Full Free Book! Get Your Book Selling on Apple Books by USA Today Bestselling Author Monica Leonelle

Chapter 1: An Apple Books Introduction. Apple Books, formerly known as iBooks, is a digital platform for downloading and reading ebooks and audiobooks. Launched by Apple Inc. in 2010, Apple Books has grown to become one of the leading digital book platforms worldwide. In this book, we will explore the history of Apple Books and its impact on the world of digital publishing, along with the many ways in which authors can start selling more books on the platform. The history of Apple Books. Launched alongside the revolutionary iPad, iBooks aimed to reshape the way we consume content. The platform came pre-installed on iPads, enabling users to browse, purchase, and download ebooks directly to their device through the integrated iBookstore. In 2011, Apple implemented a rule stating that apps could not direct users to external sources for purchasing ebooks without also offering them in-app. This rule impacted other ebook retailers, as Apple's in-app purchases required a 30% fee, which matched the industry standard for total royalty cuts. In 2012, iBooks introduced a graphical user interface (GUI) display screen that featured a visually appealing page-turning animation, mimicking the experience of reading a physical book. The same year, Apple unveiled iBooks Author, a macOS app designed for creating textbooks and visually rich books. IBooks Author utilized the iBook format (eBA) for its interactive content, but it was discontinued in 2020, with similar functionality now available in Apple's Pages app. In 2013, Apple continued to innovate and enhance its digital book platform by introducing personalized digital gifts, allowing users to send eBooks as presents to their friends and family. In 2014, Apple made a significant move by expanding iBooks beyond the iPad, making it available on iPhones and Mac computers with the release of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite. This expansion allowed Apple to reach a wider audience and compete more directly with other ebook platforms such as Amazon's Kindle. In 2018, the platform was rebranded as Apple Books, solidifying its new identity with enhanced features and an updated app design. The rebranding came with a redesigned app, featuring a new look and improved functionality. The update introduced a dedicated audiobooks section, which highlighted the growing popularity of audiobooks in the digital publishing industry. Today, Apple Books supports ePub and PDF formats, as well as audiobook files. It is one of only two major retailers that the Amazon-owned Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) distributes to, alongside Amazon. Amazon itself. This unique position has allowed Apple Books to maintain a strong presence in the digital book market and continue to attract both authors and readers alike. Apple Books Controversy. Throughout its history, Apple Books has faced some controversies, including a 2012 lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) accusing Apple and several major publishers of price-fixing in the ebook market. In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Apple's appeal, and the company was forced to pay a $450 million settlement. Despite these setbacks, Apple Books has continued to evolve and expand its offerings. Today, the platform boasts a diverse library of ebooks and audiobooks, catering to a wide variety of interests and genres. Apple Books has played a significant role in the digital publishing industry by offering a seamless, user-friendly experience for readers, and enabling authors and publishers to reach a global audience. Who is this book for? If you are reading this book, I'm going to assume you are: an independent author, or a soon-to-be-published independent author; an author interested in publishing on or optimizing their backlist at the ebook and audiobook retailer Apple Books, owned by Apple. An author who doesn't need me or anyone to give them any background on what Kindle Unlimited exclusivity is, what going wide is, or how you should choose between the two. If you have somehow stumbled upon this book and you are confused by what I'm saying, then I'm not sure this is the book for you. I would recommend instead that you pick up the first book in this series, Get Your Book Selling Wide. Get the basics of publishing in print, ebook, audiobook, translations, apps, and more. Book Sales Supercharged number 1. This book is going to catch you up on the series and prepare you for the following discussion about Apple Books, which is the subject of the book you're reading right now. The series starter, Get Your Book Selling Wide, is permanently free at most ebook retailers. Check the price to make sure. It costs nothing to try it, so definitely pick it up. With that out of the way, let's get right into the topic at hand: Apple Books. Increasing your sales at Apple Books. There's only one purpose of this book, and that is to help you increase your book sales at Apple Books. We'll do this by discussing what marketing works at Apple Books, and what doesn't, and then we'll dive into the algorithms that drive visibility on Apple Books. I'll be honest, it's very weird to be writing a book that's so specific, as normally, I have pages and pages of material to try to sell people into the concept of whatever I'm talking about. But let's face it, you just wouldn't pick up this book unless you specifically wanted to find more ways to increase your book sales at Apple Books. That's it. There's nothing else. I'm racking my brain right now for something else you could possibly want from this book. So this book is about one thing: increasing your book sales at Apple Books. Here's how we divvy up the chapters. Chapter 2: Apple Books Basics. How to upload your books, find and handle links, and the things that really move the marketing needle at Apple Books. Chapter 3: Optimizing Your Apple Books Metadata. How to use your metadata to gain visibility in various places of the retailer's store. Chapter 4: Getting Merchandised with Apple Books. The things you need to do before attempting to get merchandised, and the different ways you can get into in-store promotions. Chapter 5: A Primer on Algorithms. Why different authors might experience a platform different ways, and how algorithms can react differently to books based on category and genre. Chapter 6: A Primer on Artificial Intelligence. All retailers use some forms of artificial intelligence to sort books and other products, and many have also begun creating AI-generated content. This chapter offers a basic understanding of various terms that you might see as the publishing world changes and AI plays a greater role in subsidiary rights and offerings available through the platform, along with platform mechanics. Chapter 7: Introduction to the Apple Books Algorithms. How visibility works on the store, what you can control, and what you can't. Chapter 8: How Sales Rank Works at Apple Books. How to better understand your book's sales rank as well as how sales rank affects bestseller lists, lists and search results, a special case bestseller list at Apple Books. Chapter 9: Mastering search optimization at Apple Books. How search works on the store, what you can control and what you can't. Chapter 10: How to get the most visibility from carousels at Apple Books. How carousels work on the store and how you can use them to gain more visibility. Chapter 11: What we can use Also Bots for at Apple Books. How Also Bots work on the store and how you can use them to gain more visibility. Chapter 12: How Personalized Recommendations Work at Apple Books. How personalized recommendations work on the store and how you can use them to gain more visibility. Chapter 13: Marketing Recommendations Checklist for Apple Books. A summary of takeaways and to-dos from all previous chapters. This is your Apple Books marketing plan checklist. Chapter 14: Creating and Selling Audiobooks at Apple Books. Taking everything we've learned and applying it specifically to audiobooks. Chapter 15: Selling translations at Apple Books, taking everything we've learned and applying it specifically to translations. Chapter 16: Selling comics and graphic novels on Apple Books, taking everything we've learned and applying it specifically to comics and graphic novels. Chapter 17: Next steps, the final takeaways from the book to help you improve your marketing and sales at Apple Books. By the end of this book, you will know more about how to succeed at Apple Books than 99% of all authors, and most publishers too. Who am I? My name is Monica Leonelle, and I have been independently publishing since 2009. I write young adult fantasy under Solo Storm and used to write romance under another pen name. I'm relaunching those under the Solo Storm brand. I have about 40 books total in my catalog, 25 of which are fiction. My urban fantasy novella, The Last Daughter, hit the USA Today bestseller list in 2017 as part of a boxed set. I've also written over 15 nonfiction books about writing, editing, publishing, marketing, and business. You can learn more about my work at theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Studying the Apple Books Algorithms. When it comes to Apple Books, I have no inside information or direct line to the CEO. That is coupled with how Apple Books in particular, along with Apple itself, keeps a fairly tight lid on how their retailer storefronts work, aside from a few key things that they share privately through webinars, in person, or on a one-to-one call. I am not a representative of Apple Books, this is not an official guide to Apple Books, and I can't guarantee that I understand absolutely everything about Apple Books, or that everything I've put into this book is 100% accurate. Apple as a company does not talk about their algorithms across any of their software or products, which means that a lot of my information around how the algorithms work come from observation, talking to other authors, and educated guesses as to what might be happening behind the scenes. In short, and this is very important, unless the mechanics of the store are confirmed by an Apple Books representative, it's not a fact about how the retailer works. Throughout the book, I'm largely speculating, and while I try to use language that indicates that, I don't always get it right. And I tend to think I'm right most of the time, so sometimes the ego has a way of writing something with confidence when I don't 100% know that it's true. So even if I sound sure of what I'm talking about, always take it with a heap of salt. None of us can be sure except Apple. We can only make smart, educated guesses and experiment to see if we get the expected result in the store. Getting Things Wrong Sometimes. This book and Book Sales Supercharged, the series of books that it's attached to, covers an ambitious spread of topics in intense detail. I consider myself as well-versed in the publishing industry as any independent author making a full-time living at this. Still, there is plenty that I don't or can't know. I have done everything humanly possible to get these books right, but there may still be gaps in my knowledge or places where we misstate something. Call me out. No, seriously, notice that I got something wrong or suspect that my educated guess is not so educated. I want to hear from you. Please feel free to reach out to me with corrections or additional information if I've gotten something wrong within these pages. I want to make these books the best resource they can be, so I won't be offended. You can email me at team@theworldneedsyourpassion.com or through my email with Writer MBA, support@writermba.com. I'll be sure to incorporate those updates into the next version of the book. Lastly, Apple Books and the publishing industry as a whole are evolving rapidly. Things are changing all the time on this platform. It's a lot to take in, and even more to keep updated. While I will be issuing new editions of this book regularly, please keep in mind the publishing date on the version you're reading, as much of the book could be out of date in a few short years. Consistent formatting across the 5 retailer books. All Big Five retailer books in this series—Apple Books, Amazon Kobo, Google Play Books, and Barnes Noble—are formatted in a similar way on purpose. I want you to be able to find the thing you need, and easily be able to compare and contrast retailers by comparing and contrasting chapters. I also have to share many of the same messages, like in the first and last chapters of every book, and these messages don't change. I have written a primer to aid in your understanding of algorithms and how they work. As retailers continue to incorporate artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI, I need to provide a primer on that too. It would be foolish to try to find a unique and interesting way to write the same information 5 different times, so I've written these chapters along with the first and last chapters of every book, once. I've made these chapters the best possible for you, so that no matter which book you are reading, you have the chapter for easy reference. If you are reading multiple books about the Big Five, you can safely read these chapters once and skip them in subsequent books. Use them again only if you need to refresh yourself on the concepts. Where you can find even more information about Apple Books. If you want to follow industry news as it's happening, make sure you join my Substack newsletters. Each newsletter offers regular articles, with about half posted for free and the other half paid. By becoming a free subscriber, you'll receive great news and analysis about what is happening at various retailers and in the publishing community in general. By becoming a paid subscriber, you'll get all the content plus access to the full archives, where you will find several articles on each retailer. The biggest benefit to joining is that my newsletters are an extension of this book and the rest of the books in the series. My coverage goes deeper and is more accurate than tech sites that do not have a focus on publishing. By supporting my newsletter, you are supporting a niche news resource with a slant toward what publishing is truly interested in. My Substack newsletters are author analyst. Apple Books and all of the other big 5 retailers are changing all the time. Meanwhile, this book gets updated every 2 to 5 years, and a lot can change in that timeframe. This is a place where I can offer my news, analysis, and opinion on happenings in the industry, and I'm usually able to break news long before news outlets do. For authors who are going aggressively wide in subscriptions and memberships, this publication takes a deep dive into everything about serialization, fiction apps, and subscriptions and memberships. TheWorldNeedsYourPassion.substack.com. Author ecosystems. For authors who are trying to get to the next level in their publishing business, it would help to know exactly what kind of author you are. Are you a nimble desert, an expansive grassland, a rolling tundra, an interconnected forest, or a dynamic aquatic? Dig deep into the new methodology developed by USA Today bestselling authors Monica Leonelle and Russell Noholti, creators of the Kickstarter accelerator Go Wide Grow Wide, Book Sales Supercharged, and more. AuthorEcosystems.substack.com. Our community to support Apple Books authors. My Book Sales Supercharged series co-author Russell Nohalty and I also have a Circle community. Circle is a fantastic, decentralized platform that has similar functionality to Facebook without many of the downsides. Please join us in our Circle community to ask questions and continue the conversation from this book. We share lots of awesome stuff related to this book series there. Go.writermba.com. Additional resources: Read Monica's blog. I've been blogging professionally since 2006, and in the last several years have begun to collect all my work in one spot, under one brand called "The World Needs Your Passion." This is the one place on the internet where I am not "on brand" or niche-focused toward a goal. I bring my whole self to this blog, write about whatever I want, and share everything from my greatest lessons learned to best my business advice, to my love of Lego, tarot, Taylor Swift, and more. It's also a place where I keep the footer fully updated with all my links to everywhere you can find me on the internet. Read this resource: theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Subscribe to Monica's YouTube channel. My YouTube channel is The World Needs Your Passion, and I teach people how to find, pursue, nurture, reignite, and even make money money from their passions. I also teach people about entrepreneurship, creativity, business, writing, art, and more. You can watch my channel youtube.com/theworldneedsyourpassion. Subscribe to Monica's podcast. I post new 20-minute episodes about publishing, going wide, serialized fiction, industry trends, and so much more on my podcast feed. Theproductivenovelist.buzzsprout.com. Follow Monica on Medium. I post regular articles about the publishing industry if you prefer to read about new developments. monicalenelle.medium.com. Check out the rest of the series. The Book Sales Supercharged series focuses on each retailer, format, and platform, diving deep into everything you need to know to succeed in that particular space. You can find all the information about the series, plus grab the entire set of books in a bundle directly from my website, at a significant discount to purchasing each individually at retailers. shop.theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Take our Author Ecosystems Quiz. The Author Ecosystems Quiz will give you more self-knowledge and help you identify what type of publishing business model is going to work best for you. Are you a nimble desert, an expansive grassland, a rolling tundra, an interconnected forest, or a dynamic aquatic? Dig deep into the new methodology developed by USA Today bestselling authors Monica Leonelle and Russell Nohulty, creators of the Kickstarter accelerator Go Wide Grow Wide, Book Sales Supercharged, and more. https://author-ecosystem.com/ https://author-ecosystems.substack.com/. Takeaways. Throughout the book, I'll offer takeaways and task checklists at the end of every chapter. I'll also post takeaways as they come within each section to help you solidify some of the material, which can get dense and specific in places. Takeaways cover the big ideas, while the task checklist contains to-dos and action items that will move the needle forward for you on this platform. The takeaways for this chapter are: This book aims to help you better market and sell your books on Apple Books. Over the course of 10+ chapters, we break down all the ins and outs of this platform in incredible detail found nowhere else. You'll know more about Apple Books than 99% of authors, traditionally or independently published. I am not a representative of Apple or Apple Books, so there is a level of speculation in this work. If you think I'm wrong, let me know at support@writermba.com. The books are just a starting point to understanding this platform. Books are inherently static objects, and the publishing world is changing rapidly, faster and faster every year. Please follow my newsletters and social media content to stay up to date on newest developments about Apple Books. Task Checklist: Subscribe to the Substacks. Join our community. Follow me on social media channels and my podcast. Grab the books as a bundle and at a steep discount from my website. Keep on reading. Chapter 2: Apple Books Basics. In this chapter, I'm going to share everything you need to know to get started with publishing on Apple Books, along with why I like this platform for independent authors. I've also included some tips on topics that I know are among many authors' frequently asked questions about this platform. By the end of the chapter, you should have enough knowledge to get your catalog onto this retailer and be ready to start making sales. Why Apple Books? There are lots of reasons to consider improving sales for every retailer. So why focus your precious time, energy, and money on Apple Books? Here are 5 reasons that I think it's worth investing in improving your book sales at Apple Books. Apple Books is one of the largest ebook retailers and has a wide global audience thanks to the Books app being distributed to all Apple devices automatically. The iPhone makes up about 20-25% of all cellular devices on the planet,, and about 10% of all computer devices on the planet. Additionally, iPhone users can only buy books from the Apple Books app, aside from going to their web browser. The Apple Books storefront is highly influenceable by promotions for free and discount books. This means that many wide retailer strategies are going to work especially well at this retailer, and it will be easier to get your catalog off the ground here. If you can get into Apple Books merchandising, it works incredibly well. Some authors find that their Apple Books revenue matches or exceeds their revenue at Amazon for months on end after a promotion. Apple Books indexes descriptions in its search and is one of the few ebook retailers to do so. The other is Google Play Books. This means that you have a lot more control over where your book appears in search. Which likely accounts for 15-20% of overall visibility in the storefront, and almost no authors use this to their advantage. Apple Books is the only non-Amazon storefront that has ACX exclusive audiobooks. That means that even if you are exclusive in ebook and audiobook, you have a presence at Apple Books, and it's incredibly valuable for you to take the time to optimize your product listings there. Especially when 95% of authors don't. Takeaway: You have a surprising amount of control over your sales at Apple Books, which makes it a dream for authors who like to check off boxes from their task lists. The best part is that when you do start to gain traction, it can really pay off in consistent 4- and 5-figure months. Publishing on Apple Books. Where is the Apple Books storefront? Apple Books exists only on iOS devices and Apple products. You can access the app through iPhone, iPad, iMac, and other Apple devices. Apple Books is also the only place to directly buy an ebook from an iOS device. All other retailers can have their apps on in the Apple Store, but links take readers out of the app and direct to their retailer websites, where the reader can then purchase their book. Takeaway: Looking for the Apple Books storefront on an Android or PC device? You won't find it anywhere but in Apple products, which is a frustration for many authors who don't own them. Good news: You don't have to buy an Apple product to publish because you can go through a distributor like Draft2Digital. How do I publish to Apple Books? You can publish through a publisher, distributor, or direct to Apple Books on your own. Just like you do on Amazon. Most independent authors are choosing between a distributor and going direct, and most indies that go through a distributor choose a company called Draft2Digital. They go through a distributor for two reasons: A, Apple Books is a pain to publish through and used to require Apple devices, and B, Draft2Digital frequently collects books for Apple Books in-store promotions. Apple Books has made improvements to its uploading process with a new book uploader that you can access from the web, but the tool gives you less control over your data and causes synchronization issues if you are also updating through iTunes Producer. While Apple Books says that they are publishing agnostic and don't care if you publish through a publisher, distributor, or direct when choosing books for in-store promotions, it does seem easier to get those promotions through Draft2Digital than on your own. I don't doubt that Apple Books is publishing agnostic on their end during selection. However, getting in front of them for consideration and selection is harder to do on your own. I have a whole section about these in-store promotions later in the book. There is one downside to using a distributor, which is that some distributors only send one category to Apple Books. If you go direct with Apple Books, you can add many categories to your listing. Some authors still feel the trade-off is worth having fewer categories on the storefront, and many regularly switch out their categories over the course of the year to try to reach new and relevant audiences. Takeaway: Consider using Draft2Digital to get your books to Apple Books if you know that you cannot get promotional opportunities on your own. How do I upload my books direct? If you decide to go direct, there are two ways: Download iTunes Producer (requires an Apple laptop or desktop) and send Apple Books a package of your book files and metadata. Use their newer web upload option (does not require an Apple laptop or desktop), which is really convenient and easy to use: https://authors.apple.com/epub-upload. Once you've uploaded your book, you can make changes to pricing and territory availability in the iTunes Connect dashboard. One of the challenges with uploading to Apple Books system is that they have multiple data entry points. You can make changes in iTunes Producer (app download only), iTunes Connect, and online website. You can get to iTunes Connect or Apple Books direct upload website here. ITunes Connect: https://itunesconnect.apple.com/. An online website: https://authors.apple.com/epub-upload/. This means that if you change something through the latter two, when you go back to iTunes Producer, you won't have those changes saved. Your data in iTunes Producer lives on your computer, so it's not updated when you make changes through their web systems. Keep it in mind as you decide where to make changes, even if it's convenient in the moment. I've also heard from several authors that they've had issues with random data appearing in weird places, like their description, that they then had to hunt down across multiple places to get rid of. Takeaway: If you are going direct, I strongly recommend using iTunes Producer every time you need to make a change to your listings. Doing so prevents wrong files from getting uploaded and stray data showing up where it shouldn't. Finding links on Apple Books. Another huge challenge and frustration for non-Apple users is that Apple Books doesn't have much of a web presence. You can view the storefront in apps on Apple devices, which makes it challenging for some authors to find links to their book, series page, and author page. How do I find my book link in Apple Books? The best resource, especially if you don't own Apple products, is to use their marketing tool: https://tools.applemediaservices.com/apple-books. Here, you can find books and audiobooks and get the appropriate link for them. If you are signed up for the affiliate program, you can also get that added to your link by adding an affiliate token. You can also create a geo-targeted link, which will take a reader to their specific Apple Books storefront, based on where they live. Every country available on Apple Books has its own storefront and top 100 lists. To do so, add geo in place of the country tag, us, GB, o, etc., in your link. This works for the most part, but I've also personally had problems with it, so you may want to test it for yourself before you start distributing your links. To get a clean link, delete anything after the, as these are variables, usually tracking variables, that you don't need to pass along for the link to work. How do I sign up to be an affiliate? At the time of this writing, you can get an additional 7% of the sale price on digital products through Apple's affiliate program. This effectively raises your royalty rate on your own books purchased through your link by 7%. As you will be linking to your book regularly anyway, it makes sense to sign up and use these links everywhere. You can learn more about the program here: https://authors.apple.com/support/3977-apple-affiliate-program-books-audiobooks. You can apply for the program here: https://partners.applemediaservices.com/vip/k68480bfb1545 5-8-FC-567-C-4068-589-E-752-C-43-C-8989-C-34790-40-F-7-F-595-CB-66-C-2. Takeaway: Use the affiliate program at Apple Books and every retailer you can qualify for to get an additional boost in revenue. How do I find my author page? Use your book link to get to your book page through a browser. You should be able to click on the author name, which will take you to your author page. You can then grab the link. How do I find my series page? As far as I know, you can only find your series page through the app or web store. This means you need to own Apple products, or need to ask another author to help you out. There is no associated Apple Preview web page for a series. Navigate to the series you want in the app or computer storefront. You can right-click on the series name and copy the link. Then paste it into a browser. It will not provide a preview, but will force the user back to the app on their device when they click. The same works for the author page, but the author page will usually show up on the web as well. Takeaway: It can be difficult to find links on Apple Books, especially without Apple products, and the storefront is always changing. One thing to note is that both author pages and series pages do exist. If you are unable to find your links, ask for help from a fellow author. Organize those links in a spreadsheet when needed, and use redirects and universal links to make it easy for your readers to find them. Should I use certain terms in my advertising and/or target ads for Apple Books specifically? Apple Books recommends using the terms iOS or iBooks or Apple Books in targeting for Facebook and other major advertising platforms because the majority of their readers are reading from a device. That said, every successful author I've ever talked to said they instead use universal links, which link to the book in every retailer, rather than having a targeted ad for each one. I believe using these terms will ultimately make your ads more expensive, plus it's hard to get a good ad going with a smaller or limited audience. You can definitely test this further for yourself, but I recommend using universal links, especially if you are just starting Facebook ads. A few universal links tools you could try include GeniusLinks, Booklinker, Books to read. Book funnel. Many universal link tools will also allow you to add your own affiliate links, so be sure to do this. Takeaway: Create ads that use a landing page on your website, which then links out to individual retailers, or use universal links, or link to all the major retailers in an ad. Despite the recommendation from Apple Books, it is more expensive to create unique ads that send readers just to Apple Books. Even when targeting Apple-specific terms like iOS. Of course, feel free to test this for yourself. How do promotional codes work? Promotional codes are codes you can get from Apple Books to give away books to people with Apple Books accounts. These codes can be used to give away free books in giveaways, Facebook group takeovers, prizes and gifts, and more. You can also send them out as advanced reader copies, blogger copies, or as an email list bonus. Whatever you use them for, just remember that they have a shelf life of about a month, and there is an upper lifetime cap on how many you get for each book, so get them in small amounts at the level you need for your current promotion. You can learn more about the promotional codes here: https://itunespartner.apple.com/books/article/apple-books-promo-codes-2740 https://authors.apple.com/support/4576-use-promo-codes-2-build-buzz. Takeaway: Almost every retailer says that promotional codes are the most underutilized tool that they offer to authors. Get creative, and come up with some ideas to use promotional codes to stir sales at Apple Books. Additional Resources. You can get to iTunes Connect or Apple Books Direct Upload website here. iTunes Connect: https://itunesconnect.apple.com/. An online website: https://authors.apple.com/epub-upload/. In addition to this book, my company Writer MBA also has a section on Apple Books in our course, Go Wide, Grow Wide. You can get the Go Wide, Grow Wide course à la carte, or you can access it month-to-month or year-to-year along with our community through the Writer MBA membership. The value of joining this course through any of the options is that a book is always going to be static, while our courses and membership are dynamic and constantly updated. You can also ask me, Monica Leonellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellelle This is only available to our paid members. See pricing options at https://courses.writermba.com/. Apple Books has recently created a website for authors that offers up-to-date advice, platform tips, and links. If a question is unanswered or a link is broken throughout this book, you may be able to find the answer there. And if you can't find the answer there, I still recommend joining the course, as we can get the answer to your question through my connections. https://authors.apple.com/ Takeaways. You have a surprising amount of control over your sales at Apple Books, which makes it a dream for authors who like to check off boxes from their task lists. The best part is that when you do start to gain traction,, it can really pay off in consistent 4- and 5-figure months. Looking for the Apple Books storefront on an Android or PC device? You won't find it anywhere but in Apple products, which is a frustration for many authors who don't own them. Good news: you don't have to buy an Apple product to publish because you can go through a distributor like Draft2Digital. Consider using Draft2Digital to get your books to Apple Books if you know that you cannot get promotional opportunities on your own. If you are going direct, I strongly recommend using iTunes Producer every time you need to make a change to your listings. Doing so prevents wrong files from getting uploaded and stray data showing up where it shouldn't. Use the affiliate program at Apple Books and every retailer you can qualify for to get an additional boost in revenue. It can be difficult to find links on Apple Books, especially without Apple products, and the storefront is always changing. One thing to note is that both author pages and series pages do exist. If you are unable to find your links, ask for help from a fellow author. Organize those links in a spreadsheet when needed, and use redirects and universal links to make it easy for your readers to find them. Create ads that use a landing page on your website, which then links out to individual retailers, or use universal links or link to all the major retailers in an ad. Despite the recommendation from Apple Books, it is more expensive to create unique ads that send readers just to Apple Books, even when targeting Apple-specific terms like iOS. Of course, feel free to test this for yourself. Almost every retailer says that promotional codes are the most underutilized tool that they offer to authors. Get creative, and come up with some ideas to use promotional codes to stir sales at Apple Books. Task Checklist: Decide how you will upload to Apple Books—direct or distributor. Keep in mind that you can decide on a book level or series level as well. It's possible that you want to put your series that are most likely to get promotions into a distributor like Draft2Digital that offers them. Sign up for the affiliate program at Apple Books and update links across your universal links, your website, your social, and your advertising. Create a spreadsheet of Apple Books links for your author page, series page, and book pages so that they are easy to access. Ask an Apple product-loving friend to help if you are not able to find these links on your own. Sign up for a universal links provider or create landing pages on your website for each book. Make sure to link to Apple Books as one of the retailers on your website. Apple Books prefers to be the first link and states that it is a factor for them in choosing your book for promotions and a consideration in acceptance to its affiliate program. Brainstorm ways to use the promotional codes and plan 3 to 4 Apple Books-specific promotions per year. Get these onto your promotions calendar. Regardless of the success of the promotions, Apple Books may notice you are using these codes regularly and may give your catalog greater consideration in the future. This effort is part of building a relationship with this retailer. Keep reading. You have a ton of control over your sales at Apple Books, and the rest of the book will help you get there. Chapter 3: Optimizing Your Apple Books Metadata. The foundation of your efforts on any retailer are going to start with optimizing your metadata. This process is effectively polishing your sales page listing where you will either convert a looker to a buyer or won't. But while metadata appears on a single page on any given retailer, it will always have far-reaching influence around visibility throughout the retailer's other sales pages. Like category pages, search pages, series pages, personalized recommendation pages, and more as well. This chapter will give you everything I know, or strongly surmise, about how to optimize your metadata for Apple Books, so you have a foundation upon which to start gaining visibility at the store. One thing to keep in mind throughout this book is that there's a difference between optimizing for humans and optimizing for algorithms. Apple Books definitely cares about both, but the next several chapters are only referring to optimizing for the algorithms. As a reminder, Apple Books shares very little about their algorithms, so much of what I share here is through picking up on things they have confirmed and mixing it with things that I and others have observed. Additionally, my experience is limited, as is anyone's, by the genres I write and follow more closely. So some of this may be less true for your genre. Take it all with a heap of salt, test it with your own books, and please feel free to email me at team@theworldneedsyourpassion.com or support@writermba.com if you have additional information or think I'm missing something. How your metadata helps your visibility on Apple Books. Most of what I'm going to cover in this chapter has to do with improving your metadata, in order to appear where you want, in search results for your top keyword phrases. This is one way you can gain visibility in the store, and the Apple Books search algorithms are pretty straightforward, meaning you can get your book where you want it to be fairly easily with a few changes. That said, search is not a relatively huge part of discoverability on any retailer, and Apple Books is no different. Doing other important marketing activities—email marketing, advertising promotions, merchandising at the retailer, and more—should trump any efforts to rank in search on various keyword phrases. This is where the "optimizing for humans" part of metadata optimization comes in, as Apple Books uses metadata to select books for their in-store promotions. That means that if your book toes the line between paranormal romance and urban fantasy, for example, you may want to change your categories based on what in-store promotions you are applying for. It also means you don't want to obviously fill your book's metadata with a keyword dump, because the Apple Books team is going to heavily frown on that and not select you for in-store promotions. Takeaway: In-store promotions are worth significantly more than visibility in search results. My last warning around this section is that if a ton of people game any system,, the system changes to compensate for it. I share this information to empower smart authors who are working hard at their careers. But with knowledge, there will always be abusers. Don't get caught up in abusing this keyword information, as it doesn't tend to end well for authors on any platform that has to crack down on scammers. Your best bet is always going to be to get your metadata in line with the people who will be very interested in your books. So they can find you more easily. Use it for good, not evil. This chapter assumes you know at least some of the keywords you want or need to use in your title, subtitle, series title, description, and more. There is a chapter in this book dedicated to search if you want to explore this more. I also have a free series about building the ultimate book description that can work across all the major retailers,, which can help even more with keywords and key phrases. Armed with your key phrases, it's time to optimize your metadata. Number 1: Cover artwork. Does Apple Books use imagery in their algorithms? There is speculation across other Apple algorithms for podcasting, music, and more that Apple tests things in your cover image like contrast, text legibility, and more. While it's possible that this is true, I've thus far seen no evidence of it. I think it's safe to say that you should optimize your cover art for humans rather than algorithms. There's one issue that I and other authors have seen, which is that when you view your cover art in the browser, it can sometimes have some sort of shadow filter over it that doesn't always make your cover look great. The purpose is, I've heard, to make the book cover look 3D. My books always eventually seem to look okay after some time has passed since upload, so it's possible that it's just part of Apple Books' processing behind the scenes. Takeaway: The best way to optimize your cover artwork is to optimize it for humans. Make sure it looks good in both color and black and white where possible. Some retailers use a black and white version on their apps or e-reader devices. Number 2: Title, subtitle, and series title. As with most retailers, your book title, book subtitle, and series title are very important. For starters, they are indexed in Apple Books search engine, also true on most other retailers. What is unique about how Apple Books handles this metadata, however, is that the ranking in search is fairly straightforward. I was able to pick up on patterns immediately around this. Repeating your keywords in each metadata section matters. Most of the dragon romance books also have dragon in the subtitle or series title, sometimes both. And a large proportion of them also have the words "romance series" or "dragon romance series" or "dragon shifter romance" at the end of the subtitle in parenthesis, even if it's not part of the actual title listed on the book. As far as I know, all retailers aside from Google Play frown on this practice, but enforcement is hit or miss. Takeaway: Use your keywords in your title, subtitle, and series where it matters the most. And if you can't, you still have a chance to rank. See the section on descriptions for this. Number 3: Book description. Apple Books has confirmed that they do index their book descriptions. This is a good thing because it means that you can get into the search results for ideal key phrases even if you haven't put those phrases in your book title, book subtitle, or series title. Since Amazon search works a little differently than Apple's, This is definitely possible, if not likely. My titles are pretty heavily optimized for Amazon, but they are not for Apple Books, and of course I don't want to change the titles when I need them to match my paperbacks at other retailers. Enter the Apple Books description, a place where you can put your relevant keyword phrases. For my own books, I've found that using the phrase 5 times in the description pretty much guarantees that you'll rank higher in the search results for that phrase. Even if you don't have the phrase in your title, subtitle, or series. I did this accidentally with one of my nonfiction books, but I also saw it over and over again in my research on this topic. One example of this 5x phenomenon was when I found a dragon romance book that was ranked highly at $4.99, even though the other books in the search results were all free. Every single book, including this one, was in the romance category and had dragon in the title and series title,, so I knew it wasn't that, though obviously that helped. The other thing to note was that the first book in another of this author's series was free, was in the search results as well, and had recently had a BookBub, all things I've talked about in Chapter 2 regarding the same author effect on visibility. I thought this could be why this book was ranking highly, but then I wondered, if that's so, why aren't the other books in the series also ranked highly? Why just this one? I then looked at the descriptions, and it became obvious. This book had "dragon" in the description 6 times, in addition to having it in both the book title and series title. As I examined the other books in the series, they had the word "dragon" in those descriptions maybe once, if at all. Just like me, this author had hit the 5X phenomenon accidentally and organically. But it was creating visibility on their paid book in a sea of otherwise free books. One thing to note about description indexing is that Apple Books has a handful of negative keywords, most of which I don't really care to use in this book or risk getting stuck in an active romance jail for. Make sure your book titles, book subtitles, series titles, and descriptions are free and clear of these words. Obscenities, taboo tropes, and more fall under this category. Takeaway: You can overcome poor keywords in your title, subtitle, and series title by loading your description with keywords. Of course, you'll want to blend this in so it sounds natural for humans too. What are people using for descriptions? Most successful descriptions seem to follow this rough format: An introductory bolded sentence, like "Dragon Shifter Romance is the first in a new series by USA Today bestselling author Monica Leonelle." Ideal for readers of Game of Thrones meets Twilight, this series follows Character A and Character B through a twisted fantasy world that you'll easily get lost in. 2-4 starred reviews from A) credible publications, B) other successful authors, and/or C) general reviewers, in that order of importance. A description of the book, the blurb. Another closing sentence about the author and/or the book and series. This is roughly what Apple Books suggests authors do through their communication, so I recommend looking at other books in your genre and playing with this rough format for your own books as well. A few other things I noticed were that sometimes book descriptions included a list of all the book titles in the series, and given what we've surmised about search keywords, this may be something worth experimenting with, as well as an about the author section. Which was sometimes 2 paragraphs and sometimes 2 sentences. You can play around with these format guidelines, but I encourage you to use something like this, as it is what Apple Books recommends, and it likely plays a factor in merchandising. Takeaway: While you can look at other book descriptions in your category to see what they do, I recommend following the format provided as it is what Apple Books suspects. In my research on this storefront, very few authors have optimized their books for appropriate keywords. #4 Category. If you search for something basic, like dragon romance, the first 10 titles that show up will almost exclusively be in the romance category, and will almost always have dragon in the title. This means that your primary category will affect where and how you show up in various search results. The way Apple Books uses categories in search has some interesting ramifications. For example, the search term "dragon's baby" brought up a number of dragon books classified under the children's category. It also brought up a number of erotic romance titles. No surprise on either end, really. You should also know a few other things about Apple Books categories. Apple Books has its own subject categories that are specific to the store, and you will appear where you specify with these. The first category you select, the primary one, is the most important because of how Apple Books uses it to place you in the store. The first category you select is extra important if you are going through a distributor or aggregator, as some of them, like Draft2Digital, only submit your first category to Apple Books. Your metadata really matters around choosing categories. When you click through on some of these carousels, for example Mysteries and Thrillers, you will get more carousels, e.g. British Detectives, Women Sleuths, Historical Cozy Mystery, Hard-Boiled. You may not be big enough to compete in the large category, but you can appear early in the sub-genre categories. To my knowledge, Apple Books uses your metadata to determine which carousels you belong in. You can see all the categories here: https://books.apple.com/us genre/book/id38. During a release week, check out your category's Coming Soon section and consider how your pricing and cover looks against other books that are releasing around that same time. Change whatever is needed to help your listing fit in. The Apple Books algorithms favor books during their release week, So this is a boost of visibility to your entire catalog that you don't want to miss out on. Takeaway: The categories you choose give you automatic keywords in search. Choose your primary category based on keyword phrases you'd most like to be searched in. #5 Reviews. When it comes to reviews, humans like to see written ones, while the algorithms care more about the rating's average and the quantity of ratings. More is better. That said, you'll often see a book with 20 reviews mixed in with books that have 800+ reviews, so if review quantity and average rating are included in the algorithms, they are likely not a huge part of them. Apple Books still likes for you to have reviews. Unfortunately, they usually won't show up in someplace like the app until you've hit a minimum of 5 reviews, so it may be challenging for a new or new-to-Wide author to get the traction they need around this. As you develop an audience though, this gets easier. Currently, Apple Books also requires 25+ reviews on its platform for most merchandising spots that you could get directly through them. This can be challenging to do across your entire book catalog, so persist in your efforts from the beginning so you can build up these reviews over time. The only other thing to know about reviews is that if you have a starred review from Publishers Weekly, Apple Books review or another credible publication. Apple Books has a section on your product page where they can put the quote pull. I have seen this on both traditionally published books and independently published books. I would guess that you can try messaging Apple Books to get it added to your product page, as there's no input that I know of to put those starred reviews in. As an independent author, you can submit your book for a review request from Publishers Weekly through BookLife here. About: https://booklife.com/about-a/how-to-submit-your-book-to-booklife-reviews-and-publishers-weekly.html. Form: https://booklife.com/affiliate/pw-review-single. Takeaway: Reviews are an important factor on Apple Books and can make a difference in getting merchandising. But it's not always easy to get reviews on the site. Persist at your efforts from the beginning, and build reviews for each book across your catalog on a regular basis. #6 Sample and Screenshots from the Book. Without question, you should be adding your own sample to your metadata. Most authors seem to include 1 to 2 full chapters and a partial chapter with a cliffhanger cutoff. Apple Books also highly recommends getting a sample of your story up with your preorder, which makes sense. You can also add up to 5 screenshots to your metadata. This section of metadata is not metaphorical. Apple Books actually wants you to take a screenshot of a page of your book from an iOS device. For nonfiction, I'm starting to add some of the charts and graphics to my listings. For fiction, I don't see many authors doing much with this, but I recommend thinking about it in the same way you might think of A+ content on Amazon. Screenshot your fancy map, family tree, or bonus art for this section. You could also just screenshot the first few pages of your book too. If you use these, your screenshots will appear in full color below your description, and you can screenshot a layout, 2 pages side by side, for a total of 10 preview pages if you do it wisely. Get creative, as it can definitely make your product page pop and increase conversion for sales. Takeaway: Most authors do not optimize their sample and screenshots on Apple Books. This means there's an opportunity for your books to stand out and attract more readers. Use this tool that Apple Books is giving you to market your books. Additional resources. If you'd like to get my guide to writing the ultimate book description that is optimized for the 5 largest retailers, make sure you enroll in the course for free. https://writermba.teachable.com/p/go-wide-grow-wide-bootcamp. Takeaways. The best way to optimize your cover artwork is to optimize it for humans. Make sure it looks good in both color and black and white where possible. Some retailers use a black and white version on their apps or e-reader devices. In-store promotions are worth significantly more than visibility in search results. Use your keywords in your title, subtitle, and series where it matters the most. And if you can't, you still have a chance to rank See the section on descriptions for this. You can overcome poor keywords in your title, subtitle, and series title by loading your description with keywords. Of course, you'll want to blend this in so it sounds natural for humans too. While you can look at other book descriptions in your category to see what they do, I recommend following the format provided as it is what Apple Books suspects. In my research on this storefront, very few authors have optimized their books for appropriate keywords. The categories you choose give you automatic keywords in search. Choose your primary category based on keyword phrases you'd most like to be searched in. Reviews are an important factor on Apple Books and can make a difference in getting merchandising, but it's not always easy to get reviews on the site. Persist at your efforts from the beginning and build reviews for each book across your catalog on a regular basis. Most authors do not optimize their sample and screenshots on Apple Books. This means there's an opportunity for your books to stand out and attract more readers. Use this tool that Apple Books is giving you to market your books. Task Checklist: Check to see how your covers look on Apple Books on the web store, the computer storefront, and the app. Make sure your cover looks good in black and white as well as in color. Use your keywords in your title, subtitle, and series title when possible. This should be part of your packaging design for all books from the beginning. If you can't use important keywords in your title, subtitle, and series title, use them 5 times or more in your description. Blend this in tastefully so that it reads well for humans too. Reformat your description to the recommended guidelines in this chapter. Add other relevant book titles to the bottom of your description. This helps your search discoverability and can make it easier to embed more relevant keywords to your description in a natural way. Choose your category based on your keywords. Make a plan to get reviews on Apple Books from the beginning and aim for 5 at first, then 25 or more over the long term. Do this for every book. It will make a massive difference in the long term of your efforts on the platform. Add a sample to all of your books. Provide a sample for your pre-orders. Use screenshots to add exciting and engaging graphics to your product page, story maps, family trees, and more. Join the Go Wide, Grow Wide Bootcamp, it's free, and get the ultimate book description training that teaches you how to write a book description that is optimized for all of the Big 5 retailers. Chapter 4: Getting Merchandised with Apple Books. Since getting merchandised and included in the in-store promotions is so important to gaining traction on Apple Books, and since this is one of the most asked questions about improving sales on Apple Books, I wanted to devote an entire chapter to it. This chapter will give you the list of things you need to prepare for getting merchandised at Apple Books. And then I will give you the 6 ways you can get an in-store promotion with Apple Books. What Apple Books is looking for. Books that blend in easily with traditionally published books. Apple Books wants a solid, professional-looking catalog, and the details matter. Apple Books sells a lot of traditionally published and mainstream books still. To compete, you want to look more like a traditionally published book across pricing, cover, description, and interior. Your book doesn't have to look exactly like a traditionally published book, but it must be slick and creative. Check out Apple Books' Instagram for their aesthetic, and try to mimic it to the best of your ability. A solid catalog that will get sell-through Apple Books has limited promotion slots, and may not be able to spend one on a 99-cent standalone from an author just starting out. It is a business, and authors who have a larger catalog have more potential to make Apple Books some money, This isn't to say don't submit if you only have one title, but it is to say that your book's chances of getting featured may be smaller without a follow-up or a few starred reviews. Apple Books wants your book to have starred reviews on their platform. They also like Publishers Weekly reviews and are willing to place them in a prominent spot on your product page. As an independent author, you can request a review through BookLife here, https://booklife.com/about-us/how-to-submit-your-book-to-booklife-reviews-and-publishers-weekly.html. New releases. Sometimes authors, including me, will tell you that Apple Books likes preorders. While that's true to an extent, what they actually like is new releases, and having a preorder helps you get promotion on your new release. They market new releases heavily everywhere in their store, much like a traditional book retailer. Exclusivity: Apple Books would love to host your preorder exclusively or be the only one to have your 8-book completed series box set on their store. Get creative about what you can offer Apple Books exclusively. Hint: They are not the only retailer that would like this cough, Kobo cough. Creative brand awareness. Apple Books will reject you for promotions if you don't have Apple Books retail links listed on your website. They also like when you tweet at them for your new release, or post an Apple-specific image, your book cover on an iPad for example, on Instagram. Apple wants you to understand that they are sleek, and they want you to look sleek and well-designed too. They also want acknowledgement. As a company, they are not used to being a minor player in any space, and Apple has always had the tendency to wait out competitive challenges and launch themselves back to the top with something new and shiny when the timing is right. Don't treat them insignificantly. Woo them to your side instead. Fan-personing over Apple Books: It's not just branding, it's getting curious about them as a retailer. Knowing how their promotions work. Using their coupons. Meeting them in person. Caring about their goals. They built their brand on fanboys and fangirls, and they are accustomed as a company to being the cool kid. Get to know this retailer personally. Takeaway: Keep writing, work on your catalog, and do everything you can to blend in with traditionally published books. Build your audience so that they will show up for you on new release. 7 ways to get an in-store promotion. It is against Apple Books policy for me to share their contact information with you. What I can tell you is the 2 pieces of information you need to apply for in-store promotions and how to get them. The 2 things you need are an email address where you can contact the Apple Book reps directly to tell them about your upcoming projects, a new release, an upcoming price discount, and whatever else you would like their merchandising help with. A form where you can submit a request, with several weeks of lead time, though they typically prefer 4 to 6 months, for promotion through their store. This is where you can request to get added to a few of the carousels I talk about in the next chapter, but you can also just request a feature on an upcoming release or sale. Takeaway: To get into merchandising at Apple Books, you need access to an email address and a form. They are a small team and do not share this information publicly. Now that you know what you're looking for, I can tell you exactly how authors get access to this contact information. Since about 2014, I've seen all of these ways be effective. Through Draft2Digital, D2D is a popular distributor in the independent author space. They regularly submit their authors to Apple Books in-store promotions, and many authors go through them for Apple Books because of it. Most authors agree that their rate of acceptance through D2D is higher than what they get going at it alone. So if you want to make this easy, list your books with D2D for Apple Books. Through The Secret List. The Secret List is basically just Apple Books mailing list to authors. Unfortunately, people like to make a big deal about being on the secret list when they talk about it, usually to show that they are in the know and you are not. There's actually nothing that secret about it. Once you have the email address, you can just email them to get added to it so you can get regular communications from them. You will get notified of upcoming in-store promotions they are organizing. They also used to reach out to authors who are doing well in their store, and invite them to the list, though I don't know if that's still happening. I haven't heard of it lately, especially since Apple Books is doing much more group outreach, but maybe that's because it's supposed to be a secret after all. Through an author friend: Although authors are not supposed to share the information publicly, they often do share it amongst each other and with their friends whom they trust. This is probably okay, actually. Apple Books doesn't want the info shared publicly, but they invite whole groups of authors to their free webinars and offer the contact information at the end of each one. If you have a close author friend that you don't mind asking, you may be able to get the info, though I recommend attending a webinar anyway as they are really good. Through meeting Apple Books reps at a conference. I'm currently writing this in the middle of a pandemic, when there have been few in-person conferences to attend. In the past, and hopefully in the future, you used to be able to go up to an Apple Books representative and introduce yourself. They would give you a card with their contact information on it. Through attending their free webinars, Apple Books hosts free webinars and gives lots of solid marketing content through those. It's a good place to start with optimizing your books on the platform. To find out about these free webinars, join a large independent author Facebook group like Wide for the Win, which is hosting several of these in 2021 at the time of this writing. Through hiring a marketing and PR firm. If you have a large catalog, you can hire a few firms that specialize in indie books and already have a relationship with Apple Books. A firm like this trades on their connections, so this is great for authors that want to get semi-guaranteed placement in upcoming in-store promotions. Options. It's pricier, but you can get fairly immediate results, which means that you are making good money on the platform sooner and don't have to wait. Through select paid programs. Some paid programs that are focused specifically on publishing wide have permission to share this email and form. Ask around in a reputable group like Wide for the Win, which I am a board member of, because many of the board members offer coaching and have relationships with the retailers. Takeaway: There are many ways to connect with the Apple Books team, and in my opinion, one of the worst ways is waiting for them to choose you. You got into independent publishing to choose yourself. So choose yourself here and get the information you need to be successful. I hope this demystifies the process of getting in-store promotions for you, as there's really nothing so secret and selective about it at all. In the end, if you work on your catalog and get it ready for merchandising, getting the contact information is a cinch and fairly egalitarian. Good luck! Additional Resources. If you are a member of the Writer MBA program, Go Wide, Grow Wide, email me about any questions you have about this chapter. I will do what I can to help you get your books in front of the merchandisers. To join the program, see more information and find pricing options at https://courses.writermba.com/. Takeaways. Keep writing, work on your catalog, and do everything you can to blend in with traditionally published books. Build your audience so that they will show up for you on new release. To get into merchandising at Apple Books, you need access to an email address and a form. They are a small team and do not share this information publicly. There are many ways to connect with the Apple Books team, and in my opinion, one of the worst ways is waiting for them to choose you. You got into independent publishing to choose yourself. So choose yourself here and get the information you need to be successful. Task Checklist. Do an audit of your catalog at Apple Books. And look specifically at the 7 criteria I mentioned. Is your catalog ready for merchandising at Apple Books? What can you do to make your catalog stronger before you start to present it and ask for merchandising? Get the email and form that is required to contact Apple Books. Start submitting your relevant books to Apple Book Promotions. Chapter 5: A Primer on Algorithms. In the coming chapters, I'll be talking a lot about algorithms. Before I do that, I want to establish some terminology around how the algorithms behave differently based on genre, which largely has to do with competition and demand. To me, this is incredibly important, and why there are so many different takes on how algorithms at various retailers work. It's also why someone can share their personal experience with working the algorithms, and someone else can try it, and it doesn't work. Algorithms have to work in 4 scenarios: high sales competitive, high sales nascent, low sales competitive, and low sales nascent. For those who don't know, nascent just means an up-and-coming or developing genre with little competition. At any given time, most genres are going to fall under high sales competitive or low sales nascent. There are some genres in Low Sales Competitive, and few genres in High Sales Nascent. We'll dive more into how each of these categories of genre responds to algorithms slightly differently throughout this book. Balancing Algorithms with Visibility and Discoverability Goals. Let's break down how algorithms perform differently across these 4 categories, along with what it means for authors in those categories. High Sales Competitive. In this genre, there are a lot of readers and a lot of authors competing for attention. Contemporary romance and most of its subcategories are a great example, but really, most major genres are going to follow this trend, because writing fiction as a profession in general follows this trend. There are always more people who want to be fiction authors than there will be people who are able to succeed at it,, and build a strong audience. And even when those authors become less active in the space or stop publishing, their books still remain, and many of them continue running ads to keep those bookselling at whatever level they're able to achieve. On any retailer, this category tends to fall into a winner-takes-all scenario, and have a lot of churn, as the winner at any given moment will usually be unseated shortly into the future.. Hopefully, their millions in sales and dollars is of some comfort to them, but often it is not if they aren't aware of how this category of genres works. High Sales Nascent. In this genre, there are a lot of readers and relatively few authors who are meeting the demand. These are those genres where you can show up first and build your readership quickly and easily. Usually these genres don't stay secret for long, and often authors enter them for some quick money, which pushes the genre out of this category quickly. But not always. The challenge retailers faces with these genres is that new and/or lower-quality entrants have too easy a time getting to the top of these charts because there aren't enough high-quality entrants to satisfy demand. The algorithms need a way to sink those books and help the best ones get recommended. Retailers also don't want to show a lower-priced, lower-quality book in place of the high-quality, high-priced book that is already selling well. A great example of a set of subgenres I've been following for several years now is clean mature romance and clean mature women's fiction, which are subgenres dedicated to female characters in their mid-30s and up. Several of the authors who write in these genres, often writing in both and other tangential ones, are cleaning up in sales, making their millions and hopefully tucking at least some of that money away because the genres won't remain in this category forever. Almost no genres do. Low sales competitive. In this genre, there are relatively few readers and sales, and many authors trying to compete for attention. You may be wondering, why would anyone write in a genre like this? But when you consider that most of nonfiction falls into this category, it makes a bit more sense. There's money to be had in these genres, if you can create loyalty among your readers. I write nonfiction, and that has been a large part of my success. I show up and have done so for about 7 years. I'm smart and insightful most of the time, and people follow me from book to book, even though my books are priced at a significant premium over most of my competition. Or at least they were. When others in my niche saw that I was selling, they all raised their prices to $7.99 to $9.99 per book too. The challenge retailers have with genres like this is that there are often not any clear winners or top hits that serve the entire genre. The genre gets more fragmented but not less competitive. Retailers have to serve a mix of books that are evergreen, tried and tested, while also giving new entrants a chance to succeed or find visibility. This does not just apply to nonfiction,, but also to several genres of fiction. Often, a trend takes off, sees a bunch of writers jump in, finds out that the genre can't support so many books, and ends up saturated for months or years. Young adult has been one genre in traditional publishing with this problem, after it exploded onto the scene with huge crossover hits like The Twilight Saga and The Hunger Games. Spurred in part by the aging fanbase on their predecessor, Harry Potter, The market eventually contracted, and there are what feels like seas of young adult vampire love stories and dystopian trilogies that bombed, both in print and on screen, from this time period. In these scenarios, you need to be among the biggest or most recommended authors, need to hit the tropes of the larger genre, or need to wait it out until demand for your type of book rises again. This is the danger of writing to trends—your books may not survive long-term. Low Sales Nascent. In this genre, there are relatively few readers and also relatively few committed authors. The reason you might write in this genre is because you enjoy it, or your brain is wired for it, or you have specialized knowledge in it. The way you would make a living in the genre is by owning it and becoming the go-to person for books in it. You may also try to market your books to the broader genre,, and be the only type of that book that they are reading. Low sales, could still mean there are many millions of readers for this genre, which means you could make a healthy 6 or 7 figures writing in the genre. The challenge retailers face with this category, is that they want readers to be able to find it when they're looking for it. This is a category of genres that are highly dependent on search. If a retailer can deliver a book that actually matches their query, —that's a very good thing for its reputation. While the long tail isn't particularly profitable in any one genre, the aggregate of many, many genres does add up to a sizable chunk of the market. But more importantly, people begin to see the retailer as a destination to find anything, which is likely more important to the company than making a profit. In many ways, low-sales nascent genres are loss leaders for retailers, For these categories, they make money from the customer loyalty, not the book sales. Literary fiction could be argued to be in this category, though that's a bit too broad for our purposes. Some examples of authors I would consider in this category are Libby Hawker and Laura Morelli, both of whom started as independent authors and now have hybrid publishing deals. This is not unusual for this category of genre, which is why we often have the least data on it. They both write what I might describe as literary historical fiction, and they both specialize in their chosen time periods and areas of the world. I'm going to be using this terminology throughout the rest of this book, so please bookmark this section to refer back to if needed. Genres move fluidly through these categories until they stabilize. The last thing to know about these categories is that competition and demand are fluid and relative. At any given time, most categories in fiction are high-sales competitive or low-sales nascent. A low-sales nascent becomes a high-sales nascent when there is unrealized demand for a certain type of book that starts to take off. Right now, mature fiction, written about women in their mid-30s and up, is having a moment because readers got tired of reading about teenage and 20-something protagonists. The genre barely existed on the independent publishing side, but the demand potential did. Now the genre is growing, and authors are rushing to meet demand. Eventually there may be enough authors to meet demand, but the pendulum may also swing too far, to where there are too many books and not enough demand. Eventually, every genre will stabilize, usually in high-sales competitive. I have seen genres though that were too trendy. They came and went, and burned out their audiences so badly that it may take them several years to recover. In the meantime, those books aren't selling anymore. Most undiscovered genres start out as low-sales nascent genres, and people buy K-lytics reports to discover them and dominate them before everyone else figures it out. Some of these genres then go on to become high-sales competitive genres like LitRPG and cozy mystery, high, because demand was underserved before, and now increases along with competition. Others end up as low-sales competitive genres because demand had a ceiling, and there really isn't a huge underserved and hungry niche. Those genres level out to only the people who really wanted to write in them. An example from recent years is superheroes. Finally, some genres have so much demand because the market has swung one way, that they grow at a reasonable rate, and the authors experience riches for many years before they have to switch things up. Right now, clean women's fiction and romance are experiencing high demand with relatively few author entrants still, but that will change soon enough and is already starting to. All of this is to say that the reason I give you these terms is not to put every genre in its categorical box where it will stay forever, but to help you discern how algorithms will respond to various genres differently, depending on their maturation in competition and demand. Also, the implications of this are that most people observing or studying the algorithms will gravitate toward how they behave for genres that fall under the high sales competitive category. Because I'm a nonfiction author, low sales competitive, in addition to writing fiction in a high sales competitive genre, I tend to study different, less trodden parts of each retailer store. The algorithms behave differently on the outskirts of the top-selling books, which is fascinating and teaches me more about the algorithms. You can also see a lot of interesting things about algorithms when you study the genres that are not in the high-sales competitive category. Which category of genre do you write in? Before we move on, I encourage you to take a few minutes and see if you can figure out which category your genres and subgenres fall under. Remember, this is based on a current point in time, which for the purposes of this book is now, because I'm assuming you want to apply your knowledge of algorithms to getting your book selling more soonish, right? So we need to know where your genre is right now, and where you think it might hit a stabilization point. For example, reverse harem academy paranormal romance as a subgenre has hit a stabilization point in the high sales competitive category. Some would argue that it's now in the low sales competitive category, but remember, sales is relative, and we are just coming off of the surge of academy paranormal romance (PNR) flooding the marketplace. There will be some authors who leave, or rather, who move on to the next trend in urban fantasy and paranormal., and there will be some authors who stay and double down, and it's my belief that the subgenre will stabilize in the high sales competitive category after it completes its slight swing into low sales competitive and all the authors looking to make a quick buck hop out. You'll even start to hear authors describe this subgenre as evergreen eventually, meaning that the basic underlying emotional makeup of the tropes in reverse harem RH, paranormal, PNR Academy are inherent to the larger genre of urban fantasy and paranormal romance where a lot of these authors write. Authors will continue to throw some Academy in there or throw some RH in there as they write their upcoming books, and it will keep working because demand is high enough. This is a good thing for backlist opportunities, especially since it takes time to produce audiobooks, translations, and more. Speaking of other formats, you can also use this framework to determine where your subgenres hit in other countries and in other formats. It may be different, giving you your first clues of where to put your focus for the next several years in terms of maximizing your catalog. Algorithms must work for all 4 categories. The trouble with reading about any individual's experiences —even when they are very successful—is that it often doesn't take all of this into account. If you take a strategy based on how the algorithms respond in any one of these categories, and try to apply it to another, it just doesn't work. I hear this anecdotally all the time, and usually don't have the spoons to explain why in detail, aside from "maturations of genre matters," which in itself is not an easy-to-digest phrase. So now I have explained it in detail, and we can see how it applies to algorithms. The big picture of that is that algorithms must work for all 4 categories. The system as a whole must do a dance to make sure that no one of these 4 categories dominates their charts, nor that any of the categories gets completely left behind. For example, if they built algorithms that just took into account sales, there would be no visibility on books or genres in the low-sales nascent and low-sales competitive categories. As such, retailers build competing-with-each-other pairs of algorithms that they then tweak until the balance of these 4 categories is appropriate and expected for the demand of the 4 categories. When they are doing well at this very, very strategically difficult problem, they are making customers happy, rewarding the legitimate and hardworking authors, mostly keeping the scammers, hackers, and gamers out of the system, and growing book sales for everyone. When they misstep in the dance, let's just say they hear about it loudly and clearly. Luckily, retailers are pretty good at this dance, and it's a big part of why several of them have been so successful at selling more ebooks. A genre may have a different category for different platforms. Recall, genres and niches move through the different categories over time. Trends on wide retailers tend to lag behind, so a genre may or may not be a trend on the particular platform you are looking at. Additionally, some retailers have 15,000 book categories, while others have not even 100. So even if there is a potential audience for your book, you may not be able to find them easily on the platform. All of this is to say, as you are considering this topic, be aware of how niche you are getting. For example, a vampire paranormal prison academy book on one retailer might be a vampire or vampire academy book on another retailer, and you should adjust how you present your product on each platform with that awareness. This can then shift where your book falls, and it can offer you multiple options for how to market as well. Additional Resources. If you are trying to figure out which category your genre is in for a specific platform, make sure you join our Writer MBA community and/or sign up for the Go Wide, Grow Wide course. These are the places where we can give genre and situation-specific help that would be impossible to give in a book. https://go.writermba.com/go/wide-grow-wide https://courses.writermba.com/takeaways. There are 4 categories of genre: high sales competitive, high sales nascent, low sales competitive, and low sales nascent. Each category of genre niche responds to algorithms slightly differently, which means that different things work or don't depending on your genre category. Algorithms are designed to work for all categories, so that no one category dominates the others. A genre may fall in a different category of genre, across different platforms, which means the marketing changes. Task Checklist: Figure out where your genre lies. Which of the 4 categories of genre does it belong to? Use this knowledge as a filter through which you run all well-meaning advice from other authors. What works for one category will bomb in a different one. Almost guaranteed. Chapter 6: Primer on Artificial Intelligence. This chapter is an edited excerpt from my 2023 series of essays on generative artificial intelligence. It appears across many of my books to provide necessary context for the changes happening on retailers and platforms. If you have read this chapter elsewhere, you do not need to read it again unless you want to. I have so much to say about artificial intelligence (AI) and how it is likely to affect publishing in the near future, but it's a struggle because everything I want to say requires so much context about artificial intelligence and how it has evolved to become a major force in the evolution of publishing. So I wanted to offer a quick history of AI and how it led to where we are today in publishing, based on my own understanding of the topic. I wanted to provide this chapter on AI because the topic affects the publishing industry and specifically retailers and platforms. Without this context, I'm unable to talk about the really interesting things regarding AI. How AI has evolved as related to the publishing industry. I'm not much of a historian, but I think the historical context of artificial intelligence, along with a detailed explanation of what it even is, is needed in these conversations about AI in publishing. So many people misunderstand the technology and the progression of the technology and then purport misinformation to others about it. And so, while again, I don't claim to be perfect or get every part of this right, I did want to write a good and solid explanation on these concepts, and put those explanations in the context of publishing, specifically. For our purposes, there are essentially 4 major notches or turning points on the timeline of AI: Rule-based programming. Machine learning. Deep learning, generative AI. Let's talk about what each one is and how it relates to publishing. Number 1: Rule-based programming, the original AI. The original AI is rule-based programming, which by today's standards would probably just be called programming. Most programs contain rules. Rule-based programming is rooted in the basic building blocks of math and symbolic logic. And include structures that our brains use and think in every day, like if-then-else statements. At its most basic level, this statement tells the machine that if certain defined criteria is met, then it should execute the code within the statement. If it is not met, then it either executes the code under else or it skips the code completely. This is your basic decision tree logic. For loops, at its most basic level, this loop tells the machine that for a list of items, it should execute the code within the loop. When the list is done, exit the loop and move on. While loops: at its most basic level, this loop tells the machine that while certain defined criteria is met, while the state is true, then it should execute the code within the loop. When the state turns false, quit executing the code. It's basically an if-then statement, but on repeat, as opposed to an actual if-then statement that only executes once. These building blocks can get more specialized and complicated, of course, especially when combined. You can think of rule-based programming as a series of decision trees that are executed in a specified order, usually top-down, the same way one would read. Rule-based programming by itself can usually only handle structured data, data that is defined and can be stored in a database structure. It does not know how to handle other types of data, which I'll talk about in the next section. The majority of websites use these building blocks to display a web page. If this is the home page, display this block of text using this style defined by CSS. If this is the blog page, display this block of text using this style. If you want to better understand rule-based programming and you are not a software engineer, One of the best ways to do so is to use a no-code product like Zapier, or better yet, some of the advanced processing functions on a spreadsheet. Number 2: Machine learning. The next evolution, and a sub-branch of rule-based programming, is machine learning. Machine learning is all about developing algorithms that can learn patterns from data and make predictions or decisions. Machines are able to learn from experience, consuming more data, and this has led to significant advancements in areas like natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. Data can be categorized as: Structured: The algorithm learns from a labeled dataset, which contains both input features and corresponding output labels. Usually, this data is quantitative and can be managed with a database. A spreadsheet is a type of database. We use structured data for thousands of everyday things, like booking tickets online, storing complex lists, and all aspects of accounting. If the content can be organized in a matrix of rows and columns, then it's easily classified as structured data. Unstructured: The algorithm learns from an unlabeled dataset. It focuses on finding patterns or structures within the data without guidance. Most data falls into this category. An example might be a stack of anonymous college application essays, which is qualitative data. Semi-structured: The algorithm learns from a mix of structured and unstructured data. An example might be text messages. The contents of a text message are unstructured, but things like the date, time, sender, receiver, and the message itself can all be stored in rows and columns. To me, the biggest difference between structured and unstructured data is that structured data must have schema (structure) defined when it is inputted for storage. Going back to the example of a spreadsheet, before you can fill it with data, you usually need to label rows and columns, which requires some decision-making before you start. With unstructured data, you can collect it in any format, But when you want to read or interpret it, you must define the schema, structure, as part of the query, the question you ask the computer to answer, which can look like reporting, calculations, and more. Even something like time series or Internet of Things data, like the metrics your Fitbit collects, or your book sales over time at the hour-by-hour resolution, is usually still considered structured data. The time series is stored as a sequence, and you basically have a row-column matrix, or several, within a row-column matrix or several. You could simulate this on a small scale with multiple spreadsheet tabs that feed into one large spreadsheet. Both structured and unstructured data require a high degree of human input under machine learning models. The human brain is still making a lot of decisions about how to organize the data. Machine learning is the first major AI evolution that allowed us to store and interpret unstructured data, which made our world much easier to make decisions about or predictions on. In publishing, some examples of machine learning include: any algorithm that is used to distribute visibility in a retailer storefront, many efforts to understand or predict consumer behavior at retailers, patterns in sales data over time, which is used to support bestseller lists, category lists, and more on any storefront. Any automated efforts to handle support requests, which is often done through chatbots, but can also be done to route support requests to the right department. There is a lot of confusion in the author community that when machine learning is listed in terms of service (TOS), it means that the platform is training its generative AI tools if it has any, on all uploaded content. It's not really true, or at least it shouldn't be assumed. Nearly every platform has discoverability tools driven by algorithms, and if it doesn't, it almost certainly uses user data to forecast, predict, and make decisions about how to move forward as a business. Number 3: Deep learning. The next evolution and a sub-branch of machine learning is deep learning, Deep learning is focused on building neural networks, and specifically, as humanity is applying it, building neural networks that can mimic what we can observe about how human brains work. The reason it's called deep learning is specifically because it's structured as layers of learning, which is a learning approach that is observable in humans as young as a year or two old. Toddlers, for example, learn colors as one layer. They also learn shapes as another layer. Then all of a sudden they point and tell mama, "Red circle," despite having never studied different colored shapes before. How do they do it? Neural networks. As mentioned, both rule-based programming and machine learning require a high degree of human input to organize the data, whether it's structured, unstructured, or semi-structured. Deep learning attempts to automate this process by helping the machine learn to make these categorization decisions the way a human would. Rather than using a straightforward decision tree or series of decision trees, it uses connections between these layers to bounce the input around until it can come to a clear and accurate conclusion. In order to train the machine using deep learning, you have to first give it a lot of labeled data. You may tell the machine, "Here are a ton of text messages that contain a breakup message, and here are a ton that don't." The more labeled data you give it, the better it is able to identify texts that contain breakup messages versus texts that don't contain breakup messages. Now it can look at segments of unlabeled data and say, "This is a breakup message." You can further train the machine by having a human reviewer say, "yes, that's correct, it is a breakup message" or "nope, that's a false positive." I have no doubt that someone on the internet has figured out a way to make money from being able to tell a breakup message from a non-breakup message, probably multiple someones. But to me, the more interesting use of this level of AI is across spaces like healthcare and the environment. Being able to use this technology to spot pre-cancerous cells, or separate growing food from the weeds that surround it, or identifying recyclable materials from waste, are critical processes that support modern life on this planet. Machines can do this better than humans, and the technology has already saved countless lives. This is the advancement we will need if we hope to keep humanity and our planet alive. To me, the biggest difference between machine learning and deep learning is the human intervention around categorization. You can give a deep learning model unstructured, unlabeled data, and ask it to perform what is called feature extraction, basically asking it to create its own schema or categorization system. If you were given a closet full of clothes and asked to come up with categories for them, you might say, "I'll group them by function: pants versus shirts versus dresses, then by sleeve pant length, then by style, then by color." And someone else might group them by the same set of features, but in a different order. And yet someone else might say, "The material the clothing is made out of is an important feature," and that gets added. With rule-based programming, a human has to figure out the features and what order to process the data. Do we sort by color first? Or by style of clothing? Or by purpose of clothing? There's both linear prioritization and rigid and opinionated schema set forth. With machine learning, a human has to figure out the features only. They have to tell the machine: sort by color, style, purpose, material. This allows for nonlinear prioritization but still offers a rigid and opinionated schema design. With deep learning, the machine is just given the closet. It compares the first two items and notices that the materials are different or the shape is different. It doesn't necessarily know that a sleeve is a sleeve, but it knows that for one item, the shape of the clothing has shorter extended tube thingies near the top than for another. This allows for both nonlinear prioritization and a looser schema design. The machine may also identify new patterns. New features or categorizations that a human or group of humans might miss. When it comes to more complex problems than a closet full of clothes, this is exactly how this technology is used. In publishing, some examples of deep learning include: flagged accounts on all platforms, flagged content and content moderation on all platforms, facial or fingerprint recognition, Speech-to-text, which readers already use to get books accessibly or conveniently when there's no audiobook. Advanced spell check for less common words and other languages. Object detection in a photograph. Photoshop and other graphic editors. #4 Generative AI. Now we come to generative AI—hot topic, media darling, and according to some people, the last straw that is finally going to destroy humanity forever. The next evolution and a sub-branch of deep learning is generative AI. While it seems like something completely new and coming out of nowhere, it is truly just the natural extension of what has come before it. To give you a sense of the progression toward generative AI, consider: Rule-based programming inputted structured data, and outputted structured data with structured schema. Machine learning inputted unstructured data and outputted structured data with structured schema. This advancement allowed us to capture, store, and interpret data that we couldn't quantify and classify by hand in a database. This type of data is most of the data in the world. Deep learning inputted unstructured data and outputted structured data with unstructured schema. This advancement automated much of the human component that was once required to define the structure of the output. It helped us find patterns that we couldn't have found before, and it did so by processing big data, the buzzword of the last two decades that really just means millions of data points. Given all of this, the next logical step is generative AI, which takes an input of unstructured data and produces an output of unstructured data with unstructured schema. I say this because there is nothing particularly new about generative AI, and it is, was, and always has been the next logical step down this branch of approach that we are on. People often say that generative AI is a solution looking for a problem, but it's absolutely not. It's simply the next obvious step in the research, development, and evolution of artificial intelligence. And there are tons of important, nay critical, problems that we can solve by making this output of unstructured data significantly better and more affordable to generate. So what is generative AI anyway? How does it work? When people use this term, they are really talking about two different and innovative approaches for getting better results in artificial intelligence applications. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). What is a Variational Autoencoder (VAE)? A Variational Autoencoder is basically a neural network that allows you to estimate something that has a clear pattern in order to create something new that follows the pattern. With a VAE, you would still input thousands to millions of data points, just like with deep learning, except this time, instead of categorizing the raw data, you are actually estimating the raw data to create a pattern or recipe for outputting things that look like the raw data but are not. In other words, you are putting in unstructured data and getting out generating unstructured data as well. Hence why this technology is classified under generative AI in the timeline. The way it works is not far off from what you might do in a graduate-level statistics course. A VAE has an underlying process that we've been using to solve business problems for decades, but as computers get faster, we've been able to feed them more and more data and computationally solve bigger and bigger problems. And when combining this technology with deep learning methods that allow unstructured data and unstructured schema, we can solve the next major challenge of getting unstructured output. To build a pattern or recipe, you basically take a large dataset, made up of individual data points, and fit a curve, also called a distribution, to it. You are basically estimating, or taking the average of what the thing in the large dataset is. The most common curve to fit to the data is a Gaussian, but you could test other options. If you happen to take graduate-level or maybe undergraduate-level statistics, you'll remember looking at a set of data points and trying on different distributions to approximate a curve that described the data well. This is what a VAE is doing, just on an orders-of-magnitude more complex level. For clarity, please note that a VAE is not supposed to store the original data. Instead, it stores the estimated curves/distributions of the data, also known as the pattern or recipe of the data. It then uses this to generate more data that looks like the pattern. As an example of how this works, if you had 1,000 people write the letter "A," deep learning models would help a machine classify that these 1,000 data points do indeed contain an "A," and then a VAE would be able to estimate what an "A" usually what the object looks like, and share that as an output by drawing the letter A. Most VAEs are multimodal. That means they might fit multiple curves to the same object. Take, for example, the letter Z. Some people draw a Z with 3 connected lines. But some people also draw a 4th line horizontally through the center. A VAE would be able to model both the 3-line Z and the 4-line Z and would be able to output both versions. When the VAE outputs an A or a Z, it allows for and introduces variance, which is basically bounded randomness. This provides the VAE with endless unique ways to write an A or a Z. Now, take this idea and extrapolate it by replacing these letters with something like an I. Or a hand. Or a background. Or a whole portrait. This is effectively what a tool like Midjourney is doing. It's literally just performing graduate-level statistics on a concept like eyes, and saying, "I studied millions of images and this is what an eye looks like. Now I can draw an eye, but I can also draw infinite eyes that never quite look the same as each other because I'm allowed to add variance too." Let's say that the VAE has a large swath of data to train on, like, perhaps, the entire Getty Images catalog with its watermarks. The same watermark across hundreds of thousands of photos is statistically significant, so the machine will believe that it is an important feature to study, classify, and eventually draw. Kind of like how the fourth line of a Z might be a less used variant, but still statistically significant, given a large enough sample size. While VAEs have "encoder" in the name, please note that the name is a little misleading. VAEs are actually encoders, the estimator described above, plus decoders, the method used to generate new creations. Other ways that VAEs are explained include saying that the encoder compresses the data, which is true. The math above inherently demonstrates a loss of data, and the decoder expands the data. Or fills in the missing gaps through guessing as it tries to recreate the look or nature of the original data. You may also hear the term latent space, which just means the place where the compressed data, the encoded data, or the pattern or recipe is stored. And finally, it may be important to note that most encoders and decoders are trained to recreate the data that was lost. But VAEs are Variational Autoencoders, with emphasis on the "auto." These encoders are specifically designed so that the decoder can create new data automatically. That means the model has been tweaked specifically for a niche generative AI purpose. In other words, this is not general intelligence, nor are we anywhere close to achieving that. The models need to be fed fairly similar data and need to be told to spit out fairly similar data. That's why you can't give ChatGPT an image and text and get back both. At least not yet. Let's move on to the second AI learning approach that's classified under generative AI. What is a generative adversarial network (GAN)? A generative adversarial network is the other half of the generative AI equation, at least for the moment. There may be more beyond this as the technology evolves. The concept is this: you have two machines that are essentially playing Pong with data. One machine is programmed to come up with human-looking output, and the other machine is programmed to spot the difference between human-looking output and actual human output. In doing so, both machines get better and learn at their specific goal. The first machine makes better human-looking output, and the second machine becomes a better detector of human-looking versus actual human output. When people say things like, "OpenAI is building a synthetic generated text detector," it's important to understand that they likely already have one that trained the system. They've just never put only unlabeled data through it before. And as the internet gets flooded with synthetic text and images, GANs will attempt to sort one from the other. The whole of the internet is the unlabeled data in this case. A GAN is both: a check and balance to make sure OpenAI's output doesn't become lowest common denominator, aka the dad joke of the internet, and a training program to make generative output better and better. Companies with huge funding also have a huge financial incentive to continue building and testing GANs. So we will start seeing more consumer products around this in the next year or two. Some people believe that we'll never be able to create AI detectors that are accurate enough. On this, I'm not sure. It certainly seems like tweaking the output material even just a little should throw a detector for a loop. But again, there is going to be billions of dollars thrown at this problem in the next 5 years. It's a critical problem to solve, to make generative AI commercially viable, and the tools will only get more sophisticated. Call me a cynic, but I tend to believe that time, money, and energy spent on advancements predicts their success pretty well. And I don't think Big Tech has gone this far down the generative AI rabbit hole to fail at this clear and critical piece. So there you have it. VAEs and GANs, both of which have been around for around a decade in data science, are the two major pieces of this timeline notches puzzle and are what make generative AI possible on a wide scale right now. Is generative AI a subset of AI, machine learning, and deep learning? Yes. Technically, it is a subset. And that can be confusing in publishing, given that the terms "machine learning" and "deep learning" can be and often are used in terms of service agreements dating back to before generative AI tools became public for consumer use. That said, calling generative AI a subset of machine learning is a bit like calling the trunk of a tree a subset of tree branches. Because Big Tech is driving this technology forward, humanity is effectively putting all its energy into this one branch in particular. While there are arguments to be made that generative AI is a subset of machine learning, a more apt description is that it's an evolution of machine learning, or an advancement in machine learning, or built upon the foundations of machine learning. And given that, we have been allowing companies to train on our data for a very long time, and for very large purposes. So much of the debate around generative AI is around consent, which is one of my 6 Cs of moral evaluation of AI.— and the reality is, all of us definitely consented to this training and have done so for decades. What is the next logical step after generative AI? And how will it affect publishing? For me, some of the doom and gloom of "where the industry is going, right into the crapper" is a bit hilarious and a bit exhausting at the same time. Sci-fi writers have been predicting the future for years. And painting it with the most dystopian paintbrush they can find if possible. Here sells yo. The dystopian worst-case scenarios described almost never actually play out the way the author imagines, usually because the one thing is taken to the simplistic extreme, in a near vacuum, based on the present world, that ignores any of the numerous counterbalances that the complex and real world is surely already putting in motion. To me, the next logical step after generative AI as it applies to publishing is not that books are written by robots. That ignores the counterbalance that all of this technology requires human input to get better and better. It's literally "the one thing is taken to the simplistic extreme in a near vacuum based on the present world scenario" that is plaguing so many creatives in their thinking right now. This thinking has a predictive shelf life of a year or two max. Instead, I think the future will likely be quite a bit rosier than the doomsday predictions. I believe the next step after generative AI is being able to input multiple points of unstructured data and getting an output of multiple points of unstructured data. An example might be being able to generate text, images, audio, video, games, 3D visualizations, and more from a long prompt or series of prompts that includes multimedia inputs. Specialists in all of these areas may be helpful or required to perfect and build upon each of these experiences, and it will be cost-effective to create not just audiobooks, but also movies, 3D characters, interactive games, and more from your stories. Storytelling is only going to become more visceral. And if you are a good or great storyteller, you are going to have a natural edge on creating an immersive experience for your audience. So do not fear for your own career or your children's and grandchildren's careers. It's actually about to get interesting and exciting, as both a consumer of stories and a creator of stories. And this, of course, is just how generative AI can make books and storytelling better. It does not account for other things that will get better. For example, the very real and scary crises that humanity is facing, that if we don't solve quickly, likely with the power of generative AI and its evolution, that there won't be a very happy or sustainable world for storytellers anyway. I'm sure my thoughts on this will evolve over time, but this is my current prediction, and there is a decent amount of evidence of companies that are already trying to make this natural next step a reality. Artificial intelligence is a moving target. One last point to wrap this up. Just like products of creative fields—music, movies, television, books—eventually, what was cool artificial intelligence once upon a time becomes trite, obvious, and baseline. Artificial intelligence is a moving target and a product of a specific time period not unlike art itself. What's amazing today, generative AI, will become commonplace and a part of the fabric of life for us and our descendants in the near future. And the tools will be used to create art that we couldn't dream of before, at an effective and accessible cost. It will also be used in life-sustaining fields, and will solve problems we don't even know we have, faster than we could have solved them ourselves. All of this is to say that generative AI is just a major notch on the broader AI timeline. We are going to keep evolving, and so will this technology. The 6 Cs of Moral Evaluation of AI. With emotions running high at even the mention of artificial intelligence, I've found it necessary to develop my own framework for understanding the moral and ethical arguments. Arguments both for and against some of the newest technologies emerging from the field. Specifically: Auto-narration tools: Google Play Books, Apple Books, ElevenLabs. Visual creation and completion tools: Midjourney, DALL·E, Stable Fusion. Writing and chatbot tools: ChatGPT, OpenAI Playground, Google's Bard. I put forward for your consideration the 6 C's Moral Evaluation of AI: Consent, Copyright Contracts, Compensation, Creativity, and Capitalism. As new technology enters the field rapidly, it's worth considering these 6 Cs to decide whether you consider the technology immoral or unethical, and whether you want to use the technology in your business or not. What are the 6 Cs of Moral Evaluation of AI? The 6 Cs are: Consent. Consent asks questions around if we gave permission to use our content, if that permission was inadvertent due to generally worded terms of service and contracts, and if we should give consent going forward. Copyright. Copyright deals with legal definitions as defined by the U.S. Copyright Office. As a U.S. citizen, this is where I'll focus. Feel free to substitute your own country's copyright laws. Copyright is a tricky subject as it's tied closely to both plagiarism and fair use, so we'll be discussing those too. Contracts. Contracts deals with both how creators should approach contracts with publishers and other industry companies that may offer a contract on rights, as well as platform contracts, usually called terms of service agreements (TOS agreements), that creators must agree to in order to use a platform. Compensation: Compensation focuses on whether creatives should be paid for contributions, how compensation would work, and where the line should be drawn. Creativity: Creativity asks whether we should be replacing human work, specifically art, with machines capable of doing it faster and better than we can. What is sacred to humans, and what is okay to use AI for? Capitalism: Capitalism ties commercial use of AI to morals and ethics. Is it greedy? Is it stealing? Is it like the Industrial Revolution, in terms of how it affects the job landscape? Is it going to destroy our societal structures? As new publishing technology emerges, these 6 C's are the criteria upon which I'll be analyzing the ethics and morals of that technology. Using this framework will help me to better cover different angles of emerging publishing technology and platforms, so that I can start to unpack the many concerns and arguments both for and against this technology. Additional Resources. I write about generative AI regularly on my Substack, which is a bit like a living extension of the Book Sales Supercharged series. You can subscribe to this Substack and get updates and articles for free. Https://authoranalyst.substack.com. Because the 6 C's are so important, I've cross-posted many of the same articles to my Medium profile for freer consumption. https://medium.com/@monicaleonelle. Takeaways. There are essentially 4 major notches or turning points on the timeline of AI. Rule-based programming. Machine learning. Deep learning. Generative AI. Rule-based programming is rooted in the basic building blocks of math and symbolic logic. Machine learning is all about developing algorithms that can learn patterns from data and make predictions or decisions. Machines are able to learn from experience, consuming more data, and this has led to significant advancements in areas like natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. Deep learning is focused on building neural networks, and specifically, as humanity is applying it, building neural networks that can mimic what we can observe about how human brains work. The reason it's called deep learning is specifically because it's structured as layers of learning, which is a learning approach that is observable in humans as young as a year or two old. Generative AI is two different and innovative approaches for getting better results in artificial intelligence applications: Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). To give you a sense of the progression toward generative AI, consider: Rule-based programming inputted structured data, and outputted structured data with structured schema. Machine learning inputted unstructured data and outputted structured data with structured schema. This advancement allowed us to capture, store, and interpret data that we couldn't quantify and classify by hand in a database. This type of data is most of the data in the world. Deep learning inputted unstructured data and outputted structured data with unstructured schema. This advancement automated much of the human component that was once required to define the structure of the output. It helped us find patterns that we couldn't have found before, and it did so by processing big data, the buzzword of the last two decades that really just means millions of data points. Given all of this, the next logical step is generative AI, which takes an input of unstructured data and produces an output of unstructured data with unstructured schema. Artificial intelligence is a moving target and a product of a specific time period, not unlike art itself. What's amazing today, generative AI, will become commonplace and a part of the fabric of life for us and our descendants in the near future. As new publishing technology emerges, these 6 Cs are the criteria upon which I'll be analyzing the ethics and morals of that technology. Using this framework will help me to better cover different angles of emerging publishing technology and platforms, so that I can start to unpack the many concerns and arguments both for and against this technology. Task Checklist. Familiarize yourself with the differences between the 4 types of artificial intelligence Intelligence, Rule-Based Programming, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Generative AI. These terms come up explicitly in publishing contracts and terms of service (ToS) agreements at many of the platforms. Education makes it far easier to ask smart questions and gain clarity on what these terms mean for you at each platform, so you can make better decisions for your author career. Read more about the 6 Cs, including my essays on the topic, on my Substack. These essays untangle and bring clarity to much of the debate around artificial intelligence technology, especially as it applies to publishing. AuthorAnalyst.Substack.com. Chapter 7: Introduction to the Apple Books Algorithms. Now that we've covered the basics of how algorithms work in general, specifically for publishing and books, I wanted to dive into what's happening specifically at Apple Books as a retailer. Please note, there's lots of guesswork involved, and I am not a representative of Apple Books. Everything I share here is from observation and testing, and it's all done with the intention of helping authors get better results at this retailer. My Apple Books Algorithms Methodology. I use a few sources, to come up with theories on how a specific mechanism of the Apple Bookstore works. Knowledge from authors who are very successful on Apple Books, specifically what they've observed combined with the sales they've been willing to share with me. The top 100 charts tracked by iTopChart across different countries, https://itopchart.com/us/n/ebook/. Knowledge from other industries who have more algorithms data and studies published about Apple's other stores, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and so on. My assumption is that, like any tech company, Apple's philosophy around algorithms is likely what gets implemented across all products. This has mostly been true. Testing several of my ideas and theories across multiple genres and my own catalog, I observe and test to make sure my theory proves out, but that still doesn't mean it holds true everywhere or that Apple Books won't change how it works tomorrow. Takeaway: Algorithm work is part guesswork. I've done the best to discern the truth of Apple Books algorithms, and I've done the best to present all information in a way that can be helpful to authors. How Apple Books algorithms work. For every retailer, I like to give a visual overview of what to expect in terms of how visibility is roughly distributed through the storefront. Again, these visual overviews are not set in stone nor official, but rather based on the information that I have, which has limits. Further, many of these sections are explained in much more detail throughout the book. In the graphic, you'll see 3 columns. Trending Search: This column encompasses things like improving your search results and finding optimized keywords and descriptions. Trending Product: This column encompasses things like merchandising, getting your books into the Recommended for You personalized carousel, and achieving higher placement on the bestseller charts overall and by category. Trending Purchase: This column encompasses finding and cross-promoting with similar products and actions that a reader can take, and is mostly focused on personalization features that are individual to each reader. You'll also see 3 rows: Invisible Tier: Offsite Data. This row represents data that the retailer might be using that we simply can't see because it's not on the storefront itself. For Apple Books, it's merchandising and, by extension, all of its internal promotions, which you have to check the storefront and app for on a regular basis to see what book themes it is pushing in any given month. For the latter, by the time it's public, it's usually too late to be included. How are they merchandising these carousels ahead of time? First tier: Collective data. This row represents the things that stay the same in every user's view. These are things like search results, keywords, product rank, clusters of similar books, and so on. For Apple Books, most of their algorithmic implementations are going to fall in this category. Second tier: Personalization. This row represents the things that change based on an individual user. These are mostly personalized features that you might see in carousels, email, and push notifications from the Books app. Usually, these aspects of the algorithms are much harder to study and manipulate. For Apple Books, there are very few personalization features. Again, we will get into the details of this graphic throughout the rest of this book, in the coming chapters. It may be helpful to bookmark the graphic, so you can refer back to it after each chapter. Takeaway: The graphic in this chapter is to aid in visualization of the algorithms, and of the rest of the chapters in this book. Additional Resources: The top 100 charts for Apple Books are tracked with a free tool called iTopChart. You can even look by country. This won't give you the full picture of the various storefronts, but it will likely help you understand general trends. https://itopchart.com/a/n/ebook/ Takeaways. Algorithm work is part guesswork. I've done the best to discern the truth of Apple Books algorithms, and I've done the best to present all information in a way that can be helpful to authors. The graphic in this chapter is to aid in visualization of the algorithms and of the rest of the chapters in this book. Task Checklist: Check out iTopChart so you can explore various country marketplaces and what is popular on each. If visuals are helpful to you, bookmark this graphic so that you can refer back to it in subsequent chapters. Chapter 8: Sales Rank. In this chapter, we're talking about sales rank and how it plays out on featured, bestseller, and category seller lists. Sales rank is an algorithmic calculation, made on nearly every retailer, that helps the retailer determine where a given book should rank on a list. There are lists for everything: bestsellers, categories, and more. Sometimes sales rank is used in search as well, though often search ranking is determined through a mix of keyword optimization and sales. Sales rank drives sales at the Apple Books store and determines placement across many of the bestseller lists, which are then featured prominently in the storefront. This chapter contains a calculation for sales rank at Apple Books and also explains how each of the bestseller lists work. Takeaway: Sales rank calculations determine placement on featured, bestseller, and category lists. It's important to know how it's calculated at every storefront. iTopChart. Before we get started, I want to recommend to you a tool called iTopChart. This is a great, free tool if you want to study Apple Books alongside me. When you go to their tracking website, you can change the country code, e.g., US, GB, CA, you can change the language, e.g., NDE FR, and you can change ebook to audiobook or free ebooks to switch charts. You can also append a category to the end to find genre-specific charts. There is also a menu at the top that you can browse to find various charts. If you are struggling to get to where you want to go, do a web search using keywords like ITopChart Thrillers and see what comes up. When you look at these charts, you'll find they come close to matching the top charts on the retailer storefront. You can get to the top charts in the menu on the app, or in the 5 tabs at the top for the desktop site, it's the second one. I say comes close to matching, because iTOPCharts is usually a little behind the Apple Books storefronts, so you may be seeing yesterday's results on iTOPChart and more frequently updated results, minutes, some suggest hourly, updates on the Apple Books sidebar. This was an invaluable tool for me to figure out some of the challenges and opportunities at Apple Books. I highly recommend taking a look, it's free to use. Takeaway: Use ITopChart to view bestseller lists across each country storefront. The Velocity Factor. In studying these top 100 charts, It's my belief and theory that velocity is one of the most important things you can do to sell more books on Apple Books. You can do all the other things to optimize your metadata and get visibility in various carousels, described in other chapters of this book, but if you don't have downloads over time, then you aren't going to find visibility in the Apple Books store. What is the velocity factor? It's the phrase I'm using to describe the observation that popular books dominate the charts search, and every carousel in the store. This is what one might expect from any retailer, but it's prominent at Apple Books. Nearly every book in the top 100 paid charts in every category seems to have gotten a verifiable burst of sales over a short period of time. The top 100 free charts have a similar pattern, aside from a few caveats that I discuss throughout the book. This is in line with what others who have more heavily studied ranking algorithms under the Apple umbrella have observed as well. The sales charts that update hourly seem to use a short window—some suggest 72 hours, some suggest 7 days—and weigh sales and downloads for the free store on a sliding scale, giving the most recent 24 hours the heaviest weight and moving down from there. The exact numbers are unclear, and unnecessary to know as the concept is more important than the numbers, but it would be something like: Last 24 hours 4x sales/downloads. Hours 25-48 3x sales/downloads. Hours 49-72 2x sales/downloads. Hours 73-161 1x sales/downloads. This is not dissimilar to Amazon's sales ranking algorithms, which also seem to weigh more recent sales heavier, than ones that were further back, hence why authors frequently talk about things like the 30-day cliff. Other parts of the store don't seem to have as strong of a focus on recent sales and may be ranking based more on the overall sales history, as it seems like older books have quite a bit more stickiness. The bottom line regarding the velocity factor is that you need a lot of sales on Apple Books to be visible on Apple Books. This is very different from what authors see on Amazon, where a relatively small amount of sales can get your book ranked highly quickly. Unlike other retailers, Apple Books' sales rank calculation remains invisible to the consumer and thus to us as authors. It's still there, but because it's not posted on product pages, it makes it harder for us to understand how high we have to send sales rank to be able to meet our goals. Goals of appearing in these bestseller lists. Takeaway: Sending a lot of sales at once is one of the best ways to get noticed in Apple Books Storefront. Unfortunately, you can fall as quickly as you rise if you can't maintain those sales. That said, BookBub works very well, and you can feast on the tail of that for longer than other storefronts. Digging into the feature: Bestseller and Category Lists. Now that you understand the rough idea of how sales rank works at Apple Books, we can look at the prominent bestseller lists in the storefront. Remember, the way to get onto or to increase your visibility on these lists is to increase your sales rank. There are, unfortunately, a few things that muddy what I can share about the bestseller lists. The desktop store versus the App Store are slightly different. The views for every store change based on the country you are looking at. The carousel names, functionality, and visibility are not fully consistent across genre categories. There's some personalization on the Apple Books store for each user, and while it's not as sophisticated as Amazon's, this can change the view and order of how things are shown. Despite these challenges in deciphering the data, I hope this chapter gives you an idea of where you might be able to find visibility with within the store and in these carousels, as it's likely going to influence your sales in a positive direction when you take full advantage and get all the placement that you are eligible for. Takeaway: Increase your sales rank to get onto or increase your visibility on these lists. My personal storefronts used to research this book. I'm pulling up the US retailer storefront on my iMac where I am not logged in., and have no book history, just to give a better sense of what the store promotes. I'm also pulling it up on my iPad, which has all of my account information, so we can get a sense of what personalization Apple Books offers. The 4 Tabs Desktop Storefront. There are 4 tabs in the desktop storefront that take you to the majority of places that your book can find visibility. These tabs are: Featured: This is the main, default view of the storefront, and the place where you'll find the largest number of curated and uncurated carousels. I cover the different types of carousels, and how to get into them in this section. While the Featured tab shows you the carousels across the whole store, you can find similar carousels as you drill down to category and subcategory throughout the store. Top Charts: This is the top 100 books, separated into paid and free lists, that are selling the most across the store and in each major category. This chart represents what's actually selling on Apple Books. I have a brief section on the Top Charts tab later in this chapter, since we've covered a lot around this tab already. In short, you want to hit this list, as it feeds a lot of other visibility algorithms in the store and the app. There is no curation, or at least there shouldn't be, which means that getting into the top 100 usually just requires a BookBub, a big preorder run, or another major burst of sales promo. NY Times. This is a list of weekly NY Times bestsellers. I won't be covering this tab separately, because it's straightforward and mostly irrelevant to independent authors. They've been curating indies from the list for a few years now. Despite authors having the sales to hit the list. Categories: This is a list of the categories in the Apple Bookstore. I won't be covering this tab separately because it will be covered under the feature tab discussion. Top Authors: Not visible anymore. I've included it because I believe it is still a factor in algorithms on the store, even though Apple Books has obscured it. This tab is really interesting to me. Especially given what I've said about the same series, same author effect giving additional visibility within search results and other areas of the store. There are about 500 authors on this list, listed in alphabetical order, with a paid/free toggle to separate, well, I'm not sure what, and the lists are significantly different. Most of the authors on this list are selling huge volumes of a few breakout books, —regardless of whether they are traditionally or independently published. On the Free list, this is still true. However, there's also another category of author—one who is decidedly midlist but has a significant number of permafree titles, usually at least 10. This supports my suspicion from Chapter 2, Apple Books Basics, about how a larger catalog of permafrees can create visibility at this retailer. Unfortunately, I don't have all the answers here and can't explain exactly what's happening, but I'm paying attention. If you have any information, please shoot me a message. Takeaway: Most of these tabs are going to be dominated by either traditionally published books or the uppermost echelon of independently published books. Still, there is plenty to learn about Apple Books from studying this part of the storefront. Apple Books Featured Tab. When you pull up the Apple Books store, the top paid and top free books are in the second top charts tab. The first tab is featured. Here are some of the lists that show up in each category. Bestsellers, sometimes called recent bestsellers. This carousel is heavily stocked with traditional publishing titles that have been released in the last 3 months or so. Traditional publishing still holds a lot of the merchandising. Outside of romance, and this is true for most wide ebook platforms, independent authors still aren't holding the top spots on these charts with consistency. Traditional publishing is strong in many of these spaces. Many independent authors are pricing higher than best practice for Amazon in order to look like a good deal on Apple Books. There are almost no books at $2.99 on these charts, and limited-time deals tend to be $1.99, which is the standard traditional publishers are setting. Takeaway: Best-selling romance authors priced at $4.99 or above sometimes show up on the main bestseller list. This creates huge visibility and is a huge opportunity for independent authors who can get enough sales at this platform. Read Before You Watch, sometimes called Read It Before You Watch It. This is for books turned to movies, so you'll find books like The Queen's Gambit and Bridgerton there. It's not relevant to most independent authors, so I'll skip it. New This Week, sometimes called New Releases. This carousel contains all of the top-selling new releases for the week. The main carousel for the whole store is dominated by traditionally published books, and a few independent author titles, primarily by established names and in the romance and thriller genres. That said, you can drill down to specific categories and find a similar carousel, which may be easier to get featured in for your genre. But it depends on the genre, and I observed a few genres that seemed oddly heavy with traditionally published books. It could be that traditionally published books sell better for that genre, hence hitting higher in this carousel, or it could be that some independently published books are getting curated off the list. Additionally, I noticed that books with better covers seem to be placed higher, specifically in the first and second rows of sections like New Releases. Apple's brand is heavy on well-designed imagery, so it isn't surprising that they might have a hand in curating this list. While the traditionally published titles seem to come first, Independent authors with solid catalogs do get placed in prominent visibility here as well. In romance, for example, you'll see mostly independent authors releasing between $3.99 and $5.99. Most of the other genres are still heavily dominated by traditional publishing, though independent authors with bigger names seem to again be penetrating these lists at $3.99 to $5.99 pricing. The majority of books on these lists are still closer to the $12.99 to $14.99 price range. Price at $5.99 or higher if you dare, because the $3.99 titles genuinely look out of place next to the $14.99 traditionally published Takeaway: New releases are a really important way to gain visibility at Apple Books Storefront. Because traditional and independent books are mixed together, your book can often look like a deal if you can have a great new release. And while you may not be able to do this for the whole store, you might be able to do it for your category. New This Month. This particular carousel is similar to New This Week. And seems to focus on new releases from a specific time period. As I'm writing this in May 2023, the carousel does not appear to have been updated since December 2022 and is showing mostly December releases. That said, a little over half of the books in the carousel are from independent authors, so I hope those authors are seeing record sales in 2023, having been featured on one of the main pages in the storefront for "Chek's Calendar" nearly 6 full months. Takeaway: Storefronts have glitches. When a carousel doesn't update regularly, it hurts newer releases but helps older lucky ones. You can't control everything in the store, and it may not be your fault if a new release doesn't perform as well. It also may not be your doing when a new release does perform well. If you see something odd in your data, don't assume you created it—investigate. Limited time, under $$. The amount changes depending on the genre. For romance, for example, this number is under $4. For other genres, it's set at under $5. Get a BookBub Featured Deal (BBFD) if you can. The limited time deals list is driven by a temporary drop in price plus a ton of traffic (sales). A BBFD is probably the easiest way to make an impact here. But you can also stack other advertising and deal sites to create a mini BBFD. That said, some genres have savvier or more price-sensitive readers, like romance, where the deals section is featured. Under other genres like young adult and nonfiction, there's no push for limited-time deals. So a young adult BookBub deal may not do as well on Apple Books as other genres would. You can ask to be added to this carousel, or they may place you there. The most important thing appears to be lead time, a great-looking cover, and a solid catalog with Apple Books already. Having a well-branded series is important. Most of the books in this category are $0.99 in romance, while they are $2.99 to $3.99 in mystery thriller. Price according to your genre. Takeaway: Look at your genre to see what a typical price discount is,, then run frequent sales across your catalog. When you do, you can notify Apple Books, and ask if you can be placed in this discount carousel. Coming Soon. This section is huge and has books listed out up to a year. Pre-orders get a ton of play on Apple Books. You should set up pre-orders, but more specifically, it likely helps to always have a pre-order that is 1 year out. There are 3 views under Coming Soon: All-Time Best Sellers, Best Sellers, and Release Date. For Release Date, the pre-orders appear in reverse order by release date, and the March 2022 pre-orders appear first on the page in March 2021. While both All-Time Best Sellers and Best Sellers are probably ranked by pre-order count, the former probably uses a total count of pre-orders while the latter uses some implementation of pre-orders over time.— the velocity factor. The all-time bestsellers under each category could also possibly be ranked based on how established the author is, bringing us again back to my "same author, same series." It's also possible that this is not true, but it's worth observing for yourself. When you are working on building your preorders, cumulative preorders versus preorders over a certain period of time, the last month The last 3 months are something to consider. A longer preorder likely has a better chance of becoming an all-time bestseller. This matters because readers are less likely to toggle between these 3 views of the coming soon list, and the all-time bestsellers version is the one that comes up most often for me, though I've had the others come up too in my testing. To take away, use preorders whenever you can and set them up to a year out. Always have 1 preorder set 12 months from now, even if you have to push it back. It makes sense to do so because you can push preorders back without penalty. First in Series Free, sometimes called Free Series Starters. This is another list you can get added to through contacting Apple Books, and if you have a perma-free, I believe they will keep you on the list for the duration that your book is free for your category and/or or subcategory. The value of this list is that it's linked to from several pages on the retailer's store, both on the desktop and in the app. Apple Books also promotes this list heavily, as it's an entry point to getting more iPhone and iPad users into their ecosystem. For example, they recently promoted this list in a nationwide campaign at the beginning of the pandemic. Once you are in, there are several toggle views, including Featured, Release Date, Bestsellers, and All-Time Bestsellers. Additionally, there are versions of this list under almost every category, though some categories like Young Adult do not feature the carousel directly from the category page. This makes sense, as this list is dominated by independent author books. You can still usually get to the list by drilling down to the subcategory page and searching for this carousel. Here's the rough breakdown of how each of the 4 list sorts: Featured: A mix of the books on bestsellers and all-time bestsellers, indicating that both the velocity factor and hitting the top 100 can get you featured here, along with longevity and popularity on the platform. Release date: Sorted in reverse order of publication date, so much so that at the time of this writing, there are actually currently available books that have set their publication date metadata into the future, which puts them at the very top of the list. I assume Apple Books will eventually close the loop on that hack. Bestsellers: Sorted in reverse order based largely on recent downloads and top 100 chart status. All-time bestsellers: These are all books that have a long history of popularity on the platform, as indicated by number of star ratings and historic downloads, most likely. One thing to note on the first in series free lists is that you can be on the main one for all genres, and somehow not be on the individual ones for your genre. I found multiple books that were featured overall but absent from their category and subcategory free series starter lists. This is definitely something you want to check for your books, as the category and subcategory lists have far fewer books, and it's easy to get noticed on these pages. Again, I have no idea how much traffic a subcategory free series starter page gets, but if you can be on it, why wouldn't you be? Those are your ideal target readers. Takeaway: Free First In Series (FFIS) is a popular wide publishing strategy, and it works particularly well at Apple Books. The Top Charts tab. The Top Charts tab features many of the same books at the Featured tab. Despite the similarities, though, several of the books in the top 20 of the Top Charts tab are frequently not in Apple Books' visible Featured storefront. Again, their front page is the Featured tab rather than the Top Charts tab. The number 1 similarity for not being on the front page of the bookstore, despite being a top seller, is that Apple Books might not feature books that are more than a few months old. Either way, these two storefront views seem to operate fairly independently, with the Featured section being largely controlled by merchandising, and the Top Charts section being largely controlled by algorithms. Algorithms. Although the Top Charts tab is not as prominently featured, these books are selling. We've talked a lot about why and how. But even if you aren't a big-name author or a regular BookBub Featured Deal recipient, and even if you may not hit the top 100 anytime soon for your category, that doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile to gain visibility through climbing the charts. The Top Charts tab is featured in many prominent places,, and the first 10 books on the top charts are featured on the front page of the store. And although the top charts tab is heavily driven by advertising, particularly on BookBub, at least in the US, other charts, like those in the UK and Canada for example, seem dominated by independent authors. The US charts seem to be more of a mix of newly released traditionally published books and independent books on sale. Additionally, when you look at the charts from country to country, the rankings almost always look completely different. This is a good thing. There's more opportunity, and less competition on the top 100 outside of the US. When you look at the featured section, there is huge overlap between what's selling well and what's featured. I suspect two things are happening: being featured causes book to sell well and selling well for an extended period of time, or as a new release, causes Apple Books to reach out so they can feature you. There's a lot of value to being on the top charts, and it's likely one of the best ways to get your books featured in the future. Takeaway: Look at top charts in countries beyond the United States to find opportunities to dominate, as these charts are not as focused on traditional publishing. Additional resources. In addition to this book, my company Writer MBA also has a section on Apple Books in our course Go Wide, Grow Wide. You can get the Go Wide, Grow Wide course à la carte, or you can access it month to month or year to year along with our community through the Writer MBA membership. The value of joining this course through any of the options is that a book is always going to be static, while our courses and membership are dynamic and constantly updated. You can also ask me, Monica, specific questions or get my help with your specific catalog through our mentorship in the community. This is only available to our paid members. See pricing options at https://courses.writermba.com Apple Books has recently created a website for authors that offers up-to-date advice, platform tips, and links. If a question is unanswered or a link is broken throughout this book, you may be able to find the answer there. And if you can't find the answer there, I still recommend joining the course, as we can get the answer to your question through my connections. https://authors.apple.com/ Takeaways. Your sales rank calculations determine placement on featured, bestseller, and category lists. It's important to know how it's calculated at every storefront. Use iTopChart to view bestseller lists across each country storefront. Sending a lot of sales at once is one of the best ways to get noticed in Apple Books storefront. Unfortunately, you can fall as quickly as you rise if you can't maintain those sales. That said, BookBub works very well, and you can feast on the tail of that for longer than other storefronts. Increase your sales rank to get onto or increase your visibility on these lists. Most of these lists are going to be dominated by either traditionally published books, or the uppermost echelon, of independently published books. Still, there is plenty to learn about Apple Books from studying this part of the storefront. Bestselling romance authors priced at $4.99 or above sometimes show up on the main bestseller list. This creates huge visibility and is a huge opportunity for independent authors who can get enough sales at this platform. New releases are a really important way to gain visibility at Apple Books Storefront. Because traditional and independent books are mixed together, Your book can often look like a deal if you can have a great new release. And while you may not be able to do this for the whole store, you might be able to do it for your category. Storefronts have glitches. When a carousel doesn't update regularly, it hurts newer releases but helps older lucky ones. You can't control everything in the store, and it may not be your fault if a new release doesn't perform as well. It also may not be your doing when a new release does perform well. If you see something odd in your data, don't assume you created it—investigate. Look at your genre to see what a typical price discount is, then run frequent sales across your catalog. When you do, you can notify Apple Books and ask if you can be placed in this discount carousel. Use preorders whenever you can, and set them up to a year out. Always have one preorder set 12 months from now, even if you have to push it back. It makes sense to do so because you can push preorders back without penalty. Free First In series (FFIS) is a popular wide publishing strategy, and it works particularly well at Apple Books. Look at top charts in countries beyond the United States to find opportunities to dominate, as these charts are not as focused on traditional publishing. Task Checklist: Use iTopChart to study Apple Books by country. Land major promotions like BookBub feature deals whenever possible. If it's not possible, create a promotion stack to drive a lot of traffic to your series at once. Do this at least once a quarter, as Apple Books offers a lot of feast on the long tail of a promotion. Make efforts to make your new release launches bigger on this platform. Use preorders. They help accumulate sales which then count a second time algorithmically once the book is released. Always have one preorder set 12 months from now, even if you have to push it back—there's no penalty for moving your preorder date, so even if the book is planned for more than a year out, put it up now. Use discounts across your catalog frequently, ideally at least once per month. And notify Apple Books to try to get into their discount carousels for your genre. Make your first book in every series free for this platform, as long as you have no price matching constraints at other platforms. Chapter 9: Advanced Search Optimization. This chapter is about how Apple Books handles search and about getting your book to rank higher on key phrases that a reader might be searching for. In this chapter, I'll explain some advanced search optimization techniques that go beyond what was covered in the metadata optimization chapter. As always, when I talk about search and metadata, I always offer the caveat that this type of optimization usually accounts for 20% or less of total visibility on a storefront. Most search is additionally optimized by sales rank, meaning that books that sell better on the platform will show up higher in search results, regardless of how much optimization an author does to their book catalog. This is one of the reasons that I talk about search after talking about sales rank. It's usually a foundational concept as you unpack how search on most retailers actually works. I speak to many authors on a regular basis, and this can sometimes be a point of confusion or even contention. I optimized my books on the platform, but it didn't increase my sales. That's because search and metadata optimization alone are only able to increase your sales a little. If your sales are near zero, then you will not see much difference. If your sales are 100 books per day, then you are likely to see a substantial percentage increase in sales that adds a significant monetary value to your bottom line. Keep this in mind as you make changes. Search and metadata optimization should always be done if time and resources allow it, but getting sales through other promotional means is still required. With that out of the way, let's talk about advanced search optimization for Apple Books. Knowing what keywords to put in your books. Before we start, it could be helpful to build a list of keywords to consider ranking for. The best way, and the way to start, is to start typing in something to the retailer store's search bar and see what suggestions come up. For example, when I type in "writing," I get the suggestions: "Creative Writing." "On Writing"—this is the title of a book by Stephen King about writing. "On Writing Well"—another popular book title in the genre. These are good places to start when figuring out where you want to rank. Another thing to check is adding keyphrases like "free" to your terms, for example "free crime thriller." Once you have a list of keyphrases that Apple Books thinks that readers search for—and we have to assume Apple Books has the best data on this—you can double-check them against another keyword tool, like Google Keyword Planner, which is free to use. https://ads.google.com/au/keyword-planner/home What you're looking for is high relative traffic for those keyphrases. You can then use the traffic data to get a rough sense of how popular that keyphrase is, might be on Apple Books, relative to other keyphrases on your list. For example, when I look up "vampire romance," a keyword that Apple Books suggested to me, I get back other suggestions like: vampire romance series, "Teenage vampire romance." "Steamy vampire books." All of these terms have 100-1K monthly search averages, while the term "vampire romance books" is in the next bracket up at 1K-10K monthly search average. I will likely try to work "vampire romance books" into my search optimization on Apple Books. Since I write young adult books, I will also choose "teenage vampire romance" instead of "vampire romance." in advance and kill two birds with one stone. Once you've done your investigation in Google Keyword Planner, you can narrow down your list to a handful of phrases that are worth ranking in search for and optimize around those. You should choose fewer than 5, and most likely you'll only be able to get 1 to 3 fitted into your metadata. In the next section, I'll go much deeper on why these key phrases are so important. And how you can use them to find opportunities for visibility in the Apple Books store. In my research, I saw very few authors with optimized metadata. I could tell because it was so easy to figure out how Apple Books was ranking titles. All of this will make more sense as we continue. Takeaway: Using a keyword tool or several to understand what popular words and phrases people are searching for is a great way to approach search at any retailer. Remember, humans will be the ones typing phrases into the search box. You ultimately want to write books that humans seek to read. Exact titles matter. For the phrase "The Dragon Reborn," Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series takes up the majority of the spots. After that, however, there is another title that is an exact match, called The Dragon Reborn. It still appears about 15 to 20 books in, but it's next in line. After all the exact title matches, Apple Books seems to deliver titles still in series groupings with similar phrasing, but appears to rank them by popularity, sales, and/or velocity in their store. The next several series are from popular independent authors with titles that are a word or a tense off from The Dragon Reborn. I saw this over and over again as I searched for various phrases. Apple Books does deliver on exact phrasing, so if you have a specific keyword you want to hit, your best bet is to place that phrase at the beginning of your title. Keep in mind, however, that it's not a magic ticket to the top of search results. Apple Books places far more priority on popular books, which makes sense from a reader's perspective. Takeaway: The velocity factor I described in a previous chapter matters in search results. If you have a similar title as another book that's more popular than yours, it, and likely its whole series, will show up before yours. Can you increase your sales and downloads to improve your ranking? Exact phrasing in queries. A good example is the word "the." If you type in "The Dragon Reborn," for example, The Wheel of Time book with that exact title shows up first. If you type in "Dragon Reborn," however, both The Wheel of Time's The Dragon Reborn title still shows up first, while books with the exact title match come right after. I believe this is because The Dragon Reborn still has the exact phrase "Dragon Reborn" in it, while the reverse, typing in "The Dragon Reborn" and getting back Dragon Reborn-titled books, is not true. This can be observed with several other key phrase starters, like "a" and "of." For example, "Of Mice and Men" comes up easily when you type it in, but when you type in "mice and men," you'll still get Of Mice and Men, while a book with the exact series title shows up below it. Takeaway: Across key metadata like title, subtitle, and series, using phrases like "a dragon shifter romance series" will give you better visibility in search than "dragon shifter romance series." Series are linked to individual books. You would think that when you type in The Dragon Reborn, you might find all the books with the exact title showing up first. This is not, however, what comes up. Instead, Apple Books shows you the entire Wheel of Time series based only on the single title of one of the books in the series. This is not because Robert Jordan or the Wheel of Time series is special, or traditionally published, or extremely popular. This was true across independently published author series as well. There were even several series under this exact phrase "The Dragon Reborn." that appeared the same way. The whole series showed up in the search, even though only one of the books in the series had a matching title. Takeaway: If you write a long series, you can dominate all the visibility on a specific key phrase using only an exact match of a single title. And in the reverse, titling your book the same as a popular book is likely not going to help your visibility if it's part of a long series. Is free a useful keyword? If you type in free before any keyword phrase you can think of, you will get only free ebooks in your search results. Free is not necessary to include in your metadata on your permafree or price-pulsed free books, as like the category designation, the inclusion of the word free to your search query creates an automatic search results filter on price. That said, yes, it definitely helps to have the word free in your description. I saw it done two ways. By accident, the author had included something like "Will the truth set her free?" The word "free" was a legitimate part of the description. As an aside next to the book in a list of books in the series, the author included something like "free prequel" next to the first book in the series, then listed the other 2-4 books afterward. If you combine the word "free" in your description with some of the other metadata optimizations I've shared in this chapter, you should be able to easily improve your rank for your keyword phrases on your permafrees specifically. What that ends up being worth in terms of additional downloads to your permafree is hard to say, but it's definitely worth experimenting with. Another thing to be aware of is that in popular categories where competition is higher and there are more permafrees, most of the popular keyword phrases are going to be filled with free books, even if free books are not specified. For example, "free dragon romance" returns all free books, but "dragon romance" returns mostly free books as well. The results for the two terms are different sets of permaphrees, which I believe has to do with some of the other optimizations that we've discussed already. Takeaway: You should use the word "free" in your description for all permaphrees in your catalog. This will work even better in the title, subtitle, or series title box, but I can't advise using it, as Apple Books frowns on incorrect metadata in these boxes. If you use "free" multiple times in your description, you will rank higher in search than a free book in your category that doesn't use "free" or uses it only once. Same author, same series. While this particular piece of metadata is not something you can easily fix or change, You really just need to have stumbled into this through how you write your series or through having a huge backlist. It is something that is important to Apple Books specifically. Apple Books gives more visibility to larger, tightly targeted backlists. And as one of your titles rises in visibility, Apple Books notices that and credits your other books in visibility too. I've heard so many successful 6-figure-a-year-wide authors say something like, 'Apple Books really likes when you send them more traffic through advertising,' or 'Apple Books loves my huge backlist.' To me, what they are observing is that 'same author, same series' is a helpful factor in keeping the Apple Books algorithms juiced. I shared earlier about the $4.99 dragon romance book, and how it was ranking higher in part, because of the 5X phenomenon in the description. But it was also likely ranking in part because another free book by the author in a different, but related series—both were dragon romances—had gotten a BookBub that week, meaning that it was highly visible at that time. It wasn't because of sell-through. Again, these were two different series, and this particular book wasn't even the first or second in the series—I believe it was the fourth. There was no other huge promotion on the first book in this series, So it wasn't that either, and even if it was, the second book should have been ranked highly too. The only conclusion I could come to in my comparison was that the keywords plus some sort of "same author" factor was helping this book rise in the search results. I saw this several times in my observations. Another author ranked very highly in relevant search terms for their first in series permafreeze across 5 different series. They had 5 different permafree series starters, all around the same trope, that ranked highly for keywords around that trope. None of this author's books had a recent BookBub, so my guess was that simply having 5 permafree books in their catalog, that were all closely related—this is likely key, so stay in your lane—was helping all 5 books rank in a competitive subcategory. Takeaway: Without question,, a larger and highly focused catalog that is tightly targeted around a set of keywords will rank higher in search overall at Apple Books. If you have that, or if you can massage your catalog into being that fairly easily, you can create a huge advantage for your author name in search at Apple Books. If you are closer to the beginning of your career, this is considered a best practice strategy anyway, but it is considerably more advantageous at a retailer like Apple Additional resources. Some of my favorite free keyword search tools are: Google Keyword Planner: https://ads.google.com/au/keywordplanner/home. Answer the Public: https://answerthepublic.com/. Ubersuggest: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/. If you'd like to get my guide to writing the ultimate book description that is optimized for the 5 largest retailers, make sure you enroll in the course for free: https://writermba.teachable.com/p/go-y-grow-y-bootcamp. Takeaways. Using a keyword tool (or several) to understand what popular words and phrases people are searching for is a great way to approach search at any retailer. Remember, humans will be the ones typing phrases into the search box. You ultimately want to write books that humans seek to read. The velocity factor I described in a previous chapter matters in search results. If you have a similar title as another book that's more popular than yours, it, and likely its whole series, will show up before yours. Can you increase your sales and downloads to improve your ranking? Across key metadata like title, subtitle, and series, using phrases like "a dragon shifter romance series" will give you better visibility in search than "dragon shifter romance series." If you write a long series, you can dominate all the visibility on a specific key phrase using only an exact match of a single title. And in the reverse, titling your book the same as a popular book is likely not going to help your visibility if it's part of a long series. You should use the word "free" in your description for all permafrees in your catalog. This will work even better in the title, subtitle, or series title box, but I can't advise using it as Apple Books frowns on incorrect metadata in these boxes. If you use "free" multiple times in your description, you will rank higher in search than a free book in your category that doesn't use "free" or uses it only once. Without question, a larger and highly focused catalog that is tightly targeted around a set of keywords will rank higher in search overall at Apple Books. If you have that, or if you can massage your catalog into being that fairly easily, you can create a huge advantage for your author name in search at Apple Books. If you are closer to the beginning of your career, this is already considered a best practice strategy anyway, but it is considerably more advantageous at a retailer like Apple Books. Task Checklist: Use the keyword tools listed to find keywords and key phrases that are relevant to your books and larger catalog. Add words like "a" or "the" to the beginning of your titles where possible as it gives you better search ranking. Consider phrases you want to rank for, and see if you can incorporate them into future titles, subtitles, or series titles. Use "free" multiple times in all of your permafree book descriptions. Consider adding information about the permafree book to all other book descriptions for books in the series. If you have a tightly targeted series or pen name, think about what relevant keywords and keyphrases you want to be found under and massage all of your book descriptions to include those keywords. There is power in having similar keywords across the same series, and power in this at the author and pen name level too. Work on increasing your sales and downloads at Apple Books to get better placement in search results. Join the Go Wide, Grow Wide Bootcamp, it's free, and get the ultimate book description training that teaches you how to write a book description that is optimized for all of the Big Five retailers. Chapter 10: Carousels. We've spent some time talking about carousels already, and as carousels are a convenient way to display modular lists in a storefront, we'll continue talking about them in the subsequent chapters. In this chapter, I wanted to share information about carousels that you may see on the storefront or in the app that don't fit anywhere else in the book. As I mentioned earlier, the app storefront looks a little different than the desktop storefront. It has many of the carousels listed above, but it also has a lot more personalization, and does a better job of bringing carousels to the product page. On the desktop storefront, the main carousel is "Other books in this series," which is great for sell-through but not great for discovery. Carousels in the app only. While the Mac computer storefront for Apple Books is consistent and predictable, the app seems to be more colorful and playful and may even get updated far more often. It has many of the same features that the computer storefront has, but it also has dozens of additional carousels and promotions at any given time. Apple Books readers likely read on their app on their phone or iPad rather than downloading books from the store. One thing to note is that Apple Books is only available to Apple device users and is not featured in the Google Play Store, meaning you won't be able to get Apple Books on an Android device. Here are a few of the carousels that you might see in the app. New and Trending. This carousel does have several newer releases on it, but it also has books that have been released and are finding new life as social media posts go viral or stories get turned into movies. There are many independently published books on the list, which suggests to me that a high velocity of sales is a large part of the curation. While other retailers have specific carousels for books that are trending on TikTok, this carousel is about as close to that as Apple Books gets. Special Offers and Free. This carousel is both a carousel within itself and leads to a page of carousels that includes curated lists of books that are free or on sale. Most of these carousels are organized promotions that Apple Books puts together. See the chapter on merchandising to get a sense of how to get into these promotions. Top Rated Titles. This carousel contains books that have high ratings according to their reviews. It is mostly filled with traditionally published books and seems to focus on long-term bestsellers. Book Clubs. This carousel is both a carousel within itself, and leads to a page of carousels that include popular book clubs. Past and present picks from Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager, and more are featured on this page, and since these books are likely chosen once a month, they tend to have longevity. There are no or few independent books featured on this page, and most large book clubs will not pick a book, unless it has wide distribution in bookstores. Beyond these carousels, there are so many other specific promotions on the storefront and in the app. It's worth checking the app monthly to see what Apple Books is promoting. For example, May is Asian and Pacific Islander, AAPI, month, and I am half Pacific Islander from Guam, but missed my chance to be in the AAPI carousel. Takeaway: Keep an eye on promotional opportunities in the app. Which seems to be the most up-to-date storefront. If you see something interesting, don't be afraid to reach out and try! Carousels on the product page. The rest of these carousels, which for the most part do exist on the desktop storefront product pages, are hidden behind a tab under "Related" and are unlikely to get much traffic or traction. On the app, these carousels are featured prominently, so it's still worth figuring out how to get into them. Other books in this series. This carousel is very straightforward. It lists the next books in the series in number order, and can be found on both the app storefront and the retailer storefront. Takeaway: Write in a series—4, 5, or 6 books seems optimal on Apple Books—and make sure your series is clearly connected through metadata. This is the most likely carousel that will show on your product page. More Books by the Author Carousel. This carousel is also very straightforward. It gives you all the other books by the author, most likely in order of popularity within the store. Usually, it will have the other books from the series, then after that, other related series, or a list of permaphrases from the author. These have an advantage in popularity ranking because they organically rack up more downloads than paid books. Takeaway: Authors with larger catalogs have a strong advantage at Apple Books. Make sure you check this carousel to see what books are the most popular in your catalog, and see what you can do to optimize the traffic that is going there. Audiobooks Carousel. This carousel contains all the audiobooks by the same author. As I mentioned in earlier chapters, audiobooks are important to Apple Books, and there's a lot of visibility value in getting your books into audiobooks on this store. They are linked to all your ebooks, which means that the two will cross-sell each other. iTunes is one of the largest podcast and music homes in the world, so your audiobooks could be really helpful to you in building your sales at Apple Books. Likewise, If you don't have ebooks available at Apple Books, audiobooks could be a way to build a presence at this retailer and in search results. Takeaway: Your audiobooks, which can be exclusive to ACX, Audible's audiobook self-publishing platform, can help you establish a presence at Apple Books without being on the platform. They also link nicely to your ebooks, and having audiobooks can make your whole catalog look look more professional at the storefront. Additional resources. In addition to this book, my company Writer MBA also has a section on Apple Books in our course Go Wide, Grow Wide. You can get the Go Wide, Grow Wide course à la carte, or you can access it month to month or year to year along with our community through the Writer MBA membership. The value of joining this course through any of the options is that a book is always going to be static, while our courses and membership are dynamic and constantly updated. You can also ask me, Monica, specific questions, or get my help with your specific catalog through our mentorship in the community. This is only available to our paid members. See pricing options at https://courses.writermba.com Apple Books has recently created a website for authors that offers up-to-date advice, platform tips, and links. If a question is unanswered or a link is broken throughout this book, you may be able to find the answer there. And if you can't find the answer there, I still recommend joining the course, as we can get the answer to your question through my connections. https://authors.apple.com/ Takeaways: Keep an eye on promotional opportunities in the app, which seems to be the most up-to-date storefront. If you see something interesting, don't be afraid to reach out and try. Write in a series—4, 5, or 6 books seems optimal on Apple Books—and make sure your series is clearly connected through metadata. This is the most likely carousel that will show on your product page. Authors with larger catalogs have a strong advantage at Apple Books. Make sure you check this carousel to see what books are the most popular in your catalog and see what you can do to optimize the traffic that is going there. Your audiobooks, which can be exclusive to ACX, Audible's audiobook self-publishing platform, can help you establish a presence at Apple Books without being on the platform. They also link nicely to your ebooks, and having audiobooks can make your whole catalog look more professional at the storefront. Task Checklist: Set a monthly calendar reminder to check the Apple Books app and see what promotions are happening right now. Make sure your series are clearly connected through metadata. Check on the backend that everything is consistent, and check on the frontend that your series are appearing as you expect. Don't forget to get your audiobooks to Apple Books, as they can drastically increase your visibility in the storefront. You may also want to optimize them too. See the separate chapter on audiobooks for more information. Chapter 11: Also Bots. Also Bots carousels are a particular set of carousels that I like to talk about separately from the others because they are particularly tied to product pages or individual books. They are usually based not on bestseller or category sales ranking, but on connections between two products or two books. In recent years, also bots have played a less prominent role on Apple Books Storefront. Back in 2021, I noticed that these carousels were having intense problems with being overrun by free books, making free books a more prominent feature of the storefront. I was confident that Apple Books would have to close the loop on that potential exploitation, because it was so easily and obviously gameable. Amazon had to do the same back in 2012. In 2023, at the time of this writing, they have closed the loop. In doing so, they've made it a little bit more difficult for independent authors to gain visibility visibility in the storefront. However, you can still get into "also boughts" on other product pages, it just takes more sales, and free books are rarely featured and, and weighed in these carousels. There are two main carousels that we'll be breaking down in this section: the "readers also bought" carousel and the "more books like this" carousel. Readers also bought carousel. This carousel appears on product pages when the book has enough sales. If you can't find this on your page, check under the Related tab. Here are some notable patterns for this carousel: You need more and steady sales. Not every book has this carousel, and it seems like a book needs to accumulate a certain level of sales to receive it. The lack of this carousel on a book's product page doesn't necessarily indicate that the book is not in the carousel on other pages, but it seems less likely. How many sales do you need? Hard to say. Based on observation, you'll likely need several thousand sales or downloads. In some ways, I prefer this implementation of also-boughts to how Amazon used to do them. With Amazon, every product page had an also-bought carousel, and often they were filled with the most popular books, which took traffic from your page and sent it elsewhere. With Apple Books, you only have to contend with that carousel if your book is popular and receiving in-store traffic already. With all this said, there are still books that do not have these carousels but do have a high quantity of sales. It may be that a book needs time on the shelf to collect data as well, and there may be other factors that are personalized and optimized to get the sale. For example, If I search for a book by title, Apple Books may not want to show me other carousels because my interest in this book is high, versus if I'm just browsing and clicking around. Keep this in mind, as it seems to be a trend rather than a hard and fast rule. Takeaway: Not every book has a Readers Also Bought page and not every book is featured in Other Readers Also Bought carousels. To gain this network effect for your books, get more downloads or 99-cent sales, sales, using BookBub, other email promotions, or CPC advertising, so you can move a large quantity of books. Even then, there may be other factors at play that cause a carousel to not show on a page. Release dates matter. The books in these carousels are often similar books in the genre that were published around the same time as the book we are looking at. This makes sense if authors are putting up and accumulating pre-orders., as they'd launch on the same day, and likely have a crossover of readers between the two as the visibility algorithms kicked in. Sometimes the books hadn't been released at the time, but they instead had a BookBub or other large promotion at the same time. It could even be that the authors had cross-promoted with each other. In both of these cases, the books had a burst of sales and downloads in the same small time frame, which linked them together, even when they perhaps weren't all that similar. In that sense, it's true that customers also bought these books together, and similar to Amazon's algorithms, the Apple Books algorithms around this factor time heavily into the equation. Takeaway: Watch your wide comparison authors carefully and try releasing the same types of books in the same months/weeks as them, if it fits your strategy and catalog of course. This could be even more helpful if that comp author gets frequent BookBubs that will bring visibility to their books in the Apple Books storefront. AlsoBots are sticky. AlsoBots seem significantly stickier, which means that once a book gets linked to yours, they might stay in your carousels for a while. This isn't that surprising, as big promotions like BookBub used to have this level of influence over Amazon too, you, on both the top 100 charts and in the also-bots. If you and someone else had a BookBub at the same time, you were stuck in each other's also-bots for weeks, if not months, especially if you didn't run any other impactful promotions during that time. Also-bots can stay with books for years, so it's important to get this right upon release. Takeaway: Stickiness can be great for you if your promotions are tightly targeted.. But if you're frequently promoting with your general genre rather than your subcategory, it may be harder to control the placements in these carousels. Additionally, you can't usually control who is also having a BookBub in your larger category at the same time as you, so it's important to plan lots of smaller, targeted promotions around your BookBubs. Books travel in pricing clusters. Whether by algorithmic design or because of customer behavior, books in these carousels tend to be around the same price as the book whose product page they are featured on. I'm fairly skeptical that this is entirely customer behavior, so I would guess that there is stronger weight that keeps books that are priced at $4.99 in carousels for books ranging from $3.99 to $5.99. This is likely one of the big changes that keeps free books from flooding every "also bought" carousel. It's also likely going to keep independently published books separate from traditionally published books, which is something that almost every retailer finds a way to do algorithmically, though each implements this idea in different ways. I would guess that this is something traditional publishers want or expect, and it makes sense since independent authors can undercut a traditionally published book by over 50% every time. Takeaway: When you are planning your promotions, look for books that are in a similar price range to yours, rather than attempting to match up with traditionally published books or free books, unless you are pricing in those ranges. More Books Like This Carousel. This carousel is a little harder to find patterns in, especially because it's changed quite a bit in the last several years, and the Mac Store often doesn't match up with the App Store, indicating that they are two different algorithms. The App Store version of the carousel appears to be abbreviated and filters out a section of the books. I did notice a few things. The carousel only allows two books from each different author. The carousel seems to use the broad category, like romance, over subcategories, which made for some very odd recommendations compared to readers also bought. The "more books like this" carousel could be driven more by similar authors in the larger genre category, while the "customers also bought" carousel is driven more by a connection to individual products. Takeaway: I don't think it's worth worrying much about the "more books like this" carousel from an author perspective. There's not an easily discernible rhyme or reason for why books appear or don't appear., and that makes it difficult for authors to take action to affect the results here. Additional Resources. In addition to this book, my company Writer MBA also has a section on Apple Books in our course, Go Wide, Grow Wide. You can get the Go Wide, Grow Wide course à la carte, or you can access it month-to-month or year-to-year along with our community through the Writer MBA membership. The value of joining this course through any of the options is that a book is always going to be static, while our courses and membership are dynamic and constantly updated. You can also ask me, Monica, specific questions or get my help with your specific catalog through our mentorship in the community. This is only available to our paid members. See pricing options at https://courses.writermba.com/. Takeaways. Not every book has a Readers Also Bought page, and not every book is featured in other Readers Also Bought carousels. To gain this network effect for your books, get more downloads or 99-cent sales using BookBub, other email promotions, or CPC advertising, so you can move a large quantity of books. Even then, there may be other factors at play that cause a carousel to not show on a page. Watch your wide comparison authors carefully and try releasing the same types of books in the same months/weeks as them, if it fits your strategy and catalog of course. This could be even more helpful if that comp author gets frequent BookBubs that will bring visibility to their books in the Apple Books storefront. Stickiness can be great for you if your promotions are tightly targeted, but if you're frequently promoting with your general genre rather than your subcategory, it may be harder to control the placements in these carousels. Additionally, you can't usually control who is also having a BookBub in your larger category at the same time as you, so it's important to plan lots of smaller, targeted promotions around your BookBubs. When you are planning your promotions, look for books that are in a similar price range to yours, rather than attempting to match up with traditionally published books or free books, unless you are pricing in those ranges. I don't think it's worth worrying much about the "More Books Like This" carousel, from an author perspective. There's not an easily discernible rhyme or reason for why books appear or don't appear, and that makes it difficult for authors to take action to affect the results. Results here. Task Checklist: Look for comparable authors that price their books similarly to how you price your books. Follow other comparable authors in your genre, and notice when they are launching books on wide retailers. Where possible, try to time your release within a few weeks of theirs, as your preorder sales are probably going to be at high velocity then. Likewise, watch when comparable authors in your genre get BookBubbs and for which books. These authors have regular traffic coming to their pages, so targeting them more specifically in advertising could be helpful to your books. Don't give up on pushing your books through your email list, cross-promotion, or advertising. It takes time to accumulate sales history on any storefront. Chapter 12: Personalized Recommendations. In this chapter, we'll discuss the personalized views that readers see on Apple Books. And how we can get our books to appear in more personalized recommendations areas. Over the last several years, Apple Books has added more personalization to its store, and I expect that trend to continue. Personalization is a great tool for retailers to better match readers to books. The great thing about Apple Books' personalization options is that they are fairly easy to unpack and easy to take action on as an author. That said, there are challenges to studying personalized recommendations and to track any progress you are making at getting your books into these personalized carousels for readers. There is not much way you would ever know unless you regularly ask readers how they are discovering you and they tell you. As I share my knowledge in this chapter, please note that it is based on the limited data I was able to study in my own and personal accounts, along with a handful of other authors. Takeaway: Stay on the lookout in the Apple Books store and app for more personalized recommendation options to be added in the coming years. Check these storefronts regularly, as new features are always being launched. Personalized Carousels. There are a handful of carousels across the web store and app that are sprinkled throughout and mixed in with other apps in the store. These carousels are personalized to the individual based on previous activity. Top Picks for You Carousel. This carousel does not appear until you have some history of purchases on your account, but once it does, you can find this on the front page before the merchandised featured content. Apple Books prioritizes the personalized experience especially in its app. I did some very specific experimentation for this carousel and downloaded only one book to see what it would show me. The book was A Billionaire Romance from 2015. What I got in my carousel was several billionaire romances that had also been published around the time period 2014 to 2016, but also many more general romance books from the same time period Takeaway: Time sensitivity plays a role in how products are connected to each other. Similar books that you launch with may be recommended to your readers, and vice versa. Launches are important on Apple Books. For You Carousel. This carousel may be the successor of the Top Picks For You carousel. It is custom-built on books that readers either purchased and have in their libraries, or books that they've shown interest in by browsing the storefront. Although it's impossible to be sure of these things, I believe that books that are downloaded or dropped into Apple Books still count, meaning if someone grabs your free book through BookFunnel and drops it into their Apple Books account, your other books could show up in this carousel too. It's the same case for free books that are downloaded through the Apple Books store directly. Once in the library, Apple Books doesn't distinguish books on price, Takeaway: There is a ton of value in getting your free books into reader libraries, and that is incredibly apparent when you look at personalized recommendations. Hopefully it's already clear to you that Apple Books is an important store to have many freebies on, and this is just an extension of that. There is a greater takeaway here, however, because many authors ask me how they are supposed to balance the number of free books at this storefront when other storefronts do poorly with free books? The answer may lie in BookFunnel, where you can offer free books without making them free at all retailers. Another answer could be to use Apple Books promo codes to get more free books onto your readers' devices or strangers' devices. Suggested Authors for You Carousel. This carousel is custom-built on similar criteria to the For You carousel. It is more focused on a cluster of authors and shares multiple books from a handful of 4 to 5 authors. In the app, there is a slightly different view that seems to filter out authors that have only 1 to 2 books. On the Mac Storefront, however, I received recommendations for authors with only 1 book to their name. Unlike other carousels, I have seen a free book in this carousel. That doesn't mean others don't allow free books, but it does mean that I can confirm based on observation that free books are are allowed in this carousel. Takeaway: Apple Books loves to promote big catalogs by the same author, so one of the best things you can do is keep writing books. This is also a good reason to write longer series and tighten your branding so your books look similar. Weekly Top 5 Carousel. This carousel purports to be "5 books we think you'll love updated weekly." It's hard to tell how this carousel is curated, but it appears that Apple Books pushes top sellers in categories that readers selected as personal interests or have purchased books in. I've never seen a free book amongst this selection, but I have seen a 99 cents book. Most books seem to range between $7.99 minus $9.99. Takeaway: This list is not prominent at the moment, and there's a lot of churn if things are changing weekly. I would also guess that there's some curation or merchandising happening in this carousel. Personalized emails and push notifications. The next thing to consider after carousels is personalized emails and notifications, which are based on metadata around your pen name and series. This type of visibility is almost impossible to study from an outside perspective, but from what I understand, these notifications are heavily promoting the next books in a series that a reader has already downloaded. They also promote other books by an author they have already downloaded. This is likely a big reason why a free first in series that converts is helpful to gaining traction on Apple Books. It's also why you want to get as many readers into that freebie as possible because it expands your footprint on the store overall. Push notifications are custom to device holders who turn on those notifications in their settings. At least half of Apple Books users have these notifications turned on. There are several buttons on every product page to encourage readers to follow or get more notifications from your author name or your series. You can encourage readers to do so, so that they receive notifications of your new releases. At the time of this writing, readers can use Suggest More Like This and suggest less like this, to help control their recommendations. This is the majority of the metadata that you can tinker with. So hopefully I've given you some ideas of what to test for your books. Takeaway: I've stressed how important getting that free book into reader libraries is. This is the foot-in-the-door strategy for Apple Books. But I also think it's helpful to ask your readers to actively tell Apple Books it wants to see more of your books using the Suggest More Like This feature. This will help your new releases have more visibility, and it will help you get into more readers' ecosystems as you accumulate positive feedback in this particular loop with Apple Books. Alert Me Notifications. When you go to your author page or author collection, which you can usually find by searching with your pen name as the keyword, and go to a book in the collection, you will see an "Alert Me" link on the page. I've only ever been able to find this on the Mac version of the store. I would also say that in general, this link is hard to find, and may be hard to explain to readers as well. A reader can click on that, and presumably be alerted about new books for a specific author. There may even be other alerts that happen through this link, now or in the future. Takeaway: While the "Alert Me Notifications" link is not the easiest follow button a retailer has ever created, it is available and you could direct readers to it with a set of instructions and a reason to follow you. Reading Goals. Apple Books also records reading goals for each reader in its app. Some of the things it tracks include goals that the reader sets, with the default being 5 minutes per day of reading, and how many minutes a reader has spent on various books in their library. There is also a way to share progress on social media. Takeaway: While this doesn't seem like something you as an author have any control over, and while it doesn't seem to relate to selling books, it is a possible activity you can do with readers on the platform that also translates to public sharing on social media. If your audience leans toward a younger iPhone and iPad-using crowd, You could run a 30-day challenge using this feature to encourage readers to read more, and specifically, read your books. Additional Resources. As new personalized recommendation features get added, I'll be posting about them on my Substack, Author Analyst. You can join the email list for free here: https://authoranalyst.substack.com/ I also post about new developments on this front in our Circle community. Stay up to date by joining the free section of our community here: https://go.writermba.com/. In addition to this book, my company Writer MBA also has a section on Apple Books in our course Go Wide, Grow Wide. You can get the Go Wide, Grow Wide Course à la carte, or you can access it month-to-month or year-to-year along with our community through the Writer MBA membership. The value of joining this course through any of the options is that a book is always going to be static, while our courses and membership are dynamic and constantly updated. You can also ask me, Monica Leonellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellelle This is only available to our paid members. See pricing options at https://courses.writermba.com/takeaways. Stay on the lookout in the Apple Books Store and app for more personalized recommendation options to be added in the coming years. Check these storefronts regularly as new features are always being launched. Time sensitivity plays a role in how products are connected to each other. Similar books that you launch with may be recommended to your readers, and vice versa. Launches are important on Apple Books. There is a ton of value in getting your free books into reader libraries, and that is incredibly apparent when you look at personalized recommendations. Hopefully it's already clear to you that Apple Books is an important store to have many freebies on,, and this is just an extension of that. There is a greater takeaway here, however, because many authors ask me how they are supposed to balance the number of free books at this storefront, when other storefronts do poorly with free books. The answer may lie in BookFunnel, where you can offer free books without making them free at all retailers. Another answer could be to use Apple Books promo codes to get more free books onto your readers' devices, or strangers' devices. Apple Books loves to promote big catalogs by the same author, so one of the best things you can do is keep writing books. This is also a good reason to write longer series and tighten your branding so your books look similar. Ask your readers to actively tell Apple Books it wants to see more of your books using the "suggest more like this" feature. This will help your new releases have more visibility. And it will help you get into more readers' ecosystems as you accumulate positive feedback in this particular loop with Apple Books. While the "Alert Me" notifications link is not the easiest follow button a retailer has ever created, it is available and you could direct readers to it with a set of instructions and a reason to follow you. Starting a reading goals challenge is a possible activity you can do with readers on the platform that also translates to public sharing on social media. If your audience leans toward a younger iPhone and iPad-using crowd, you could run a 30-day challenge using this feature to encourage readers to read more, and specifically, read your books. Task Checklist: Add a recurring reminder to your calendar to open your Apple Books storefront and/or app if you don't shop and read on the storefront regularly. If you're able to spend 30 minutes every 3 months, that should keep you apprised of changes. If you have Apple Books readers segmented on your email list, add all of your series starters to BookFunnel and offer them exclusively to your Apple Books readers for download. If you don't have Apple Books readers segmented on your email list, offer your readers promo codes for free books on Apple Books, perhaps on series starter per month. Upload a larger catalog, if possible. Apple Books loves pushing authors with more books. Email your readers a link to your most popular book's product page and ask them to click on "suggest more like this" so they can essentially follow you as an author on Apple Books. This isn't exactly how it works, but it does increase your catalog's visibility to your readers, and that's a great thing. Ask your reader list to follow you on Apple Books, with instructions to click on the "Alert Me" notifications link. Take a look at Apple Books' reading goals, and brainstorm how you might incorporate it into your promotional calendar or social media strategy. Chapter 14: Audiobooks. In this chapter, we'll take everything we've learned about Apple Books and its algorithm and apply it specifically to audiobooks. How to get audiobooks to Apple Books. The most important thing to understand, and the key piece of information that answers many more questions that people have about audiobooks at Apple Books, is that Apple Books has no direct upload option for audiobooks at the time of this writing. They only allow direct upload for ebooks. A lot of people get confused about this and question if they can upload their own AI-narrated audiobooks or upload this thing or that thing, but the answer is no, you can only upload ebooks directly. There are two major places that will distribute your audiobook to Apple Books. ACX, also known as Audiobook Creation Exchange, and Audible Amazon Company. If your books are distributed through ACX, they are automatically made available on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes, as well as their global global partner sites, which for iTunes includes Apple Books. Findaway Voices, a Spotify company. If your books are distributed through Findaway, you simply need to check a box to opt in to have your books distributed to Apple Books. Neither of these platforms currently allow any sort of automatically narrated audiobook files unless through their private partners, as is the case for Findaway Voices working with partner Deepzen. Takeaway: Apple Books does not have a direct upload for audiobooks, which means you cannot upload either human or AI-narrated books to the platform directly. Instead, get your audiobook to Apple Books through ACX or Findaway Voices, which both distribute to Apple Books through iTunes. Please note that neither distributor accepts AI audiobooks at this time. Digitally Narrated Audiobooks. In late 2022, Apple Books, through a partnership with Draft2Digital, launched their first tranche of auto-narrated audiobooks, which they call "Digitally Narrated Audiobooks," in the contemporary romance category through an invite-only beta. For publishers, Apple Books has partnered with IngramCourseSource. The retailer also sells auto-narrated books, created through a company called DeepSend, that appear to use a different technology than what powers this new program. Takeaway: Apple Books has a program for creating digitally narrated audiobooks that is currently open for some genres. Authors can access this program through Ingram CoreSource or Draft2Digital. Requirements for Digitally Narrated Audiobooks on Apple Books. Whether you have your ebooks direct with Apple Books or distributed through Draft2Digital, you can create a digital narration, as long as you meet additional requirements. It's very important to understand this detail. Your ebook is what you distribute to Draft2Digital, and that is what the digitally narrated audiobook is based on. You do not need to distribute the same ebook to Apple Books through Draft2Digital. Those are considered separate channels that can each be opted into or opted out of. The requirements for digital narration through Draft2Digital are listed here: https://itunespartner.apple.com/books/article/apple-books-digital-narration-3479. Some of the requirements subject to change include: Currently, only English language books are allowed, and the eligibility appears to be restricted heavily by genre. Genre, specifically by BISAC. Contemporary categories like romance, women's fiction, general literature, and historical are said to be eligible, though not every book that meets those requirements seems to be able to get into the program. All of the BISACs associated with your book must be eligible to make the book eligible. Other major genres like mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy are not eligible at this time. Erotica is not allowed at all. They also do not appear to want most nonfiction books, as their software cannot handle tables, charts, and complicated formatting. Some nonfiction in the memoir and self-help categories should be added as eligible later in 2023. Apple Books has been accepting eligible books from Draft2Digital since 2022, Draft2Digital has also published a page that can show you why your particular books are not available here. Must be logged in. https://draft2digital.com/book/digner/ineligible. Takeaway: If your ebook meets eligibility requirements, you can submit them through Draft2Digital to get a digitally narrated audiobook created and added to the Apple Books store. How this compares to Google Play Books' auto-narration program. Google has had at least a year to test their auto-narrated books option, and has made significant improvements in that time period, along with adding tons of new features, and bringing the program out of beta. Because of this, there are significant differences between the two programs at this time. Google's program is open to all publishers with a self-service dashboard, while Apple's program still appears to be based on stringent eligibility requirements which leave out entire genres. Google's program allows authors to train on how to pronounce any word or phrase, while Apple's program does not appear to have granular editing capabilities. Google's program has many narrator options, along with multi-narrator functionality, ability to change narrators and ability to choose a narrator for a selection of text, while Apple's program does not appear to allow these options. Google's program is available in multiple languages, while Apple's program is only available in English. Google's program allows you to create a new audiobook in a few hours, while Apple's program seems to take at least a month. Google's program allows you to download your audiobooks, and sell them elsewhere for the same price, while Apple's program creates an exclusive audiobook for the platform. There is no question that Apple's program will improve quickly over the coming years. They intend to open the program to more contemporary genres and improve the time to create an audiobook, as well as the approval process. They will likely add new features just as Google has. I expect to see the program look entirely different by 2024, more, because of how rapidly this technology is improving across the board. Takeaway: Google Play Books and Apple Books both offer auto-narrated audiobooks, but there are huge differences in the two programs at this time. Please note that these are completely separate products, using different underlying technologies and requiring different SKUs or ISBNs. There is no way to post one book to the other storefront, either. What Auto-Narrated Books Means for the Publishing Industry. One of the questions that often comes up in discussions about auto-narrated audiobooks, especially as there are multiple technological approaches to solving the problem of generating human-sounding and smooth narration for fiction, is whether one audiobook can be used for multiple platforms. The challenge is that neither Apple Books nor Google Play Books accepts audiobooks, human-narrated or auto-narrated at this time. You cannot upload your own AI audiobook to either of these platforms. You can only use the platform's proprietary software to create an AI audiobook, and in the case of Google Play Books, you can download that audiobook and sell it in other places as long as it is published to the Play Bookstore already. This creates an interesting publishing ecosystem where not only are AI audiobooks a separate format from human-narrated audiobooks and audio dramas, but AI audiobooks are also separate formats from each other. A Google-narrated audiobook will sound different from an Apple-narrated audiobook, and readers will need to choose the AI version they prefer before buying. It also means that these two versions may have different price tags without being in conflict. As they are different products. Takeaway: Google and Apple have built the case and paved the way for a long-standing question in the publishing industry: Can audiobooks have multiple versions? Without question, the answer is now yes. If there can be different AI versions, there can also be different human-narrated versions. This is a good thing because it punches a hole in audiobook exclusivity clauses in contracts as we move forward as an industry. There is currently no conflict between these two AI products, and you don't need to choose. If you meet eligibility requirements at Apple Books, you can have both versions. You just need to communicate to your readers what the differences are between the two audiobooks. The Rapid Creep of Generative AI into Publishing. This second major entrant into the auto-narrated audiobook space cements the looming threat to human narration. Both Google and Apple are able to produce high-quality narration that is rapidly improving. Further, the majority of readers are comfortable with the level of quality that this narration can provide. As always, new technology will often start by taking out the low end of a market, meaning that the current software can compete with an audiobook book, by a narrator, at the $100-150 per finished hour level. The technology may creep up into the mid-tier narrator level as it improves, leaving only the higher levels of performance—celebrity narrators, audio dramas, and more—in the industry. Authors may have more options, but there is no question that AI is coming for many creative fields besides the audio narration industry. Including artists and writers. It's a tricky space to navigate at the moment, as emotions are running high on all sides of the argument. Will you be using these tools to create auto-narrated audiobooks? Takeaway: Generative AI is infiltrating every aspect of publishing. Most of us are blown away by how good AI-generated audiobook narration has gotten in a short time, time, but I suspect we will see the same in synthetic art and writing. The best way to keep up with my evolving thoughts on the subject is to follow my Substack, authoranalyst.substack.com. What Auto-Narrated Books Means for Amazon. Amazon has long dominated the ebook industry in English-language markets thanks in large part to its exclusivity program, KDP Select. With its two largest competitors offering free audiobook narration. However, there is no question that some market share will shift to wide platforms as authors see new and better opportunities outside of Amazon. In the larger picture, Google has admitted that it processes all the data it collects through audiobook narration to improve its narrator profiles, which we have been able to see and hear over the last year. Apple likely has a similar goal, and the endgame for both companies is probably mobile, in-home, and in-car devices. Amazon currently owns the majority of the market share in in-home devices with its Alexa line, but can it keep up? Amazon also has its own auto-narrated software in Amazon Polly, which can already be accessed through AMZ and edited with a lexicon of commands. Will it make this program available to authors, perhaps through Audible? And can it offer terms that make it worthwhile for authors to use it? At the time of this writing, Amazon has entered the corporate market with generative AI tools through their Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. These tools are aimed at corporations and software developers. Amazon Polly is not currently available as one of their tools. But someday it could be. Takeaway: Amazon may enter the market with auto-narration, but right now it is focused on enterprise tools for teams of software developers. There are no rumors of this happening on the horizon. How to Apply Your Knowledge of Algorithms to Your Audiobooks at Apple Books. Now that we've covered all angles of digital narration, let's get back to algorithms at Apple Books. Can we apply what we've learned to audiobooks too? It depends. The chapters on product optimization and search optimization work nearly identically for ebooks and audiobooks. But audiobooks are also in a different section of the storefront and are not directly connected to their ebook counterpart on the product page. Takeaway: Use the chapters on product page optimization and search optimization to help your audiobook get more visibility on the storefront. Where audiobooks differ is that they don't have the same categories. There are fewer, so you'll need to check the storefront to reposition your audiobooks well. They are not mixed with ebooks in product carousels, which means they have their own list of unique carousels. Many of those carousels work very similarly to how they work for ebooks, and differences are noted below. New and Trending: This section includes recent bestsellers, read before you watch, and new this week, each of which works similarly to its corresponding ebook carousel. Coming Soon: This carousel is where you'll find audiobook pre-orders. Pre-orders are available to independent authors through both Findaway Voices and Audible. Top Charts: This section includes the bestsellers in each category. The algorithms for these carousels work similarly to their corresponding ebook carousels. The $9.99 Collection: This carousel is considered to contain affordable audiobooks and may be merchandised by Apple Books. Audiobooks We Love: This section is merchandised, so if you have something relevant for it, send your audiobook information to them. Although they do seem to be primarily traditional audiobooks, traditionally published books. Special Offers: This section is where you can find free books, seasonal books (e.g., Oppie Month), and $6 or less books. It is a merchandised section, and the most likely place that Apple Books would place your audiobooks. Takeaway: Use previous chapters about carousels to better understand the audiobook carousels available to you, and use previous chapters on merchandising to attempt to bring more visibility visibility to your books through carousels. Additional Resources. There have long been rumors about Apple Books training their digital narration software on human narration from books that were made accessible to them for training purposes via Findaway Voices. My opinion is that the accusations are not true, and that this rumor was instead a witch hunt that caught steam in the narrator community. See my full post tracing the matter through different organizations on my Author Analyst Substack here. Https://authoranalyst.substack.com/p/did-find-a-way-voices-allow-apple-to. Apple Books keeps an updated list of requirements for creating a digitally narrated audiobook, here: https://itunespartner.apple.com/book/article/apple-books-digital-narration-3479. Draft2Digital explains how to publish a digitally narrated book through their platform here: https://draft2digital.com/digital-narration/. Ingram CoreSource explains how to publish a digitally narrated book through their platform here: https://lp.ingramcontent.com/publisher/audio-books/. Takeaways. Apple Books does not have a direct upload for audiobooks, which means you cannot upload either human or AI narrated books to the platform directly. Instead, get your audiobook to Apple Books through ACX or Findaway Voices, which both distribute to Apple Books through iTunes. Please note that neither distributor accepts AI audiobooks at this time. Apple Books has a program for creating digitally narrated audiobooks that is currently open for some genres. Authors can access this program through Ingram CoreSource or Draft2Digital. If your ebook meets eligibility requirements, you can submit them through Draft2Digital to get a digitally narrated audiobook created and added to the Apple Books store. Google Play Books and Apple Books both offer auto-narrated audiobooks, but there are huge differences in the two programs at this time. Please note that these are completely separate products, using different underlying technologies and requiring different SKUs or ISBNs. There is no way to post one book to the other storefront, either. Google and Apple have built the case and paved the way for a long-standing question in the publishing industry: Can audiobooks have multiple versions? Without question, the answer is now yes. If there can be different AI versions, there can also be different human-narrated versions. This is a good thing because it punches a hole in audiobook exclusivity clauses in contracts as we move forward as an industry. There is currently no conflict between these two AI products, and you don't need to choose. If you meet eligibility requirements at Apple Books, books, you can have both versions. You just need to communicate to your readers what the differences are between the two audiobooks. Generative AI is infiltrating every aspect of publishing. Most of us are blown away by how good AI-generated audiobook narration has gotten in a short time, but I suspect we will see the same in synthetic art and writing. The best way to keep up with my evolving thoughts on the subject is to follow my Substack, authoranalyst.substack.com. Amazon may enter the market with auto-narration, but right now it is focused on enterprise tools for teams of software developers. There are no rumors of this happening on the horizon. Use the previous chapters on product page optimization and search optimization to help your audiobook get more visibility on the storefront. Use previous chapters about carousels to better understand the audiobook carousels available to you, and use previous chapters on merchandising to attempt to bring more visibility to your books through carousels. Task Checklist: If you have a book that may meet Apple Books requirements for digital narration, you can check through Draft2Digital's website. Remember, all of the BISACs associated with your must be eligible to make the book eligible. If you are not seeing your book as eligible, then you may need to adjust your categories. To keep up with how AI is affecting the publishing industry, follow my Substack, authoranalyst.substack.com. Use the previous chapters on product page optimization and search optimization to help your audiobook get more visibility on the storefront. Use previous chapters about carousels to better understand the audiobook carousels available to you, and use previous chapters on merchandising to attempt to bring more visibility to your books through carousels. Chapter 15: Translations. This chapter is a short one that will give a little more information on how to specifically sell translations translations at Apple Books. The first thing to note is that most of the work is the same as selling English-language books. It can all apply to both translated ebooks and translated audiobooks. There are a handful of tidbits specific to translations that may be useful, so that is what we will cover here. Takeaway: Use the previous chapters to increase your sales for both translated ebooks and translated audiobooks. The biggest challenge with selling translations on Apple Books. The biggest challenge with selling translations on Apple Books is that you likely can't access the storefront in the language that you are selling in. Apple only lets you see your current region and language. If you live in a country that supports multiple languages, like Canada which would have English and French, then you might see both in the storefront. Still, you would not be able to get to Apple Books France. I have searched far and wide for workarounds for this, but Apple Books makes it impossible. There is no web-accessible storefront at all for Apple Books. Though you can find product listings on the web, that is not the same thing as a storefront. Apple Books only allows you to see one region, your own. While Apple Books does allow you to change your region,, it is a convoluted process and requires a payment method for that specific region. This is either a hassle or impossible to set up without living in the country. If you wish to look into this further, you may find the instructions given here useful: https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht2389. With all of this said, it's not exactly a disaster to not be able to see the other storefronts directly, really, just a frustration. It may mean that you work with another author from that country to understand what's possible, or you may want to reach out to Apple Books directly for opportunities. It may even be that you don't need to see the storefront, though I tend to believe that more information is always better. Takeaway: You cannot view Apple Books storefronts for other countries outside of your own, so you will not be able to see how books are merchandised, what the country is pushing to their readers, or what books are trending at the retailer in each country. This can be frustrating when it comes to translations, but there are some workarounds, like pooling your knowledge with other authors, that may be helpful to gleaning some insight into what's going on at each storefront. How to find your translated books in your storefront. Despite not being able to see other storefronts, along with how they are merchandised or what titles might be trending and visible, you can still find your books in your country's storefront. There is usually a marker next to the book to indicate a different language, e.g., "de" for German, "fr" for French, and so on. You can search for a direct link to include on your website or in your newsletter by searching your favorite web browser for: the name of the book plus the language plus the author name plus Apple Books. This should take you to the product page on the web. From there, you are able to change the country and language in the URL to best serve your readers and take them to the right place. You can find a series page using the same instructions for finding a series page for an English language title. Takeaway: If you are looking for a link to your book to share with readers, the best way to find it will be to search for it on the web. Web rather than through the storefront, where the book is likely to be buried beneath many other English-language titles. Optimizing for search for translated works. Because you can't easily search other storefronts, it's much harder to find good keywords and see how your book and other books rank for those keywords on Apple Books, in the language, in any storefront besides your own. Search in a primarily English-language country, like the US or UK, will return English language titles first, which defeats the purpose of searching for good keywords this way. To get around this, there are a few ways to consider optimizing your keyword description at Apple Books for your translated title. You can optimize for keywords that you find through other retailers, where you can search other storefronts more easily. You can use Google search tools to compare keyword search volume. Use previous chapters on search optimization to find my favorite tools for this. You can use some of the strategies outlined in this article to help you find good keywords in other languages. https://www.btranslated.com/blog/keyword-research-unfamiliar-language/ comparing_keyword score volumes. The one thing I don't advise—skipping this step. Remember, Apple Books is one of only two major retailers that indexes the book description, in addition to the book title, book subtitle, series title, and author name. Although this effort is tedious and deep in the weeds, it's still worth doing if you are trying to systematically improve your sales at this retailer. Takeaway: You'll likely have to go off-site or rely on your translator to get a good and optimized description for your translated works at Apple Books. But it's worth it, and you can apply what you've learned about doing this for English-language books to your translated books too. Additional Resources. Some of my favorite free keyword search tools are: Google Keyword Planner: https://ads.google.com/au/keyworplaner/home Answer the Public: https://answerthepublic.com/ Ubersuggest: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/ If you'd like to get my guide to writing the ultimate book description that is optimized for the 5 largest retailers, make sure you enroll in the course for free: https://writermba.teachable.com/p/go-y-grow-y-bootcamp I rarely share blog posts as resources in my books, but this one from BeTranslated seemed like a useful guide to tackling keyword optimization in other languages. Note that I do not endorse this company in any way, as I have no affiliation with them and am not a customer. https://www.betranslated.com/blog/keyword-research-unfamiliar-language/#blog comparing_keywordVolumes. The top 100 charts for Apple Books are tracked with a free tool called iTopChart. You can even look by country. This won't give you the full picture of the various storefronts, but it will likely help you understand general trends. https://itopchart.com/a/n/ebook/ Takeaways. Use the previous chapters to increase your sales for both translated ebooks and translated audiobooks. You cannot view Apple Books storefronts for other countries outside of your own, so you will not be able to see how books are merchandised, what the country is pushing to their readers, or what books are trending at the retailer in each country. This can be frustrating when it comes to translations, but there are some workarounds like pooling your knowledge with other authors, that may be helpful to gleaning some insight into what's going on at each storefront. If you are looking for a link to your book to share with readers, the best way to find it will be to search for it on the web, rather than through the storefront, where the book is likely to be buried beneath many other English-language titles. Or beneath whatever languages are most spoken in your country. You'll likely have to go off-site or rely on your translator to get a good and optimized description for your translated works at Apple Books. But it's worth it, and you can apply what you've learned from this book about doing this for English-language books to your translated books too. Task Checklist: Use the previous chapters to increase your sales for both translated ebooks and translated audiobooks. Grab your links for translated editions of your books to share with readers. Develop a list of keywords that are appropriate for your book in each language that your books are translated in. Optimize your book description and other metadata for each translation. This is especially important for Apple Books because they index the book description. Chapter 16: Illustrated Books. In this chapter, I wanted to quickly cover everything we know about selling Illustrated books like comic books, children's books, art books, picture books, workbooks, cookbooks, magazines, printables, and more on Apple Books. Unfortunately, there's not much to say about this at the moment, so this chapter will in some ways be a collection of all the information available and in other ways be a placeholder for future editions of this book. My hope, especially since my business partner Russell Nohalty works with many in the comics community, is that someday, Apple Books does become a strong competitive retailer for these books. Most of the books in these categories are sold primarily through print books at this time, which Apple Books does not carry. It is a retailer for ebooks and audiobooks only. Still, many creators who make books in these categories are interested in how to sell more in the ebook format, so this chapter we will provide as much information as possible about that. Takeaway: Russell Nohulty is our Writer MBA expert on comics, and tends to be at the forefront of it. If there are any new developments, you'll hear it from us first. Carousels. Apple Books has several carousels that may be of interest to creators of illustrated books. They have a carousel that specifically shows comics and graphic novels. Titles, as well as a carousel for children's books. There are sections for: Comics and Graphic Novels. Cookbooks, Food and Wine. Children's Books, Kids. Education. Computers and Internet. Professional and Technical. Reference. These categories are for ebooks only, but do indicate that there is some market opportunity for illustrated books at Apple Books. That said, many of these carousels are currently filled with books from traditionally published authors. Takeaway: There are not a ton of merchandising opportunities for illustrated books at Apple Books. Still, it couldn't hurt to reach out if you have something that fits these categories. The reading experience. One of the challenges of illustrated books is creating a good reading experience that follows the natural flow of a print book. For comics and graphic novels, for example, it is difficult to read a two-page layout on a device like an iPad because readers will need to zoom in and zoom out. The same challenges can be found for books with images and text dispersed throughout, as image-heavy books are difficult to create a default ordering from, which is required in the EPUB format. Additionally, because of the size of these books, creators may not be able to upload to Apple Books. The maximum upload size is 2GB. Because of these challenges, creators are probably better off selling their books directly to readers or through a retailer that distributes PDFs, like Kickstarter or Etsy, that someone can then read on the iPad easily. Takeaway: If your illustrated book is in ePub format and under 2GB, you can upload it to Apple Books. If not, it may be easier to sell it directly to your readers as a PDF. The Interactive Experience. Likewise, the Apple Books reader misses an opportunity around interactivity in their reader app. Even on iPad, there is no way to use the stylus to make notes, or even highlight something, making it difficult to put a workbook on this platform. Creators will be better off selling their books directly to readers or through a retailer that distributes PDFs like Kickstarter or Etsy that someone can then import into an app like GoodNotes or Notability, where they can easily use a stylus to fill in the workbook or otherwise make notes and highlights. Takeaway: If your book requires interactivity, it is easier to sell it directly to your readers as a PDF with instructions to download an appropriate app, like GoodNotes or Notability, so they can use the PDF as an interactive book. Comics and graphic novels. I came across a few tools that may be worth looking into specifically for comics and graphic novels. I do not currently use or endorse any of these tools, but I thought they might be worth mentioning, especially because more ebook retailers are trying to find ways to grow their storefronts. And comics and graphic novels seem to be one area of publishing with a dearth of solutions. Retailers see opportunity here. ComicLife: This product helps you turn comics and graphic novels into EPUB files, which are then accepted at every retailer, as long as the file meets size limits. http://comiclife.com/ Omnibus: This is a new app that launched in 2023 and is only available on iOS devices. Prices. It purports to be a Comixology competitor, though it doesn't yet have the same functionality that the previous storefront and reader had. Still, it's worth watching this development, especially as Apple is known for acquisitions of companies like these to fill a gap in their iPhone offerings. https://omnibus.app/khannaz. In May 2023, Apple Books signed a 3-year deal with South Korean webtoon startup Khannaz, The companies estimate that about 30% of content will be published to Apple Books first. Note: The website is published in Korean. https://kanaz-ri.com/ Takeaway: There is a huge gap in the marketplace with the recent changes to Comixology. Other ebook retailers are looking for ways to capture that readership and market. Especially since it makes up about 10% of the publishing industry. At the same time, progress is slow and there are not enough resources and opportunities now for comics creators. Hopefully, this changes in the future. Additional Resources. Apple Books has recently created a website for authors that offers up-to-date advice, platform tips, and links. If a question is unanswered or a link is broken throughout this book, you may be able to find the answer there. And if you can't find the answer there, I still recommend joining the course, as we can get the answer to your question through my connections. https://authors.apple.com/ Both Russell and I take great interest in this topic and are monitoring progress, both for ourselves and for the larger independent author community. When there are developments, we'll be writing about them. You can follow us individually here: Russell, authorstack.substack.com. Monica, authoranalyst.substack.com. Takeaways: Russell Nohulty is our writer MBA expert on comics and tends to be at the forefront of it. If there are any new developments, you'll hear it from us first. There are not a ton of merchandising opportunities for illustrated books at Apple Books. Still, it couldn't hurt to reach out if you have something that fits these categories. If your illustrated book is in EPUB format and under 2GB, you can upload it to Apple Books. If not, it may be easier to sell it directly to your readers as a PDF. If your book requires interactivity, it is easier to sell it directly to your readers as a PDF, with instructions to download an appropriate app, like GoodNotes or Notability, so they can use the PDF as an interactive book. There is a huge gap in the marketplace with the recent changes to Comixology. Other ebook retailers are looking for ways to capture that readership and market, especially since it makes up about 10% of the publishing industry. At the same time, progress is slow and there are not enough resources and opportunities now for comics creators. Hopefully, this changes in the future. Task Checklist: Turn your illustrated book into an EPUB, if possible. Check out some of the applicable resources in this chapter to look at ways to sell your books. Follow Russell and Monica Leonellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellelle and hope to have exciting news to report on it in the future. Chapter 16: Apple Books Marketing Recommendations. Now that I've given you all the information the author community has about this retailer, I wanted to make sure you had a clear marketing strategy to move forward with at Apple Books. Part of your strategy is going to be a general wide retailer strategy. I've included a generalized section on how wide authors promote their books in this chapter. The other part of your strategy will be to follow the task checklist items at the end of every chapter in this book. This chapter is meant to serve as both a marketing plan and marketing checklist for Apple Books. My hope is that you use it to take action and improve your sales at Apple Books. Not everything on this checklist will apply to your catalog, book, but do what you can and make more money. What you can expect when you check these items off your list. I often hear from other thought leaders in the industry that not everyone can succeed at this business. I know these thought leaders mean well with this message because on some level it's true. It is a challenging line of work to be in, and not every personality will be suited for it. Some may not want or be able to do all of the work that is involved, and that's understandable too. However, outside of those scenarios, I genuinely believe that every author can create the career they want, using their own unique talents and stretching their catalog appropriately at each given retailer. In the past, one retailer ruled them all, and that retailer required authors to play a very specific game that simply didn't suit every personality type or skill set. Now, there are so many retailers gaining traction in the marketplace, thanks to a surge in formats like large print, audiobooks, and serials becoming an emerging and burgeoning attractor to other retailers. Retailers are investing and innovating with independent authors in mind, which creates a ton of opportunity for everyone. Most authors are not going to be successful on every single platform, However, any author can succeed on any single platform with the right catalog, hard work, and a bit of luck. And there are now dozens of platforms that are worth investing in, and they are investing in us too. This fracturing of the market means that there is more opportunity for every author, along with a chance for every author to forge their own path based on their personality and skill sets. At Writer MBA, my sales and marketing training company with Russell Noholti, we are really invested in helping every author find their best path to success. Part of that is exploring multiple platforms and formats, and the other part of it is creating the right author ecosystem that an author can thrive in. To that end, we've built our premier programs, Kickstarter Accelerator, Direct Sales Accelerator, and Go Wide, Grow Wide to help authors do this. And additionally, we've created the Author Ecosystem Archetypes—5 different personality types modeled after the 5 major biomes on planet Earth. Are you a desert, grassland, tundra, forest, or aquatic? And what can that tell you about how to think about production, promotion, and audience building? You can learn more about the Author Ecosystem and take our quiz to learn which one you are here. Https://author-ecosystem.com/. If you make a genuine effort to check off as much in this chapter as your situation and catalog allows, I believe that you could double or triple your sales at Apple Books. Many authors have reported these results after reading and implementing this book. Some caveats to this. Obviously, I can't guarantee any results, You are 100% in charge of your results, not me. I have merely laid out everything I know about this platform with as much integrity as possible and with the goal to be as helpful as possible. Nothing has been held back. Do what you can with the information. Apple Books can change their platform at any time. This book is static and cannot move anywhere near as fast as the changes in the industry do. If you are already making a lot of money on Apple Books, then you are most likely doing many of the things in this book already, and the opportunity would not be as great for you. Every platform has an earnings ceiling. If you are making very little at Apple Books, the opportunity is much greater than doubling or tripling your sales. However, if you are struggling to gain ground, it may be valuable to take another look at your catalog to ensure you are putting out a solid product with sellability. Unfortunately, no amount of optimization or marketing in the world can fix a book that readers are not interested in buying. How wide authors market their ebooks. There are so many groups and communities dedicated to marketing your book while it's in KDP Select. If your ebooks are wide, you will undoubtedly run across lots of well-meaning advice that is billed as "for all authors" when really it's only appropriate to KDP Select authors. For example, you might hear that rapid release works, or that short pre-orders work, or that writing to certain trends work, or that having a certain cover style works, but those things are tailored to the KDP Select program. Usually, What works on wide retailers is the opposite of what works on KDP Select, as Amazon tends to favor its own program in terms of visibility and sales rankings. This is a book about going wide, and that includes in the ebook format. These are some of the general ways that wide authors use to find new readers. If you want to do a deep dive into each retailer, all of them have visibility levers that are just as interesting as Amazon's, I highly recommend picking up the series books for each of the retailers, plus the book for selling directly on your website. Number 1: First in series permafree. Most personalized visibility on the ebook retailer platforms, specifically personalized emails and push notifications, will default to showing books in the same series or showing books by the same author first. This means that while in general permafree is good, a first in series permafree is better. Because if someone downloads your Book 0 or Book 1 for free, they will be shown the next book in your series not long after. Many of the retailers also have in-app or in-store display of the next several books in your series. This can appear to the side of your main listing, below your main listing, or within the app in your library where the first book is downloaded. Several retailers also have an end-of-book experience which basically just means that when you finish a book, you will be directed to another specific action. This action is often to direct the reader to buy the next book in the series by making it obvious, prominent, and attractive. All of the retailers have specific pages dedicated to helping readers find books for free. Each retailer has a different system for getting added to this free page, though it's usually through the promotions tabs or through contacting a representative or their support team. Wide retailers tend to be more friendly toward free books and encourage them. Amazon has a free bestseller list for every category, but it prefers to push its Kindle Unlimited program, where books can feel like they are free because they are part of a subscription. Amazon also de-weights free books in sales rank, as it should, a free sale is not the same as a paid sale. Unfortunately though, sales rank drives much of the visibility on Amazon, so free books don't stand much of a chance. This means that a permafree book on Amazon is far less likely to show up prominently in Also Boughts, the Kindle reading app, search results, and presumably in other personalized visibility like emails and push notifications. You can get to these perma-free lists here. Apple Books, Kobo, B&N, via Draft2Digital, which is the easiest way if you don't have an Apple Books representative. https://draft2digital.wafuu.com/form/draft2digital-free-first-in-series/. Kobo Books, under the promotions tab, apply for one of the free page lists. Once accepted, schedule a permanent price change or a freebie sale under your book's pricing page. This will keep you on Kobo's free page as long as your book is free. Number 2: Big and relatively cheap visibility on permafree. Giving away a free book can be a lot of work. It can also seem strange to pay to give away a free book of yours, even if it might result in further read-through and purchases.. I instead think of my perma-frees as loss leaders, which are a commonality in most businesses, including Walmart, your local gym, and a 5-star hotel. Spending money to give away a free book makes you a smart and savvy businessperson. Never forget that. The best places to get cheaper downloads is through email lists, particularly BookBub Featured Deals (BBFD), which will give you the highest number of downloads in the shortest period of BookBub is not the only email list; there are dozens of smaller ones that serve most fiction niches. There are also plenty of lists that are focused on a small niche or genre, such as Discover Sci-Fi and I Love Vampire Novels. Some authors try to use advertising to drive traffic to their permafrees, but this can get pricey quickly due to high cost per click (CPC). You can create some effect through CPC ads,, but they usually work better to bolster a running promotion like the launch of a new book, rather than to create a burst of downloads on a regular basis. Finally, the best price can sometimes be free. Authors also do newsletter swaps where they each post about the other's freebie in their newsletter, which can be another good way to promote your freebie. You can find these opportunities in the independent author community through your network work, but if you are struggling to get started with setting up newsletter swaps, I encourage you to get into the Facebook group that specializes in it. Wide Newsletter Swaps Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/group/791442171751855. Number 3: Pre-orders. Pre-orders work particularly well on retailers that are heavily merchandised, which are Kobo, Apple Books, and to some extent Barnes Noble. Kobo and Apple Books run their promotions like traditional book retailers, in that they push new releases the most in their store apps and websites. Barnes Noble does this in their retail stores, and also does this to some extent in their online store, though most of the spaces seem to go to traditionally published authors. When it comes to preorders on wide retailers, I like to say the best preorder to have is one that's going out this week. The second best is one that's going out as far out as allowed, usually up to 1 year on most retailers. Apple Books specifically sorts some of their visibility lists in reverse preorder date, meaning that if it's mid-May of 2021, the books that are publishing in mid-May of 2022 are the first to show up. As such, some of the most successful authors always have a book in the series that's set for preorder a year out. You can let retailers know about your upcoming new releases as well, as this can help them plan for merchandising opportunities. Kobo Preorders: https://theworldneedsyourbook.com/kobo-preorders-form. Draft2Digital Preorders: https://draft2digital.wafuu.com/form/draft2digital-preorder-info/. #4 Merchandising. Many of the retailers have merchandising for their online storefronts, which means that someone hand-selects your book for various promotions that they show their readers, usually on the homepage of their store or via email and notification pushes. Kobo and Barnes Noble handle this through a promotions tab that you request via email, just their basic support emails listed on their respective websites. While Apple Books handles it through forms and email or through third-party distributors like Draft2Digital. Neither Google Play Books nor Amazon does much merchandising for independent authors. The merchandising options at the three that do it are all slightly different. Kobo has free lists for all the major genres and also does #ownvoices, holiday-themed promotions, box set promotions, promotions, VIP promotions to their loyalty program, and special promotions by territory, for example, a promotion that only goes out to their Australia/New Zealand readers. They also have daily and double daily deals, which are featured books in their newsletter. Barnes Noble has fewer promotions, and they tend to be for free or discounted books. There's also a separate promotion for discounted romance books that you can apply for. Apple Books does a lot of promotions that are focused on holiday themes. They value having a diverse spread of books across multiple genres that all fit the theme. I highly recommend going through Draft2Digital to reach Apple Books on at least one of your series. This will get you access to D2D's promo submissions forms, where you can submit your book for consideration without an Apple Books representative. 5. Metadata. Metadata is the data you fill out when you upload your book that helps the retailer understand what your book is about and where they should place it within their digital store. It's important on all retailers, but especially Google Play Books and Amazon, where visibility is almost entirely driven by algorithms. Each retailer has metadata that they really care about retailer, because they use it to make decisions about where to put the book in their store. For example, categories are really important on Apple Books, while series data is really important on Kobo. Having your metadata optimized on each listing and at each retailer is an important part of selling. It will affect your visibility in each retailer's store, and the difference between an optimized product listing and one that is not can create double or triple the sales. You also want to stay up to date on new dashboard features at each retailer and re-optimize your metadata once a year, as not only do things change, but changing things up in your backend can help you reach a new audience. #6: Box sets and anthologies. One of the best joint promotions you can join is a box set or anthology. For these, you join up with other authors in your genre,, and provide a title in the box set or anthology according to the specifications. Then, the group of you work together to get that in front of readers at all of the retailers, including getting the set merchandised where possible, and using pooled advertising dollars to get book downloads. The value of participating in these efforts is that many readers in the genre download these sets to find new authors they love. Most authors also contribute content that leads to a key series in their back catalog, Because these sets often get high downloads and read-through, they are a great way to find the die-hard readers of the genre, as well as to promote the start of a new series. Additionally, most of the retailers like boxed sets, so if you can create one for your series, it'll probably do well, and they may be more willing to push it to their readers. Readers like the deal bundling, and they like the revenue on the single larger purchase. All of the retailers aside from Amazon let you publish boxed sets at whatever price you want, with no ceiling on your royalties—you get 70% even when priced over $9.99. There are so many authors setting up boxed sets and anthologies to participate in. So if you are a part of the independent author community, you'll likely find yourself invited to one at some point. You can also find boxed set and anthology opportunities in 2 places on Facebook. Margot's Group for Authors, Boxed Sets: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2503316186646612/ Wide Anthology, Boxed Sets, and Shared Worlds Brands Collaboration Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ group/188642269649938/. #7 Group list builders. Lots of authors use joint promos like BookFunnel or viral giveaways to pool resources in order to build an email list. These email lists are with permission distributed to all authors involved, helping each author find new readers. While some people think that list builders tend to attract freebie seekers or non-buyers, I tend to think of them in terms of the 10 stages of audience. Someone who signs up to your email list from the back of your book is likely a customer and fan, thus they will have a high conversion rate to your next book. Someone who signs up to a list builder is really just a prospect or slightly warmed lead at best. It's my job to get that reader to follow through on reading my freebies and then direct them to a paid book. When I participate in list builders, I receive the list and immediately run a Facebook ad to it just for additional visibility before I start sending emails. I also use the emails for lookalike audiences, as those readers are definitely in my genre, and if you give that information to Facebook, they can find many, many more of those readers for you. Number 8: Bestseller runs. With a focus on long preorders, and a readership building at each of the retailers, wide authors are well positioned for bestseller runs to try to hit the USA Today and Wall Street Journal lists. While you can do it on your own with a single title, many people start by joining a boxed set list run. In a boxed set list run, you work with about 20 other authors to get an omnibus or anthology to the USA Today bestseller list. Each author contributes a story and pools their readerships and ad money to get the level of sales needed for a list rank for launch week. Some authors argue that the bestseller status or earning your letters doesn't matter for sales. I disagree and have seen significant sales gains by being a USA Today bestseller, plus I learned a ton about large-scale marketing and advertising through the group. Group, that was innumerably helpful in my career going forward. There is sometimes debate about what counts as a USA Today bestseller, or whether single title ranking is more legitimate than a boxed set ranking, or whether a book on full preorder price versus 99 cents is better, and so on. At the end of the day, the most respectful thing is to use the list's rules for how they determine who has earned their bestseller 9. Being everywhere. Wide authors seem to be in more places in general. This is partially because they are allowed to be, and don't have a 10% limit on the work they can share, but I believe it's also partly a distribution mindset. Wide authors seem to believe they can find a new reader anywhere, on any platform, and are usually willing to give away a free book,, as a way of planting a seed for someone to discover their work. Successful wide authors tend to be on a lot of platforms, even experimental ones, be in lots of boxed sets, anthologies, and book funnel email list builders, and do a ton of cross-promotion with other wide authors. Wide authors are passionate about distribution specifically. They find particular joy in finding readers in many places through promotions and evergreen green content marketing, which creates a long-term security on both the marketing side and the financial side. #10 Being in Every Format. One of the major visibility factors on several retailers is the connection between ebook, print, and audiobook formats. You could have part of your catalog in Kindle Unlimited but still be visible with those series in print or audiobook book on other retailers, especially if you are also visible in ebook on those platforms. Readers do buy the same book in multiple formats, and they do buy different formats for different titles. Additionally, if you get promotion on one format like ebook, the overflow of traffic will create sales on your print and audiobook formats for that title, as the higher visibility brings more people in who prefer other formats. More recently, fiction apps have sprouted up everywhere, each with their own requirements. Many romance authors are currently making a chunk of their wide income from these apps. The interesting thing is that this is not a new format to exploit. If you sign a traditional publishing contract, they split out print, audiobook, ebook, and serialization excerpts as 4 separate formats. The latter was usually used for book excerpts reprinted in magazines or anthology works, but it covers a scenario like fiction apps also. Chapter 1 Task Checklist. Subscribe to the Substacks. Join our community. Follow me on social media channels and my podcast. Grab the books as a bundle and at a steep discount from my website. Keep on reading. Chapter 2: Task Checklist. Decide how you will upload to Apple Books, direct or distributor. Keep in mind that you can decide on a book level or series level as well. It's possible that you want to put your series that are most likely to get promotions into a distributor like Draft2Digital that offers them. Sign up for the affiliate program at Apple Books and update links across your universal links, your website, your social, and your advertising. Create a spreadsheet of Apple Books links for your author page, series page, and book pages so that they are easy to access. Ask an Apple product-loving friend to help if you are not able to find these links on your own. Sign up for a universal links provider or create landing pages on your website for each book. Make sure to link to Apple Books as one of the retailers on your website. Apple Books prefers to be the first link and states that it is a factor for them in choosing your book for promotions and a consideration in acceptance of its affiliate program. Brainstorm ways to use the promotional codes and plan 3 to 4 Apple Books-specific promotions per year. Get these onto your promotions calendar. Regardless of the success of the promotions, Apple Books may notice you are using these codes regularly and may give your catalog greater consideration in the future. This effort is part of building a relationship with this retailer. Keep reading. You have a ton of control over your sales at Apple Books, and the rest of the book will help you get there. Chapter 3: Task Checklist. Check to see how your covers look on Apple Books on the web store, the computer storefront, and the app. Make sure your cover looks good in black and white as well as in color. Use your keywords in your title, subtitle, and series title when possible. This should be part of your packaging design for all books from the beginning. If you can't use important keywords in your title, subtitle, and series title, use them 5 times or more in your description. Blend this in tastefully so that it reads well for humans too. Reformat your description to the recommended guidelines in this chapter. Add other relevant book titles to the bottom of your description. This helps your search discoverability and can make it easier to embed more relevant keywords to your description in a natural way. Choose your category based on your keywords. Make a plan to get reviews on Apple Books from the beginning and aim for 5 at first, then 25 or more over the long term. Do this for every book.. It will make a massive difference in the long term of your efforts on the platform. Add a sample to all of your books. Provide a sample for your pre-orders. Use screenshots to add exciting and engaging graphics to your product page—story maps, family trees, and more. Join the Go Wide, Grow Wide Bootcamp—it's free—and get the ultimate book description training that teaches you how to write a book description that is optimized for all of the Big 5 retailers. Chapter 4 Task Checklist. Do an audit of your catalog at Apple Books and look specifically at the 7 criteria I mentioned. Is your catalog ready for merchandising at Apple Books? What can you do to make your catalog stronger before you start to present it and ask for merchandising? Get the email and form that is required to contact Apple Books. Start submitting your relevant books to Apple Book Promotions. Chapter 5 Task Checklist. Figure out where your genre lies. Which of the 4 categories of genre does it belong to? Use this knowledge as a filter through which you run all well-meaning advice from other authors. What works for one category will bomb in a different one. Almost guaranteed. Chapter 6: Task Checklist. Familiarize yourself with the differences between the 4 types of artificial intelligence: rule-based programming, machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI. These terms come up explicitly in publishing contracts and terms of service (TOS) agreements at many of the platforms. Education makes it far easier to ask smart questions and gain clarity on what these terms mean for you at each platform, so you can make better decisions for your author career. Read more about the 5 Cs, including my essays on the topic, on my Substack. These essays untangle and bring clarity to much of the debate around artificial intelligence technology, especially as it applies to publishing. authoranalyst.substack.com. Chapter 7: Task Checklist. Check out iTopChart, so you can explore various country marketplaces and what is popular on each. If visuals are helpful to you, bookmark this graphic, so that you can refer back to it in subsequent chapters. Chapter 8: Task Checklist. Use iTOPChart to study Apple Books by country. Land major promotions like BookBub feature deals whenever possible. If it's not possible, create a promotion stack to drive a lot of traffic to your series at Do this at least once a quarter, as Apple Books offers a lot of feast on the long tail of a promotion. Make efforts to make your new release launches bigger on this platform. Use preorders. They help accumulate sales which then count a second time algorithmically once the book is released. Always have one preorder set 12 months from now, even if you have to push it back, There's no penalty for moving your preorder date, so even if the book is planned for more than a year out, put it up now. Use discounts across your catalog frequently, ideally at least once per month, and notify Apple Books to try to get into their discount carousels for your genre. Make your first book in every series free for this platform, as long as you have no price matching constraints at other platforms. Chapter 9: Task Checklist. Use the keyword tools listed to find keywords and key phrases that are relevant to your books and larger catalog. Add words like "a" or "the" to the beginning of your titles where possible, as it gives you better search ranking. Consider phrases you want to rank for, and see if you can incorporate them into future titles, subtitles, or series titles. Use "free" multiple times in all of your permafree book descriptions. Consider adding information about the permafree book to all other book descriptions for books in the series. If you have a tightly targeted series or pen name, think about what relevant keywords and key phrases you want to be found under and massage all of your book descriptions to include those keywords. There is power in having similar keywords across the same series, and power in this at the author and pen name level too. Work on increasing your sales and downloads at Apple Books to get better placement in search results. Join the Go Wide, Grow Wide Bootcamp, it's free, and get the ultimate book description training that teaches you how to write a book description that is optimized for all of the Big Five retailers. Chapter 10 Task Checklist. Set a monthly calendar reminder to check the Apple Books app and see what promotions are happening right now. Make sure your series are clearly connected through metadata. Check on the backend that everything is consistent, and check on the frontend that your series are appearing as you expect. Don't forget to get your audiobooks to Apple Books, as they can drastically increase your visibility in the storefront. You may also want to optimize them too. See the separate chapter on audiobooks for more information. Chapter 11: Task Checklist. Look for comparable authors that price their books similarly to how you price your books. Follow other comparable authors in your genre, and notice when they are launching books on wide retailers. Where possible, try to time your release within a few weeks of theirs, as your preorder sales are probably going to be at high velocity then. Likewise, Watch when comparable authors in your genre get BookBub and for which books. These authors have regular traffic coming to their pages, so targeting them more specifically in advertising could be helpful to your books. Don't give up on pushing your books through your email list, cross-promotion, or advertising. It takes time to accumulate sales history on any storefront. Chapter 12: Task Checklist. Add a recurring reminder to your calendar to open your Apple Books storefront and/or app if you don't shop and read on the storefront regularly. If you're able to spend 30 minutes every 3 months, that should keep you apprised of changes. If you have Apple Books readers segmented on your email list, add all of your series starters to BookFunnel and offer them exclusively to your Apple Books readers for download. If you don't have Apple Books readers segmented on your email list, offer your readers promo codes for free books on Apple Books, perhaps on Series Starter per month. Upload a larger catalog, if possible. Apple Books loves pushing authors with more books. Email your readers a link to your most popular book's product page and ask them to click on "Suggest More Like This" so they can essentially follow you as an author on Apple Books. This isn't exactly how it works, but it does increase your catalog's visibility to your readers, and that's a great thing. Ask your reader list to follow you on Apple Books, with instructions to click on the "Alert Me" notifications link. Take a look at Apple Books reading goals, and brainstorm how you might incorporate it into your promotional calendar or social media strategy. Chapter 13: Task Checklist. If you have a book that may meet Apple Books requirements for digital narration, you can check through Draft2Digital's website. Remember, all of the BISACs associated with your book must be eligible to make the book eligible. If you are not seeing your book as eligible, then you may need to adjust your categories. To keep up with how AI is affecting the publishing industry, Follow my Substack, authoranalyst.substack.com. Use the previous chapters on product page optimization and search optimization to help your audiobook get more visibility on the storefront. Use previous chapters about carousels to better understand the audiobook carousels available to you, and use previous chapters on merchandising to attempt to bring more visibility to your your books through carousels. Chapter 14: Task Checklist. Use the previous chapters to increase your sales for both translated ebooks and translated audiobooks. Grab your links for translated editions of your books to share with readers. Develop a list of keywords that are appropriate for your book in each language that your books are translated in. Optimize your book description and other metadata for each translation This is especially important for Apple Books because they index the book description. Chapter 15: Task Checklist. Turn your illustrated book into an EPUB if possible. Check out some of the applicable resources in this chapter to look at ways to sell your books. Follow Russell and Monica Leonellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellelle report on it in the future. Chapter 17: Next Steps. The first profession I can ever remember wanting to have was to be an author, so I know how much a writing dream can mean to a person. I tried a number of careers before I got very honest with myself and accepted that I was meant to be an author. It took me years to make any sort of money at it, and then another few years to make a modest 5-figure-a-year income. With this series, I want to help demystify many of these platforms. With this book, I want to help more authors make more money, at one of the biggest ebook retailers in the world. I hope this book inspires many of you out there to dive into the rabbit holes of Apple Books, make a ton of money, fulfill your dreams, and turn around and share what you've learned. Although this is among the first books about Apple Books, it will not be the last. Maybe you'll write the next one. What next? Please send your questions and suggestions to Monica's team at support@writermba.com or team@theworldneedsyourpassion.com. We will get your message to the right person. We'd love to help you out. Monica's Blog. I've been blogging professionally since 2006, and in the last several years have begun to collect all my work in one spot. Thought, under one brand called "The World Needs Your Passion." This is the one place on the internet where I am not "on brand" or niche-focused toward a goal. I bring my whole self to this blog, write about whatever I want, and share everything from my greatest lessons learned to best my business advice, to my love of Lego, tarot, Taylor Swift, and more. It's also a place where I keep the footer fully updated with all my links to everywhere you can find me on the internet. Read this resource: theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Monica's YouTube channel. My YouTube channel is The World Needs Your Passion, and I teach people how to find, pursue, nurture, reignite, and even make money from their passions. I also teach people about entrepreneurship, creativity, business, writing, art, and more. You can watch my channel: youtube.com/theworldneedsyourpassion. Monicaspodcasts.com. I post new 20-minute episodes about publishing, going wide, serialized fiction, industry trends, and so much more on my podcast feed. theproductivenovelist.buzzsprout.com. Russell Nohulty and I also have a podcast for Writer MBA called Kickstart Your Book Sales. There are over 80 episodes here. kickstartyourbooksales.buzzsprout.com. Follow Monica on Medium. I post regular articles about the publishing industry if you prefer to read about new developments. monicalenelle.medium.com. Take our Author Ecosystems Quiz. The Author Ecosystems Quiz will give you more self-knowledge and help you identify what type of publishing business model is going to work best for you. Are you a nimble desert, an expansive grassland, a rolling tundra, an interconnected forest, or a dynamic aquatic? Dig deep into the new methodology developed by USA Today bestselling authors Monica Leonelle and Russell Nohulty, creators of the Kickstarter accelerator Go Wide Grow Wide, Book Sales Supercharged, and more. https://author-ecosystem.com/ https://author-ecosystems.substack.com/. The Book Sales Supercharged Series. The Book Sales Supercharged Series focuses on each retailer, format, and platform, diving deep into everything you need to know to succeed in that particular space. If you want to dig into other platforms that are useful to authors, I encourage you to continue the series. I have books on all 5 major retailers. Get Your Book Selling on Amazon: Book Sales Supercharged #3. Get Your Book Selling on Kobo: Book Sales Supercharged #4. Get Your Book Selling on Google Play Books: Book Sales Supercharged #5. Get Your Book Selling on Barnes Noble: Book Sales Supercharged #6. The series is available at all retailers. We are aggressively wide over here. You can find all the information about the series, plus grab the entire set of books in a bundle directly from my website at a significant discount to purchasing each individually at retailers. Shop.theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Your feedback, please. Our goal for writing this book is to help get more authors up to speed on how to use Facebook book to build their careers. We would love to know how we did. There are two ways to leave feedback. Reviews. If you loved this book, we can always use an honest review on our public retailer pages, where other people looking for the books can see what real people think of them. Choose your retailer and leave a review here. theworldneedsyourpassion.com/reviewbus2 Feedback form. If you have anything you'd like to share privately, please feel free to fill out our feedback form here: theworldneedsyourpassion.com/feedback. All answers are private unless you say we can use the responses publicly in our marketing materials. Spread the word. Can you think of 2 people who could use this book in their lives? Perhaps they've just started their author career and don't know much about Apple Books. Or perhaps they're considering going wide and wondering how they will make the transition. Maybe they are an old hat at Apple Books and are always looking for the little tidbit or trick that can propel their sales and reach even higher. If so, we would love it if you could connect them to this book so they too can learn the ins and outs of Apple Books and its visibility and discoverability out there. Algorithms. Thanks again for reading. Be the igniter.