Self Publishing Trends to Watch for 2019

All right. Hello and welcome, everybody. It's Julie Broad with what is normally the first look, book reviews. And this is our first show of 2019. I am skipping the book review today because as will certainly become evident, I am battling a pretty great cold and coughing is sure to happen. So I'm just going to cut this as short as possible and skip the book review. I'll save that for our next live, which will actually not be happening in two weeks. Normally this show is every other Tuesday at 2pm Pacific Standard Time, but on the 20th or what is it on the 22nd, which is when the next show would be. I'm actually going to be in Dallas, so I won't be able to do the live show. Excuse me. So instead, I will do the next live show on the 29th, I believe. Unless I can, of course, somebody on my team to do it, but I'm not sure that that's going to be up their alley or not. Maybe Sarah, our book marketing pro, will do it in my absence just to make sure that we give the prizes away. So, yeah, stay tuned as to the next date for the next show and we'll figure that out. And if you're already following, if you're already getting our book launchers launch letter every other week, you'll be notified via the launch letter. So if you're here, make sure you say hello because we will recognize you for being here. And today I'm just going to keep it super short. Like I said, my health is not where I'd like it to be. But welcome to my brand new office. I'm very excited. I haven't done any decorating, so it's pretty sparse right there. You can just see some of the books that we've worked on, but I don't even have a nice bookshelf for them. And one of the books coming out next week, I see that one. Let's see that one right here. That's coming out on the 15th of January. So that's exciting. And one just came out yesterday. So huge shout out to Carol Sanford for the launch of her book. And I'll post that wherever you're watching us in YouTube or on Facebook. I'll post about that as well. Hey, Amber. Hello. Nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. Okay, so what I'm going to do today is besides the normal prizes, I'm going to just hit you guys with the five. Actually, I really have four things that I think you should be watching in 2019. Excuse me. So the first thing is, and I talked about this in the launch letter recently is that I think that Amazon is moving. And it's not just me thinking this, A lot of people are thinking this, but Amazon is moving to a pay to play model. So what does that mean? Well, normally in the past, if you drove some traffic to Amazon and basically taught Amazon who was most likely to buy your book, they would show it to those other people that were like the people that were most likely to buy your book. So this was done in the form of also bots or people that bought this book also bought it with other books a variety of ways. Well, there's been a lot of reports of the Alsobots being replaced by sponsored ads, and I'm actually not seeing this myself. I'm not sure if that's because I actually pile a lot of books and a lot of them are as a result of the also bought recommendations. Because I'm always doing market research. I buy in. You know, when I buy one book, I'm like, oh, I'll get that book and that book. So it might be because of my own buying habits that I am still seeing also bots. I'm not sure. But many people are reporting the disappearance of the also bots on Amazon. And it makes sense if you think about the, the evolution of pretty much every major online company, eventually you have to pay to play Facebook, you have to pay to play, right. If you have a page and even to a degree, your personal page. But if you have a page, a business page, or an author page, virtually nobody sees your posts unless you pay to sponsor them. So it makes sense that we're moving stuff. I think Instagram is probably going to go that way. It's just, it's just the way of the world. So Amazon is really moving that way. So you have to drive traffic to your Amazon book page. And I think if you want to be shown, if you want to be seen amongst other books like yours, you're going to have to pay. Not necessarily today, but I'd say it's time to start learning Amazon ads if you haven't already. And I have a couple resources that can help you. KDP Rocket has a great free course. Just kick it off. And KDP Rocket is a great tool to use in Amazon ads because you actually want to use hundreds of keywords, which can be a giant pain in the butt to come up with yourself. So. Hi, Brian. Hi, Jacqueline. Nice to see you on here. Welcome. Okay, so that's really the big thing is I'd say if you're not already Take some time to learn Amazon ads and start investing in that skill set because it's going to matter a lot. Moving to the end of 2019. Okay, so also with that note, it's also going to be really important to go wide. Kobo, for example, does a lot of things to support their authors. So I think it's a great idea to be wide. And what I mean by wide is making your book not just exclusively available via Kindle or via Amazon. You know, it's making it available through many, many sources, in particular your ebooks, but also audiobooks and so forth. And I just put a video up on YouTube about this two weeks ago, so definitely check that out if you don't know what I'm talking about. Okay, second trend. Excuse me. Oh, the Joyce. Okay, so we're make this fast so I could get through without a coughing bit for you guys. Number two is, I believe, and this is already happening, but I'm having more and more calls with people. More people are going to self publish by choice. They are going to, you know, have the option of traditional publishing deals and they're going to choose to self publish because the benefits far, far outweigh the negatives. It will be really interesting to see what happens with Barnes and Noble with it being for sale. If an interesting player picks it up, it could change the landscape. Because right now, the real big benefit of going traditional is it gets you into the Barnes and Noble space. That's the benefit. Otherwise, they own the content, they still look to you to do the marketing, and they pay you almost nothing for it. So the model isn't working right now. And a little bit of a shakeup like the sale of Barnes and Noble to an interesting player could, could shake it up enough that the traditional publishing companies change their offers to people regardless. More and more I'm talking to people who have been traditionally published or they have traditional publishing deals on their table and they're still going self publishing. And I think that trend is going to continue in 2019, which is great for us. But I don't say that out of a bias towards it though. I just. It's just something I'm seeing more and more. Number three, two things are going to continue to matter a lot when it comes to book marketing, and that is, number one, your author platform. It is essential. The stronger your platform, the stronger your book will do, the stronger the business you can build off of it. So investing and building it as soon as possible is essential. And number two, Amazon reviews and both I put some YouTube videos out on very recently, so I'll link to those afterwards. Unless Jacqueline is able to grab the links off my YouTube channel to the one that was just put up on Author platform as well as the two that I just did on Amazon Reviews. So how to get reviews and what to say if you are available and able to put those links up on Facebook and then I'll do that on YouTube as well when I post the replay there. Number four is find a Way Voices, sorry, is really around audiobooks and one of the driving reasons I continue to be really excited about audiobooks is I really see this as being one of the biggest areas where there's going to be innovation and shakeups. Right now audiobook production costs are really high and you have to have it. You have to do a really good job narrating and you have to pay for production and that is an expensive endeavor. And I think that over time we're going to see better ways to produce them so we can still have high quality results but not have it be so expensive to get them produced. Addition Findaway Voices is doing some really cool things that are going to make it less reliant on Audible, which Audible kind of has a stranglehold on authors. You don't get to pick your pricing. You know, they choose the price of your audiobook and often, you know, for independent publishers in particular, they're often selling that book for way cheaper than you want it to be sold. Okay, so Find a Way Voices announced a couple of cool things. One is that they now have storytelled distribution and storytel is probably the biggest competitor to Audible. And if you're in, if you're in the States and you're going, what the heck is storytelling? Totally get it. But they're really big outside of the United States and their expansion is just growing and they're strengthening. But the cool thing is storytelling. You get paid based on the time spent listening. So you're going to be better compensated if you have a really good audiobook that people just keep listening to and love. So that's cool. Find a Way Voices also struck up a great partnership with Apple Books and the author is able to set the pricing and they also have partner favorable pricing for Findaway Voices in particular. So there's really cool partnerships popping up and it's putting less emphasis on Audible, which is a good thing because Audible is pretty tough on authors. I think they're not paying you very well and the expectations of the quality of material that you're putting in there is really, really high. So Some really cool innovations. I've always said audiobooks are, I wouldn't say a must have because of the expense, but for most authors, especially if you're a podcaster, it makes a lot of sense to produce an audiobook, especially if you can find a way to do it as cost effectively as possible. So those are the four trends I've got for you. And I'm just gonna give a prize here and duck out because this voice is pretty precarious today. All right, so if you don't already know, normally this is a book launcher's mug, but I'm off my game today, so I've got wework. Gotta wework. Do what you love. Which is also a good message, right? So what we're going to do is every time I have a new video coming out. And by the way, every Tuesday and Friday, we now have a new video going up on YouTube. So check that out. Make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven't already, because every Tuesday, every Friday, there's going to be a new video coming out there. And when you comment on the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some cool book launchers swag, which right now is a book launcher's mug. But I'm ordering some new swag for you guys to check out. All right, so let's just do this prize and call it a day, shall we? Okay. So you guys can see I'm not cheating. I'm not. Here we go. And the winner of the book launcher's mug this week is. April Braswell. Oh, April, you've earned this mug, my dear. You have been commenting on just about every single video I've put out. So thank you. And now you can be a proud hashtag NoBoringBooks Mugdrinker. So just shoot me an email at team t e a mooklaunchers.com and teamoklaunchers.com and send me your mailing address and we'll get you a mug in the mail. And Amber just said, is a video coming out today on YouTube. So when I do live streams, I repost on YouTube. So when every other week when I do a live stream and I re upload it and at some point, I will stream from both, I promise, because I know everybody. Everybody's like, we follow you on YouTube, not Facebook. So I get a lot of people watching the replay on YouTube, more so than joining me on Facebook. So at some point, I am going to try to simulcast them, I promise. But yes, in the meantime, Every other Tuesday. The live stream is my Tuesday video. But then when it's not a livestream week, Amber, I will be posting new videos. My editor and I have been working like crazy. We've already started to build a backlog so that we can hit you guys up, so with two new videos every single week. So I'm excited. Hopefully you guys are excited for that. And, yeah, so they'll be dealt the chances to win, which is really, really fun because I like giving away prizes, and I love to see your pictures when you're drinking from your book launcher's mug, when you've got it, when you win, and you get it at home. So cool. All right, so thank you, April. And I'm just gonna cut it right there, you guys. So thank you so much for joining me. And if you're listening to the replay after the fact, say hello. I promise to respond. And. And of course, if you're commenting on the YouTube page on Tuesday when this video is released, you will then be entered to win and again on Friday when I put out a new video. All right, thanks, guys. Take care and stay healthy.