Amazon Updates and Publishing Industry News for June 2023

Hello, Happy Tuesday. Today is going to be rapid fire industry news updates because I have a hard stop in 20 minutes, so we're just going to dive right in. There's lots of important news that I want to cover. And for those of you that have questions, I'll be getting Angela, who will probably be saying hello any moment now. I'll be getting her to collect the questions and the end of the month live stream that we do. So when we're back here in two weeks, we will do a full Q and A session and then we take a break for July. So diving right in with the exciting industry news that we have on tap right now. Right now we have. The big thing that I really wanted to talk about today is the Amazon category updates. So Amazon used to have three official categories and you didn't choose the Amazon categories, you chose the bisect codes, which was always a little bonky bonky, a little bonkers, a little wonky. When you put those together, they become bonky. So you used to have to choose the bisect codes and then the Amazon algorithm would determine, you know, using that and some other things, what categories you'd be in. And then you could email Amazon to add up to seven more categories so you could have a total of 10 categories. Now, the change they've made is one that streamlines it, makes it way more logical and will hopefully really improve the quality of books that are in a given category. So I ultimately think this is a really positive change for authors. And the change is that you can now select three categories and you're selecting Amazon categories so you're not using the bisect codes to figure out what the Amazon codes are. And Angela, if you can grab the video on bisect codes so we don't have to dive into what that is and drop that in here and then collect it. I have a bunch of links today, so I will get those in the description for you after the fact, although it won't be until tomorrow because like I said, I have a hard stop at 20 after. It's the Golden Knights are playing in game five tonight and hopefully they're going to hoist the cup tonight. And as a result, the meeting that I have this evening got condensed, moved earlier and condensed so we can be done in time for the game. Very important stuff happening here. So we've got a short time together today, but I will have lots of links for you to give you more information on all the things we're talking about. So hello, Philip, welcome. Standard keeper, Debbie Dose and Tony Bonke he's hashtagging bonky. My new word. I love it. Angela's here. And T Body and Alvin. Welcome. Welcome T Body from Canada, which is where my passion for hockey comes from. Okay, so. So that's the first thing. So ultimately I think this is a positive change and I believe that if you have an existing book out, you still will, quote, unquote, appear in 10 categories. Although I don't think very many books ever did appear in 10 categories or they shouldn't. But I don't think it impacts existing books. It is for the books that are getting uploaded. Going forward, you will be choosing your three categories and I believe you're choosing them for print as well as for ebook. That is one thing that on the top of my head, I don't remember that particular detail. As we've talked about before, Amazon has a plethora of places your book will appear. You have different categories for your print book, your Kindle book, your Amazon in Canada, your Amazon and other countries, they all have different categories. Some. So I don't believe that this change changes that. I might sneeze. That could be fun. We'll see how fast I can get to the mute button if I need to sneeze. Okay, next up is the. Oh, and I do have a YouTube link that Angela will drop in here and we'll post in the description from Dave Chesson, kind of showing you how this category update looks behind the scenes. So rather than recreate that for you, especially since we're doing Rapid Fire news today, we'll just drop that link in the chat and in the description below for you tomorrow. Next up, the print price increase at kdp. And there's going to be three changes to the printing costs and it's ultimately an increase in all fixed costs for paper, paperback, and I believe it's going to work out to like roughly 15 cents a book. And I'm just reading my notes to make sure I don't get this wrong. Specifically from the site, which is also a link that Angela will drop in there for you. We're talking about how there'll be a fixed and per page cost for paperback and hardcover with large trim sizes that will be implemented to cover the additional costs for printing those books. A large trim size is anything more than 6 0.12 inches or 155 millimeters in width and more than 9 inches. So anything bigger than your 6.1 times 9 inch books, which is 229 millimeters in height, that's the 6.6 times 9 is a regular trim size. So if you're larger than that regular trim size, then this will, there'll be an additional fee on there. There will be a decrease in the per page cost for certain color ink print books ordered from some marketpl. And so basically review this. Essentially what you need to know is it's going to impact most of most nonfiction authors anyways by about 15 cents a book. Not huge. And they didn't raise their prices last year when the paper costs went up. So it's not, I mean it's inflation. And that's the reality of this is everything has gone up. And print books, it's up to you as an author to decide if you pass this on to your reader or not. I think we are seeing a slight lift in the overall print prices in some categories. I don't have any real stats or data on this, but you can always test it. That's my answer. And as a self published author, you absolutely can put your price up by a dollar and see what happens to try and recover these costs. It is, it's business these days. Everything has gone up in price. So it's not surprising. And they actually waited quite some time to raise their price. So, you know, it is what it is. LULU has raised their prices dramatically as I talked about to the point where we don't even work with Lulu anymore on their print on demand stuff. And KDP hadn't raised them over that time. So. Okay, I'm just checking your guys's notes. Bill's here too. Quizmaster China. Hello. You guys can see I'm. I'm not sponsored by Celsius, but I am drinking one today. I got in super late last night and I was in Maryland and my flight was delayed. Delta had a ticketing computer ticketing issue which caused some delays for almost all their flights. And as luck would have it, mine got delayed by about two and a half hours, resulting in me getting home at 1am and as anybody who travels and has kids knows, it doesn't matter what time you get home and what time you get to bed and go to sleep. You're still getting up at 6 o'. Clock. So I'm a little, I'm a little tired today, but all good. I'm happy to be here with you. So the next piece of news that I wanted to touch on was about Barnes and Noble. And I have talked about this, but it's been a while and there's been some news. The James Dalt, I think that's his name, the CEO of Barnes and Noble. He's been doing some articles lately and so there's also an article from Shelf Awareness that we will link to. But I thought this was an interest quote from, from one of the articles and it said and I've been talking about how I even talked about this when I they announced that he was going to become the CEO is that he's going to move to a store by store book buying process, which is a much stronger thing for self published authors. It's better for readers. They the stores had become cluttered and were overflowing and the decisions were made from head office. Now the opportunity is opening up that they are looking for, you know, really regional specific type books. What their audience, what their community, what their market wants in each store. He said it's been a slow evolution and they still have a lot of work to do to get to the changes. But he did say key books are now being chosen not because of dollar remuneration but because someone at Barnes and Noble has read them and believes they will sell well. They also noted that Barnes and Noble's bestseller list had become stagnant with the same authors appearing for nearly a decade. And so they've worked on ways to identify and promote new talent in their bestseller list list. So all good news for self published authors in the states that want to have a presence in Barnes and Noble. I think the local push for buying decisions, the reduction in titles in the store, maybe not as favorable, but it further decreases the value of a traditional publishing deal for authors because it used to be really the traditional publishing deal guaranteed you bookstore distribution. And that is not the case. The bookstores are buying fewer books, listing fewer books, making their choices locally. There's still an element of what is driven through the New York head office, but it is, it is moving more and more local, which is positive, albeit there are going to be fewer listings. So that can have a drawback. But for certain topics, certain authors, local talent, there is going to be some opportunities and it also makes you more on an even playing field to a point with some of the traditionally published books. So I think that's pretty cool. Okay. And I'm just looking, I'm just reading. I wonder if this will work for Kohl's as well. So in Canada, tbody Chapters and Kohl's already were, I mean Chapters moved to kind of a being a gift store more than a bookstore quite some time ago. You can get local. We've had a lot of success getting local buying from Chapters books for certain topics and then what we, what has worked is if a book sells really well in a certain area, we reach out to the regional manager and, and we've been able to get some pretty good momentum for some of our authors in Canada that way. Doesn't work every time. Certain books, certain topics are more favorable, more trendy than others for them. But one of our books, Jillian Gerson's the Elephant in the Gym got MCAP displays in 26 of the chapter's locations. Because of it fit in. I gotta pick up the pace, my friends. I only have 10 more minutes. This was her book and so we got that into chapter stores and then she even got NCAP display space which was really exciting for her. And so any questions? Tony and everyone else, Angela, you're going to collect them and we're going to do a Q and A in the next live stream because I won't have time for questions. But I love your questions and I don't want to leave you hanging but I have a very tight timeline today. So do post your questions and we will do a full Q and A session in two weeks when we're back here for our live before we take a break for the month, July. Okay, next up, this is kind of a funny one. Don't engage your reviewers. So this is, we've talked about this before. It can be so tempting when you get a one star review or a two star review or any review that you don't agree with to respond or to shoot a live stream and trash them and all those things but it can backfire in your face. And so it's really better to just let that reviewer lie and just carry on and focus on getting good reviews. And it's kind of funny, but not funny. There was a. I believe she's a tiktoker. And again we have Angela has a link on this story just and I'm just sharing this for fun but because this tiktoker didn't like and I think it was even a four star review and she says that she was doing this as a joke but she doesn't actually say it's a joke in her TikTok but she was kind of ripping on that reviewer for their four star review and it blew up and she got review bombed and review bombed. May none of you ever know personally what a review bomb is. It's when a whole bunch of people come in and give you one star reviews and they did this kind of angry at her for this, you know, trashing of this four star reviewer and, and, and it Got to the point where she was with a hybrid publisher. So it wasn't like a traditional publishing deal. But the hybrid publisher dropped her. They didn't want anything to do with this and it was just quite a big mess and way more dramatic than it should have been. So it's kind of funny. But don't engage your reviewers, don't engage your haters. Focus on the people who love you, who are giving you great reviews. And by the way, a four star review is often a really great review. In the mind of the person posting the review. You will see many reviews where they write. Four stars, great book. I enjoyed this. I learned a lot. And you're like, well, if that's the case, where's the other star? But in their mind, some reviewers save those five stars for those like, oh my God, this was a life changing book. So that's just how it is. And I am grateful for all four and five star reviews and every author really, really should be okay. And Nathalia, welcome to her first time in a live stream. Today is a short rapid version compared to what we usually do. But come here, back here in two weeks at the same time, same, well, almost the same place, Book Launchers tv. But it'll be a slightly different link and we'll be doing rapid fire. Not rapid fire, we'll be doing a longer session covering all your Q and A and not rapid fire like today. All right, the last piece of news before I give you the prizes and sign off for the day is that at Book Launchers. This is a little piece of Book Launchers news. Actually there's two pieces. One is Self promote and Succeed, My book on all things book, marketing strategy, tactics, et cetera. That's coming out in October. It went back. Well, it went to the proofreader. I finally finished copy edit round two when I had to fly to Maryland. I forced myself to spend the entire flight time finishing the copy edit round two. So the book's in pretty good shape. Although things like this category change, I have to update inside of the manuscript because that change happened and I was reading the book going, oh, oops, this has changed since I wrote the book. So we'll be doing some updates, but very exciting. But the other news is that we have a new person that started at Book Launchers today in a very unique role. We have a new person named Logan who started as our AI specialist supporting the marketing team. So there's and this is something that I have been getting my team trained on and it's not to start Writing the books. We're using AI for ideation and some brainstorming and things like that in the earlier phases. But I am so excited about AI for marketing purposes, for helping. Draft bios, book descriptions, media kits, speaker topics. There's just so many applications of AI, but it takes work to train the AI, to teach it what you need to teach it about the person that you're drawing this information from. We were trying to work this into our daily routines and then you know, this one of our, one of the people who was on our contract team, he showed a passionate interest and just a real creativity for Speak and Robot. And so we started a position in house that he will be our specialist supporting the marketing team. So I'm pretty excited about what we're going to be doing. It'll take a little bit before I have anything really concrete to share from that, but I'm very excited to have a dedicated person working on that, so. Yay. Okay. Hey Logan, ask the AI what I want for dinner. Okay, so I got prizes for you. I figured out last time that I can share my screen. So one moment, let me do that again so you guys can see the prizes. And Angela, just go ahead and pick one or two prizes and I might just do like a super speedy reveal. Six year anniversary prizes. There's two new swag things and I'm going to show you real fast. You guys want to see? I want to see some comments. Do you want to. Do you want a sneak peek of what one of our six year anniversary swags is going to be? Or is. I should say I got it in the mail today so let me see some excitement for that. You guys can post while I'm trying to share. My screen says sharing screen is easier with two monitors. Well, I can barely handle one monitor so I'm definitely not going to have two monitors at this stage. Okay. Entire screen. No, we don't want to share the entire screen. We just want Firefox. Why can't I? Oh, it's not letting me share it today. Oh, you know what I might have to do. Hold on. This might fix it. One moment please. Copy and pasting all my names back over. Okay, here we go. Okay, now I think this should work. I think this should work. Present, share screen, share screen. And maybe not that one. Okay, forget it. We don't have time to do it today. Sorry, it's not working. I got it to work last time. But it wants to show. It doesn't want to show the right thing today. So we are going to Just do the draw. So yes. Yay. Yes. Woohoo. So excited. Okay, so I'll show you that. One second. We gotta go. Oh, the browser has blacked your screen. Clear the icon. Okay. Are you guys seeing me practice? I know I need to practice. Thanks, Phil. I don't have time to practice. You guys are my practice. All right, My first winner is Brian K. Morris. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for your likes, comments and shares. And by the way, this is for the people who comment the day a video is released. So every Tuesday and Friday we'll have one last round of prizes in two weeks and then we'll have our six year anniversary prizes giveaway. We'll be doing some of those in the deep dive, which is you can register for@book launchers.com deep dive. So we'll be giving our six year anniversary prize away for that. And then we'll do a live stream in probably early August. Or maybe we'll do a special one time only live stream in July to give away some of our six year anniversary swag. But okay, so Brian K. Morris. Now let me hit the button again. Congratulations. Email angelaeamooklaunchers.com your prizes will be self publish and succeed the oh so soft journal and of course our hashtag no boring books mug. And then our second winner is Alana Rien. R Y A N E. Congratulations and thank you for your likes, comments and shares on the day a video was released. And I've lost you guys. There you are. All right, so here it is. Okay, that was your sneak peek. If you snoozed, you missed it. If you weren't looking, you missed what the swag was. But that is what we have for our new swag. I personally am very excited about it because I've been wearing another company's and I'm not going to say it out loud. I'm not going to say what it is in case you weren't looking. So anyways, that is our swag. That will be our six year anniversaries so you can get one by going to our deep dive as well as we will have an official six year anniversary celebration which you'll need to make sure that you are on our newsletter so that you know when that's happening. All right, Angela, who are our two prizes for today? I know a couple of you saw it, Bill saw it, Stella saw it, Suzanne saw it. That's awesome. Okay. And Angela. I'm just looking to see if Angela picked winners yet. Okay. Angela has not picked winners yet for today. We got two minutes. I gotta go winners. Here they go. Here we go. Tony's like, I wear mini blank so I can't wait to get mine. Yes, I am sure you will win one, Tony. I am sure you will. And for those of you who don't know, Tony does some video editing for me. We and he edited our six year anniversary video. So when that special six year anniversary video comes out, you can say, hey, Tony did awesome. You can tip your hat at Tony. All right. Congratulations. T body and Philip Reed. Thank you for joining us today and for being here live. You get your choice of self publish and succeed our mug or our journal and just email angelaeamteamooklaunchers.com with your mailing address and which you would like and I'll see you guys back here in two weeks. And the deep dive is on Saturday, June 24th I believe. Give me the date here. So I'm telling you right Saturday, June 24th at 10am and we have four of our fabulous authors joining me for a little bit of a spotlight Q and a chatting session. It's going to be fantastic. I have some really cool people for you to meet who wrote some really great books. So do join and you can get entered to win some of our new swag and just have some fun and ask your authors the questions and we'll be back here in two weeks for a full on Q and A. Thank you all. Go nights go. I hope we're celebrating the Stanley cup tomorrow but regardless, it was great to be with you all today. Thank you. Take care.