Episode 122 - Using Data to Guide Your Craft with Nat Connors
March 1, 2022
This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Nat Connors of Kindletrends discusses USING DATA TO GUIDE YOUR CRAFT, including how authors can assess whether their covers, blurbs, content, and mechanics (such as release schedule and price) attract browsers, impact readers, and set the stage for a book’s sales. He discusses the importance of having a consistent throughline across the cover, blurb, and content. And he talks about how being market-aware doesn't mean following market trends slavishly, but rather developing an understanding of genre expectations and how you can fulfill them in a way that’s right for your own style and writing goals.
Nat Connors is a romantic comedy writer, medical scientist, and dance teacher, and creator of the Kindletrends newsletter for genre fiction authors. Nat created Kindletrends when he got fed up with trying to make sense of the Kindle store and wanted a no-nonsense summary of the most important information. As an indy author himself, Nat understands the need for focused, relevant, and actionable information with which to make decisions.
"Being market-aware doesn't mean that you are driven by the market slavishly. You don't have to adhere to all genre tropes, you don't have to adhere to all of the standard elements in covers. But it behooves you to be aware of them so you know where you are aligned with the norms of your genre and where you're differing from the norms of the genre." —Nat Connors
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Nat "Nose" Connors. Nat Connors, how are you doing?
[00:00:08] Nat: Hi Matty, lovely to be here.
[00:00:10] Matty: I am happy to have you here, and to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, and first of all, just to say, I said, Nat "Nose" Connors because that's what Nat's name is listed as on our Zoom window here.
[00:00:21] Nat is a romantic comedy writer, medical scientist, and dance teacher, and creator of the Kindletrends newsletter for genre fiction authors. Nat created Kindletrends when he got fed up with trying to make sense of the Kindle store and wanted a no-nonsense summary of the most important information.
[00:00:36] And as an indy author himself, Nat understands the need for focused, relevant, and actionable information with which to make decisions. And I think this is actually going to be a really nice companion piece to episode 117, which was TRACKING SALES DATA AND HOW SCRIBECOUNT CAN HELP, which was with Philippa Werner. And that episode, I would say, focused a little bit more on using data to make decisions about one's publishing voyage. But we're specifically going to be talking today with Nat about using data to guide your craft.
[00:01:08] And so I wanted to start right out because, Nat, in your bio, you talk about the focus on genre fiction authors. So just so we understand the context, how are you defining genre fiction authors?
[00:01:21] Nat: Yeah, that's a really good question, Matty. And I think we could use up the entire hour talking about that. We won't, but when I think of genre fiction authors, I tend to, and this isn't an exclusive definition at all, but I think probably of two things. One, I think of people like myself who write partly for creative fulfillment, but also because they want to use their writing to help pay the bills, bluntly. They want to earn an income from their writing, either part-time or full-time, and they want to do that so they have the creative freedom to live their life the way they want, and so they can also write to some degree things that are creatively fulfilling for themselves.
[00:02:03] So the first thing I would say as a genre fiction author, is that you have a goal at least to earn an income, a big one or a small one doesn't matter, from your writing.
[00:02:13] The second thing for me, which is a consequence of that, is that you are focused, at least in some part, on what readers want, on what works for them and what they are enjoying.
[00:02:26] So I see myself, when I'm writing, I see myself as an entertainer first and foremost. I have my own craft and I care about the artistic expression of what I'm doing, but I'm also here to tell a story. I think of myself as a professional storyteller, which as we know, is a noble craft that has existed for as long as human beings have been gathering around campfires. So that's the thing, I think, is that you are doing this in part as a job, even if you're yet to earn money from it. And the other thing is that you are guided to some degree by your readership.
[00:02:58] So in a way, I would say everyone, every author is a genre fiction author to a greater or lesser degree.
[00:03:04] Matty: I agree with all of that. And I think that what it highlights nicely is the idea that each genre has certain expectations and tropes, and that the data side comes into it when you think about the importance of understanding expectations and tropes of the readers who enjoy that genre.
[00:03:21] And I watched an excellent video that you had done that was talking about four components of the content that you present to your readers: covers, blurbs, content, and mechanics. And I thought that might be a nice way to frame up our conversation and talk generically about the data that's out there for authors to use, and then also specifically how Kindletrends can help do that.
[00:03:43] So I wanted to start out with covers. Talk a little bit about the data that you look for, whether you're looking at it in Kindletrends or outside of Kindletrends, what data do you recommend authors look for in terms of covers?
[00:03:56] Nat: Yeah, I guess it's obvious to say that your book's cover is usually the first thing that potential readers see, whether it's in a store like the Kindle store, or whether it's in an ad or whether it's a blog post or something like that. So the way that I think about this, is that covers make a specific set of promises to a reader about what they're going to get in a book. Those promises are usually centered around a genre, so we can talk a lot about how different covers in different genres signify certain things, but they're also centered around brand, around your brand as an individual author.
[00:04:33] But just thinking back to one of your other podcasts, Matty, Nick Erik does some really good stuff about branding. I'm a huge fan of Nicholas Erik's work, I devour everything he writes about marketing, and he has a great series of things about how you can use elements in your cover to indicate your brand, to have a sense of commonality between your books.
[00:04:54] So to answer your question, I think the things that I would encourage authors to look at are, when you're looking at a bunch of covers, like a montage, get a lot of covers together, which are like the sort of work that you want to do, something that you could see being on the front of your books, and then ask yourself, what does each element signify? Why is the type the way it is? Why is the lighting the way it is?
[00:05:18] I have a bit of a checklist of different things that I work through, so for instance, are there people on the cover or is it a scene? What's the focus of the attention? If there are people, is there only one person or are there two people? Whether there's one or two, can you see people's faces or not?
[00:05:36] Some genres have very strong trends about whether you see someone's face. So to use a very obvious example, as I'm sure you know, in mystery or thriller or suspense, typically if there is a figure on the cover, it's generally not one where you can see their face. There are a small number of covers, I think, where that's different, so you'll see a face in half profile or something like that, that's another style for mystery, but often if there's a figure, it's shrouded or looking away from the camera to convey a sense of what's going on, a sense of mystery.
[00:06:09] By comparison, though, a lot of romance novels will have faces on them, either in sort of extreme closeup or they'll have two people. A very common trend for romance novels is to have two people's faces and then the title and then a sort of a landscape or something like that. So in sweet romance or in romantic comedy, that's a very common style. Does that sort of help?
[00:06:34] Matty: Yes, it does. In fact, one of the things that I wanted to ask you about was some of the tools that Kindletrends offers to do this, but one of the tools I started recommending to people is to subscribe to the BookBub Daily Featured Deal email for their genre, because there you get a list of six or however many books that the good folks at BookBub have decided are going to be appealing to people of that genre. And every once in a while, I'll hit one where those tropes are so obvious. So I believe that I'm probably subscribed to mystery, suspense, thriller, and one time, of the six or seven books in there, almost all of them had a small, silhouetted image of a man in black against a background of European capitals and identifiable buildings. It's so striking.
[00:07:24] But, one of the things I loved about Kindletrends is, you make it, so you don't have to wait until your BookBub Feature Deal email comes in.
[00:07:33] Nat: Yeah. Yeah, so one of the things that I started doing, and again, a lot of the things that are in Kindletrends, the things that I started doing for myself, and then I shared them with my friends and, then they said, hey, can you do this for this genre, can you do it for that genre, and so forth. So having a cover montage every week is a really low effort way of keeping up with what's going on in your genre. I think of this as being like exercise. A little bit every day or every week is something that's easy to keep up with and it attunes you to what's happening.
[00:08:01] Also, it gives you ideas, it helps keep you creatively fresh. So if you're thinking about what guidance to give your cover designer, you can go to the last couple of weeks or the last couple of months of top selling covers and scan down them and say, okay, so about 50% of them use this style and maybe 25% of them use this style. And there's always one or two that do something completely different. And so I'm going to pick out these ones and I'm going to send them to my cover designer to say, hey, can we blend some of this with my own individual elements?
[00:08:32] One of the things that I think I want to keep coming back to, Matty, is the idea that being market-aware doesn't mean that you are driven by the market kind of slavishly. You don't have to adhere to all genre tropes, you don't have to adhere to all of the standard elements in covers. But it behooves you, I think, to be aware of them, so you know where you are aligned with the norms of your genre and where you're differing from the norms of the genre.
[00:09:00] Matty: I think it was one of my conversations with Orna Ross, when we did the series on THE SEVEN PROCESSES OF PUBLISHING, and we talked about the fact that a book's cover image is the visual equivalent of a keyword that is sending an instant message to the browser about the kind of book that it is. And I think sometimes people shy away from, sure, I'm writing a mystery, but I don't want to be like everybody else. Well, you can take the risk of not being like everyone else in terms of the general approach you take, but then the risk is that people look at your book and they don't realize it's the kind of book that they would be interested in reading, because you're not sending them those visual cues.
[00:09:37] Nat: Yeah, yeah, so that's exactly analogous I think to the way that I put it, when I say that covers make a promise to the reader. And so when you look at a cover, what promises is it making to you about genre and about the author, and possibly about the setting? So you said that like the European capitals. Even if you don't know which European capital it is, you get an idea of where the book is going to take place or what the element or something like that.
[00:10:02] So for me covers make a promise to the reader and then that promise is developed in the blurb, where you go into a bit more detail about the things that you've highlighted or suggested in the cover. And then finally, you deliver on that promise in the story itself.
[00:10:17] So a large part of what I encourage people to think about, like in my research work is, getting authors to think about how things are set up in the cover and then they're developed and expanded in the blurb and then they're delivered in the story, and you can draw a throughline between those.
[00:10:34] And you find, once you start thinking about this, it's actually obvious. You look at top-selling books and you go, okay, there's the hooded figure and he's in a graveyard or something like that. So I think, okay, death, some sort of death is going to be involved in this book. And then, there's some sort of death mentioned in the blurb, and then of course death is an element in the book. So for any genre, that's the thing that I would always encourage people to start doing, is look at cover, then blurb, then content, and see how they fit together, because that's the track that you're drawing readers down when they pick up your first book.
[00:11:08] Matty: I really liked you pulling it together in that way. And I do want to move on to blurbs, but before I do that, I also wanted to mention one other thing that I really liked about the Kindletrends newsletter, and that is the color block assembly of those books that you include in the montage. Can you describe a little bit what that is?
[00:11:27] Nat: Yeah, so what I'm trying to do there, Matty, is next to every montage of the top-selling covers, I've also extracted the key colors that are in those covers and plotted them in accordance with how much there is. So if there's a lot of blue in a cover, then there'll be a big blue block at the beginning. If there's a lot of red, then there'll be a big red block. And what that does is, cover designers love this because it helps you get an idea of what the dominant colors are in a particular market.
[00:11:57] And sometimes you'll see quite strong trends. So a very common thing in urban fantasy is to have a purple or a green background behind a character, often a girl or something like that. And so you can see those kinds of dominant shades. Again, you don't have to use those shades, but it behooves you to be aware of them.
[00:12:17] The other thing of course, is to help you see how one shade complements another. So if you see a mystery author and their author name is often in big block letters for certain kinds of action type mysteries, big block letters in yellow or red. And what that implies is, you're going to need a dark background to help the author name really stand out. And abstracting out the colors helps you see those things.
[00:12:42] Matty: It would be nice to see in sub-genres, like the difference in a color block montage between a thriller mystery and a cozy mystery, like I'm sure a color block for cozy mysteries would be primary colors, bright.
[00:12:57] Nat: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, so if you compare the cozy mystery newsletter each week with the broader mystery, thriller, and suspense one, then you're right, you will see profound differences just in the colors. And in a way, I often talk about a sort of a blind test, if I were to give you a cover blind, without even the title on it, could you tell what the genre was? And the answer is, yeah, generally you can, because if it's got cupcakes on it or an Irish terrier or something like that, it's probably not a hard-hitting sort of Jack Reacher-type murder novel, right?
[00:13:29] Matty: Yeah, I just think seeing those together in that way, in that montage way, is very useful.
[00:13:35] So let's move on to blurbs. I liked what you said about the blurb is now supporting the message that you've first attracted a potential reader with your cover image.
[00:13:46] Nat: Yeah, so I think again, firstly, let me say that a blurb writing is a real skill and there are lots of great author services, people out there who can help you write different kinds of blurbs. I have a few go-to styles for writing blurbs, and some sort of starting points, which I think I mention on my website, but you really need to experiment with different styles that suit you. However, again, the two things that I would always encourage people to do are, be aware of what's going on in your genre, in the top 100 or the top 400, and ask yourself which ones of these blurbs stick out for you. Why do they stick out for you? And I'll talk about a technique for doing that in just a sec.
[00:14:26] And the other thing is understanding, as we were saying before, what is the blurb describing that was promised in the cover and is going to be delivered in the book?
[00:14:38] Sometimes this is quite explicit, like it's a list of tropes. So in a romance novel, you'll often say, this has a guaranteed HEA <happily ever after>, or this is a friends-to-lovers romance or something. So in some genres, you'll really spell out what the key story elements are.
[00:14:54] In other genres, you might not do that so much. So in a mystery novel, I think that's less common in a way. But you'll still see some of the kind of key words or key phrases, which indicate what kind of mystery novel it is.
[00:15:08] For instance, you can probably tell a cozy mystery quite readily from the blurb, compared to a more gritty, dark kind of murder mystery. The thing that I was going to say before was about keeping up with blurbs is, I recommend that everyone skims very quickly, without spending much time on it, skims the top blurbs in their genre, maybe each week or every fortnight or something like that. In Kindletrends, I've got a downloadable PDF where you can just grab all the blurbs in one list and just skim-read them.
[00:15:37] I do this every week, and I don't spend a lot of time on it, I just mark down the ones that catch my eye. And then I go back to think about, why do they catch my eye? I don't necessarily want to change my blurb style to write that way, but I do want to see what made me stop about it.
[00:15:51] This is an exercise that takes me maybe 15 to 20 minutes a week, so it's easy, and it's fun too, because you get to see the top blurb writers doing their thing, and you're the audience. And I find whenever I do that, I come away feeling a bit energized about writing my own blurbs.
[00:16:06] Matty: Do you find that there's a difference between blurbs written for indy books and for traditionally published books? Because I remember, I wish I could remember who had made this observation to me, but that traditionally published books rely much more heavily on a synopsis of the plot, which this person was advising against. Do you see any trends there?
[00:16:26] Nat: That's an interesting one. I mean, first I would say that, as always, it's different for different genres, but in genres which have a heavy representation of trad books, clearly, the covers are often different. Although there are trends for each genre, covers will be often more different, I think, than blurbs. However, I would agree with you that sometimes, trad-published books will tend to summarize the story or fit it in within the stable of the publishing house itself, more than advertising the book directly to the reader.
[00:17:03] The other thing I would observe generally is that trad-published books will often make more use of quotes from reviewers or from editors or from other authors. So that's one of the ways like if I was going to try and tell one or the other, I think if there's a quote from PUBLISHERS REVIEW WEEKLY or something on a book, it's probably a trad book.
[00:17:22] Matty: Yeah, another thing that I liked in the Kindletrends information, and I wasn't sure if this was related to blurbs or not, was the word cloud idea, is that something you pull from blurbs?
[00:17:32] Nat: Yeah, so that's a very simple way. What we're doing there just to summarize for readers is, we're getting all of the words in all of the blurbs for a particular genre for the top 100 and we're counting them all up. And a word cloud, which I think probably a lot of people have seen in other contexts, makes the most common words large. So this is a way of making it obvious what the dominant elements are, whether they're nouns, adjectives, or whatever, in a series of blurbs. And if you study these over time, you see some really interesting differences.
[00:18:03] Often you will find, for instance, in historical fiction, you'll see a lot of words about people's station, words like "Duke" and "Earl" and "inheritance" and so forth. Obviously, in a mystery book, you'll see a lot more words about things that have happened. So "crime" is a really obvious one, but also you will find "race" or "run" or, so a lot of verbs in a way.
[00:18:27] This isn't again, to say that you have to use any of those things, but it's a really quick, thirty-second way of saying, okay, here are the things that people talk about most commonly in this genre, so maybe I should think about. This is what readers are primed for. Maybe that's the way to think about it is, readers are primed for hearing these kinds of words, because these are the words that they hear every day when they go to pick up a book. So I need to think about my blurb in relation to those words.
[00:18:54] Matty: A while ago, I had gone through the exercise of copying the text of my five- and four-star reviews on Amazon into a tool that produced a word cloud. And I think that one of the revelations I had was that I write supernatural suspense and many of the reviews referenced, use the word "haunted," and I didn't have "haunted" anywhere in my blurb, so I ended up adding it to my blurb to more closely match what the happy readers said in their reviews.
[00:19:21] Nat: Yeah, okay, so that clearly is a story element, and I use the term story element quite generally, because it could mean themes or tropes or all kinds of things, but that's a story element that is resonating a lot with your readers, and that's a way that they are describing things. And often, I'm really aware of the fact that sometimes the way that we see our books as authors and as creators is not the way that readers see them at all. And that's okay. Neither of these things is more important than the other, but it's really helpful to interact with readers and to see what they do and don't like, and what resonates with them.
[00:19:55] Obviously as an author you have to be a bit careful about that because there's always going to be people for whom your book just really doesn't work. And no one likes getting one- and two-star reviews, it's lousy. But you also have to understand if there's something valuable there, you also have to understand that. But your book isn't going to be for everybody and that's okay. But understanding what really works for your readership and doubling down on it, that's a very satisfying and a very productive thing to do, I think.
[00:20:21] I was just going to say about your covers, Matty, one of the first things that I noticed, and I think I said it in just about our first email was, wow, what great covers. And one of the reasons they were great, like they looked very classy. But also, they signify, they do this thing of signposting the elements in your book very, very clearly, I think.
[00:20:39] Matty: Oh, that's great to hear, thank you.
[00:20:42] Nat: Yeah, they had the double whammy because they're very obviously, they're all thematically related, I can see a clear thematic kind of throughline between them, but they also leave me in no doubt about the kind of books that you write, which is cool, that's what we should all aim for.
[00:20:56] Matty: Yeah, thank you. I have to say that the theme, I've had several different versions of the cover of my first book, THE SENSE OF DEATH, and the main thing that's changed, I mean the image has been tweaked by professional image tweakers, but the font has changed, and I feel like the font that I have now is the one that's the best match with the tone. It's sort of retro-looking but modern-looking at the same time. I don't know quite how to express that, but I'm really pleased with the font that the cover designer came up with for that.
[00:21:23] Nat: Yeah, that's good. So again, going back to one of the things I learned from Nick Erik's writing was, if you are planning to write in a series, or even if you're not, even if you're putting out multiple books, then you need to build in some flexibility in some of your choices, including your font choice, because you're not always subject to the cover art that you have.
[00:21:43] You're not always going to be able to have your fonts, the author name or title, in exactly the same size. So you want a font which is flexible enough that it can fill up like, most of the top part of the cover or one which can shrink down a bit, if you need to tweak it a little.
[00:22:00] Matty: Yeah, and one of the things that I did is I got the font names from my cover designer and then purchased those fonts, so I was able to reuse them.
[00:22:08] Nat: Yeah, and then you can use them in other ads and all of those kinds of things. So the more that you can create a reinforced, particularly if you're writing in a series, if you can reinforce particular elements. That's another thing just jumping back to covers for a minute, when I'm looking at a series, I try to look at what the similarities in that series are. So how do we know that these books, without even looking at the titles, how do we know that these books are all in a series? And when you're designing a series cover, or when you're informing a cover designer, thinking about how many different ways you can mix and match color schemes and layouts, that's quite challenging too. So seeing them all side-by-side in a series, like we do in the cover montage, helps you see that.
[00:23:18] Matty: Something you had mentioned made me think of this, and I think this will probably still hold true when we talk about the third element, content, but I think it's really apparent with the cover and the blurbs. And that is that we've been talking so far about, you know your genre, you sign up for the Kindletrends email newsletter, or you sign up for the BookBub daily Featured Deal email to take a look at what else is going on. And you look for where the disconnects are, so that maybe you could consider complying with the expected tropes further.
[00:23:48] I think the other thing where that can be useful is, if you think you're writing noir and so you subscribe to the noir newsletter, and then everything that's coming across is looking different to you, it could also be that you're not really writing noir, that what you think of as your self-assigned genre may not be the same genre that readers will see. So a disconnect could have two different solutions. One is to change your presentation, and one is to recognize that you're really in a different genre.
[00:24:20] Nat: Yeah, so one of the things that I also encourage people to do is think, not just about their genre in a very big picture sense, but, and this is, I guess, kind of obvious, drill down as much as possible into your sort of sub-genre, if you want to call it that, and also into your comp authors. So understand what else your readers are reading. You can do this by looking at the Also Boughts. If you've got a couple of books out and they're selling, look at the other things that people are buying who have bought your book. And sometimes they'll look very similar to yours, but in the example that you're talking about, Matty, what you might find is that people are buying your book and they're liking it, but everything else they're buying is really not what you thought it was. And that's interesting. It doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong, but it does mean that something, reader behavior is not what you expect.
[00:25:09] And, I have a freebie thing on my website, which allows people to download the Also Bought for their book or another book, it's a Chrome browser extension. And one of the reasons why I do this a lot is because I want to understand what else people are doing after they buy my book or before or whatever. Because that tells me a lot about how my positioning is coming across. I hasten to add that again, none of this is mandatory, it's about market awareness, not necessarily being at the behest of the market. And I hope that comes across really clearly.
[00:25:40] Matty: Yeah, I think that's a great entree to the third component we were going to talk about, which is content. Because I think that for a lot of authors, it's not too hard a sell to tell them that if they're writing a Jack Reacher-like book, they should look at the Jack Reacher covers and see what expectations they're setting. Similarly, with a blurb. I think people start pushing back a little more when you get to the content question and then it becomes, oh, are you selling out because you're writing to market? And I think that what you're saying is exactly the response to that. But talk about that a little bit.
[00:26:10] Nat: Yeah, as creative professionals, we have a dual role. If we're genre fiction writers, we want to write things that appeal to people, because I see myself as a storyteller, but I also want to be creatively fulfilled. If I don't enjoy what I am writing, it's going to be a very long workday. Like a very, very, very long workday. And we all know, like the one reinforced thing that successful authors always say is that it's quite hard work. You need to spend a lot of time with your posterior in the chair, typing.
[00:26:41] So it's a matter of self-preservation to carry on being creatively fulfilled and to not get stale in your work. And the way that I do that is by understanding what else is in the market and by folding that into my own creative process and to my own brand.
[00:26:59] So, to go back to what you were saying about writing to market, Matty, I think of writing to market as being a process of understanding what is working for readers and what they're liking, and then reflecting on that and saying, okay, how am I going to make this into Nat Connors' style? And I back myself always to do that.
[00:27:21] There won't always be things that I will want to write, and so I can differ from the market at times, but when I do it, I want to choose to do it. I don't think anyone should ever feel that being market-aware is a matter of having to do things. Instead, it's a matter of finding your market and finding your readers and making sure that you communicate very clearly what you're doing.
[00:27:42] And staying fresh as well, the other thing that I recommend, the reason why I recommend people looking at blurbs and looking at covers and looking at story elements, is that will help you stay creatively fresh. You'll see what other people are doing. And when I see what other people who are my comp authors are doing, I am inspired by them. One of the brilliant things about this job, I think, is that my comparable offers are not my competitors, they are my collaborators. The more great books they are writing, the better it is for me, because the more people will be reading books. And what I want is for a lot more people to read a lot more books.
[00:28:15] So yeah, that's always the thing people ask me a lot about, does writing to market mean I have to do the same thing as everyone else? No, I think you have to do your own thing for your own sake, but you have to understand who it's for and make sure that they really get it. I hope that helps.
[00:28:31] Matty: Yeah, absolutely. So the fourth component that you talk about is mechanics. And so now we're getting a little bit away from the writing craft and a little bit more into the publishing voyage aspect of this. And I understand that by mechanics, you mean things like release, schedule, pricing, things like that. Can you just expand on the mechanics portion?
[00:28:49] Nat: Yeah, exactly. So I invented the term mechanics as a sort of catch-all for everything about the outcome of you releasing your book, that isn't actually directly related to covers, blurbs, or content, the stuff that's in the book itself. Those things are things like, as you say, Matty, the frequency with which you release books, the price at which you're releasing them. Also your choices about standalone versus series, whether you choose to be in the Kindle Unlimited program, or whether you choose to be wide and to sell on a number of different storefronts.
[00:29:21] Also, how long your books are, those kinds of things. Those things, you're right, they are all publishing adjacent, and they're very much part of publishing and marketing, but they do also affect our decisions and they are affected by our context.
[00:29:35] For instance, if you have limited time to write, then it might take you a long time to write a long series. So you might not want to start off on a 12-book sort of WHEEL OF TIME magnum opus if you've only got an hour a week to write. You might want to start writing something else. That's an extreme example. Or if you want to, if you see yourself as being a writer in a genre which is heavily trad-focused, then you want to maybe consider pitching to trad publishers or understanding what's in the trad market at that point.
[00:30:06] So the thing I often say is, those things won't make or break your book, but they will make it more or less successful. So you can write a brilliant book with a killer cover and a kick-ass blurb, but if it's not at the right price point, or if it's twice as long or half the length as reader expectations, it's maybe not going to have the impact in the market that you would like it to. That's why I think those things are important.
[00:30:31] Matty: It is interesting that the data that you can get from, I spoke about this with Philippa Werner when we talked about ScribeCount, I think the same is true of any source like Kindletrends, where you're getting this data, and I think that the question is always now I have the data, what do I do with it?
[00:30:47] So in the mechanics realm, there's great information about the spread of the price of books. So many were at $2.99, so many were at $3.99, so many were at $4.99, and this is something that's of interest to me because I recently set up the price of my eBooks from $4.99 to $5.99. So I saw that I think that the $5.99 books represented like 9% of the pool of books that were being assessed. But then I think, is that good? Is it bad? Is it neither good nor bad? You know, what should I do? What should I do on the basis of that information?
[00:31:26] Nat: Yeah, that's a very good question. I think the most important thing to do is, when you're just taking pricing as a decision, try to see if there is a meaningful difference between books in your genre, relevant ones, at one price point and at another. So maybe the $5.99 books, hypothetically are all in a series, and maybe that's one of the reasons why their priced, maybe they're the second and subsequent ones in a series. Or maybe they're a lot longer, or maybe they're not.
[00:31:52] So if I were to advise someone on making pricing decisions, I would say, go look at, if you want to think about pricing at $5.99, filter in the spreadsheet or wherever, by the books which are $5.99 and say, is there anything specific about them, which kind of segregates them from the other books?
[00:32:11] If there isn't, you could maybe just give it a go. If there is, then you need to evaluate your books relative to them. Again, that doesn't mean that you have to do what everyone else does, but it does mean that's a reader expectation. So maybe, if all the $5.99 books are 100 K, 140 K, 140,000 words or so, maybe that's a reader expectation of a book at that price point. If your book is only 50,000 words and you price it at that much, maybe that's not going to be what readers are expecting.
[00:32:42] And so we see these things changing also over time. So I would recommend for all authors, that they keep an eye on pricing trends in their genre and sub-genre and try and update their own prices to take account of that. One of the things that I'd like to do is to look at the difference between first in series and subsequent books. Cause we know that a common pricing strategy is to have a lower price, like 99 cents or $2.99 for a first in series to encourage people to start reading and then put the prices up. So I'd like to see where that does happen, and to help people separate that out as well.
[00:33:17] Matty: Yeah, in other sort of publishing related things, I also thought that the Kindletrends newsletter was just great industry info that, correct me if I'm wrong, so each newsletter is assessing the top 100 books in that genre on Amazon for the previous week.
[00:33:38] Nat: Yeah, so there are weekly and monthly newsletters, and they serve different roles. The weekly newsletter is a little bit every week. I think I was saying, Matty, you can dip into it as much as you want. If you've got 30 seconds, you can read the by-lines at the top and it'll give you a kind of snapshot of stuff that's going on that week. What's trending, what story elements are going up and what are going down. So that's a very quick thing.
[00:34:01] If you want to dig into things more, then there's a lot more opportunity for you to do so. So picking up on your question before about, now I've got all the data, what do I do with it, if you've got a short amount of time, you can just skim it to kind of keep up with what's going on. And most weeks, you'll see stuff and then go eh, okay, and then you'll go back to your writing.
[00:34:19] The monthly newsletter is possibly a bit more in-depth, because that looks at the 400 bestselling books since the last month, the recently published ones, and it gives you more information about pricing and it lets you filter by story elements. So if you're interested in writing a book that's a heist book, let's say, maybe you get the top 400, the monthly newsletter and you say, okay, this month, I want to look at all of the other books that have heists in them. So I'm going to filter by words like "heist" and "robbery" and so forth in the tags.
[00:34:53] And I can also see that mentions of books that have heists and robberies in them have gone up pretty consistently over the last three or four months. So I'm going to take that subset, and that's what I guess I would say is, the monthly newsletter is more for subsetting things and drilling into your sub-genre and understanding a very fine relationship between your books and other comparable books in the market.
[00:35:18] The weekly newsletter is a bit more of a what's hot every week. Both of those are important, and again, you don't have to devote hours to this. When I came up with this information, I was very strong on saying, it has to be actionable and it has to be concrete for somebody, otherwise it's not in there. I don't like the idea of overwhelming people with data. It's all got to be focused and okay, that's cool, that's interesting, all right, now I'm going to go back to my job. We've all got enough ways to procrastinate and distract ourselves. I know I certainly have.
[00:35:46] Matty: I do like the approach, and I think Philippa of ScribeCount said the same thing, that you shouldn't open up the first one and then set aside half a day to drill through it. It's more like you open it up, you look at it, go, that was interesting, and then after a week, two weeks, a month of that, you're going to say, wait a minute, that looks different than it did last week, now I want to look at it. Yeah, not feeling overwhelmed, not feeling put off by the data that you're getting.
[00:36:10] Nat: Yeah, that's a really good point, is that often the interesting stuff that happens reveals itself over time. It's less about a single snapshot. Instead it's more about world trends, changes from one week to another, and only you can decide what are the interesting changes or trends for your context, you know?
[00:36:30] So if you look at the newsletters every week for a month, then as you say, after a month, you'd be like, that's interesting, I've seen this thing every week for the last three months. I've noticed that this story element is continually getting more and more popular. Okay, now I'm going to go and dig into it and do a bit more research about why that is. Is that one author who's driving the whole darn thing, or is it a bunch of authors, or is it the culmination of a series, where all of a sudden, the whole series is being promoted really, really heavily?
[00:36:56] One of the things I would also say there is, decide whether you are just browsing or whether you're answering a specific question. Both of those are totally fine, and I think you asked me how much looking at the data is too much? I think the key is why you're looking at it. Just browsing to keep abreast of what's going on is a legit thing to do, but also answering a specific question is also a good thing to do.
[00:37:17] So my question might be, of all of the covers in my genre at the moment, is there a difference in covers between the books which are $4.99 and the ones which are $2.99 or 99 cents? So I'm going to sort them like that, and I'm going to see whether there's a difference. Or maybe, all of the trad books tend to be published higher. What's the price point for trad books versus what's the price point for indy or self-published books?
[00:37:43] Matty: Yeah, I think that a cool way to use that would be, and I think that this is less of an issue than it would have been, I don't know, five years ago, but if you open up the books that are most similar to you from a data point of view, you're looking at the books in your genre, let's say at the price point you have yours set, and if the cover image I'll say, looks more professional than the others, at that price point, it may be an indication that readers would be willing to pay more for it. If yours looks like it was done on PowerPoint when compared to the other covers, then maybe it's an indication either that you better up your game so that you're playing in the same pool with the same professionalism, or that you've got to knock the price down. So I can imagine that could be an action item.
[00:38:29] Nat: Yeah, that's very true. The question I always ask, what message are you sending to readers with your cover and with your blurb? And every message is okay, there's nothing that you have to do, and I would never suggest to people outright that you have to spend X amount on a cover because I don't think that's true at all, but if you're in particular genres, then it behooves you to understand what's the norm for that genre and what reader's expectations are. And if you differ from those expectations, then it's good that you know about it.
[00:38:57] For instance, paranormal romance is an area where that's quite a competitive genre, and so a lot of the covers, if you look at the top 100, they are very professionally done and they're quite ornate. There's quite a lot going on there. So if you wanted to get into that genre, you need to be aware of that. You could do something else, you could have a very sparse cover and it would be very different, but you'd have to be aware that you were striking out on your own.
[00:39:21] Matty: So, I like to end each conversation with kind of an assignment to the listeners or the viewers as a question or an action item they should take. So I think that the action item here is, go to your favorite retail platform, go to the genre that you believe your book to be in and take a look at exactly what you're talking about. Maybe we'll specifically pose the question about the book covers, because that's pretty easy to take a glance at. And of course there'll be a link to Kindletrends in the show notes, so if people want to use that, and just take a look and I would love to hear people's comments about, what's their reaction. Do they feel like their covers are fitting in, not fitting in, and if not fitting in what action they might be considering taking as a result of that?
[00:40:07] Nat: Yeah, what are the key elements on your cover and how do they relate to the key elements on other covers and why? That's a really interesting question, you can spend all day doing that.
[00:40:16] Matty: Yeah, and then set a timer so that you don't do that when you get back to the writing.
[00:40:20] Nat: Yeah, and then get back to writing. I'm going to have a big sign that says, get back to writing and have it laminated, like just there, out of shot.
[00:40:29] Matty: I think that's wise.
[00:40:30] Nat, I wanted to thank you so much for reviewing that information and please let listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
[00:40:39] Nat: Yeah, absolutely. So my author newsletter, Kindletrends, you can get to at kindletrends.com. The first month is free. You can sign up and it's month to month, so there's no extended contracts, no premium pricing, any of that kind of stuff. I am an author, I'm not really an internet salesman, so I make things as simple as I can. The idea is that it should pay for itself every single month, and it should save you a couple of hours of work per month.
[00:41:06] If it doesn't, I'll just give you your money back, honestly. So the idea for me also, just as a personal note is, I’m quite glad that I can help give indy authors some reasonably heavyweight kind of data analysis, that traditionally would only be available to people who were part of a big publishing house.
[00:41:24] I feel that indies have so many more tools now than they did even 10 years ago, to deliver the product that they want to deliver and to write the way they want to write, and I want to play a small role in that. So one of my goals with Kindletrends is giving indy authors access to this kind of data analytics that normally would just have been blocked off, just have been blocked off to them.
[00:41:45] You can get me at [email protected]. And the other thing I wanted to highlight to the listeners and to the viewers, Matty, is I've got a bunch of free resources. If you go to Kindletrends.com/resources, all of those things are completely free, you don't have to be a subscriber to use them.
[00:42:02] There are things about the categorization, there's the ability to download all the Also Boughts in a Chrome browser extension, and a bunch of stuff like that. So those are all tools to help the community generally.
[00:42:12] Matty: Great, thank you so much.
[00:42:14] Nat: Thank you, Matty. It's been a lot of fun.
[00:00:08] Nat: Hi Matty, lovely to be here.
[00:00:10] Matty: I am happy to have you here, and to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, and first of all, just to say, I said, Nat "Nose" Connors because that's what Nat's name is listed as on our Zoom window here.
[00:00:21] Nat is a romantic comedy writer, medical scientist, and dance teacher, and creator of the Kindletrends newsletter for genre fiction authors. Nat created Kindletrends when he got fed up with trying to make sense of the Kindle store and wanted a no-nonsense summary of the most important information.
[00:00:36] And as an indy author himself, Nat understands the need for focused, relevant, and actionable information with which to make decisions. And I think this is actually going to be a really nice companion piece to episode 117, which was TRACKING SALES DATA AND HOW SCRIBECOUNT CAN HELP, which was with Philippa Werner. And that episode, I would say, focused a little bit more on using data to make decisions about one's publishing voyage. But we're specifically going to be talking today with Nat about using data to guide your craft.
[00:01:08] And so I wanted to start right out because, Nat, in your bio, you talk about the focus on genre fiction authors. So just so we understand the context, how are you defining genre fiction authors?
[00:01:21] Nat: Yeah, that's a really good question, Matty. And I think we could use up the entire hour talking about that. We won't, but when I think of genre fiction authors, I tend to, and this isn't an exclusive definition at all, but I think probably of two things. One, I think of people like myself who write partly for creative fulfillment, but also because they want to use their writing to help pay the bills, bluntly. They want to earn an income from their writing, either part-time or full-time, and they want to do that so they have the creative freedom to live their life the way they want, and so they can also write to some degree things that are creatively fulfilling for themselves.
[00:02:03] So the first thing I would say as a genre fiction author, is that you have a goal at least to earn an income, a big one or a small one doesn't matter, from your writing.
[00:02:13] The second thing for me, which is a consequence of that, is that you are focused, at least in some part, on what readers want, on what works for them and what they are enjoying.
[00:02:26] So I see myself, when I'm writing, I see myself as an entertainer first and foremost. I have my own craft and I care about the artistic expression of what I'm doing, but I'm also here to tell a story. I think of myself as a professional storyteller, which as we know, is a noble craft that has existed for as long as human beings have been gathering around campfires. So that's the thing, I think, is that you are doing this in part as a job, even if you're yet to earn money from it. And the other thing is that you are guided to some degree by your readership.
[00:02:58] So in a way, I would say everyone, every author is a genre fiction author to a greater or lesser degree.
[00:03:04] Matty: I agree with all of that. And I think that what it highlights nicely is the idea that each genre has certain expectations and tropes, and that the data side comes into it when you think about the importance of understanding expectations and tropes of the readers who enjoy that genre.
[00:03:21] And I watched an excellent video that you had done that was talking about four components of the content that you present to your readers: covers, blurbs, content, and mechanics. And I thought that might be a nice way to frame up our conversation and talk generically about the data that's out there for authors to use, and then also specifically how Kindletrends can help do that.
[00:03:43] So I wanted to start out with covers. Talk a little bit about the data that you look for, whether you're looking at it in Kindletrends or outside of Kindletrends, what data do you recommend authors look for in terms of covers?
[00:03:56] Nat: Yeah, I guess it's obvious to say that your book's cover is usually the first thing that potential readers see, whether it's in a store like the Kindle store, or whether it's in an ad or whether it's a blog post or something like that. So the way that I think about this, is that covers make a specific set of promises to a reader about what they're going to get in a book. Those promises are usually centered around a genre, so we can talk a lot about how different covers in different genres signify certain things, but they're also centered around brand, around your brand as an individual author.
[00:04:33] But just thinking back to one of your other podcasts, Matty, Nick Erik does some really good stuff about branding. I'm a huge fan of Nicholas Erik's work, I devour everything he writes about marketing, and he has a great series of things about how you can use elements in your cover to indicate your brand, to have a sense of commonality between your books.
[00:04:54] So to answer your question, I think the things that I would encourage authors to look at are, when you're looking at a bunch of covers, like a montage, get a lot of covers together, which are like the sort of work that you want to do, something that you could see being on the front of your books, and then ask yourself, what does each element signify? Why is the type the way it is? Why is the lighting the way it is?
[00:05:18] I have a bit of a checklist of different things that I work through, so for instance, are there people on the cover or is it a scene? What's the focus of the attention? If there are people, is there only one person or are there two people? Whether there's one or two, can you see people's faces or not?
[00:05:36] Some genres have very strong trends about whether you see someone's face. So to use a very obvious example, as I'm sure you know, in mystery or thriller or suspense, typically if there is a figure on the cover, it's generally not one where you can see their face. There are a small number of covers, I think, where that's different, so you'll see a face in half profile or something like that, that's another style for mystery, but often if there's a figure, it's shrouded or looking away from the camera to convey a sense of what's going on, a sense of mystery.
[00:06:09] By comparison, though, a lot of romance novels will have faces on them, either in sort of extreme closeup or they'll have two people. A very common trend for romance novels is to have two people's faces and then the title and then a sort of a landscape or something like that. So in sweet romance or in romantic comedy, that's a very common style. Does that sort of help?
[00:06:34] Matty: Yes, it does. In fact, one of the things that I wanted to ask you about was some of the tools that Kindletrends offers to do this, but one of the tools I started recommending to people is to subscribe to the BookBub Daily Featured Deal email for their genre, because there you get a list of six or however many books that the good folks at BookBub have decided are going to be appealing to people of that genre. And every once in a while, I'll hit one where those tropes are so obvious. So I believe that I'm probably subscribed to mystery, suspense, thriller, and one time, of the six or seven books in there, almost all of them had a small, silhouetted image of a man in black against a background of European capitals and identifiable buildings. It's so striking.
[00:07:24] But, one of the things I loved about Kindletrends is, you make it, so you don't have to wait until your BookBub Feature Deal email comes in.
[00:07:33] Nat: Yeah. Yeah, so one of the things that I started doing, and again, a lot of the things that are in Kindletrends, the things that I started doing for myself, and then I shared them with my friends and, then they said, hey, can you do this for this genre, can you do it for that genre, and so forth. So having a cover montage every week is a really low effort way of keeping up with what's going on in your genre. I think of this as being like exercise. A little bit every day or every week is something that's easy to keep up with and it attunes you to what's happening.
[00:08:01] Also, it gives you ideas, it helps keep you creatively fresh. So if you're thinking about what guidance to give your cover designer, you can go to the last couple of weeks or the last couple of months of top selling covers and scan down them and say, okay, so about 50% of them use this style and maybe 25% of them use this style. And there's always one or two that do something completely different. And so I'm going to pick out these ones and I'm going to send them to my cover designer to say, hey, can we blend some of this with my own individual elements?
[00:08:32] One of the things that I think I want to keep coming back to, Matty, is the idea that being market-aware doesn't mean that you are driven by the market kind of slavishly. You don't have to adhere to all genre tropes, you don't have to adhere to all of the standard elements in covers. But it behooves you, I think, to be aware of them, so you know where you are aligned with the norms of your genre and where you're differing from the norms of the genre.
[00:09:00] Matty: I think it was one of my conversations with Orna Ross, when we did the series on THE SEVEN PROCESSES OF PUBLISHING, and we talked about the fact that a book's cover image is the visual equivalent of a keyword that is sending an instant message to the browser about the kind of book that it is. And I think sometimes people shy away from, sure, I'm writing a mystery, but I don't want to be like everybody else. Well, you can take the risk of not being like everyone else in terms of the general approach you take, but then the risk is that people look at your book and they don't realize it's the kind of book that they would be interested in reading, because you're not sending them those visual cues.
[00:09:37] Nat: Yeah, yeah, so that's exactly analogous I think to the way that I put it, when I say that covers make a promise to the reader. And so when you look at a cover, what promises is it making to you about genre and about the author, and possibly about the setting? So you said that like the European capitals. Even if you don't know which European capital it is, you get an idea of where the book is going to take place or what the element or something like that.
[00:10:02] So for me covers make a promise to the reader and then that promise is developed in the blurb, where you go into a bit more detail about the things that you've highlighted or suggested in the cover. And then finally, you deliver on that promise in the story itself.
[00:10:17] So a large part of what I encourage people to think about, like in my research work is, getting authors to think about how things are set up in the cover and then they're developed and expanded in the blurb and then they're delivered in the story, and you can draw a throughline between those.
[00:10:34] And you find, once you start thinking about this, it's actually obvious. You look at top-selling books and you go, okay, there's the hooded figure and he's in a graveyard or something like that. So I think, okay, death, some sort of death is going to be involved in this book. And then, there's some sort of death mentioned in the blurb, and then of course death is an element in the book. So for any genre, that's the thing that I would always encourage people to start doing, is look at cover, then blurb, then content, and see how they fit together, because that's the track that you're drawing readers down when they pick up your first book.
[00:11:08] Matty: I really liked you pulling it together in that way. And I do want to move on to blurbs, but before I do that, I also wanted to mention one other thing that I really liked about the Kindletrends newsletter, and that is the color block assembly of those books that you include in the montage. Can you describe a little bit what that is?
[00:11:27] Nat: Yeah, so what I'm trying to do there, Matty, is next to every montage of the top-selling covers, I've also extracted the key colors that are in those covers and plotted them in accordance with how much there is. So if there's a lot of blue in a cover, then there'll be a big blue block at the beginning. If there's a lot of red, then there'll be a big red block. And what that does is, cover designers love this because it helps you get an idea of what the dominant colors are in a particular market.
[00:11:57] And sometimes you'll see quite strong trends. So a very common thing in urban fantasy is to have a purple or a green background behind a character, often a girl or something like that. And so you can see those kinds of dominant shades. Again, you don't have to use those shades, but it behooves you to be aware of them.
[00:12:17] The other thing of course, is to help you see how one shade complements another. So if you see a mystery author and their author name is often in big block letters for certain kinds of action type mysteries, big block letters in yellow or red. And what that implies is, you're going to need a dark background to help the author name really stand out. And abstracting out the colors helps you see those things.
[00:12:42] Matty: It would be nice to see in sub-genres, like the difference in a color block montage between a thriller mystery and a cozy mystery, like I'm sure a color block for cozy mysteries would be primary colors, bright.
[00:12:57] Nat: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, so if you compare the cozy mystery newsletter each week with the broader mystery, thriller, and suspense one, then you're right, you will see profound differences just in the colors. And in a way, I often talk about a sort of a blind test, if I were to give you a cover blind, without even the title on it, could you tell what the genre was? And the answer is, yeah, generally you can, because if it's got cupcakes on it or an Irish terrier or something like that, it's probably not a hard-hitting sort of Jack Reacher-type murder novel, right?
[00:13:29] Matty: Yeah, I just think seeing those together in that way, in that montage way, is very useful.
[00:13:35] So let's move on to blurbs. I liked what you said about the blurb is now supporting the message that you've first attracted a potential reader with your cover image.
[00:13:46] Nat: Yeah, so I think again, firstly, let me say that a blurb writing is a real skill and there are lots of great author services, people out there who can help you write different kinds of blurbs. I have a few go-to styles for writing blurbs, and some sort of starting points, which I think I mention on my website, but you really need to experiment with different styles that suit you. However, again, the two things that I would always encourage people to do are, be aware of what's going on in your genre, in the top 100 or the top 400, and ask yourself which ones of these blurbs stick out for you. Why do they stick out for you? And I'll talk about a technique for doing that in just a sec.
[00:14:26] And the other thing is understanding, as we were saying before, what is the blurb describing that was promised in the cover and is going to be delivered in the book?
[00:14:38] Sometimes this is quite explicit, like it's a list of tropes. So in a romance novel, you'll often say, this has a guaranteed HEA <happily ever after>, or this is a friends-to-lovers romance or something. So in some genres, you'll really spell out what the key story elements are.
[00:14:54] In other genres, you might not do that so much. So in a mystery novel, I think that's less common in a way. But you'll still see some of the kind of key words or key phrases, which indicate what kind of mystery novel it is.
[00:15:08] For instance, you can probably tell a cozy mystery quite readily from the blurb, compared to a more gritty, dark kind of murder mystery. The thing that I was going to say before was about keeping up with blurbs is, I recommend that everyone skims very quickly, without spending much time on it, skims the top blurbs in their genre, maybe each week or every fortnight or something like that. In Kindletrends, I've got a downloadable PDF where you can just grab all the blurbs in one list and just skim-read them.
[00:15:37] I do this every week, and I don't spend a lot of time on it, I just mark down the ones that catch my eye. And then I go back to think about, why do they catch my eye? I don't necessarily want to change my blurb style to write that way, but I do want to see what made me stop about it.
[00:15:51] This is an exercise that takes me maybe 15 to 20 minutes a week, so it's easy, and it's fun too, because you get to see the top blurb writers doing their thing, and you're the audience. And I find whenever I do that, I come away feeling a bit energized about writing my own blurbs.
[00:16:06] Matty: Do you find that there's a difference between blurbs written for indy books and for traditionally published books? Because I remember, I wish I could remember who had made this observation to me, but that traditionally published books rely much more heavily on a synopsis of the plot, which this person was advising against. Do you see any trends there?
[00:16:26] Nat: That's an interesting one. I mean, first I would say that, as always, it's different for different genres, but in genres which have a heavy representation of trad books, clearly, the covers are often different. Although there are trends for each genre, covers will be often more different, I think, than blurbs. However, I would agree with you that sometimes, trad-published books will tend to summarize the story or fit it in within the stable of the publishing house itself, more than advertising the book directly to the reader.
[00:17:03] The other thing I would observe generally is that trad-published books will often make more use of quotes from reviewers or from editors or from other authors. So that's one of the ways like if I was going to try and tell one or the other, I think if there's a quote from PUBLISHERS REVIEW WEEKLY or something on a book, it's probably a trad book.
[00:17:22] Matty: Yeah, another thing that I liked in the Kindletrends information, and I wasn't sure if this was related to blurbs or not, was the word cloud idea, is that something you pull from blurbs?
[00:17:32] Nat: Yeah, so that's a very simple way. What we're doing there just to summarize for readers is, we're getting all of the words in all of the blurbs for a particular genre for the top 100 and we're counting them all up. And a word cloud, which I think probably a lot of people have seen in other contexts, makes the most common words large. So this is a way of making it obvious what the dominant elements are, whether they're nouns, adjectives, or whatever, in a series of blurbs. And if you study these over time, you see some really interesting differences.
[00:18:03] Often you will find, for instance, in historical fiction, you'll see a lot of words about people's station, words like "Duke" and "Earl" and "inheritance" and so forth. Obviously, in a mystery book, you'll see a lot more words about things that have happened. So "crime" is a really obvious one, but also you will find "race" or "run" or, so a lot of verbs in a way.
[00:18:27] This isn't again, to say that you have to use any of those things, but it's a really quick, thirty-second way of saying, okay, here are the things that people talk about most commonly in this genre, so maybe I should think about. This is what readers are primed for. Maybe that's the way to think about it is, readers are primed for hearing these kinds of words, because these are the words that they hear every day when they go to pick up a book. So I need to think about my blurb in relation to those words.
[00:18:54] Matty: A while ago, I had gone through the exercise of copying the text of my five- and four-star reviews on Amazon into a tool that produced a word cloud. And I think that one of the revelations I had was that I write supernatural suspense and many of the reviews referenced, use the word "haunted," and I didn't have "haunted" anywhere in my blurb, so I ended up adding it to my blurb to more closely match what the happy readers said in their reviews.
[00:19:21] Nat: Yeah, okay, so that clearly is a story element, and I use the term story element quite generally, because it could mean themes or tropes or all kinds of things, but that's a story element that is resonating a lot with your readers, and that's a way that they are describing things. And often, I'm really aware of the fact that sometimes the way that we see our books as authors and as creators is not the way that readers see them at all. And that's okay. Neither of these things is more important than the other, but it's really helpful to interact with readers and to see what they do and don't like, and what resonates with them.
[00:19:55] Obviously as an author you have to be a bit careful about that because there's always going to be people for whom your book just really doesn't work. And no one likes getting one- and two-star reviews, it's lousy. But you also have to understand if there's something valuable there, you also have to understand that. But your book isn't going to be for everybody and that's okay. But understanding what really works for your readership and doubling down on it, that's a very satisfying and a very productive thing to do, I think.
[00:20:21] I was just going to say about your covers, Matty, one of the first things that I noticed, and I think I said it in just about our first email was, wow, what great covers. And one of the reasons they were great, like they looked very classy. But also, they signify, they do this thing of signposting the elements in your book very, very clearly, I think.
[00:20:39] Matty: Oh, that's great to hear, thank you.
[00:20:42] Nat: Yeah, they had the double whammy because they're very obviously, they're all thematically related, I can see a clear thematic kind of throughline between them, but they also leave me in no doubt about the kind of books that you write, which is cool, that's what we should all aim for.
[00:20:56] Matty: Yeah, thank you. I have to say that the theme, I've had several different versions of the cover of my first book, THE SENSE OF DEATH, and the main thing that's changed, I mean the image has been tweaked by professional image tweakers, but the font has changed, and I feel like the font that I have now is the one that's the best match with the tone. It's sort of retro-looking but modern-looking at the same time. I don't know quite how to express that, but I'm really pleased with the font that the cover designer came up with for that.
[00:21:23] Nat: Yeah, that's good. So again, going back to one of the things I learned from Nick Erik's writing was, if you are planning to write in a series, or even if you're not, even if you're putting out multiple books, then you need to build in some flexibility in some of your choices, including your font choice, because you're not always subject to the cover art that you have.
[00:21:43] You're not always going to be able to have your fonts, the author name or title, in exactly the same size. So you want a font which is flexible enough that it can fill up like, most of the top part of the cover or one which can shrink down a bit, if you need to tweak it a little.
[00:22:00] Matty: Yeah, and one of the things that I did is I got the font names from my cover designer and then purchased those fonts, so I was able to reuse them.
[00:22:08] Nat: Yeah, and then you can use them in other ads and all of those kinds of things. So the more that you can create a reinforced, particularly if you're writing in a series, if you can reinforce particular elements. That's another thing just jumping back to covers for a minute, when I'm looking at a series, I try to look at what the similarities in that series are. So how do we know that these books, without even looking at the titles, how do we know that these books are all in a series? And when you're designing a series cover, or when you're informing a cover designer, thinking about how many different ways you can mix and match color schemes and layouts, that's quite challenging too. So seeing them all side-by-side in a series, like we do in the cover montage, helps you see that.
[00:23:18] Matty: Something you had mentioned made me think of this, and I think this will probably still hold true when we talk about the third element, content, but I think it's really apparent with the cover and the blurbs. And that is that we've been talking so far about, you know your genre, you sign up for the Kindletrends email newsletter, or you sign up for the BookBub daily Featured Deal email to take a look at what else is going on. And you look for where the disconnects are, so that maybe you could consider complying with the expected tropes further.
[00:23:48] I think the other thing where that can be useful is, if you think you're writing noir and so you subscribe to the noir newsletter, and then everything that's coming across is looking different to you, it could also be that you're not really writing noir, that what you think of as your self-assigned genre may not be the same genre that readers will see. So a disconnect could have two different solutions. One is to change your presentation, and one is to recognize that you're really in a different genre.
[00:24:20] Nat: Yeah, so one of the things that I also encourage people to do is think, not just about their genre in a very big picture sense, but, and this is, I guess, kind of obvious, drill down as much as possible into your sort of sub-genre, if you want to call it that, and also into your comp authors. So understand what else your readers are reading. You can do this by looking at the Also Boughts. If you've got a couple of books out and they're selling, look at the other things that people are buying who have bought your book. And sometimes they'll look very similar to yours, but in the example that you're talking about, Matty, what you might find is that people are buying your book and they're liking it, but everything else they're buying is really not what you thought it was. And that's interesting. It doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong, but it does mean that something, reader behavior is not what you expect.
[00:25:09] And, I have a freebie thing on my website, which allows people to download the Also Bought for their book or another book, it's a Chrome browser extension. And one of the reasons why I do this a lot is because I want to understand what else people are doing after they buy my book or before or whatever. Because that tells me a lot about how my positioning is coming across. I hasten to add that again, none of this is mandatory, it's about market awareness, not necessarily being at the behest of the market. And I hope that comes across really clearly.
[00:25:40] Matty: Yeah, I think that's a great entree to the third component we were going to talk about, which is content. Because I think that for a lot of authors, it's not too hard a sell to tell them that if they're writing a Jack Reacher-like book, they should look at the Jack Reacher covers and see what expectations they're setting. Similarly, with a blurb. I think people start pushing back a little more when you get to the content question and then it becomes, oh, are you selling out because you're writing to market? And I think that what you're saying is exactly the response to that. But talk about that a little bit.
[00:26:10] Nat: Yeah, as creative professionals, we have a dual role. If we're genre fiction writers, we want to write things that appeal to people, because I see myself as a storyteller, but I also want to be creatively fulfilled. If I don't enjoy what I am writing, it's going to be a very long workday. Like a very, very, very long workday. And we all know, like the one reinforced thing that successful authors always say is that it's quite hard work. You need to spend a lot of time with your posterior in the chair, typing.
[00:26:41] So it's a matter of self-preservation to carry on being creatively fulfilled and to not get stale in your work. And the way that I do that is by understanding what else is in the market and by folding that into my own creative process and to my own brand.
[00:26:59] So, to go back to what you were saying about writing to market, Matty, I think of writing to market as being a process of understanding what is working for readers and what they're liking, and then reflecting on that and saying, okay, how am I going to make this into Nat Connors' style? And I back myself always to do that.
[00:27:21] There won't always be things that I will want to write, and so I can differ from the market at times, but when I do it, I want to choose to do it. I don't think anyone should ever feel that being market-aware is a matter of having to do things. Instead, it's a matter of finding your market and finding your readers and making sure that you communicate very clearly what you're doing.
[00:27:42] And staying fresh as well, the other thing that I recommend, the reason why I recommend people looking at blurbs and looking at covers and looking at story elements, is that will help you stay creatively fresh. You'll see what other people are doing. And when I see what other people who are my comp authors are doing, I am inspired by them. One of the brilliant things about this job, I think, is that my comparable offers are not my competitors, they are my collaborators. The more great books they are writing, the better it is for me, because the more people will be reading books. And what I want is for a lot more people to read a lot more books.
[00:28:15] So yeah, that's always the thing people ask me a lot about, does writing to market mean I have to do the same thing as everyone else? No, I think you have to do your own thing for your own sake, but you have to understand who it's for and make sure that they really get it. I hope that helps.
[00:28:31] Matty: Yeah, absolutely. So the fourth component that you talk about is mechanics. And so now we're getting a little bit away from the writing craft and a little bit more into the publishing voyage aspect of this. And I understand that by mechanics, you mean things like release, schedule, pricing, things like that. Can you just expand on the mechanics portion?
[00:28:49] Nat: Yeah, exactly. So I invented the term mechanics as a sort of catch-all for everything about the outcome of you releasing your book, that isn't actually directly related to covers, blurbs, or content, the stuff that's in the book itself. Those things are things like, as you say, Matty, the frequency with which you release books, the price at which you're releasing them. Also your choices about standalone versus series, whether you choose to be in the Kindle Unlimited program, or whether you choose to be wide and to sell on a number of different storefronts.
[00:29:21] Also, how long your books are, those kinds of things. Those things, you're right, they are all publishing adjacent, and they're very much part of publishing and marketing, but they do also affect our decisions and they are affected by our context.
[00:29:35] For instance, if you have limited time to write, then it might take you a long time to write a long series. So you might not want to start off on a 12-book sort of WHEEL OF TIME magnum opus if you've only got an hour a week to write. You might want to start writing something else. That's an extreme example. Or if you want to, if you see yourself as being a writer in a genre which is heavily trad-focused, then you want to maybe consider pitching to trad publishers or understanding what's in the trad market at that point.
[00:30:06] So the thing I often say is, those things won't make or break your book, but they will make it more or less successful. So you can write a brilliant book with a killer cover and a kick-ass blurb, but if it's not at the right price point, or if it's twice as long or half the length as reader expectations, it's maybe not going to have the impact in the market that you would like it to. That's why I think those things are important.
[00:30:31] Matty: It is interesting that the data that you can get from, I spoke about this with Philippa Werner when we talked about ScribeCount, I think the same is true of any source like Kindletrends, where you're getting this data, and I think that the question is always now I have the data, what do I do with it?
[00:30:47] So in the mechanics realm, there's great information about the spread of the price of books. So many were at $2.99, so many were at $3.99, so many were at $4.99, and this is something that's of interest to me because I recently set up the price of my eBooks from $4.99 to $5.99. So I saw that I think that the $5.99 books represented like 9% of the pool of books that were being assessed. But then I think, is that good? Is it bad? Is it neither good nor bad? You know, what should I do? What should I do on the basis of that information?
[00:31:26] Nat: Yeah, that's a very good question. I think the most important thing to do is, when you're just taking pricing as a decision, try to see if there is a meaningful difference between books in your genre, relevant ones, at one price point and at another. So maybe the $5.99 books, hypothetically are all in a series, and maybe that's one of the reasons why their priced, maybe they're the second and subsequent ones in a series. Or maybe they're a lot longer, or maybe they're not.
[00:31:52] So if I were to advise someone on making pricing decisions, I would say, go look at, if you want to think about pricing at $5.99, filter in the spreadsheet or wherever, by the books which are $5.99 and say, is there anything specific about them, which kind of segregates them from the other books?
[00:32:11] If there isn't, you could maybe just give it a go. If there is, then you need to evaluate your books relative to them. Again, that doesn't mean that you have to do what everyone else does, but it does mean that's a reader expectation. So maybe, if all the $5.99 books are 100 K, 140 K, 140,000 words or so, maybe that's a reader expectation of a book at that price point. If your book is only 50,000 words and you price it at that much, maybe that's not going to be what readers are expecting.
[00:32:42] And so we see these things changing also over time. So I would recommend for all authors, that they keep an eye on pricing trends in their genre and sub-genre and try and update their own prices to take account of that. One of the things that I'd like to do is to look at the difference between first in series and subsequent books. Cause we know that a common pricing strategy is to have a lower price, like 99 cents or $2.99 for a first in series to encourage people to start reading and then put the prices up. So I'd like to see where that does happen, and to help people separate that out as well.
[00:33:17] Matty: Yeah, in other sort of publishing related things, I also thought that the Kindletrends newsletter was just great industry info that, correct me if I'm wrong, so each newsletter is assessing the top 100 books in that genre on Amazon for the previous week.
[00:33:38] Nat: Yeah, so there are weekly and monthly newsletters, and they serve different roles. The weekly newsletter is a little bit every week. I think I was saying, Matty, you can dip into it as much as you want. If you've got 30 seconds, you can read the by-lines at the top and it'll give you a kind of snapshot of stuff that's going on that week. What's trending, what story elements are going up and what are going down. So that's a very quick thing.
[00:34:01] If you want to dig into things more, then there's a lot more opportunity for you to do so. So picking up on your question before about, now I've got all the data, what do I do with it, if you've got a short amount of time, you can just skim it to kind of keep up with what's going on. And most weeks, you'll see stuff and then go eh, okay, and then you'll go back to your writing.
[00:34:19] The monthly newsletter is possibly a bit more in-depth, because that looks at the 400 bestselling books since the last month, the recently published ones, and it gives you more information about pricing and it lets you filter by story elements. So if you're interested in writing a book that's a heist book, let's say, maybe you get the top 400, the monthly newsletter and you say, okay, this month, I want to look at all of the other books that have heists in them. So I'm going to filter by words like "heist" and "robbery" and so forth in the tags.
[00:34:53] And I can also see that mentions of books that have heists and robberies in them have gone up pretty consistently over the last three or four months. So I'm going to take that subset, and that's what I guess I would say is, the monthly newsletter is more for subsetting things and drilling into your sub-genre and understanding a very fine relationship between your books and other comparable books in the market.
[00:35:18] The weekly newsletter is a bit more of a what's hot every week. Both of those are important, and again, you don't have to devote hours to this. When I came up with this information, I was very strong on saying, it has to be actionable and it has to be concrete for somebody, otherwise it's not in there. I don't like the idea of overwhelming people with data. It's all got to be focused and okay, that's cool, that's interesting, all right, now I'm going to go back to my job. We've all got enough ways to procrastinate and distract ourselves. I know I certainly have.
[00:35:46] Matty: I do like the approach, and I think Philippa of ScribeCount said the same thing, that you shouldn't open up the first one and then set aside half a day to drill through it. It's more like you open it up, you look at it, go, that was interesting, and then after a week, two weeks, a month of that, you're going to say, wait a minute, that looks different than it did last week, now I want to look at it. Yeah, not feeling overwhelmed, not feeling put off by the data that you're getting.
[00:36:10] Nat: Yeah, that's a really good point, is that often the interesting stuff that happens reveals itself over time. It's less about a single snapshot. Instead it's more about world trends, changes from one week to another, and only you can decide what are the interesting changes or trends for your context, you know?
[00:36:30] So if you look at the newsletters every week for a month, then as you say, after a month, you'd be like, that's interesting, I've seen this thing every week for the last three months. I've noticed that this story element is continually getting more and more popular. Okay, now I'm going to go and dig into it and do a bit more research about why that is. Is that one author who's driving the whole darn thing, or is it a bunch of authors, or is it the culmination of a series, where all of a sudden, the whole series is being promoted really, really heavily?
[00:36:56] One of the things I would also say there is, decide whether you are just browsing or whether you're answering a specific question. Both of those are totally fine, and I think you asked me how much looking at the data is too much? I think the key is why you're looking at it. Just browsing to keep abreast of what's going on is a legit thing to do, but also answering a specific question is also a good thing to do.
[00:37:17] So my question might be, of all of the covers in my genre at the moment, is there a difference in covers between the books which are $4.99 and the ones which are $2.99 or 99 cents? So I'm going to sort them like that, and I'm going to see whether there's a difference. Or maybe, all of the trad books tend to be published higher. What's the price point for trad books versus what's the price point for indy or self-published books?
[00:37:43] Matty: Yeah, I think that a cool way to use that would be, and I think that this is less of an issue than it would have been, I don't know, five years ago, but if you open up the books that are most similar to you from a data point of view, you're looking at the books in your genre, let's say at the price point you have yours set, and if the cover image I'll say, looks more professional than the others, at that price point, it may be an indication that readers would be willing to pay more for it. If yours looks like it was done on PowerPoint when compared to the other covers, then maybe it's an indication either that you better up your game so that you're playing in the same pool with the same professionalism, or that you've got to knock the price down. So I can imagine that could be an action item.
[00:38:29] Nat: Yeah, that's very true. The question I always ask, what message are you sending to readers with your cover and with your blurb? And every message is okay, there's nothing that you have to do, and I would never suggest to people outright that you have to spend X amount on a cover because I don't think that's true at all, but if you're in particular genres, then it behooves you to understand what's the norm for that genre and what reader's expectations are. And if you differ from those expectations, then it's good that you know about it.
[00:38:57] For instance, paranormal romance is an area where that's quite a competitive genre, and so a lot of the covers, if you look at the top 100, they are very professionally done and they're quite ornate. There's quite a lot going on there. So if you wanted to get into that genre, you need to be aware of that. You could do something else, you could have a very sparse cover and it would be very different, but you'd have to be aware that you were striking out on your own.
[00:39:21] Matty: So, I like to end each conversation with kind of an assignment to the listeners or the viewers as a question or an action item they should take. So I think that the action item here is, go to your favorite retail platform, go to the genre that you believe your book to be in and take a look at exactly what you're talking about. Maybe we'll specifically pose the question about the book covers, because that's pretty easy to take a glance at. And of course there'll be a link to Kindletrends in the show notes, so if people want to use that, and just take a look and I would love to hear people's comments about, what's their reaction. Do they feel like their covers are fitting in, not fitting in, and if not fitting in what action they might be considering taking as a result of that?
[00:40:07] Nat: Yeah, what are the key elements on your cover and how do they relate to the key elements on other covers and why? That's a really interesting question, you can spend all day doing that.
[00:40:16] Matty: Yeah, and then set a timer so that you don't do that when you get back to the writing.
[00:40:20] Nat: Yeah, and then get back to writing. I'm going to have a big sign that says, get back to writing and have it laminated, like just there, out of shot.
[00:40:29] Matty: I think that's wise.
[00:40:30] Nat, I wanted to thank you so much for reviewing that information and please let listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
[00:40:39] Nat: Yeah, absolutely. So my author newsletter, Kindletrends, you can get to at kindletrends.com. The first month is free. You can sign up and it's month to month, so there's no extended contracts, no premium pricing, any of that kind of stuff. I am an author, I'm not really an internet salesman, so I make things as simple as I can. The idea is that it should pay for itself every single month, and it should save you a couple of hours of work per month.
[00:41:06] If it doesn't, I'll just give you your money back, honestly. So the idea for me also, just as a personal note is, I’m quite glad that I can help give indy authors some reasonably heavyweight kind of data analysis, that traditionally would only be available to people who were part of a big publishing house.
[00:41:24] I feel that indies have so many more tools now than they did even 10 years ago, to deliver the product that they want to deliver and to write the way they want to write, and I want to play a small role in that. So one of my goals with Kindletrends is giving indy authors access to this kind of data analytics that normally would just have been blocked off, just have been blocked off to them.
[00:41:45] You can get me at [email protected]. And the other thing I wanted to highlight to the listeners and to the viewers, Matty, is I've got a bunch of free resources. If you go to Kindletrends.com/resources, all of those things are completely free, you don't have to be a subscriber to use them.
[00:42:02] There are things about the categorization, there's the ability to download all the Also Boughts in a Chrome browser extension, and a bunch of stuff like that. So those are all tools to help the community generally.
[00:42:12] Matty: Great, thank you so much.
[00:42:14] Nat: Thank you, Matty. It's been a lot of fun.
Links
https://kindletrends.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Kindletrends/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuKbk4V9H9E
Episode 117 - Tracking Sales Data and How ScribeCount Can Help with Philippa Werner
Episode 102 - The Second Process of Publishing: Design with Orna Ross
https://www.facebook.com/Kindletrends/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuKbk4V9H9E
Episode 117 - Tracking Sales Data and How ScribeCount Can Help with Philippa Werner
Episode 102 - The Second Process of Publishing: Design with Orna Ross
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
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