Should You Still Use Amazon to Sell Your Books - Live Stream

Foreign Happy July. This is a special live stream. Just making it up to all of you for missing the live stream a couple weeks ago. But after this, we are taking our July break. So there won't be new videos popping on your feed for the month. But not to Worry, there's like 500 other videos on the channel, so you can take the month of July to just catch up on on videos that you may have missed. And then we'll be back with our live streams and our regular Tuesday Friday content starting back in August. So July gives me a chance to get caught up on videos, get some more ideas, get some fresh content for you, and it gives you a chance to check out some of the past content that you may have missed. All right, so I see Kevin in the house, although he goes by, I think, Kevin. Yep. And we've got black market leadership. Angela, welcome. Welcome, everyone. Okay, so today we are going to catch up on a whole bunch of prizes that I owe you. But also, I thought it was a great time to talk about Amazon a little bit. So the Friday video that came out was all about the recent issues that we'd been encountering with kdp. And of course, the next thought is, well, if there's all these problems with Amazon and kdp, should I even be using them? So let's just kind of recap first the problems. And I could almost call this like 5 reasons why I'm frustrated with Amazon KDP, but also why I'm still recommending authors use it, but with backups and alternates and kind of a different framing of how you're going about using this. You know, I could also call this why it's never been more important to go wide and to sell direct. So if you are not already building an email newsletter list and coming up with ways to connect directly with your readers, this is almost a wake up call as to why it's so, so vitally important, but also why I just, I have never recommended you go exclusive with Amazon. And this is kind of just reinforcement as to why I believe that. But what's been happening? Well, if you missed the video on Friday, I'll give you a shorter version recap, which, you know, the first issue we have been encountering. So, you know, if you're watching this, wondering, who is this person? Well, I'm the founder of Book Launchers, and at Book Launchers, we're a full service self publishing company. So we help authors write, publish and promote nonfiction books. And as part of that, we're facilitating the setup of distribution of These books. And we've worked with more than 500 authors, although we haven't uploaded or helped all these authors upload and kind of distribute their books. Books because sometimes people come to us with a book that's already published and sometimes they get three quarters of the way through the process and then decide they're not actually going to publish the book. So not all of those have gone through the part where they're getting their book onto Amazon. But that said, there's been still hundreds and hundreds and something that's been happening and it did happen to me last year and, and it just happened to me or it just, and it's been happening more and more is they're asking for proof of publishing rights and where not an issue. You know, one of the things that I talked about in the video on Friday is simply to just make sure you're filing for copyright before you are publishing so that if this happens, you've got that letter which is the best possible proof you can offer. And so that's one thing is they're asking for proof of publishing rights. Where this is problematic is if you are not responding promptly to, to the email where they flag this for you. So monitoring. Some people use strange, not strange, but email addresses that are not their everyday email addresses when they set up their Amazon accounts. This is fine, but that email needs to be monitored on a regular basis because if it's not and you receive a notice from Amazon that they are questioning your rights to this material that you have uploaded and you do not respond promptly. So this results in an account suspension which can then be escalated to an account termination and now you're in a whole other ball of fun. So that's one issue again, not a huge deal deal. And frankly with all of the challenges with AI books for Amazon and everyone, you know, there's a lot of people that are just cranking out crap and they can't copyright protect that crap. And so this isn't a bad thing. So I'm not really mad at them for this. It's more of a heads up for you as an author. If you're uploading to make sure you're ready for it, the next thing that's been happening is that there's just been untold delays. Amazon used to be one of those places where you uploaded your book and boom, the next day it is ready to rock. And sometimes things that would take less than 48 hours, we're finding they're taking weeks. And again if you end up with some sort of a Notice where you have to check something or we're getting weird kickbacks and you have to dispute the kickback and then you have to wait five days until that dispute is responded to. And so there's a whole bunch of things that are accumulating to make it not a fast place to publish anymore. Sometimes it is, but we're finding a lot more authors are having issues and, and sometimes it's really, really weird issues and we're kind of guessing because you get vague responses as to what the issue is. Like we had one that they. I think the exact phrasing it came back was the title was misleading, but in fact the title was exactly what the book was. It just had, it had the same word in there twice, but it was. One was like a, the root of the word and then the other one was ing. But they had a very distinct reason for having those two words in there. And it kept getting kicked back as misleading. And it took repeated, repeated efforts to get that accepted and to explain, hey, listen, like, it is not a, it's not a repeated word. They mean different things and they're necessary for the reader to know what this book is about. That is another thing. We've also had books caught in what they're calling a technical glitch, which has caused further delays. Things are just taking way longer. One of the things that used to be possible is what was called a load to launch loaded on Amazon launch the next day. You could set your launch date knowing when you're going to load it. Well, if you're not giving yourself an extended period of time, like six weeks, eight weeks for that pre sale period, in case there's issues, then we're recommending you don't tell anybody your book is launching until it's official and it's out and it's going through all these checks and it's actually live suspensions and terminations, rather than kind of go through all of this, I'm going to link to, or actually Angela's going to link to the latest video from Dave Chessen talking about potentially some of the reasons why there's been more account suspensions and terminations than ever before. Because this is rampant and yes, some of them are valid, some of them are happening and you know, thank goodness, but a lot of them are happening to authors that have not violated any terms and, and then trying to resolve it is a glorious pain. It is just a horrendous experience for anyone and I can't. I get emails almost every single week, if not more from People pleading with me to help them. You know, I had one just a couple days ago where he's like, this was the income me and my daughter relied on. And then they just shut count down and I can't and I don't know what to do and I'm stuck and, and I, I feel so, you know, I feel it right here for these authors where this happens and they're actually relying on their income from these books and Amazon does not care. And that is the hardest part is you're battling the bots. You're going through the system just trying to get a human that can actually take a look at the case and see that it was a mistake and that it was not. It should never have been terminated. So it's frustrating. And at the end of the day, the thing that will resolve it for the majority of authors is also expensive and that is a lawyer. Because, you know, we've seen this over and over again that as soon as you do bring a lawyer in, it seems like KDP folds and immediately rectifies whatever situation is there. The lawyers that do this work, we've had consultations with them and they're $2,500 to get started. So it's a significant chunk of money for, for a resolution on these. And $2,500 doesn't ensure that it will be, that it will be resolved. But they are pretty good about saying, you know, what your chances are and what they think will happen. Another issue that we've been encountering is price reductions are not happening. So we're not, most of our authors are not in Kindle Unlimited, so they're not eligible for those Kindle Countdown deals. And so, you know, they'll, they'll, we'll set up ebook sales for them where the price needs to be manually changed on their ebook from 7.99 or 9 and it needs to be changed to 99 cents for the ebook sale. And you know, for years and years and years, this was never an issue issue. The price gets changed the night before and boom, it's ready to go for the 99 cent ebook sale the next day. And with a handful of our authors recently we've made that or the price change has been made and on the back end, but it never appears on the front end. And so that ebook sale where there has been ad space paid for on multiple platforms, that ebook sale is a total bust. And so this has been frustrating and there's been no response as to why or what's going on or any resolution on The Amazon side, you know, so that is a newer one. I haven't seen many other people talking about that, but we have encountered that a handful of times recently. And then of course, there's been ongoing issues with Amazon author central, you know, linking the books, linking the authors, getting the profiles set up. You know, that just seems to be an endless basket of joy. And so it's kind of like, what, what are we doing? Why are we still. So, you know, why do we all still use Amazon so heavily? But, you know, they are the biggest marketplace. You, when you are doing well on Amazon, you are doing really well. And it does help with discoverability and sales. And they do have things like Amazon ads that help you sell, but books. But you know, for me, I've really shifted my own focus from just selling on Amazon to, you know, okay, how can I use my book to get email addresses? Can I sell it direct? Can I give it away more strategically so that it's having an even bigger impact on the bottom line than, you know, if I had sold the books? And this is a lot of what we're helping our clients do as well as going wide because of all the issues. So I'm just checking what you guys are talking about over here. I see a few questions. I'll get. Angela's going to save the questions for me for after. And Caitlin's in the house. Hello, Caitlin and Amy. Hello, Richard. Hello. Okay, so some of those questions. Oh, and Angela is telling you that participating in chat does help you win prizes. Absolutely. So if you have questions, Angela will grab them for you. But yeah, so as far as what I'm doing and what we're recommending with our authors, it's a variety of things. So first it's filing for copyright as soon as your book is pretty much ready to go and well before publishing. So that's one thing, because having that letter, having that proof is a really quick way. And then just monitoring that email when you are uploading to Amazon, just monitor that email and reply promptly to anything that comes through from them. And then the next thing is, is going wide. So again, you know, in the seven plus years of book launchers tv, I have never once said, go exclusive with Amazon because I am not, I am not a, you know, I'm a fan of Amazon and what it has done for indie authors. Because of Amazon, we have, you know, we don't need publishers at all. We can do almost everything a traditionally published author can do. Make more money doing it, have more rights, have more control. You know, I'M a huge fan of what Amazon has given us as self publishing authors and I don't believe any one company should get all of our business because the minute you give all your business to one place, one company, that's the chance where something can go wrong. And that is what's happened for some of these authors who've had their account terminated and that was their sole income source. And so that's why I have always advocated for going wide. And the more we go wide as authors, the more options and opportunities will come about because it will make more sense, it'll be more profitable for other companies to step up and offer us services and platforms and opportunities. So I'm a big, big advocate for spreading your book out there. Why does possible. And so that is something that we've always advocated. We upload to IngramSpark for print distribution far and wide. We advocate for using platforms like Draft 2 Digital and Authors Republic and Find a way voices for distributing ebooks and audiobooks to places outside of just the Amazon ecosystem. Now for the 99 cent ebook thing, which is really funky and like I said, I'm hoping this is just a weird glitch because again, hundreds and hundreds of ebook sales, probably thousands actually, because we've run multiple ebook sales for a lot of clients and I've run them, so it's probably, it's probably well into the thousand ebook sales. We've never had this issue before where the price is not getting lowered in time for the ebook sale. So a couple things. If you have a 99 cent launch strategy, my recommendation is to go exclusive with Amazon for that launch because with Kindle Countdown it's going to go 99 cents. You've got that, you've got that kind of system built into Amazon for it and you can go wide after 90 days has passed. So again, not advocating for exclusivity with Amazon on a permanent basis, but for Launch, if your 99 cent launch strategy is a vital part of your launch, that is one way to do it. What we've had to do for some of these clients where the 99 cent ebook sale bombed because the price didn't go down, is we're going to do it or we have pivoted and we're just focusing on $0.99 ebook sales everywhere but Amazon. So Amazon is not getting the sale. We're going to be focused on other platforms like Apple and Kobo and you know those places for that 99 cent ebook sale. So those are, those are different things for that. And the big thing that we've been talking a lot about is going direct. So setting up your ebook, your audiobook and your print book to sell direct or to give away to your reader in exchange for email addresses or in exchange for credit card and contact information. So we are using my personal favorite is Book Funnel for audiobook and ebook distribution to. And I just give it away. I'm not selling it. I've done a video which Angela didn't give you this link. But story origin on selling your ebook through Story Origin. I love Story Origin as well. Simple, simple little platform only does ebooks, doesn't do audio yet I don't think. But so there's lots of different platforms for selling and giving away your audiobook and your ebook for free. Book Funnel hooks up to a lot of different paid platforms. And if you ever have downloaded Self Promote and Succeed in audiobook format for free, which you can do at self promote and succeed.com forward/audio, Angela frantically behind the scenes getting all these links for you will also drop that Self Promote and Succeed audiobook link in there for you so that if you want to check that out, download it for free, you can see that. So I'm doing that. And then for direct sales we are setting up through Book Vault and Book Vault then connects to Shopify. So we're using that to sell print books direct. And we actually have an service now where if you're not a client but you want us to build your author website for you and you want us to set up your own Shopify platform with Book Vault as your print on demand provider for that, we also have that service. So another link for Angela to drop in there for you because she has nothing else to do. But if you're interested, we do have services now where we will. In the past we've only ever done this for our clients, but we do have an add on service now where if you want us to help you with the direct sales setup of your print book and your website, you know that's there too. All right, so there's a lot there. I know I just gave you a whole bunch of issues followed by a whole bunch of things that we're doing to handle them. And I'm really hopeful that at some point KDP will just improve their customer service on this because you know, we as indie authors maybe aren't their biggest moneymaker, but we are a big, big piece of their platform and it would be great if we could just get some help from KDP to resolve some of these issues and not have these 5 day bot responses that we wait for. You know, trying to get humans, but that's where I'm at. All right, what are our questions that we've got? Oh, actually, before I do questions, I will do some prizes from the people who have commented the day a video is released. So we have four weeks of people commenting. So every Tuesday and Friday a new video comes out. Except for the rest of July. We won't be back until the middle of August with another live stream and new content will start hitting the first Tuesday of August for you. But I have all the names. So let me just pop on over there right now. Hang on a second. And let's go here. Share screen. And I have everybody loaded up in my little chat GPT name chooser here. Where is it? Strange. It is hiding on me. One moment. Oh, that's why. Okay, it wasn't open. Can't. You can't make it do something when it's not open. Okay, so try this again. Share which screen we want that one. There we go. Okay, so you should be seeing my little wheel of names interactive name picker. So let me just tell it to please choose one name. Actually, let's do two. Two names from the following. All right, so every Tuesday and Friday you can comment on the day the video is released and then you get entered to win. Our prize are a hashtag. No boringbooks. Mug our oh so soft journal. Here's our journal. Our mugs are not exactly like this and they do not include the stapler and the blue blocker eyeglasses, but those are there. You can also get a physical copy of Self publish and succeed or Self promote and succeed. And so Team Tope, if that is you. And if you to collect your prize, email Angela a teambook launchers.com let her know your mailing address as well as your choice of prize. If you are outside of the United States, we will send you ebooks. And sometimes physical books are an option as well, but the mug is not an option and sometimes the journal isn't either. So Angela will correspond with you and Darla, let me know if there's anything you have not yet won and email Angela@TeamookLaunchers.com all right, and then we do owe you another one because I owe you guys two from the week that I missed. So please remove those two names and choose two more. All right, so Kevin hall and Beeline Bill. I don't know if I saw. Let's see. I don't know if either of them were there. Oh, and Tony's in the house. Unbreakable tv. Welcome, Tony. All right, so I don't know if I see either one of them, but both of you are now winners. So email Angela teamoklaunchers.com and let her know what she can send you. So, thank you. And of course, if you have not already said hello, be sure to say hello because I will be doing draws for, for prizes for everybody who is here, but I only can include you in the draw if you have said hello. Okay, so let me stop sharing that and see what our questions are. So, Angela, let's see, question one. We've got black market leadership. Technical question. Should email go through our DBA Publishing Press Corp. Should email. So I don't know if you mean the email to set up your Amazon account or your email to. Yeah, set up. So when you say should email go through, I'm not sure specifically what you're asking, so maybe a little bit more context so I can give you a more valuable answer. So email to Amazon. So when you're setting up your Amazon account or if you're emailing about the issues, so either way you can use whatever email address you want. The one tip I will give you for setting up an email or setting up your account with Amazon is, is if it's at all possible not to use the same email address that you use for social media. And it's just one extra layer to potentially reduce the ways that Amazon can identify or correlate who your friends and family might be. There's been a lot of theories, and again, this is not fact, but there's their theories that, well, Amazon owns Goodreads. Goodreads encourages you to connect your Goodreads account to Facebook and to your social media. So should you have the same email address for all of these things, it is not unreasonable for you to quickly guesstimate how much data Amazon has, which is already a gargantuan amount of data on you. But you know, the more separation you can create between your Amazon account and your, your social media, the potential layers of protection from your, you know, from reviews being removed en masse. So that's that. If you ever have issues and you have to contact Amazon, it always has to be through the email address that you have the Amazon account set up through. So hopefully that answered your question. Yes, you said thank you. Cool. Okay, next question is from Amy. And would a copyright be needed for a memoir? I would encourage everyone to file for copyright. And again, we've talked a lot, we have a few videos on copyright and you know, if Angela's feeling energetic, she can try and search for a couple of them. Probably the best one, Angela is the copyright FAQs. It's a more recent one. So if you search for copyright FAQs, you can bring that one up and she'll drop that in the comments for you. But given the issues that are coming up and the fact that, you know, while we do all own our copyright, the minute we put pen to paper, Amazon or KDP is requesting for proof of ownership of the material more and more often. And the absolute best way to prove that you own it is simply by sharing the letter that you get back after you filed for copyright. So I would recommend, no matter what it is that you are, that you are filing. And now I gotta hide this one. Hide current comment. There we go. Okay, so next question. Hi someone, I'll wait till it comes up. Okay, so question two, question. I'm waiting for Q3 to pop up over here and Angela did drop the specific copyright FAQ video in there, so that's great. And yes, Amy, quick answer. You can file after the book is published. The reason we're talking about filing it before the book is published is just because Amazon has been asking for proof. But yes, I did. In that FAQ video I talk about all the specifics with regards to this. And of course this is only for the us the process is different in other countries and the needs for doing it are different in different countries as well. But yes, you could file anytime you can file for copyright, but, but there is like a six month window after your book has come out that gives you certain rights. But again, you know, I'm not a copyright expert so you can check out that video and of course always copy consult with a lawyer if this becomes important issue. Okay, Michael's question. How do you file for copyright? I am not going down that rabbit hole. But you know what? Because again, it is different everywhere. And there are plenty of tutorial videos online that you can find as well as the actual site that you use to file the copyright has really good clear instructions on what to do. So I'm not going to go down that. But that FAQ video starts to talk about some of those things for you. Okay. All right, so next up, next question, let's see. Just waiting for it to pop up. And while I wait, why don't we do a sock come up. But I'm going to pop over. I'm already halfway there. So let's do the first prize for all of you that are here and if you haven't said hello yet or commented or asked a question, now's your time to make sure you're in on the next one. So this one, and I'll make it bigger so you can all see it. Let's do it that way. So I have this cool little tool that Caitlin actually told me about. So thank you, Caitlin. And I just choose it and I collect. Boom. So there's 15 of you that have commented so far, and all of you get entered to win. And Tony, I swear, every time you come on, you win. So, Toni, thank you, Unbreakable tv. Welcome, and of course, thank you for commenting and participating. So just let us know what prize you could use. And if not, if you feel like you've got everything, you are always welcome to gift it to someone else. Okay, I. I think that's hilarious because I swear every time you win. Every time. Okay, so question four. What is your go to ebook distributor? I am looking for a distributor who will let me run sales better. So again, distributor or aggregator? So aggregator. We use Draft two Digital. That's our favorite. That's the one that we set. We recommend all of our clients use. So Draft 2 Digital, you can just go book launchers.com forward/D2D and that will get you onto that page. For direct sales, I use book funnel, but StoryOrigin also has a really simple, good platform. I like Book Funnel because I'm also using it for audiobooks, and I can seamlessly change between selling and giving away and giving away in bulk. It's just a really, really robust tool. So I did a video recently. Gosh, I'm really making you work hard today, Angela. I did a video on how I set my audiobook up on Book Funnel for giving it away for free. And I walk you through how to do it. And setting it up for audiobook is very similar to how you would set it up for ebook. So Angela can drop the that down in the comments for you as well. And Tony has taken a journal. So, yes, I highly recommend our beautiful, oh so Soft Book Launchers journal with these beautiful red pages. And this one Angela sent to me recently. Can you tell? It's blank inside. Okay, so I saw my next question here. Let's hide that one. And Mason, can Amazon refuse to terminate a book that its author requested? Sorry, I just did the old head tilt. I don't know. Yes, Amazon can do whatever they want, so I'm not really sure of the scenario where this would happen. So I assume you're asking to delete a book and they're refusing. That doesn't really happen. But it can be more difficult than you think to remove a book from Amazon because if third party sellers start selling it, you can't not sell it because they're not going to stop a third party seller from selling it. But honestly, I'm not totally sure what you were asking with that question. Okay, let's see. Next question. Here we are. Richard. Yes. Do you do book promotion and marketing for the book already published? So in general, yes, you should. Self Promote and Succeed is a fabulous resource for you. Whoops, wrong way. That book. Right. The mirror version always throws me off. Self Promote and Succeed, that has a whole bunch of strategies, tactics, tools that authors should be and could be trying to help promote a book post launch. We did drop the link earlier. Self promote and succeed.com audio if you want to download that for free, of course you can buy it wherever books are sold as well as for a company. Book Launchers. Yes, we occasionally, I would say maybe 5 or 10% of the time, somebody comes to us with a book and wants us to market it for them post launch, we will take them on as a client and help them. The reason it's such a low percentage, well, frankly that's, it's kind of that low for all of them because we want to make sure you're a great fit so that you know you're going to love our service. But a lot of books that somebody has self published, there's a lot of work that needs to be done before the book comes out in order for the book to be successfully marketed. And so typically we're not just taking the book and starting a marketing plan. Typically we're taking a step back and we're looking at the COVID we're looking at the metadata. So looking at the keyword category pricing we're creating, we're probably rewriting the book description and the author bio. Sometimes we're even recommending some changes to the interior content of the book. Then we do a media kit and then yes, after all of that, we are also working on your strategy and looking at your goals and figuring out, okay, who are we going to pitch and how are we going to reach them? And then we'll run ebook sales, we'll submit for catalogs, book awards, we will pitch you for podcasts, live appearances, media. That's kind of the bulk of what we're doing to help somebody market a book. But there is typically a pretty large step back before we can step forward with how we do it. We are working on a new service called Strategic Author Success. And we will be launching that probably in August to kind of a beta group with a full rollout probably in September. So if you're not already getting our newsletter and you want something like that to help support with book marketing, definitely get on our newsletter list, which you can do@book launchers.com newsletter very simply. And that should be an exciting extra that people have been asking us for for a long time. Okay, next question. I have my new book on kdp, but I also set up the paperback on Ingram. Is it possible to have Ingram take over the paperback sales on kdp? I mean, you can just leave. So I, I don't know the order of operations here. This is a good nuanced question for Alyssa. And by the way, she did a fantastic deep dive on distribution, covering some of these things. She did that last month. And if you want, if you missed it and you want to purchase the Deep dive, it's only $35. It was a two hour deep dive. Angela can drop that down here. And Angela also would know exactly what Alyssa covered. I was back in Canada with my family, so I didn't actually catch her deep dive. And I haven't gone through it all just yet. But she covered a lot of these nuanced things. But we do set up Ingram for print pre sale, and then we usually switch it to KDP for, for, for launch and beyond. But some of these issues we've had with KDP we haven't had with Ingram. And so the print, the print fulfillment is happening through Ingram in some of the cases and it's not happening through kdp. So it's kind of a complicated answer to a situation that without kind of truly understanding, my loose answer is yes. Hopefully that helps a little bit. Cool gamers here. Hello and welcome. Okay, and I think I'll wait for Angela. I saw a couple other questions coming in here. I'll wait for Angela for question eight. And I will quickly pop over and do our other live comment right now. And then that will give Angela a chance to drop in Q8 and Q9 for me. All right, so giveaway tool. So we have Tony, who won the last one. And our next one is. Whoops, here we go. So now I can draw again. And you can see up here now there's 17 entries. So a couple new people commented since the last draw. And Melissa, congratulations. I think you're a brand new winner. So I love getting brand new winners. So you have to email Angela at team at Book Launchers. Dot com, and you let her know if you want the journal, the mug, or a print copy of Self Promote and Succeed, or Self Publish and Succeed, and she will mail that off to you. Of course, include your mailing address because she does not know where to send it. So congratulations. Yay. Okay, question eight. Here we go. How do I know if my email is secure without someone stealing my ideas? I. I don't know exactly. Again, context is really important when you ask a question. So I don't know is the answer I can truly give on that answer. And I mean, there's always, to me, there's always an element of something can always be stolen. So take that for what you will. I always walk around with a healthy, you know, dose of paranoia, but at the same time, I'm going to carry on anyways. I'm not that worried about somebody stealing an idea because execution is where that really needs to happen. And if you've written a book, yes, somebody can steal it, but most of the time they're going to spend their time stealing books that are already selling really well. Like David Goggins, which we talked about a couple months ago in one of these live streams, how he's suing Amazon because there were copies of his book being sold on Amazon and Amazon didn't do anything about it. And, and he's certain it cost him a lot, a lot of money. So yes, the scammers that are going to steal a book or an idea, they're more likely to steal a book that is doing extremely well already because they're more likely to make a lot of money doing it than to take a raw idea and have to build it all the way up. Because all of us authors know what a journey it is to actually get somebody to buy a book. But I'm not, I'm sorry, I don't really know exactly what you're asking, asking there. And Amazon's integrity, I mean, Amazon has, doesn't have humans involved. So, you know, Amazon's not stealing ideas. Amazon's not doing enough to protect authors. Again, David Goggins lawsuit is, I think, a really good case in point. They aren't shutting down accounts that should be shut down, and then they're shutting down accounts that shouldn't be shut down. And so it is a little bit of a mess. But no, I'm not worried about Amazon stealing my ideas. They have more bots than humans working there. But that's me. Again, do your own research and do things that you're comfortable with. Don't just do What I do because I'm more comfortable with a lot of those kind of risks than, than some people are. Okay. Emily says, what's working with Amazon like from a user interface standpoint? Will it be intuitive for novices like myself and my co author to learn? Maybe it is a. So yes, they have a lot of tutorial videos and it takes a bit of time. But as far as like the basics of can I upload a book? Yes. Is there a lot of opportunity to. To make mistakes and do the wrong thing? Yes. And so, you know, it's one of those things where I joke, but I'm not really joking when I say I started book launchers after self publishing my first two books because I pretty much never wanted to do that stuff again, you know, and that is a joke. But also there was that thing in my head which is I knew I wanted to write a lot more books than just two. And I also knew that I didn't want to be the one that's uploading the books and dealing with all of the shenanigans that go on behind the scenes to do keyword research and manage all the pieces that happen. But you know, if you are a go getter, you can get it done. I mean, I did with my first two books. I made mistakes, but they make for great videos and great content. So. So you're welcome. Okay, Anything else here? Any other questions? It says the categories, Renee. I'm just reading the comment from Renee. The categories you set up with Amazon should be the same as the categories in the product details. My book is an ebook, paperback and hardcover. They are all different with product details. That is a really nuanced question that I feel like that's like something. Part of why I want to start this strategic author success group is those kind of questions. I want somebody to be able to put their, their screen up on the, you know, to go into an office hour and have somebody from my production team who uploads books, you know, and oversees the uploading of books all the time. They can look at your screen and go, that shouldn't be like that. And that should be because I don't. For the exact reason I just said I don't get into the nuance like, like the really, really finite details of that. The short answer is the categories are different for each format. That's the short, short answer. They are different by country. So Amazon Canada has different categories than Amazon United States and they're different all over the world. So there are nuances like that. Okay, so question 10 here we go. How important is your Amazon author position page in respect to SEO? As far as SEO goes, your title, your book title, your subtitle, your book description, those are things that are really important. Then the categories that you enter in those seven boxes, those are really important. And I just sent an email today, so everybody on the launch letter newsletter list got the email. Our tool, our go to tool for Amazon category and keyword research is Publisher Rocket. And they're raising their prices. I think at the end of this week. It's only $97. And that price never changes. So if you don't already have it, I highly recommend that you get it. But, and plus, this content is fantastic. And so I also linked to an article on category research inside of that, inside of that, that talks about this. But yeah, that's from a, from an SEO perspective, those are the most important. There's a knock, there's a knock on the wall. So that's what I would recommend, is grab Publisher Rocket and kind of go through it that way. But title and subtitle are really, really important. So when you're doing your category and keyword research kind of and think about your title and subtitle, those are the hardest things to change and they're the most important for SEO. All right, let's see. Just looking at the next comments here. Okay. Benefit of A plus content. Yes, I just did a video on that. So Angela, if you're watching the replay, the description will have all of these links and it's going to be about this long. But I just came out, if not last week, the week before. So it was a video all about a content and I talked about it. Okay. Okay, last question. You guys have made me work hard today. Okay, Melissa, title versus subtitle and SEO. If I have a good descriptor keywords in my subtitle, is it okay to have a more generic title? Maybe. So titles are fun because with the generic title, if you have a good subtitle, that can make up for it. But the other piece that really has to work is your cover. So you really have to make sure if you have a generic title, that your cover is, makes it clear who your book is for and why they would pick it up. So I don't know. I just got some books behind me here. Let's pull. Pardon me for turning my back on you, but let's just pull here. So just a couple examples. So this is Susan Henley Hensley's book. So how this is art for your sanity, how art journaling can Help you manage chaos and unleash joy. So art for your sanity. Yeah, that's already fairly clear. How art journaling. So it's not just about art, but it's how art journaling can help you manage chaos and unleash joy. Let's see. Here's another one. Again, I just randomly picked these off my pile. So you are the dream of the universe. It all works together. And then the subtitle on this one is moving towards the inner adult as a further step in the evolution of self awareness. So the. The category or, sorry, the title and the COVID go together. Just trying to see if I have anything more generic here to. To illustrate. Okay, let's try this one on for size. Soul Farmer by Dina Jansen. Sowing seeds of change to reap an inspired life. So I think the answer is probably yes. But the COVID has to work hand in hand with the title and subtitle because ultimately it has to speak to the reader. So the reader has to be able to take one look or even hear the title and know it's for them. Because if it's too generic, like Fun Day, I don't know. I'm trying to think of something really generic like Coffee Cup. That's your book title. Well, like, what is that about? And so that can be. I always. I always tell people to tell your friend what your book is called, and you could even ask them, what do you think it's about? And then later on, ask them for what that title was. Because you want your title to be memorable. You want the reader to know it's for them. You want it to be easy to say. You want to make sure that you're not competing with some other major book out there. And you know that it has the same title, because two books can have the same title. Ten books can have the same title, but you don't want to compete with another book with the same title. So, sorry, it's hard to hand answer questions like that without actually diving into what it is. But hopefully that gave you something to work with. Okay, let's see if the title is Coffee Cup. I'm reading it. Right. Me too. You guys should see my desk here. Oh, look, I can show you. I've got Coffee Cup. This is full of iced coffee. Okay. Del Mar. Del Mar center for Therapeutic Massage. Oh, wish you were here right now. Okay. I have a series of four books all titled the same, except for the indication of book one, book two. I would be less worried about Amazon and more worried about my reader not realizing that they are a series. So. And I was just thinking about this because I was in Barnes and Noble with my son. And I am lucky, I guess, because my son. Maybe it's not luck, given what I do for a living, but my son is an avid reader and he's obsessive about it. Like, he'll sit down and read a book cover to cover, and then he loves these series. So he just finished this series called Dogman. He's now done. He's now onto this series called Investigators and the next series that comes after Investigators. And what frustrates me about series is they don't have the numbers. And there was a couple series where they actually have the number on the spine. And so, like, if this was moving to tax free and then the next one would be tax free and making, you know, tax free and higher income. I don't know. I'm just making this up because Bruce only did one book. But, you know, maybe it's moving to tax free and then tax free and rich and then rich and, you know, retired or rich and giving money away. Something like that. But I would want to see up here. I want this to be one, right. Because when I'm looking at the books online and in the store, I don't know which one comes next. So I would say I would recommend, if it's not too late in your series, to have them tie together. And I don't think I have. I don't have any series examples here, but we just designed some covers for a series. So it's a great example of having them look similar, not the same, giving the title something different, but it also is identifiable as part of the series. So book one, book two, book three, Book four would be part of it. But I would encourage you to change the title for no other reason than to encourage the reader to want to read each book, to kind of sell them on what's coming next and why they would need the next book in that series. Are we done? These are great questions to kind of wrap up before we take our summer break. So thank you so much for being here and participating. We will be back with new videos the first Tuesday of August, and our first live stream, I think, is the second Tuesday in August. So we'll be back to hang out again there. And I look forward to seeing all of you then. And if you're watching the replay, you've got questions, you've got topics. I'm going to be producing content and prepping for you all in the month of July. So this is a great time to plant the seed for what you want us to cover coming up in August, September and beyond. So. All right, thank you so much, and I can't wait to see you all back here in August. Bye.