing on their website, you get penalized by Google for doing -- keyword stuffing and going overboard to the extent that you're trying to manipulate things -- you'll eventually get your fingers smacked. My rule is find a happy medium between giving the reader what they need, the search algorithm what it needs, and make it all look nice. And at every point be as useful to the reader as possible. If you follow that and it's intended to make the retailer money -- you're not trying to drive traffic off the retailer to somebody else -- if you do all of those things, it tends to work well and people don't tend to get their feelings hurt one way or another, and you don't tend to get whacked either by an algorithm or by somebody who looks to go, Oh, you're not supposed to be doing that.
[00:15:47] One of the ways I do it is I go in, I search for those common search terms. Who's showing up at the top? Why? Why are they showing up at the top? Sometimes you can look at the book that's showing up at the top and it has two reviews, it was released three years ago, and there's books underneath of it that had a thousand reviews or new release. Why is that book showing up when they're not? And a lot of times if you start pulling up the product pages, you'll notice, Oh, look, this keyword phrase that I searched for is the very first thing in their description.
[00:16:18] Matty: Are there examples you can give for your own books whereas a keyword was successful on Amazon but not <on Google Play>?
[00:16:24] Brian: Fantasy. If you type in fantasy, epic fantasy, dragon, any of those terms, my books are going to show up in some cases in a very dominant fashion. And you'll notice a big difference between where my audio books show up versus where my eBooks show up. My eBooks are not going to show up at the top of the list all the time, but the audio books will. And it's a much less competitive market on Google Play to sell audio books. And eBooks happen to be a really good tool to sell audio books. That's one of the things I've been taking advantage of is having my audio books in wide distribution, having them available on all these different retailers and knowing that the metadata that's associated with my ebook can be used by the algorithm to apply additional metadata to my audio book. So I want to make sure that they're linked, because I'm publishing them through different interfaces.
[00:17:26] I like to go direct, and Google traditionally has not worked really well with distributors. I don't mean that as a knock to them, I particularly liked them focusing on having authors come directly to their platform. But distributing to Google Play through a distributor is traditionally not the best way to go. If you can tolerate the interface, and these days, it's pretty nice and no reason not to, it's best to go direct.
[00:17:50] Matty: Yeah. I go through Draft2Digital for everything else, but I do go direct to Google Play for my e-books. Do you go direct to Google Play for your audio books?
[00:18:00] Brian: I wish I could. I've been begging for that. I think they're working on it. But it's not available yet for folks at my size level. I don't think I have enough content.
[00:18:11] I know they have programs, and they have ways to do it, but I think I don't yet meet their threshold. And what I'm hoping is that they're working on a little bit better I'm going to say self-service type of interface where the threshold is a little lower. I think that's what's going to happen based on things I've heard through the grapevine.
[00:18:30] But for right now, I use Findaway and I'm very happy with it. I've had really good experiences with them, and I've had some challenges along the way. I don't love everything about it. I'm not jumping up and down and say do everything on Findaway because in general distributors, even ones I really liked like Draft2Digital and Findaway, they have some issues when it comes to one-size-fits-all metadata.
[00:18:53] The one thing I'm unhappy with about Findaway's distribution to Google Play right now is the metadata, your description is they strip out all of the formatting. All the rich text comes out and that's important to know because sometimes they strip out line endings or the formatting that was like an H2 kind has an inherent line ending, and if you take it out, all of a sudden, your text gets all mushed together and there's no more endings. So it's important to, after you published from Findaway to Google Play, go look at the metadata specifically for the audio book, just to make sure it looks as good as it can with all the rich text stripped down.
[00:19:33] Matty: There's actually another episode that I'm going to provide a link to in the show notes, which was Episode 42, Joshua Tallent was on talking about metadata. So if people are intrigued by our metadata conversation, they can go to that episode for more information.
[00:19:47] Could you just briefly describe when you say going wide via audio, it's slightly different than when people talk about going wide with eBooks. Can you talk about what you mean by that?
[00:19:57] Brian: Yes. AndI started out audio mostly with ACX years ago. I had an audio publisher originally that took my audio books to Audible, and then I went with ACX and I did PFH where I paid per finished hour of audio outside of the ACX system. I did those first six inside the ACX system, but I paid for the audio and then I had three books at the end that I did a royalty share on. I wouldn't do that again because the contract term is too long and now I have three books that I can't distribute outside of Amazon, iTunes, and Audible.
[00:20:36] So right now, once I got to the point that the other distributors were coming up in the audio realm, and really most of it revolved around Findaway because I think Authors Republic used Findaway. Findaway was really the audio distributor that caught my eye as the mover and shaker in the market and kind of the one to go to. AndI was able to get the first six moved to non-exclusive on ACX. So I basically moved them from exclusive to non-exclusive because I own the rights and I was able to do that. And my term was up and those were the earlier years of ACX and I didn't have as much trouble with them.
[00:21:15] The last three, I'm probably just going to have to wait out the seven years and just pay my narrator and do all these other things that are going to be required of me. And it's fine. I knew what I was taking on when I did that, but the world has changed and I wouldn't do that today because it took away my options of my last three books in that series are not on Google Play.
[00:21:34] I'm very sad about that. All of my Google Play listeners, I'm sorry. I will fix it as soon as I possibly can. But I can't, I'm legally prevented from doing that. And it was the right thing to do at the time because I didn't have the money to pay for it. So in the absence of the funds, that was the way to get it done. And now I'm just paying a bit of a price for that because the world did change.
[00:21:57] And so I went to Findaway with my titles. Now I have six non-exclusive titles, and I'm trying to distribute these audio books everywhere that will distribute audio books. And I'm also trying to promote them in every area that will allow me to put up some audio or a video, YouTube SoundCloud, things like that.
[00:22:21] I think one of the missing opportunities, for example YouTube is a Google owned property and it links in some ways back to Google Play from a number of different ways. So I use YouTube to promote my Google Play products. I'm a bit more generic than others. At some point, people have to pick a retailer that they want to focus on. And many of them pick Amazon for obvious reasons. I did that for a portion of my career. And it had a wonderful effect in certain years and a terrible effect in others. At this point in my career, I focus a lot on Google and a lot of it comes from the analytics I'm doing in my reports. I write software that pulls in all my sales reports and I can look at it and it's plain as day, I'm picking up the most new readership on Google and I'm doing it without having to pay them. They pay me.
[00:23:13] Matty: I definitely want to get back to that, but there's one step in the process of actually getting a book up on Google Play that I want to hit first. I didn't see the earlier version of the Google Play user interface because I was put off by it, but I've now got my books loaded to Google Play. It was very easy to do, but the one thing that was intimidating is you can price in, I don't know, at least dozens, if not hundreds of different currencies. How do you choose which of those currencies you're going to enter? And then do you know what the ramifications are down the road if you fail to enter a certain currency?
[00:23:45] Brian: That is a can of worms that I have looked at across the room and thought, nope, don't want anything to do with that. I just stick with one price. And I let the system do the currency conversion based on the current conversion rate and apply that for me. So for my purposes, it hasn't been something that I've dealt with in the past few years.
[00:24:07] I know that because just the way technology works, we've had this ability to mess with those prices for a long time, and there were times that I did that. The longer you've had your account, the longer you've had books up there, the more likely you are up for an audit of your stuff. Somebody mentioned this the other day and I haven't even gone in and look at it, but there's a nice way to export an Excel spreadsheet with all of that information and to just take a look to make sure that the none of your products are out there without price.
[00:24:38] Matty: Is that what the audit is looking for?
[00:24:41] Brian: Anything, anything weird. And I find I do this with Findaway. I do this with all of my Smashwords. You just end up with feature creep crud in the database where the interface got updated, but your records for your stuff never got updated. It's the same kind of thing. I'm sure people who use Findaway a lot know what I'm talking about. It's like when you go to Findaway and you update a book and you see the list of distributors, and for some reason, the list of distributors changes and you didn't do anything. And you ask yourself at that point, am I now just updating my list of distributors when I hit update or was it somehow done in the background for me and I'm just now having it sync up my record?
[00:25:22] But one way or another, if I hadn't come and done that, was I not available on that retailer? Something that I do -- I've been doing this for long enough that I have a lot of this kind of stuff at 50 titles to deal with over all of them. And the more I go back through them and we're like, Oh shoot, I didn't do the thing. I was, oh yeah, I didn't fill that out. What was I thinking? And I just find that the longer you've been doing it, the more titles you have, with the pricing in particular being an issue, that's been evolving on Google. the audit's probably useful to make sure you're not leaking money.
[00:25:58] I've helped a number of people do things on Google. There was one author I was working with. I said, Hey, book one of your trilogy's up and book three of your trilogy's up, but everybody's complaining where's book two. And he kept saying, Oh no, it's up there. And we went back four or five times and I finally said , no, no , no, not on Google Books, but Google Play Books. They had book one on book three.
[00:26:19] So especially if your sales are not going well or anything like that, it's a good idea to look. I like to keep a good eye on my data anyway, and that's something I've been working on writing software for. And I feel for everybody out there struggling with spreadsheets because it's difficult to do. And Google was always a challenging one, but they've improved their reporting lately enough that I think even at a glance, you can go to the dashboard and get an idea of what your books are doing.
[00:26:47] Matty: There is one tip I wanted to share about the international pricing, because what I did is there was a finite list, 10 or so for Amazon and for Draft2Digital, of countries that they're distributing to, and then what I did is I found an author that was in more or less the same genre, more or less the same level of well-known-ness, and who I knew had incentive to be monitoring their prices in the different platforms and intentionally putting in a price for each of those markets that was not just a conversion because Australia, for example, has higher tolerance for high book prices than Mexico, for example, let's say. And so I kept a record of what all those were and most of them were overlapped between Draft2Digital and Amazon. Draft2Digital had a few more than Amazon did.
[00:27:39] And then I also factored in things like the fact that I think I was publishing a book on Amazon UK for 9.99, but I realized that Amazon will deliver a print book for free if it's 10 pounds or over. So I just added a penny because that would mean that people who are ordering it could get it delivered free. SoI was tweaking them there.
[00:28:02] And then when I went to Google Play, I just entered the prices that I already had. And I didn't bother going into the many , many, many other currencies. So I don't want people to be put off either by our discussion about auditing or by my comment about the complexities of pricing, because they're only going to be complex if you want them to be. You can take up a much simpler approach in order to gain the benefits of Google Play.
[00:28:26] Brian: I would agree with that. And it is a wise thing to look at existing examples. And I think that what you just said is another example of what I was talking about is if you're curious about something and you feel like , well, I wish I understood more about it, go look at existing examples of what other people in similar or more successful or less successful and look at it and go, why? What is it about that one? Sometimes it's cover art. Sometimes it's just missing the market. Sometimes it's pricing. But that's where the longer I do this, the more I realize sometimes I get lazy and I get in a hurry and I'm not as thorough in my metadata as I should've been. And every time I go back, I find something to improve. So I very much am not a set it and forget it metadata guy. I like to go back and look for opportunities to improve. And sometimes it works to my benefit and sometimes it doesn't do much at all, that's been my practice.
[00:29:26] Matty: Just working through this chronologically from the point of view of the author, are there promotions that are available to people who are going to Google Play that they should be aware of? Google Play-sponsored promotions or other promotions that are only available to people on Google Play?
[00:29:41] Brian: It's not like some of the other retailers where they have a promo tab in their dashboard. They actually do have a promo tab on their dashboard, but it's a way of you doing price promotions for a limited time where you essentially commit to that timeframe so that the algorithm and or merchandisers can look at that and say, Oh, okay, there's a sale that's going on and this product's going to be on sale during that time. But I haven't really found it to be as much human intervention as some of the other retailers.
[00:30:14] For example, I go and I study Google Play's web interface -- it's a little different than the one on the app on the phone or on the tablet. It has the most information on a full-size desktop web browser. And if I just go to science fiction and fantasy, which is my realm, there are a list of predefined things that are illustrated there. So it'd be like epic sagas and military sci-fi. Those are their most visible promo slots.
[00:30:48] And my experience has been getting into those slots is mostly about doing something the algorithm liked, doing something that the code recognized. Sometimes it is a price change, a change in the metadata. Changing the book linking, something along those lines, something changing is usually the trigger is been my experience
[00:31:15] Matty: And for pricing, is it necessarily the price going down?
[00:31:21] Brian: The opposite, actually. It seems to me that Google likes to sell books. And they don't mind giving them away, but the end of the day they want to make money. So they're generally wanting to promote the ones that, from me looking at the outside in at their algorithm, that are popular, well-rated, have good reviews, and are going to generate revenue.
[00:31:41] And so when you maybe run a discount promo for awhile and it does well when you flip it back to full price, that's when it'll show up on one of those top pages. And so it's not full-proof, you can't do it like clockwork. I wish I could. But anecdotally, that's my best perception of how it's worked over the years.
[00:32:05] Now they've got that promotions tool that allows you to mark your product down for a predetermined amount of time. And when you do that, the biggest difference from just going in and changing your price is you'll actually notice in the interface, it'll show your original price, slash, and then your sale price. So there are some advantages to using that and I'm actually going to start using that tool because just historically, I've just always gone in and changed my prices. I want to change it for a month. I'll go in and I'll just take my price for a month and I'll come back and I'll change it back.
[00:32:38] And that's worked well for me, but I've watched some of the other authors I'm working with use the promo tools, and I think that with the work that Google has been doing, I would advise people to try those promo pricing tools. I suspect the algorithm's going to look favorably on tool on books that use those and really with my discussions of this, limited as they've been with folks at Google, I think they lean more towards the algorithm than human beings coming in and going, Oh, okay. We're going to feature this person's books.
[00:33:10] Matty: Yeah. You would think Google would be all about algorithms.
[00:33:14] Brian: Yeah. I always like talking to algorithms. That's what I do. And I'm talking with the Google metadata.
[00:33:20] Matty: Let's assume now the person's gotten their books loaded to Google Play and they're taking advantage of the promotions and so on. I think the whole Google Play thing is great, but their reporting is abysmal. And coincidentally, between the time that you and I talked about having this conversation and today, they announced an improvement and I was like, Oh, isn't this good timing? It was just like a couple of days ago. And I looked and it looks pretty much the same to me. So am I just looking at the wrong place or is their reporting horrible? And if it is, is there a way around that?
[00:33:54] Brian: Reporting has historically been one of their weaknesses. They've improved it in that there's now an at-a-glance in the home tab, not the sales and analytics tab. So if you go up to the home tab, at the bottom, it'll show you your top selling book and you can flip last 30 days tell you your last 30 days earnings and which ones were your top earners. So there are some at-a-glance features that are in there that are better.
[00:34:24] The other thing that improved probably three or four months ago was it used to be that the only report you could get was the sales summary report. And that one did not convert the currency back to US dollar or your payment currency. But they added the sales transaction report, which includes the raw transaction data for all of your transactions. And it does convert them into US dollars. So in some ways it's a lot easier to work with.
[00:34:54] In other ways, when you have a lot of downloads, it's a lot harder to work with, but at least it does not force us to convert the currencies. So from that aspect, that just the average person who wants to download a report in Excel and do some quick sums and look at it, grab the transaction report and work on that. Because at least that will not force you to deal with every currency individually. I started writing software years ago, specifically around Google Play and translating those currencies, andit's something I still work on today, but I was pretty happy to see them come out with that report that did the currency conversion, because no matter how much you guess the currency conversion rate at the time that they determine the payout, you're going to be wrong. So I prefer accurate numbers over fuzzy guesswork. And so I think it keeps improving.
[00:35:45] Personally biased because I've been developing software in this market. It's not on sale yet, but I have been developing software around the sales tracking because personally as a publisher, I just found it painful to deal with all the things for reports and all of the different retailers. And then as a publisher, I pay other authors, so having to split up the royalties was really ridiculously painful if you had to convert the currency.
[00:36:10] So I see those as major improvements. But if you really weren't paying attention and didn't go click the drop down box and switch to the different report, you might not even see that. I would keep an eye on what reports are showing up in their drop-downs. They don't tend to make huge announcements about it. And I would check your home tab. One of the other things about the way we do things on the internet is sometimes when we put out new stuff, we roll it out to users in phases andyour account may not have received it yet, so you'll see that a lot. They call it continuous improvement and deployment. It's when you deploy something new, you're like, all right, I'm going to deploy it out to 5% of users and see how much this stuff it breaks before I give it to everybody. So it may be that it'll show up soon.
[00:36:51] Matty: What I was seeing is that the couple of stats they had, they were presenting as percentages, and all my stats were a hundred percent. So it was like number of your books that are live: a hundred percent! This is really not helpful.
[00:37:05] Brian: That is on the analytics tab. Only some users would get the bar chart that shows your monthly earnings. There are some folks that just wouldn't show up for. And I'm not terribly ashamed to admit that I've broken numbers of retail reporting interfaces, mostly because I do a lot of free downloads and just, that's not what they're expecting when they build their interfaces. And I have several retailers that I'm lucky if I can download the sales report because all of our online charts just fail.
[00:37:35] And so I think there's a little bit of a challenge with all that on a number of retailers, but Google traditionally has struggled around their reporting. They've put a lot of effort into it this year, so I'm just going to encourage them to keep going in the direction they're going, because it is definitely getting a lot better.
[00:37:54] Matty: Are there other things based on conversations you might have with folks at Google Play or news stories you follow, what do you think is coming up in the news for Google Play?
[00:38:05] Brian: A lot of uncertainty ahead. When I turn over the magic eight ball, it says beware antitrust laws. Google's going to have a tough year. I look at Google Play and specifically Google Play Books as a side business. It's one of the downsides, it's not their main business. It can get downplayed at times. If they're looking to make cuts, that might be one of the areas where they don't put as much effort into it. But when I look at the writing on the wall and I look at the fact that they've hired multiple people around Google Play and Google Play Books in particular, they've made a bunch of changes to the interface.
[00:38:45] Writing's on the wall. I think they'll end up doing direct audio distribution. I think they're going to end up doing a lot more podcast distribution. And I think podcasting is one of the best ways to promote audio books. You want listeners, market to listeners. And for me, I'm all in. I expect good things. But I also, as a technologist and looking at the industry, I can see a couple of things that might be barriers coming up as well that might dampen the effort. Because really it's been my experience that when Google decides they want to sell a lot of books, they have the ability to do it. But if they decide not to focus on it, it can shut off.
[00:39:27] I've had months that are 10 to 12 time multiple of my average. That doesn't tend to happen to me a lot on other retailers. I tend to be fairly steady, but with Google, there's been a few times over the years, we're up two or three months where all of a sudden I go from, where I am to ten or 12 times multiple. And the only thing I can trace back to it -- BookBub free book deals, yes. But metadata changes really. The biggest one, I don't know what I did in March of 2018, but I made the algorithm to happy. It just had three months of joy. And I've just have been trying to reproduce that ever since.
[00:40:04] Matty: Can you share what percentage of your book sales come from Google Play versus other platforms you're on?
[00:40:10] Brian: Yes. And so traditionally, full history, it's about 30% of my sales come from Google Play and probably 55 to 60% came from Amazon. Now 35% of my sales come from Google Play eBooks. 25% of my sales come from Google Play audio books via Findaway. Amazon is number five at 17% of my sales. And that's not because I'm so much better than other retailers on Amazon, I have ignored my books over on Amazon for a while. We had a bad breakup and I should probably go back and pay more attention to it now.
[00:40:52] Matty: Have a makeup. Makeup with Amazon.
[00:40:55] Brian: I should certainly make up with them professionally. It would probably be a good idea. But, it was something that I think those have gone down. But it was an intentional thing to diversify. And now I look at it and I'm probably a little Google heavy. I love me some Google, but I probably should re-diversify again. I'm looking at iTunes, I'm looking at Barnes and Noble and looking at Kobo, especially now with the audio book direct to Kobo, those sorts of things, seeing those kinds of things.
[00:41:20] That's for me has been what's kept me alive as a publisher. All these years watching all the different stuff going on and identifying an opportunity when it comes up. And as much as I love Google, I'll sell books where people will sell my books and where readers want them.
[00:41:36] I'm seeing a lot of action around apps these days. And that's interesting because you go to the app store or the the Google Play Store and now you can download these different reading apps through Google Play. They're still monetizing it. They're still selling eBooks, but they're not necessarily selling them through Google Play. And so there's a lot of interesting things going on there.
[00:42:00] I also noticed that Google's going to make a lot of people mad and I think there's going to be a lot of people get upset about artificial intelligence narration audio book sales. I think that's coming. In some ways I'm a supporter of it. In some ways I look a little crossways at it, and it all depends on how it's implemented. I love my voice artists. I love working with voice artists to produce human-narrated audio books because they bring so much character to the work, but they're expensive and it can be a hurdle. And I see that as one of the things that that whole audio market, I'd watch that.
[00:42:37] Matty: Yeah, that was actually another topic in the episode with Joanna Penn, 54, that I mentioned that I've been trying to get an audio book of my two non-fiction books done for just an embarrassingly long amount of time. And I was asking her, is it worth it? How long do I have to wait before I can just plug it into an algorithm? And her recommendation was, especially if you're doing it yourself, which is free at least from a financial point of view, do that. And then when the AI-generated audio is good enough, to do that too. And then you have really two independent offerings. You have the inexpensive AI-generated offering, and then you have the premium human-generated offering. And I think that makes a lot of sense.
[00:43:18] Brian: And I would add to that if you're doing fiction, audio drama is a separate art form. Podcast novel is a separate art form. So I have podcasts versions of my novels that I read myself, and those are free for the first three books, but then I had the professionally narrated editions that I sell, and I have videos that use the narration. And I'm going to be working on doing some new videos with those.
[00:43:46] And I'm very much open to the AI read, partially because I use it myself. Not so much today, but there was a period for a couple of years where I was doing a lot of traveling and I had books that I wanted to read that weren't available in audio books. So I would load them as a PDF on my Android device and have it read it to me. And that was better than not being able to experience it. So did it have its limitations? Oh yeah. Was the pronunciation annoying? Yup. And that's what they're trying to address with AI and they're going to get better and better and better at it. They're probably still going to have trouble reading my books -- fantasy, I'll throw them off one way or the other. They're not pronouncing that, right. Nope.
[00:44:30] Matty: Whenever there's a fantasy author on and I use Descript for automated transcription creation, I just know that I'm going to be doing a boatload of edits because all the odd names, no transcription software is going to be able to get that.
[00:44:44] Matty: Well, Brian, thank you so much for sharing that information. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you, your work, and your books online.
[00:44:55] Brian: Probably the easiest place to find me is at Brianrathbone.com and on Twitter I'm at Brian Rathbone. I tell a few too many bad dragon jokes over there, so if you don't get enough, definitely come over and visit us there. But yeah, those are probably two of the best places to find me.
[00:45:15] Brian: And Google Play, actually. If you want to go on Google Play, I've got free audio books and free books. You should really check that out. Search fantasy. You'll find me.
[00:45:22] Matty: The first place people should go after this conversation. Thank you.
[00:45:26] Brian: Thanks everybody. Have a great day.
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