Episode 244 - Understanding Your Book's Neighborhood with Nat Connors
June 25, 2024
"Market research is an ongoing process if you're an author. And in fact, I call it market awareness more than market research--we need to be aware of our market, aware of what's going on around us. We make most of our time for writing because that's what we love, but we also have to look up from our keyboards occasionally and see what other people in our genre are doing, see how readers are responding to it, and think a little bit about how that affects us." —Nat Connors
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Nat Connors discusses UNDERSTANDING YOUR BOOK’S NEIGHBORHOOD, including the importance of understanding what books you want your book to appear next to and how authors can use data to guide their publishing decisions about positioning their books. We discuss wide versus KU, series versus standalone, pricing, cover design, blurbs, and compliance with genre conventions. We discuss the importance of tracking the best practices in your genre, how to solicit input from readers to get the most valid results, and using categories to educate the retail platforms about your books. And Nat has a special offer for listeners of The Indy Author Podcast!
Nat Connors is a romantic comedy writer, medical scientist, and dance teacher, and creator of the Kindletrends newsletter for genre fiction authors. Kindletrends started 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. Nat uses the Kindletrends information to plan his own writing, publishing, and book launches, so it has to be focused, relevant and actionable.
Links
Nat's Links:
https://kindletrends.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Kindletrends
https://x.com/kindletrends
https://www.youtube.com/@kindletrends
Fantasy 'State of the Nation', powered by Kindletrends: https://kindletrends.com/static/fantasy/ - a free interactive infographic for fantasy authors, referenced in our discussion.
Kindletrends newsletters: https://kindletrends.com - subscription is free for the first month, and you can cancel any time. Use the code 'INDYAUTHOR' on signup for a USD5 discount, making it USD10/month, forever.
Kindletrends free resources for authors:
Also Boughts Downloader Chrome Extension: https://kindletrends.com/download-also-boughts-chrome-extension/
Kindle Power Search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUP5I1hBq00
List of categories on the Amazon Store: https://kindletrends.com/categories/
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
https://kindletrends.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Kindletrends
https://x.com/kindletrends
https://www.youtube.com/@kindletrends
Fantasy 'State of the Nation', powered by Kindletrends: https://kindletrends.com/static/fantasy/ - a free interactive infographic for fantasy authors, referenced in our discussion.
Kindletrends newsletters: https://kindletrends.com - subscription is free for the first month, and you can cancel any time. Use the code 'INDYAUTHOR' on signup for a USD5 discount, making it USD10/month, forever.
Kindletrends free resources for authors:
Also Boughts Downloader Chrome Extension: https://kindletrends.com/download-also-boughts-chrome-extension/
Kindle Power Search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUP5I1hBq00
List of categories on the Amazon Store: https://kindletrends.com/categories/
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Nat! When you consider your own book’s cover, blurb, conventions, and the other aspects Nat mentioned, do you feel like their “in the right neighborhood” along with the books you consider comps? If not, are there steps you might take to address that?
Please post your comments on YouTube--and I'd love it if you would subscribe while you're there!
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
AI-generated Summary
The episode of The Indy Author Podcast, featuring Nat Connors, delves into numerous strategies for genre fiction authors to enhance their publishing decisions and optimize their writing processes.
Data Utilization for Authors:
Nat emphasizes the importance of authors understanding their genre's dynamics, recommending a breakdown of big data into manageable segments. He advocates for what he calls "market awareness," suggesting that authors periodically engage with market trends while balancing writing and promotional efforts.
Choosing Publishing Platforms - Wide vs. Kindle Unlimited (KU):
The discussion shifts to deciding between publishing wide (across multiple platforms) or exclusively through Amazon's Kindle Unlimited. This decision is noted as genre-specific, with some genres traditionally performing better on KU. Nat mentions how book length and author preference for marketing channels play into this choice, with tools like Draft2Digital facilitating multi-store marketing.
Series vs. Standalone Books:
Considering whether to write a series or standalone books is another focal point. Nat points out that series may benefit more from KU due to the binge-reading potential, whereas standalone books might appeal differently to the market. He also discusses the impact of series on book cover design, stressing the need for visual consistency across series.
Pricing Strategies:
The conversation touches on pricing strategies, highlighting the recent trends of increasing ebook prices. Nat discusses the strategic pricing of series books and the implications of Amazon’s pricing policies on royalties, advocating for pricing that aligns with perceived value and competitive positioning.
Cover Design and Market Trends:
Cover design is a critical topic, with Nat advising authors to revisit their cover designs periodically to align with current market trends. He recommends subscribing to reader-focused newsletters to understand visual trends and stresses the importance of covers in marketing and reader engagement.
Blurb Writing and Genre Conventions:
The role of book blurbs and the need to keep them updated with genre conventions is discussed. Nat suggests using AI tools like ChatGPT to refresh blurbs, while cautioning against losing originality.
Understanding and Utilizing Genre Categories:
Nat explores the significance of accurately categorizing books in online retail platforms like Amazon to ensure they appear alongside similar titles, enhancing visibility and sales potential.
Kindletrends and Author Resources:
Nat concludes by discussing Kindletrends, which provides genre-specific insights and trends to help authors make informed decisions.
Data Utilization for Authors:
Nat emphasizes the importance of authors understanding their genre's dynamics, recommending a breakdown of big data into manageable segments. He advocates for what he calls "market awareness," suggesting that authors periodically engage with market trends while balancing writing and promotional efforts.
Choosing Publishing Platforms - Wide vs. Kindle Unlimited (KU):
The discussion shifts to deciding between publishing wide (across multiple platforms) or exclusively through Amazon's Kindle Unlimited. This decision is noted as genre-specific, with some genres traditionally performing better on KU. Nat mentions how book length and author preference for marketing channels play into this choice, with tools like Draft2Digital facilitating multi-store marketing.
Series vs. Standalone Books:
Considering whether to write a series or standalone books is another focal point. Nat points out that series may benefit more from KU due to the binge-reading potential, whereas standalone books might appeal differently to the market. He also discusses the impact of series on book cover design, stressing the need for visual consistency across series.
Pricing Strategies:
The conversation touches on pricing strategies, highlighting the recent trends of increasing ebook prices. Nat discusses the strategic pricing of series books and the implications of Amazon’s pricing policies on royalties, advocating for pricing that aligns with perceived value and competitive positioning.
Cover Design and Market Trends:
Cover design is a critical topic, with Nat advising authors to revisit their cover designs periodically to align with current market trends. He recommends subscribing to reader-focused newsletters to understand visual trends and stresses the importance of covers in marketing and reader engagement.
Blurb Writing and Genre Conventions:
The role of book blurbs and the need to keep them updated with genre conventions is discussed. Nat suggests using AI tools like ChatGPT to refresh blurbs, while cautioning against losing originality.
Understanding and Utilizing Genre Categories:
Nat explores the significance of accurately categorizing books in online retail platforms like Amazon to ensure they appear alongside similar titles, enhancing visibility and sales potential.
Kindletrends and Author Resources:
Nat concludes by discussing Kindletrends, which provides genre-specific insights and trends to help authors make informed decisions.
Transcript
Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today my guest is Nat Connors. Hey, Nat, how are you doing?
Nat: Hi, Matty, it's great to be back!
Meet Nat Connors
Matty: It is lovely to have you here, and to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Nat is a romantic comedy writer, medical scientist, dance teacher, and creator of the Kindletrends newsletter for genre fiction authors. Kindletrends started 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. Nat uses the Kindle Trans information to plan his own writing, publishing, and book launches. So, it has to be focused, relevant, and actionable.
And I invited Nat back to the podcast, he's been a previous guest, to talk about the state of the genre. We're going to be talking generally about what is the data that every author should be tracking related to their own genre, but because it's always more fun to talk about something specific than something general and theoretical, we're going to be talking about fantasy.
I figured I talked so much about crime fiction, it was time to talk about something different. But if you're not a fantasy author, I would recommend you not tune out because the information we're going to be sharing is something that is applicable to really any kind of genre fiction that listeners may be working on.
How can authors use data to guide their publishing decisions?
Matty: And so, Nat, I'm just going to ask you to sort of step back and talk generally about how people should be looking at the data that's available to them out there, in order to better plan their writing and publishing work, and then we'll dive into the details of a couple of pieces of data that you specifically recommend people look at.
Nat: Yeah, sure. So, this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time, as Matty and many others will know, about how you go about getting your head around all of the things that are going on in your genre, and in your subgenre, and the specific environment that you're in, and I've got a bunch of stuff that I've written about this stuff. About ways to take a very big problem and divide it up into little chunks because when you're looking at a whole genre, something like fantasy, which has got so many different aspects to it and so many different moving parts, it can be a bit overwhelming. You read some books and you think, well, I like this, but do other people like this? Having a way of listing the things that I need to look at and the things I need to think about helps me feel like I'm getting around stuff and I'm not missing anything. One of the things I often say to people is that market research is an ongoing process if you're an author. In fact, I call it market awareness more than market research. I like to think of the fact that we need to be aware of our market, aware of what's going on around us. We make most of our time for writing because that's what we love, but we also have to look up from our keyboards occasionally and see what other people in our genre are doing, see how readers are responding to it, and think a little bit about how that affects us. So, I've got a few different things that I go through step by step when I'm looking at what's going on in my genre and we're going to do that sort of bit by bit with fantasy but to try and generalize it at the same time.
Wide versus KU
Matty: Well, one of the things that I think is top of mind for many authors who are deciding what route to take for their publishing is the whole question of wide versus KU. My understanding is that this is very genre dependent. There are just genres that have historically proven to do well in KU and genres that have not.
I think that would be a great point to start if people are deciding whether they want to go the KU route or not. What pieces of information do you recommend they be aware of in order to make that decision?
Nat: Yeah, that's a very good place to start, Matty. I think there's a bunch of factors, and some of those factors, just stepping away from the market, are also to do with you, the writer, and your own preferences for where you want to market and sell your work. and also for the length and the tempo at which you prefer to write.
I'd never want anyone to feel like they have to do a particular thing if they want to be in any genre. It's absolutely true that some genres have traditionally been quite heavily KU. We've also seen that changing, I think. And when we look at the fantasy, what we'll see is that there are some subgenres in fantasy, which are quite all-in on KU, but there are others which are pretty much 50/50.
So, I guess I'd put it down to a couple of factors. As far as the individual author is concerned, as we know, KU pay rates are per page. So, if you tend to write longer, then, relatively speaking, KU is going to be a better bet for you. So, a good example there is LitRPG, which has really exploded in popularity over the last, what is it, four years, five years, I think.
I probably first heard the term about 2019, just before the lockdown. now, and then that, that was a genre, subgenre, that was always around before that, but it sort of got this name and suddenly exploded in popularity. lit RPG books, my colleagues who write in that genre, tend to run quite long.
And by quite long, I mean more than a hundred thousand words. They are often sort of in serials. So I think that has contributed to them being in KU quite a lot. On the other hand, there are a lot of shorter fantasy, and there are a lot of more traditional, sort of swords and sorcery fantasy books that are published by small publishers, not by the big five, big four, but they, in that situation, they are more often wide.
So another factor for authors to consider, I think in terms of KU versus wide, as well as their writing tempo, is also how much they want to spend time on marketing to different stores. There are great services now like Draft2Digital, which will make it very much easier for you to get your books onto multiple stores, but then of course.
Remember, there's the exclusivity agreement, so if you are wide, then you are prevented from having your books in KU for a three-month period. We also know, then, that quite a few authors have practiced putting books in KU for the first three-month period and then taking them out and going wide.
Matty: Yeah, I think that one of the areas that I as someone who is not in KU have benefited from being aware of the KU versus Y distinction is when I'm running book bub ads. And I know that I would go through, and I would find other authors who are successful in my genre, which is Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, and I would run book bub ads against them.
But one thing that I realized very quickly I had to check was whether they were in KU or not. Because I realized that running a BookBub ad, now I'm talking about ads, not feature deals, but running a BookBub ad against a KU author's audience when I myself am not in KU is probably targeting the wrong group because KU readers are looking for something different than people who are not KU readers.
And so I feel like, you know, if I had spent money on advertising to KU author followers, then I probably would have been not using my advertising dollars to the best effect because I'm advertising to people who aren't used to interacting with getting content in that way.
Nat: Yeah, that's true. I mean, I think also there, my instinct is that it is less a matter of the difference in terms of what people are looking for, and maybe a bit more the simple fact that they have already paid for KU. So for them to pay extra money for a book, it's much more difficult for them to justify.
So, you're absolutely right that targeting if you're not a known author to them, it's much less likely that they're going to take a
punt on your book rather than taking a punt on another book that's actually in KU already. It's interesting also, and I don't know if you heard this, but as a romance author, traditionally, like five years ago, it was very difficult to get a book bub if you were in KU.
There was a belief, true or otherwise, that you were much more likely to get one if your books were wide than in KU, and you could get them if you were in KU, but you had to be a very heavy hitter. Was that a belief in Mystery and Suspense as well? I think it's changed a bit now, and I've seen, you
Matty: Yeah, not that I've heard of. And I also think that it's important to point out to people who aren't familiar with BookBub that I think you're talking about feature deals, sort of two approaches to BookBub. One is to apply for a feature deal, which is quite challenging to get and expensive if you land it, and then ads, which anyone can run. But, it could well be. I just don't recall, hearing, you know, hearing chatter about that in my genre.
Nat: yeah, yeah. So, so talking about the Y versus KU distinction in the case of fantasy, what we can see, just looking at the data that I've got in front of me now, is that actually, for the top 200 books in all of fantasy. They're actually pretty much 50 50 wide versus KU. if you look at this sort of split across other genres, like say paranormal romance, or urban fantasy, then you'll find a much higher proportion of KU, books compared to wide, but across all of fantasy, it's actually pretty much 50 50.
At the moment. Now there's a couple of, in the case of fantasy, there's a couple of, reasons for that. And probably one of the, the most common ones, or the most obvious ones is that, there are quite a lot of TRA published fantasy books in the top 200. Those are the ones which tend to be more wide.
So we've got a situation where kind of 50% wide, 50% KU. The KU half is mostly indie. Mostly and the wide half is much more trad. So that another, another factor, I think, for listeners is if you are interested in being trad published now or in the future, then that might affect your decisions about whether you're IN KU or wide.
Of course, Your commitment to, enrollment in KU is only a 90-day commitment, so there are always options to change things later on, and I think, we, and we'll see this when we get to the covers. I think in the past, there was a much bigger, distinction between KU covers and wide covers. It was generally believed that you sort of had to recover your books if you were going to go wide, otherwise they wouldn't sell.
I think that's much less the case now than it has been in the past. Yes,
Matty: to that conversation.
Series versus Standalone
Matty: Another piece of data that you recommend people look at is series versus standalone. And this is usually not something that people are, like, some people who are really organized are actually making this as a decision, but I think many authors, if they're like me, finish their book and then realize it's one or the other. So can you talk a little bit about when people are looking at data and using fantasy as an example, and they're looking at the series versus standalone, what are you recommending people look at there?
Nat: Yeah, sure. Well, another kind of obvious thing is that if you are in mind to write a series or you're continuing a series, then KU in some ways is a bit more appealing because if people like your work, it's very easy for them to binge and to just keep reading the next book in the series and the next book and the next book. And, as a lot of listeners will know, often, whether you're in KU or not, people in the past have priced the first book in their series quite low, so 99 cents or $2.99, in order to encourage people to take a gamble on it. And then, when you get them interested in your writing style and you get them invested in your characters, then you can carry on, you know?
However, of course, planning out a series is a lot of work, and it's quite reasonable, I think, to start, I've certainly done this, to start something without really knowing whether the world has got enough in it for you to write a compelling series, you know? I think not every long series, or even series of just a couple of books, starts out that way.
So, I think, and also, in fact, again, when we get to covers, we'll see that if you have a series that places different constraints on your cover design, because as we know, we want the covers to be linked in one way or another, and when we look at a cover montage, you can really see examples of things where there's a bunch of books in a series, and you want it to be very clear to the reader that that's what's going on.
Pricing Considerations
Matty: Oh, the pricing conversation is interesting because we're recording this in the middle of 2024. At the end of 2023, I made a change to my pricing because everything was getting more expensive. For a long time, my pricing model was that for my nonfiction books, my first in series book was $2.99 and then the subsequent books were $4.99. And I started feeling like not only is it nice to get more money for each book, but I felt as if the pricing defines the books that you want to be compared with. Now many of the traditionally published ebooks are $14. There are reasons that indie authors are not doing that because we get penalized for pricing a book over $9.99, but I put up all my first in series ebooks to $6.99, and then I increased my first in series to $3.99, which I still feel as if it's a price that I as a reader am willing to take a chance on, and I think that's kind of a benefit that indies have.
I mean, it's unfortunate that we're, in a sense, being forced to do this because of the Amazon rule that if a book is priced over $9.99, then you get a lower royalty rate, but it also makes it easier for readers to say, "Oh, here's somebody that looks interesting, but I don't know them, but I want to check it out."
And having that lower cost of entry to the series, I think, is really smart.
Nat: Yeah, that's true. I think also in your case, Matty, and I know I've said this a lot in the past, your covers and your branding are very classy, so it looks like it's done by a trad house, it looks like books that should be on the shelf next to some of the famous trad mystery authors, and that's a specific branding decision, and I think it's great. Look, fantastic, I've always been a big fan of your covers, but that's one decision and there are other decisions, but I think for where you are at and for the price point that you're talking about, particularly since, as you've said and we'll see, prices across most all genres have been steadily marching upwards over the past four years or so, which is great news because of that, I think you're absolutely right that your books can stand a higher price point.
Matty: Yeah. I'm sort of fascinated with this topic lately of what. What do you want? What books do you want to show up next to yours? And when I think about the books that I would love to have my books show up next to, many of them are traditionally published, and so you're sending a message one way or the other to your audience based on the kinds of information that you're putting on, you know, the quality of your cover, but the style of your cover, and it's all messages that you're sending to your potential reader.
Nat: Yes, exactly. It's a question of a sort of visual language and the pricing and the language in your blurb and so on and so forth. So, I'd never say to any author that they have to do exactly the same things that their comp authors or comp titles do, but I would always say that you need to be aware of them because if you want to be seen next to those books and also boughts and also reads and those kinds of things and in ads, then you need to be aware of what they're doing.
And to some degree, you need to align with it. I guess that's the point I'd say you've got to align with what those, in your case, those trade authors are doing. You don't have to copy it, but you've got to not kind of go against it, as it were.
Cover Design
Matty: Well, we've been referring to cover design and I'm going to seize the opportunity to go slightly off the fantasy topic because I'm very interested in this currently. For my Lizzie Ballard thrillers, I had covers that I love. Like, when I hold one of those print books in my hand, it gives me good goosebumps because I think they're lovely covers. But what I realized was that, first of all, the subtleties that make the print covers lovely are kind of lost in the tiny thumbnails online. And then the other thing I realized is that in some ways they were almost more fantasy-esque than thriller-esque. And I'm just having them redone, and I'm starting to be a real believer in the idea that you really need to revisit your covers maybe every five years because I always recommend that people subscribe to an email newsletter like BookBub or BargainBooksy, FreeBooksy, one of those, eReader News Today, Fussy Librarian, there are many of them out there. Subscribe as a reader to your own genre, because oftentimes the trends in the cover are so starkly evident when you look at the list, and I would pull up my daily BookBub newsletter for mystery, thriller, suspense. And I was like, I don't know, my book cover isn't looking like it fits in with these books now.
And you have these trends that come and go, like for a long time with a thriller, it was the woman in the yellow jacket running away. I don't know why yellow jacket was so popular. But I finally just thought, you know, I have to stop being sort of emotionally tied to the beautiful covers that I love and say, "You know, that was fine, but it's not what I need to be doing in 2024."
Can you talk more generally about advice you would give to people on that front?
Nat: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I mean, first I always loved those covers and I think that was maybe one of the first things I said to you when we first started talking some years ago was, wow, those are really classic covers. But yes, you're absolutely right. The thing is, new books come out all the time. And, what that means is those books, the readers read them, and those books will change readers' expectations of what is being communicated, the visual language. of particular elements or colors or devices on the page that changes over time because of course it does and so what your book, what anyone's cover is communicating in 2018 or 2019 is not what it is going to be communicating to readers in 2024.
Those things don't change overnight. And, you know, I'd never say that you have to constantly be changing your covers because I think sometimes that could be confusing as well as expensive and a lot of work. But the timeframe that you're talking about, Matty, I think is absolutely right. and you're very right that subscribing to reader-focused newsletters is a great way to see a low effort way to see what other people are doing because you can, as you say, imagine your book next to them and say, well, does it fit in?
And you, like, if you will see, I suspect, probably, you were seeing books that, if you read the blurb or the ad, they sounded like your books, they sounded like a potential comp, but the cover was completely different. So you're sort of thinking, well, hang on, this looks like my kind of book, it looks like my reader's kind of book, more to the point, but my cover is saying is speaking a really different language to this book, which is kind of coming out now.
And again, you don't have to change absolutely everything, but it pays to be aware of that. And some of the best redesigns, I think, that I've seen have been quite subtle ones, where they are updating things, but they're keeping what was good about the original cover.
You know, you can see this a lot in fantasy and in some other speculative fiction genres with the trend towards what are called discrete covers. I think maybe we've talked about this a bit in the past, that there are now a lot more covers that have objects or sort of symbolic representations of them of things on them a bit like that so the classic example I think from a long time ago was the Harry Potter books that the first editions had illustrated covers and then there were some more ostensibly more adult, images of, of symbols and things.
And you can see the difference. And they convey, they convey different things in a way that's happened for a lot of people in fantasy now. And in fact, if when we look at a montage of all of fantasy books, we can see a lot more of those discrete object style covers. that, that they often include things about the, the nature of the story.
And they also just going back to the issue of, series. a discrete or object style cover often makes it quite easier for you to have a common through line in terms of the same, having similar elements or complementary elements on a particular series. So if you've got a series of objects or whatever.
Matty: Yeah, the Harry Potter one is interesting because my guess is that when they were first putting out the first book, and it was very much targeted at children, that they came up with that illustrated idea, and then they had to kind of carry it through, but then I think when they realized what appeal that had to adult readers.
They wanted to readjust it a little bit to make it less like, not cartoonish, but more serious. I'm not coming up with exactly the
Nat: something, something, yeah, absolutely something that somebody in their sort of 40s would be more likely to go into a bookstore and pick up. yeah, you're absolutely right. But I think also, if we look at the history of all of the covers of a sort of a very famous book or book series, we can see these changes as well.
So, one reason to change covers, of course, is to appeal to a different market segment. But another one is the thing that you were saying about your books that, even if you're trying to appeal to the same people that you were five years ago, their expectations have changed because of all of the other books coming out.
And now, just looking at the cover montage, now we can see that, fey or books about, fey or elves will often have these kind of symbolic discrete covers, whereas in fantasy lit RPG books will often have more cartoon, illustrated type covers, actually more similar to the old Harry Potter books in some ways.
Matty: And we're going to be talking eventually about an easy way people can see all this information, but a good available resource for people would just be to go to your favorite online retailer, go to your genre, look at the top, however many books, top 100 books or whatever, and try to picture your book cover among those and see if it makes sense to you, visual sense to you or not.
Nat: Yeah, absolutely. It's okay with you, Matty, in the show notes, we'll list a couple of free tools, which I've got, which will make it very easy for you to just download that kind of information. So to download a cover montage and the simplest things, you know, if you're very short on time, then the things that I would recommend would be one, as Matty says, sign up to relevant newsletters in your genre. Scan them, because that's what your readers are seeing, and the other one is go to the relevant top 100s in your genre, download the cover montage, and just look at that. That's a very short job every week, and once you do it for a month, you'll start seeing a whole lot of little changes, and those changes can be quite profound.
Matty: Maybe a good news for indie authors is that something I've noticed in my BookBub emails is that I'll see the same authors come up, over the course of a month, over the course of a couple of months, the same authors pop into those. And the covers from book to book are very similar, the overall design is very similar. In a sense, almost identical, but maybe the colors are slightly different. I'm following this approach with the updated covers for the Lizzie Ballard books, but rather than a cover designer having to start from scratch each time they do a new book in a series, it seems as if readers are accepting of and maybe even looking for more consistency. So you make a few tweaks from cover to cover, but the designer isn't having to start from scratch each time, which I think could be a more efficient and more cost-effective way of indie authors getting covers in, you know, if what I'm saying is true.
Nat: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And in some situations where you have serials, that is, and by serial I mean a story which follows essentially the same group of characters over perhaps three or four or even more books, and there is sort of an overall story arc and the focus is on that, which we do, we see in a number of situations. So, at the moment, short romance, just to take a quick look. Diversion, Short Romance, has a few different segments in it. Some of it is the sort of fairly steamy instant attraction thing, but there's also, and this is from fairly recent, quite a lot of serials which have very, very similar covers. And the reason I bring this up, Matty, is to pick up on your point about the similarity of covers. in that situation, the covers are so similar that I actually thought they were all the same cover, from a distance, you know, in a montage or in the sort of thumbnail size thing you get in an ad, they all look like the same book, and it's not until you, and it seems to work, but, it's not until you actually look at the thing, that it will sort of say, you Book five or book four or something like that. So the focus there, if you're a serial writer, is much more on reinforcing the brand of the serial as a whole. And of course, a lot of them are in KU. So it's easy for people to pick up The next one and the next one and to keep reading, you know, to reinforce the brand of the serial as a whole, rather than to differentiate the books in the serial, you know, because if people come to the book and they think, Oh, hang on, this is book five, and I haven't read book three yet, they're just going to go back to book three, they're much less likely to kind of give up. So different, I think the take-home message that I'm trying to get to there, Matty, is that, your choices, listeners' choices about, cover design, whether it's for stand-alones or series, are affected not only by your comps, but also by the reading habits of people in your genre. whether they prefer to read, sort of, long books, or whether they prefer to read IN KU, or wide, or whatever.
Matty: Yeah, I think another good takeaway for people would be, whatever tool they're using, whether that would be, email, like BookBub emails or other tools, that when you see a cover from an author that you would consider a comp author that you really like, just copy that off into a little, you know, a little, book. electronic bulletin board because, it's, it can be very informative. That's how I ended up landing on the redesign that I wanted because I started seeing this emerging, trend in thriller type covers. I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. And so I, you know, collected half a dozen that I really liked, and I was able to send that to my cover designer and say, I
Collect Best Practices in Your Genre
Nat: Yeah, well, that's good. I mean, one per five years, that's probably okay. Yeah, absolutely. So keep a, another great tip, I think, for listeners is to keep a crib file, like a file of all the things that you like, which are relevant to you in terms of your comps, terms of phrase, advertising taglines, loglines for books, and also covers, of course. Sign up to one of those free services like Notion or Airtable, and you will quickly, if you do that sort of once a week, end up with a whole lot of stuff that you can use to start making decisions. Because I think in the past when I've tried to recover things or rewrite my blurbs, I've started from a blank slate, and that was a long way up the hill, if you know what I mean, whereas if you've got a bunch of other stuff that people are doing and you think, "oh, that's cool," or "wow, I wish I'd come up with that," that makes it that much easier for you to get into the groove of what it is you're actually trying to do.
Study Genre Conventions for Blurbs
Nat: When you're rewriting blurbs, because we, I know we haven't talked about blurbs very much this time, Andy, but again, that's a thing. Blurbs drift. They change just the same way covers do and for exactly the same reasons. So they are something that's worth revisiting periodically to see what the other blurbs in your neighborhood are saying to readers, you know, and they're also arguably cheaper and easier to work on than covers.
Matty: One of the things that I've seen that's very interesting is when, like, ChatGPT started to be all the rage. And I would do things like I would take my existing blurb and put it into ChatGPT, and I would say, like, rewrite this as in the style of a best-selling thriller or mystery or suspense novel. And, you know, a lot of times the information I got back was quite good. But I realized that there's like an identifiable ChatGPT style. And so it's just an argument for using these things as a tool, not for the final product, because what I did find is that I would think like, "oh, that's a word, like, it's using a word that I hadn't thought of." I'm going to incorporate that word. But I think as people get more sophisticated about it, I think it's a good look at the kinds of information that AI platforms like ChatGPT put out, then they're going to read something and it's going to be clearer that, where it's coming from, because there would be, like, there were very identifiable ways that it would close out the blurb. And, and it sounded okay to me the first time, but after I read three or four, I was like, "yeah, no."
Nat: In stats, it's called regression to the mean, Matty. And a lot of those LLM text generation things, it's very much regression to the mean where, it looks good the first time and looks pretty good the second time and then you do it a few times and you start to look in the store and you realize how many other blurbs are like that and you're like, "wait a minute, you're not being as creative as you kind of implied you were, buddy." So yes, absolutely a great way to help if you're creatively blocked, but generally much better if you use it as a starting point rather than as an ending point.
Soliciting Input - Ask People to Rank a Selection
Nat: The other tip that I have, if you don't mind me mentioning, Matty, which I know I've mentioned before, is when I get people to evaluate stuff, I never send one blurb and say, do you like it? Or tell me what's wrong. I always send them three. Not two, but three. And I say, rank these in the order that you prefer. And this has a bunch, yeah, this has a bunch. Now, maybe one of them is your real one and two of them are kind of crappy ones that you just got ChatGPT to do. Doesn't matter. Don't tell anyone that. Just present them neutrally, but the reason I do this is because people often find it much easier to rank things in order of their preference than to say specifically that they do or don't like something because in a way, saying whether they do or don't like something is a little bit of an emotive decision, you know, and if you don't like something, then it's sort of incumbent upon you to articulate why, a lot of people don't like giving feedback that is along the lines of, I don't really like this, but I've got no idea why. And yet, that's actually a valid feeling, particularly if it's something that a reader might have. Whereas, if you give your blurbs to five people, and they all rank a particular blurb bottom of three, probably don't use that one. Like, whatever else is going on, that's probably not the blurb you want to use, you know, if there's one, what I find usually is that there is one that everyone dislikes, and sometimes it's the one that I thought was good, and rarely there is one that everyone thinks is the best, and in that situation you go with your own intuition and your experience and stuff, but yeah. I hope that helps.
Consider the "Key Topics" of Your Genre
Matty: Yeah, that's great advice. When we were talking about, we haven't hit, I haven't given you a chance to talk about fantasy books specifically, very, but I think that the generic stuff is great because then this, everybody can apply it to their own. Circumstances, but this is one where we might want to, we might end up diving into fantasy as an example a little bit, but you had said key topics is another piece of data people should be looking at.
Nat: Yeah. Absolutely. So one of the things that I've spent a lot of time thinking about is trying to understand what's in a book that is resonating with readers, we use words like tropes, and archetypes, and settings, and themes, and so forth, and those are all, they're all perfectly valid words, and I use them a lot, but for me, they're all trying to answer the same question, which is, what's in this book? What am I going to get when I read it? And our blurbs, of course, are one of the main things, as well as the title and the cover. Those are the instruments by which we signal to readers what you're going to get, what's the emotional experience you're going to get when you, you pick up a book. Readers have their own language about doing this, and it's not always the same one that we do. And it's very genre specific. I think that's maybe a bit of a statement of the obvious, but one of the things that I try to do when I'm looking at a genre is to say, what does this specific word mean in this genre? So to give you an example, I'm looking at the fantasy, a list of sort of key topics in the top 200 fantasy books at the moment. And I'm seeing some, like, there's some kind of obvious ones like supernatural and dragons and fey and elves and yeah, it's not surprising that those, but I'm also seeing an interesting one, which is military. And the reason that I, I've sort of collected these things together is to get a general sense of what's going on. So in this case, in the fantasy books, if a book has any mention of military units, So, I don't just use general words or military words, so generals and corporals and captains or battalions or, you know, strategy, those kinds of things. I kind of group them all into one topic. So what I'm trying to do is to get a general sense of what's going on. in the case, this was coming, came to me this morning, the use of those military words in a fantasy blurb, it means something different to the way it might mean something in, say, a mystery blurb. So, if you see military words in a fantasy blurb, I think that's more likely to imply that there is
Assessing Your Genre Assignment
Matty: But I think the other thing that's always important to point out is you may have picked the wrong genre. I think that writers are notoriously bad at understanding their own genre because they're writing from their heart. Many writers are writing, "Oh, I want to write a military fantasy book," but some are just writing a story, and then they're stepping back and saying, "What is this?" And so if you're stepping back and looking and you're seeing a disconnect, maybe it's not a matter of changing what you're doing to match what you thought were the comps. Maybe it's a lesson that your comps are different than you thought. And if your blurb or your tropes or your cover is looking more like something else, maybe you just need to recategorize the genre that you've put your book in.
Nat: Yeah, totally. The way that I would put it is that at the moment it might be that the current conventions and reader expectations of that genre are not a fit for the story that you're telling. And it might be that other conventions and other expectations in another genre, at the moment, are better because we know that genres are constantly on the move, and reader expectations are constantly on the move. And so it doesn't mean that your book is doomed. It doesn't mean that it's never going to find a readership. It just means that the expectations of what people, what's resonating with people right now in that area, aren't a fit for what you're doing. So, there are a lot of other areas, and sometimes it can take a bit of work to go and find those other areas, you know?
The Neighborhood of Your Books
Nat: Maybe this is where I can talk about this concept that I've been thinking of to do with a neighborhood—that is, the neighborhood of your books is not just your genre or your subgenre, and it's not just your comps. For me, it's actually the things that make your comps and your subgenre what they are. It is the language that people around you, your authors around you, use in their blurbs. It's the visual elements that they use on covers to signify particular things. So, we'll be able to see that a visual element in one genre signifies one thing. Same visual element, different genre. Different signification.
It might also, your neighborhood, as an author, might also include some of the other products that your readers are interested in. So for instance, if you have a fantasy reader, they are much more likely to be interested in fantasy TV shows, so your neighborhood also in that case includes fantasy TV shows. It might also include podcasts or videocasts about fantasy. Now, I'm not saying all of this to sort of overwhelm listeners and to say, "Hey, you've got to spend all your time keeping up with all of this other media rather than writing," but rather to think of, to encourage people to think of their neighborhood as being kind of a broad thing, which includes the books that people are reading, but it also includes the language that they're using and what emotions are being triggered when they read books, for instance. And my argument, the reason why I'm talking about this, is because I think the important business decisions are actually made in that microenvironment. They're actually made in your neighborhood, much more than about the generally what's happening in your genre, so in mystery or in fantasy, there will be some big trends, but, my argument is actually it's the little trends, the things that are happening close to you, which are the ones that really affect the day-to-day business decisions you make as an author, like your covers, your example before, Matty, of how your reader expectations for books like yours have changed in terms of covers. That's a great example because if you were just looking at all mystery books, that might not be so obvious, you know?
Using Categories to Educate the Retail Platform
Matty: So, we've been talking, I think that the conversation about neighborhood is hopefully a good entree to the last topic I wanted to discuss, which is categories. So, I can imagine that neighborhood and categories have a connection, but how direct is the connection between those two concepts?
Nat: Yeah, well, I mean, a lot is discussed about categories on the Kindle store, and on the wide stores as well, although generally the wide stores don't have the same level of detail, I think, in terms of how many categories they have. Whether that's a bad thing or not, I'm not sure, but sometimes I think it's not a bad thing at all. But, one thing's for sure, there are a heck of a lot of categories on the Amazon store, and they are, the way I see them, is actually they're a way of teaching Amazon what books your books are like. They are the most direct way of teaching Amazon about your comps, and I think that's why they are important.
I think they're less important in the sense of an objective description of what's in your book. I think what matters is when you're looking at categories, where are the books that you want to be next to? Those are the categories that you should be in, even if the label on top of the category isn't quite how you'd describe your book. I would urge listeners to take a pragmatic approach and say, "Okay, well, this category, when I look at the top 100, or I follow it for a bit, I see that this category includes a lot of my comps and the language, the visual language and the language of blurbs in this category, is a fit for what I'm doing." So that's the category for me, even if the name of the category isn't what you personally see as being your book, you know, because ultimately all of that metadata is a way of teaching Amazon who to show your book to with the greatest chance that they're going to like it. When we look at a lot of these categories, a lot of them are actually pretty arbitrary.
Just looking at fantasy, obviously, most books in the top 200 in fantasy, have at least one category in fantasy, but there are also a fair chunk, so what, 25 percent of them have a romance category as well. A bit more than 25 percent are in one of the literature and fiction categories, so mythology and folk tales and so on and so forth. Now, is that where you want to be? Well, that depends, but it's always worth looking at the other categories that are kind of around yours, and you know, listeners I'm sure know that when you go to a book on the Amazon store, you can scroll down, and when you go about halfway down the page, you'll see the three top-ranked categories for a book. Again, I would put those in your crib file that we talked about a little bit earlier and make a note of those categories and go and investigate them when you can, because you might find that there are some other categories, as well as the obvious ones, which are a good fit for your book.
Matty: That's great. Especially now because I think that Amazon's trying to get its hands around this idea. You had suggested that maybe more categories isn't necessarily a good thing. And some of the changes that they're making, recently, I think, suggest that they also agree that more categories are not necessarily a good thing. And I think it's an incentive for people to think about it more carefully than maybe they would have in the past.
Nat: Yeah, well, I think maybe what's happened is that there was a huge explosion of them when ebook reading took off. And so they were added a lot. I don't know, Matty, if you've ever looked at all of the categories under mystery thriller and suspense, like the thriller ones and stuff. Boy, there are a lot of them. And boy, I don't know what the difference is. And I mean, you could sort of invent one, but then you go and look, and in actual fact, in the top 100 or 200, there's a lot of overlap. So what that's telling me is I don't think readers really know either, but it doesn't change the fact that at the moment, the important thing to do is go and find the ones where your comps are most likely represented and find the ones that are within your neighborhood and stick with them. It may be that there will be a reduction in categories in the future, because I don't think that readers really browse by category. I think this is, you know, pure speculation, but I think that most buying decisions are made by books being shown to readers, and the things that we talked about before, the visual language of the cover, the language of the blurb, those are the things
that make a reader give a buying decision. I don't believe that many readers come to new books and new authors by browsing categories. So they're still important, but they're important indirectly rather than directly, because they can teach Amazon who our books should be shown to, so they then make the buying decision.
Matty: And I like that idea of looking at it both ways. Go to the category and see what other books are there, but then also look at the books that you consider to be comps and go backwards and see what categories they're putting themselves in. So we've talked about lots of great information, some of which would be quite labor-intensive to collect manually. So I want to give you an opportunity to talk about a less manual way that people can get the information that we've been talking about.
Nat's resources, including the Kindletrends newsletter
Nat: Thank you, Matty. So, there are a few things. First, I hope we can fit all of this in the show notes. I have a bunch of free tools for the author community that make collecting information quite easy. I've got a Chrome browser extension where you can download cover montages, and data about the Top 100, and also about your also boughts.
We didn't get time to talk very much about also boughts, but they are important when they're around because they come and go. They are a really important part of understanding what's going on in your neighborhood because they are what readers are prepared to pay money for. They don't have to be your also boughts; they might be the also boughts of your comps or also boughts of an author to whom you aspire to be like. Go and look at those when you can find them because, to me, they are the most concrete aspect of reader behavior because it involves putting down some money, and that's what really counts. So, I have a tool that allows you to download all of the also boughts from a particular book very quickly and easily.
What I also do, though, to help people keep up with what's going on in their neighborhood, is make an author newsletter called "Kindle Trends," and this is a subscription thing. I'll give you a discount code just at the end, but the idea is that you sign up, and every week or every month, I send to your inbox a quick description of what's going on in your genre of interest or genres of interest. There are 14 different ones, and you get links to everything that's trending on the Kindle store and suggestions about books to look at because they've just come out and they're shooting up the charts, and so forth. So, what I'm trying to do is to take a lot of the donkey work of research out and make it so the author can spend all the time doing the stuff that only you can do, which is reading and understanding how it fits with you.
Matty: Yeah, I'm a subscriber of Kindletrends and, just as one example, one way that I've used it recently is when I was rethinking my pricing. It was great to be able to go into the Kindletrends newsletter and see the breakdown, in the top 100, of how many books were priced at each price level. Of course, I could have come up with that eventually myself, but it is super nice just to open a newsletter and have it right there for you.
Nat: Yeah. So, my 30-second description is it is like the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times for working fiction authors. If you've got 30 seconds, you can just read the front bit, read the headlines. If you want to dig into a specific thing that's going on in your genre, then it's all laid out for you there as well. I've got a bunch of videos showing you how to do things, and some examples of how to do research in your genre, and to keep up to date. What's going on using Kindletrends as a base and all of the data there. I want to take a moment to mention this: All of the data is available to you. So, if you want to go and do your own thing, if you really like using Excel, people like that do exist. If you really like doing that kind of thing, then, hey, look, then I'm very much an open data advocate. So, I try to make things straightforward for authors. But also, if you want to know why something is the way it is, or why I'm recommending things, there are no black boxes. It's all laid out there for you, and you can go through the reasoning yourself and come to a different conclusion if you want. That's one of the things I'm really trying to advocate now, is the idea that we can have kind of roundtable discussions, in a genre community about what's going on. And we might agree or we might disagree about what's going to happen, but we've all got a common evidence base of the information that I've gathered, and I think that's really important, and it's a lot of fun too.
Nat's offer to followers of The Indy Author
Matty: That's so great. Well, Nat, thank you so much. It's always lovely to chat with you and let people know where they can go to find out more about you and Kindletrends and the discount code online.
Nat: Thanks for reminding me about it. So, I am at kindletrends.com, and that's where you'll find all the free resources, we'll put some of the links in the show notes, for listeners of The Indy Author Podcast. I have a special deal, which is if you use the code INDYAUTHOR, then you will get a 33 percent discount. So normally, Kindletrends is $15 a month flat, never changes. There's no upselling, no premium tiers. There will never be any of those kinds of things. That's my commitment. It's one price. That's it. But if you are a listener of The Indy Author Podcast, then you can put in the coupon INDYAUTHOR and get it for $10 a month forever.
Matty: Thank you so much.
Nat: All right. Thanks very much, Matty. It's been a lot of fun.
Nat: Hi, Matty, it's great to be back!
Meet Nat Connors
Matty: It is lovely to have you here, and to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Nat is a romantic comedy writer, medical scientist, dance teacher, and creator of the Kindletrends newsletter for genre fiction authors. Kindletrends started 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. Nat uses the Kindle Trans information to plan his own writing, publishing, and book launches. So, it has to be focused, relevant, and actionable.
And I invited Nat back to the podcast, he's been a previous guest, to talk about the state of the genre. We're going to be talking generally about what is the data that every author should be tracking related to their own genre, but because it's always more fun to talk about something specific than something general and theoretical, we're going to be talking about fantasy.
I figured I talked so much about crime fiction, it was time to talk about something different. But if you're not a fantasy author, I would recommend you not tune out because the information we're going to be sharing is something that is applicable to really any kind of genre fiction that listeners may be working on.
How can authors use data to guide their publishing decisions?
Matty: And so, Nat, I'm just going to ask you to sort of step back and talk generally about how people should be looking at the data that's available to them out there, in order to better plan their writing and publishing work, and then we'll dive into the details of a couple of pieces of data that you specifically recommend people look at.
Nat: Yeah, sure. So, this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time, as Matty and many others will know, about how you go about getting your head around all of the things that are going on in your genre, and in your subgenre, and the specific environment that you're in, and I've got a bunch of stuff that I've written about this stuff. About ways to take a very big problem and divide it up into little chunks because when you're looking at a whole genre, something like fantasy, which has got so many different aspects to it and so many different moving parts, it can be a bit overwhelming. You read some books and you think, well, I like this, but do other people like this? Having a way of listing the things that I need to look at and the things I need to think about helps me feel like I'm getting around stuff and I'm not missing anything. One of the things I often say to people is that market research is an ongoing process if you're an author. In fact, I call it market awareness more than market research. I like to think of the fact that we need to be aware of our market, aware of what's going on around us. We make most of our time for writing because that's what we love, but we also have to look up from our keyboards occasionally and see what other people in our genre are doing, see how readers are responding to it, and think a little bit about how that affects us. So, I've got a few different things that I go through step by step when I'm looking at what's going on in my genre and we're going to do that sort of bit by bit with fantasy but to try and generalize it at the same time.
Wide versus KU
Matty: Well, one of the things that I think is top of mind for many authors who are deciding what route to take for their publishing is the whole question of wide versus KU. My understanding is that this is very genre dependent. There are just genres that have historically proven to do well in KU and genres that have not.
I think that would be a great point to start if people are deciding whether they want to go the KU route or not. What pieces of information do you recommend they be aware of in order to make that decision?
Nat: Yeah, that's a very good place to start, Matty. I think there's a bunch of factors, and some of those factors, just stepping away from the market, are also to do with you, the writer, and your own preferences for where you want to market and sell your work. and also for the length and the tempo at which you prefer to write.
I'd never want anyone to feel like they have to do a particular thing if they want to be in any genre. It's absolutely true that some genres have traditionally been quite heavily KU. We've also seen that changing, I think. And when we look at the fantasy, what we'll see is that there are some subgenres in fantasy, which are quite all-in on KU, but there are others which are pretty much 50/50.
So, I guess I'd put it down to a couple of factors. As far as the individual author is concerned, as we know, KU pay rates are per page. So, if you tend to write longer, then, relatively speaking, KU is going to be a better bet for you. So, a good example there is LitRPG, which has really exploded in popularity over the last, what is it, four years, five years, I think.
I probably first heard the term about 2019, just before the lockdown. now, and then that, that was a genre, subgenre, that was always around before that, but it sort of got this name and suddenly exploded in popularity. lit RPG books, my colleagues who write in that genre, tend to run quite long.
And by quite long, I mean more than a hundred thousand words. They are often sort of in serials. So I think that has contributed to them being in KU quite a lot. On the other hand, there are a lot of shorter fantasy, and there are a lot of more traditional, sort of swords and sorcery fantasy books that are published by small publishers, not by the big five, big four, but they, in that situation, they are more often wide.
So another factor for authors to consider, I think in terms of KU versus wide, as well as their writing tempo, is also how much they want to spend time on marketing to different stores. There are great services now like Draft2Digital, which will make it very much easier for you to get your books onto multiple stores, but then of course.
Remember, there's the exclusivity agreement, so if you are wide, then you are prevented from having your books in KU for a three-month period. We also know, then, that quite a few authors have practiced putting books in KU for the first three-month period and then taking them out and going wide.
Matty: Yeah, I think that one of the areas that I as someone who is not in KU have benefited from being aware of the KU versus Y distinction is when I'm running book bub ads. And I know that I would go through, and I would find other authors who are successful in my genre, which is Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, and I would run book bub ads against them.
But one thing that I realized very quickly I had to check was whether they were in KU or not. Because I realized that running a BookBub ad, now I'm talking about ads, not feature deals, but running a BookBub ad against a KU author's audience when I myself am not in KU is probably targeting the wrong group because KU readers are looking for something different than people who are not KU readers.
And so I feel like, you know, if I had spent money on advertising to KU author followers, then I probably would have been not using my advertising dollars to the best effect because I'm advertising to people who aren't used to interacting with getting content in that way.
Nat: Yeah, that's true. I mean, I think also there, my instinct is that it is less a matter of the difference in terms of what people are looking for, and maybe a bit more the simple fact that they have already paid for KU. So for them to pay extra money for a book, it's much more difficult for them to justify.
So, you're absolutely right that targeting if you're not a known author to them, it's much less likely that they're going to take a
punt on your book rather than taking a punt on another book that's actually in KU already. It's interesting also, and I don't know if you heard this, but as a romance author, traditionally, like five years ago, it was very difficult to get a book bub if you were in KU.
There was a belief, true or otherwise, that you were much more likely to get one if your books were wide than in KU, and you could get them if you were in KU, but you had to be a very heavy hitter. Was that a belief in Mystery and Suspense as well? I think it's changed a bit now, and I've seen, you
Matty: Yeah, not that I've heard of. And I also think that it's important to point out to people who aren't familiar with BookBub that I think you're talking about feature deals, sort of two approaches to BookBub. One is to apply for a feature deal, which is quite challenging to get and expensive if you land it, and then ads, which anyone can run. But, it could well be. I just don't recall, hearing, you know, hearing chatter about that in my genre.
Nat: yeah, yeah. So, so talking about the Y versus KU distinction in the case of fantasy, what we can see, just looking at the data that I've got in front of me now, is that actually, for the top 200 books in all of fantasy. They're actually pretty much 50 50 wide versus KU. if you look at this sort of split across other genres, like say paranormal romance, or urban fantasy, then you'll find a much higher proportion of KU, books compared to wide, but across all of fantasy, it's actually pretty much 50 50.
At the moment. Now there's a couple of, in the case of fantasy, there's a couple of, reasons for that. And probably one of the, the most common ones, or the most obvious ones is that, there are quite a lot of TRA published fantasy books in the top 200. Those are the ones which tend to be more wide.
So we've got a situation where kind of 50% wide, 50% KU. The KU half is mostly indie. Mostly and the wide half is much more trad. So that another, another factor, I think, for listeners is if you are interested in being trad published now or in the future, then that might affect your decisions about whether you're IN KU or wide.
Of course, Your commitment to, enrollment in KU is only a 90-day commitment, so there are always options to change things later on, and I think, we, and we'll see this when we get to the covers. I think in the past, there was a much bigger, distinction between KU covers and wide covers. It was generally believed that you sort of had to recover your books if you were going to go wide, otherwise they wouldn't sell.
I think that's much less the case now than it has been in the past. Yes,
Matty: to that conversation.
Series versus Standalone
Matty: Another piece of data that you recommend people look at is series versus standalone. And this is usually not something that people are, like, some people who are really organized are actually making this as a decision, but I think many authors, if they're like me, finish their book and then realize it's one or the other. So can you talk a little bit about when people are looking at data and using fantasy as an example, and they're looking at the series versus standalone, what are you recommending people look at there?
Nat: Yeah, sure. Well, another kind of obvious thing is that if you are in mind to write a series or you're continuing a series, then KU in some ways is a bit more appealing because if people like your work, it's very easy for them to binge and to just keep reading the next book in the series and the next book and the next book. And, as a lot of listeners will know, often, whether you're in KU or not, people in the past have priced the first book in their series quite low, so 99 cents or $2.99, in order to encourage people to take a gamble on it. And then, when you get them interested in your writing style and you get them invested in your characters, then you can carry on, you know?
However, of course, planning out a series is a lot of work, and it's quite reasonable, I think, to start, I've certainly done this, to start something without really knowing whether the world has got enough in it for you to write a compelling series, you know? I think not every long series, or even series of just a couple of books, starts out that way.
So, I think, and also, in fact, again, when we get to covers, we'll see that if you have a series that places different constraints on your cover design, because as we know, we want the covers to be linked in one way or another, and when we look at a cover montage, you can really see examples of things where there's a bunch of books in a series, and you want it to be very clear to the reader that that's what's going on.
Pricing Considerations
Matty: Oh, the pricing conversation is interesting because we're recording this in the middle of 2024. At the end of 2023, I made a change to my pricing because everything was getting more expensive. For a long time, my pricing model was that for my nonfiction books, my first in series book was $2.99 and then the subsequent books were $4.99. And I started feeling like not only is it nice to get more money for each book, but I felt as if the pricing defines the books that you want to be compared with. Now many of the traditionally published ebooks are $14. There are reasons that indie authors are not doing that because we get penalized for pricing a book over $9.99, but I put up all my first in series ebooks to $6.99, and then I increased my first in series to $3.99, which I still feel as if it's a price that I as a reader am willing to take a chance on, and I think that's kind of a benefit that indies have.
I mean, it's unfortunate that we're, in a sense, being forced to do this because of the Amazon rule that if a book is priced over $9.99, then you get a lower royalty rate, but it also makes it easier for readers to say, "Oh, here's somebody that looks interesting, but I don't know them, but I want to check it out."
And having that lower cost of entry to the series, I think, is really smart.
Nat: Yeah, that's true. I think also in your case, Matty, and I know I've said this a lot in the past, your covers and your branding are very classy, so it looks like it's done by a trad house, it looks like books that should be on the shelf next to some of the famous trad mystery authors, and that's a specific branding decision, and I think it's great. Look, fantastic, I've always been a big fan of your covers, but that's one decision and there are other decisions, but I think for where you are at and for the price point that you're talking about, particularly since, as you've said and we'll see, prices across most all genres have been steadily marching upwards over the past four years or so, which is great news because of that, I think you're absolutely right that your books can stand a higher price point.
Matty: Yeah. I'm sort of fascinated with this topic lately of what. What do you want? What books do you want to show up next to yours? And when I think about the books that I would love to have my books show up next to, many of them are traditionally published, and so you're sending a message one way or the other to your audience based on the kinds of information that you're putting on, you know, the quality of your cover, but the style of your cover, and it's all messages that you're sending to your potential reader.
Nat: Yes, exactly. It's a question of a sort of visual language and the pricing and the language in your blurb and so on and so forth. So, I'd never say to any author that they have to do exactly the same things that their comp authors or comp titles do, but I would always say that you need to be aware of them because if you want to be seen next to those books and also boughts and also reads and those kinds of things and in ads, then you need to be aware of what they're doing.
And to some degree, you need to align with it. I guess that's the point I'd say you've got to align with what those, in your case, those trade authors are doing. You don't have to copy it, but you've got to not kind of go against it, as it were.
Cover Design
Matty: Well, we've been referring to cover design and I'm going to seize the opportunity to go slightly off the fantasy topic because I'm very interested in this currently. For my Lizzie Ballard thrillers, I had covers that I love. Like, when I hold one of those print books in my hand, it gives me good goosebumps because I think they're lovely covers. But what I realized was that, first of all, the subtleties that make the print covers lovely are kind of lost in the tiny thumbnails online. And then the other thing I realized is that in some ways they were almost more fantasy-esque than thriller-esque. And I'm just having them redone, and I'm starting to be a real believer in the idea that you really need to revisit your covers maybe every five years because I always recommend that people subscribe to an email newsletter like BookBub or BargainBooksy, FreeBooksy, one of those, eReader News Today, Fussy Librarian, there are many of them out there. Subscribe as a reader to your own genre, because oftentimes the trends in the cover are so starkly evident when you look at the list, and I would pull up my daily BookBub newsletter for mystery, thriller, suspense. And I was like, I don't know, my book cover isn't looking like it fits in with these books now.
And you have these trends that come and go, like for a long time with a thriller, it was the woman in the yellow jacket running away. I don't know why yellow jacket was so popular. But I finally just thought, you know, I have to stop being sort of emotionally tied to the beautiful covers that I love and say, "You know, that was fine, but it's not what I need to be doing in 2024."
Can you talk more generally about advice you would give to people on that front?
Nat: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I mean, first I always loved those covers and I think that was maybe one of the first things I said to you when we first started talking some years ago was, wow, those are really classic covers. But yes, you're absolutely right. The thing is, new books come out all the time. And, what that means is those books, the readers read them, and those books will change readers' expectations of what is being communicated, the visual language. of particular elements or colors or devices on the page that changes over time because of course it does and so what your book, what anyone's cover is communicating in 2018 or 2019 is not what it is going to be communicating to readers in 2024.
Those things don't change overnight. And, you know, I'd never say that you have to constantly be changing your covers because I think sometimes that could be confusing as well as expensive and a lot of work. But the timeframe that you're talking about, Matty, I think is absolutely right. and you're very right that subscribing to reader-focused newsletters is a great way to see a low effort way to see what other people are doing because you can, as you say, imagine your book next to them and say, well, does it fit in?
And you, like, if you will see, I suspect, probably, you were seeing books that, if you read the blurb or the ad, they sounded like your books, they sounded like a potential comp, but the cover was completely different. So you're sort of thinking, well, hang on, this looks like my kind of book, it looks like my reader's kind of book, more to the point, but my cover is saying is speaking a really different language to this book, which is kind of coming out now.
And again, you don't have to change absolutely everything, but it pays to be aware of that. And some of the best redesigns, I think, that I've seen have been quite subtle ones, where they are updating things, but they're keeping what was good about the original cover.
You know, you can see this a lot in fantasy and in some other speculative fiction genres with the trend towards what are called discrete covers. I think maybe we've talked about this a bit in the past, that there are now a lot more covers that have objects or sort of symbolic representations of them of things on them a bit like that so the classic example I think from a long time ago was the Harry Potter books that the first editions had illustrated covers and then there were some more ostensibly more adult, images of, of symbols and things.
And you can see the difference. And they convey, they convey different things in a way that's happened for a lot of people in fantasy now. And in fact, if when we look at a montage of all of fantasy books, we can see a lot more of those discrete object style covers. that, that they often include things about the, the nature of the story.
And they also just going back to the issue of, series. a discrete or object style cover often makes it quite easier for you to have a common through line in terms of the same, having similar elements or complementary elements on a particular series. So if you've got a series of objects or whatever.
Matty: Yeah, the Harry Potter one is interesting because my guess is that when they were first putting out the first book, and it was very much targeted at children, that they came up with that illustrated idea, and then they had to kind of carry it through, but then I think when they realized what appeal that had to adult readers.
They wanted to readjust it a little bit to make it less like, not cartoonish, but more serious. I'm not coming up with exactly the
Nat: something, something, yeah, absolutely something that somebody in their sort of 40s would be more likely to go into a bookstore and pick up. yeah, you're absolutely right. But I think also, if we look at the history of all of the covers of a sort of a very famous book or book series, we can see these changes as well.
So, one reason to change covers, of course, is to appeal to a different market segment. But another one is the thing that you were saying about your books that, even if you're trying to appeal to the same people that you were five years ago, their expectations have changed because of all of the other books coming out.
And now, just looking at the cover montage, now we can see that, fey or books about, fey or elves will often have these kind of symbolic discrete covers, whereas in fantasy lit RPG books will often have more cartoon, illustrated type covers, actually more similar to the old Harry Potter books in some ways.
Matty: And we're going to be talking eventually about an easy way people can see all this information, but a good available resource for people would just be to go to your favorite online retailer, go to your genre, look at the top, however many books, top 100 books or whatever, and try to picture your book cover among those and see if it makes sense to you, visual sense to you or not.
Nat: Yeah, absolutely. It's okay with you, Matty, in the show notes, we'll list a couple of free tools, which I've got, which will make it very easy for you to just download that kind of information. So to download a cover montage and the simplest things, you know, if you're very short on time, then the things that I would recommend would be one, as Matty says, sign up to relevant newsletters in your genre. Scan them, because that's what your readers are seeing, and the other one is go to the relevant top 100s in your genre, download the cover montage, and just look at that. That's a very short job every week, and once you do it for a month, you'll start seeing a whole lot of little changes, and those changes can be quite profound.
Matty: Maybe a good news for indie authors is that something I've noticed in my BookBub emails is that I'll see the same authors come up, over the course of a month, over the course of a couple of months, the same authors pop into those. And the covers from book to book are very similar, the overall design is very similar. In a sense, almost identical, but maybe the colors are slightly different. I'm following this approach with the updated covers for the Lizzie Ballard books, but rather than a cover designer having to start from scratch each time they do a new book in a series, it seems as if readers are accepting of and maybe even looking for more consistency. So you make a few tweaks from cover to cover, but the designer isn't having to start from scratch each time, which I think could be a more efficient and more cost-effective way of indie authors getting covers in, you know, if what I'm saying is true.
Nat: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And in some situations where you have serials, that is, and by serial I mean a story which follows essentially the same group of characters over perhaps three or four or even more books, and there is sort of an overall story arc and the focus is on that, which we do, we see in a number of situations. So, at the moment, short romance, just to take a quick look. Diversion, Short Romance, has a few different segments in it. Some of it is the sort of fairly steamy instant attraction thing, but there's also, and this is from fairly recent, quite a lot of serials which have very, very similar covers. And the reason I bring this up, Matty, is to pick up on your point about the similarity of covers. in that situation, the covers are so similar that I actually thought they were all the same cover, from a distance, you know, in a montage or in the sort of thumbnail size thing you get in an ad, they all look like the same book, and it's not until you, and it seems to work, but, it's not until you actually look at the thing, that it will sort of say, you Book five or book four or something like that. So the focus there, if you're a serial writer, is much more on reinforcing the brand of the serial as a whole. And of course, a lot of them are in KU. So it's easy for people to pick up The next one and the next one and to keep reading, you know, to reinforce the brand of the serial as a whole, rather than to differentiate the books in the serial, you know, because if people come to the book and they think, Oh, hang on, this is book five, and I haven't read book three yet, they're just going to go back to book three, they're much less likely to kind of give up. So different, I think the take-home message that I'm trying to get to there, Matty, is that, your choices, listeners' choices about, cover design, whether it's for stand-alones or series, are affected not only by your comps, but also by the reading habits of people in your genre. whether they prefer to read, sort of, long books, or whether they prefer to read IN KU, or wide, or whatever.
Matty: Yeah, I think another good takeaway for people would be, whatever tool they're using, whether that would be, email, like BookBub emails or other tools, that when you see a cover from an author that you would consider a comp author that you really like, just copy that off into a little, you know, a little, book. electronic bulletin board because, it's, it can be very informative. That's how I ended up landing on the redesign that I wanted because I started seeing this emerging, trend in thriller type covers. I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. And so I, you know, collected half a dozen that I really liked, and I was able to send that to my cover designer and say, I
Collect Best Practices in Your Genre
Nat: Yeah, well, that's good. I mean, one per five years, that's probably okay. Yeah, absolutely. So keep a, another great tip, I think, for listeners is to keep a crib file, like a file of all the things that you like, which are relevant to you in terms of your comps, terms of phrase, advertising taglines, loglines for books, and also covers, of course. Sign up to one of those free services like Notion or Airtable, and you will quickly, if you do that sort of once a week, end up with a whole lot of stuff that you can use to start making decisions. Because I think in the past when I've tried to recover things or rewrite my blurbs, I've started from a blank slate, and that was a long way up the hill, if you know what I mean, whereas if you've got a bunch of other stuff that people are doing and you think, "oh, that's cool," or "wow, I wish I'd come up with that," that makes it that much easier for you to get into the groove of what it is you're actually trying to do.
Study Genre Conventions for Blurbs
Nat: When you're rewriting blurbs, because we, I know we haven't talked about blurbs very much this time, Andy, but again, that's a thing. Blurbs drift. They change just the same way covers do and for exactly the same reasons. So they are something that's worth revisiting periodically to see what the other blurbs in your neighborhood are saying to readers, you know, and they're also arguably cheaper and easier to work on than covers.
Matty: One of the things that I've seen that's very interesting is when, like, ChatGPT started to be all the rage. And I would do things like I would take my existing blurb and put it into ChatGPT, and I would say, like, rewrite this as in the style of a best-selling thriller or mystery or suspense novel. And, you know, a lot of times the information I got back was quite good. But I realized that there's like an identifiable ChatGPT style. And so it's just an argument for using these things as a tool, not for the final product, because what I did find is that I would think like, "oh, that's a word, like, it's using a word that I hadn't thought of." I'm going to incorporate that word. But I think as people get more sophisticated about it, I think it's a good look at the kinds of information that AI platforms like ChatGPT put out, then they're going to read something and it's going to be clearer that, where it's coming from, because there would be, like, there were very identifiable ways that it would close out the blurb. And, and it sounded okay to me the first time, but after I read three or four, I was like, "yeah, no."
Nat: In stats, it's called regression to the mean, Matty. And a lot of those LLM text generation things, it's very much regression to the mean where, it looks good the first time and looks pretty good the second time and then you do it a few times and you start to look in the store and you realize how many other blurbs are like that and you're like, "wait a minute, you're not being as creative as you kind of implied you were, buddy." So yes, absolutely a great way to help if you're creatively blocked, but generally much better if you use it as a starting point rather than as an ending point.
Soliciting Input - Ask People to Rank a Selection
Nat: The other tip that I have, if you don't mind me mentioning, Matty, which I know I've mentioned before, is when I get people to evaluate stuff, I never send one blurb and say, do you like it? Or tell me what's wrong. I always send them three. Not two, but three. And I say, rank these in the order that you prefer. And this has a bunch, yeah, this has a bunch. Now, maybe one of them is your real one and two of them are kind of crappy ones that you just got ChatGPT to do. Doesn't matter. Don't tell anyone that. Just present them neutrally, but the reason I do this is because people often find it much easier to rank things in order of their preference than to say specifically that they do or don't like something because in a way, saying whether they do or don't like something is a little bit of an emotive decision, you know, and if you don't like something, then it's sort of incumbent upon you to articulate why, a lot of people don't like giving feedback that is along the lines of, I don't really like this, but I've got no idea why. And yet, that's actually a valid feeling, particularly if it's something that a reader might have. Whereas, if you give your blurbs to five people, and they all rank a particular blurb bottom of three, probably don't use that one. Like, whatever else is going on, that's probably not the blurb you want to use, you know, if there's one, what I find usually is that there is one that everyone dislikes, and sometimes it's the one that I thought was good, and rarely there is one that everyone thinks is the best, and in that situation you go with your own intuition and your experience and stuff, but yeah. I hope that helps.
Consider the "Key Topics" of Your Genre
Matty: Yeah, that's great advice. When we were talking about, we haven't hit, I haven't given you a chance to talk about fantasy books specifically, very, but I think that the generic stuff is great because then this, everybody can apply it to their own. Circumstances, but this is one where we might want to, we might end up diving into fantasy as an example a little bit, but you had said key topics is another piece of data people should be looking at.
Nat: Yeah. Absolutely. So one of the things that I've spent a lot of time thinking about is trying to understand what's in a book that is resonating with readers, we use words like tropes, and archetypes, and settings, and themes, and so forth, and those are all, they're all perfectly valid words, and I use them a lot, but for me, they're all trying to answer the same question, which is, what's in this book? What am I going to get when I read it? And our blurbs, of course, are one of the main things, as well as the title and the cover. Those are the instruments by which we signal to readers what you're going to get, what's the emotional experience you're going to get when you, you pick up a book. Readers have their own language about doing this, and it's not always the same one that we do. And it's very genre specific. I think that's maybe a bit of a statement of the obvious, but one of the things that I try to do when I'm looking at a genre is to say, what does this specific word mean in this genre? So to give you an example, I'm looking at the fantasy, a list of sort of key topics in the top 200 fantasy books at the moment. And I'm seeing some, like, there's some kind of obvious ones like supernatural and dragons and fey and elves and yeah, it's not surprising that those, but I'm also seeing an interesting one, which is military. And the reason that I, I've sort of collected these things together is to get a general sense of what's going on. So in this case, in the fantasy books, if a book has any mention of military units, So, I don't just use general words or military words, so generals and corporals and captains or battalions or, you know, strategy, those kinds of things. I kind of group them all into one topic. So what I'm trying to do is to get a general sense of what's going on. in the case, this was coming, came to me this morning, the use of those military words in a fantasy blurb, it means something different to the way it might mean something in, say, a mystery blurb. So, if you see military words in a fantasy blurb, I think that's more likely to imply that there is
Assessing Your Genre Assignment
Matty: But I think the other thing that's always important to point out is you may have picked the wrong genre. I think that writers are notoriously bad at understanding their own genre because they're writing from their heart. Many writers are writing, "Oh, I want to write a military fantasy book," but some are just writing a story, and then they're stepping back and saying, "What is this?" And so if you're stepping back and looking and you're seeing a disconnect, maybe it's not a matter of changing what you're doing to match what you thought were the comps. Maybe it's a lesson that your comps are different than you thought. And if your blurb or your tropes or your cover is looking more like something else, maybe you just need to recategorize the genre that you've put your book in.
Nat: Yeah, totally. The way that I would put it is that at the moment it might be that the current conventions and reader expectations of that genre are not a fit for the story that you're telling. And it might be that other conventions and other expectations in another genre, at the moment, are better because we know that genres are constantly on the move, and reader expectations are constantly on the move. And so it doesn't mean that your book is doomed. It doesn't mean that it's never going to find a readership. It just means that the expectations of what people, what's resonating with people right now in that area, aren't a fit for what you're doing. So, there are a lot of other areas, and sometimes it can take a bit of work to go and find those other areas, you know?
The Neighborhood of Your Books
Nat: Maybe this is where I can talk about this concept that I've been thinking of to do with a neighborhood—that is, the neighborhood of your books is not just your genre or your subgenre, and it's not just your comps. For me, it's actually the things that make your comps and your subgenre what they are. It is the language that people around you, your authors around you, use in their blurbs. It's the visual elements that they use on covers to signify particular things. So, we'll be able to see that a visual element in one genre signifies one thing. Same visual element, different genre. Different signification.
It might also, your neighborhood, as an author, might also include some of the other products that your readers are interested in. So for instance, if you have a fantasy reader, they are much more likely to be interested in fantasy TV shows, so your neighborhood also in that case includes fantasy TV shows. It might also include podcasts or videocasts about fantasy. Now, I'm not saying all of this to sort of overwhelm listeners and to say, "Hey, you've got to spend all your time keeping up with all of this other media rather than writing," but rather to think of, to encourage people to think of their neighborhood as being kind of a broad thing, which includes the books that people are reading, but it also includes the language that they're using and what emotions are being triggered when they read books, for instance. And my argument, the reason why I'm talking about this, is because I think the important business decisions are actually made in that microenvironment. They're actually made in your neighborhood, much more than about the generally what's happening in your genre, so in mystery or in fantasy, there will be some big trends, but, my argument is actually it's the little trends, the things that are happening close to you, which are the ones that really affect the day-to-day business decisions you make as an author, like your covers, your example before, Matty, of how your reader expectations for books like yours have changed in terms of covers. That's a great example because if you were just looking at all mystery books, that might not be so obvious, you know?
Using Categories to Educate the Retail Platform
Matty: So, we've been talking, I think that the conversation about neighborhood is hopefully a good entree to the last topic I wanted to discuss, which is categories. So, I can imagine that neighborhood and categories have a connection, but how direct is the connection between those two concepts?
Nat: Yeah, well, I mean, a lot is discussed about categories on the Kindle store, and on the wide stores as well, although generally the wide stores don't have the same level of detail, I think, in terms of how many categories they have. Whether that's a bad thing or not, I'm not sure, but sometimes I think it's not a bad thing at all. But, one thing's for sure, there are a heck of a lot of categories on the Amazon store, and they are, the way I see them, is actually they're a way of teaching Amazon what books your books are like. They are the most direct way of teaching Amazon about your comps, and I think that's why they are important.
I think they're less important in the sense of an objective description of what's in your book. I think what matters is when you're looking at categories, where are the books that you want to be next to? Those are the categories that you should be in, even if the label on top of the category isn't quite how you'd describe your book. I would urge listeners to take a pragmatic approach and say, "Okay, well, this category, when I look at the top 100, or I follow it for a bit, I see that this category includes a lot of my comps and the language, the visual language and the language of blurbs in this category, is a fit for what I'm doing." So that's the category for me, even if the name of the category isn't what you personally see as being your book, you know, because ultimately all of that metadata is a way of teaching Amazon who to show your book to with the greatest chance that they're going to like it. When we look at a lot of these categories, a lot of them are actually pretty arbitrary.
Just looking at fantasy, obviously, most books in the top 200 in fantasy, have at least one category in fantasy, but there are also a fair chunk, so what, 25 percent of them have a romance category as well. A bit more than 25 percent are in one of the literature and fiction categories, so mythology and folk tales and so on and so forth. Now, is that where you want to be? Well, that depends, but it's always worth looking at the other categories that are kind of around yours, and you know, listeners I'm sure know that when you go to a book on the Amazon store, you can scroll down, and when you go about halfway down the page, you'll see the three top-ranked categories for a book. Again, I would put those in your crib file that we talked about a little bit earlier and make a note of those categories and go and investigate them when you can, because you might find that there are some other categories, as well as the obvious ones, which are a good fit for your book.
Matty: That's great. Especially now because I think that Amazon's trying to get its hands around this idea. You had suggested that maybe more categories isn't necessarily a good thing. And some of the changes that they're making, recently, I think, suggest that they also agree that more categories are not necessarily a good thing. And I think it's an incentive for people to think about it more carefully than maybe they would have in the past.
Nat: Yeah, well, I think maybe what's happened is that there was a huge explosion of them when ebook reading took off. And so they were added a lot. I don't know, Matty, if you've ever looked at all of the categories under mystery thriller and suspense, like the thriller ones and stuff. Boy, there are a lot of them. And boy, I don't know what the difference is. And I mean, you could sort of invent one, but then you go and look, and in actual fact, in the top 100 or 200, there's a lot of overlap. So what that's telling me is I don't think readers really know either, but it doesn't change the fact that at the moment, the important thing to do is go and find the ones where your comps are most likely represented and find the ones that are within your neighborhood and stick with them. It may be that there will be a reduction in categories in the future, because I don't think that readers really browse by category. I think this is, you know, pure speculation, but I think that most buying decisions are made by books being shown to readers, and the things that we talked about before, the visual language of the cover, the language of the blurb, those are the things
that make a reader give a buying decision. I don't believe that many readers come to new books and new authors by browsing categories. So they're still important, but they're important indirectly rather than directly, because they can teach Amazon who our books should be shown to, so they then make the buying decision.
Matty: And I like that idea of looking at it both ways. Go to the category and see what other books are there, but then also look at the books that you consider to be comps and go backwards and see what categories they're putting themselves in. So we've talked about lots of great information, some of which would be quite labor-intensive to collect manually. So I want to give you an opportunity to talk about a less manual way that people can get the information that we've been talking about.
Nat's resources, including the Kindletrends newsletter
Nat: Thank you, Matty. So, there are a few things. First, I hope we can fit all of this in the show notes. I have a bunch of free tools for the author community that make collecting information quite easy. I've got a Chrome browser extension where you can download cover montages, and data about the Top 100, and also about your also boughts.
We didn't get time to talk very much about also boughts, but they are important when they're around because they come and go. They are a really important part of understanding what's going on in your neighborhood because they are what readers are prepared to pay money for. They don't have to be your also boughts; they might be the also boughts of your comps or also boughts of an author to whom you aspire to be like. Go and look at those when you can find them because, to me, they are the most concrete aspect of reader behavior because it involves putting down some money, and that's what really counts. So, I have a tool that allows you to download all of the also boughts from a particular book very quickly and easily.
What I also do, though, to help people keep up with what's going on in their neighborhood, is make an author newsletter called "Kindle Trends," and this is a subscription thing. I'll give you a discount code just at the end, but the idea is that you sign up, and every week or every month, I send to your inbox a quick description of what's going on in your genre of interest or genres of interest. There are 14 different ones, and you get links to everything that's trending on the Kindle store and suggestions about books to look at because they've just come out and they're shooting up the charts, and so forth. So, what I'm trying to do is to take a lot of the donkey work of research out and make it so the author can spend all the time doing the stuff that only you can do, which is reading and understanding how it fits with you.
Matty: Yeah, I'm a subscriber of Kindletrends and, just as one example, one way that I've used it recently is when I was rethinking my pricing. It was great to be able to go into the Kindletrends newsletter and see the breakdown, in the top 100, of how many books were priced at each price level. Of course, I could have come up with that eventually myself, but it is super nice just to open a newsletter and have it right there for you.
Nat: Yeah. So, my 30-second description is it is like the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times for working fiction authors. If you've got 30 seconds, you can just read the front bit, read the headlines. If you want to dig into a specific thing that's going on in your genre, then it's all laid out for you there as well. I've got a bunch of videos showing you how to do things, and some examples of how to do research in your genre, and to keep up to date. What's going on using Kindletrends as a base and all of the data there. I want to take a moment to mention this: All of the data is available to you. So, if you want to go and do your own thing, if you really like using Excel, people like that do exist. If you really like doing that kind of thing, then, hey, look, then I'm very much an open data advocate. So, I try to make things straightforward for authors. But also, if you want to know why something is the way it is, or why I'm recommending things, there are no black boxes. It's all laid out there for you, and you can go through the reasoning yourself and come to a different conclusion if you want. That's one of the things I'm really trying to advocate now, is the idea that we can have kind of roundtable discussions, in a genre community about what's going on. And we might agree or we might disagree about what's going to happen, but we've all got a common evidence base of the information that I've gathered, and I think that's really important, and it's a lot of fun too.
Nat's offer to followers of The Indy Author
Matty: That's so great. Well, Nat, thank you so much. It's always lovely to chat with you and let people know where they can go to find out more about you and Kindletrends and the discount code online.
Nat: Thanks for reminding me about it. So, I am at kindletrends.com, and that's where you'll find all the free resources, we'll put some of the links in the show notes, for listeners of The Indy Author Podcast. I have a special deal, which is if you use the code INDYAUTHOR, then you will get a 33 percent discount. So normally, Kindletrends is $15 a month flat, never changes. There's no upselling, no premium tiers. There will never be any of those kinds of things. That's my commitment. It's one price. That's it. But if you are a listener of The Indy Author Podcast, then you can put in the coupon INDYAUTHOR and get it for $10 a month forever.
Matty: Thank you so much.
Nat: All right. Thanks very much, Matty. It's been a lot of fun.