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Helping International Readers Find Your Book

March 19, 2018March 14, 2018Business of Writing, Promo Tips, Uncategorized

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Recently, I went through and updated all of my individual book pages on my website… a very tedious process, but it was a rainy day and a worthwhile endeavor.

I’ve known for some time about Draft2Digital‘s Universal Links, but for some reason hadn’t put it to use on my website.

Sometimes I’ll get emails or messages on Facebook asking how to order one of my books on Apple iBookstore or Amazon…in another country. This means that I spend some time trying to locate it myself (even though I’m automatically redirected to the US site in many instances).

I especially want to get my individual book pages on my website right, because I link to the pages in each book’s back matter and on Facebook when I have a release. Plus, if you look up any of my book titles, my website usually comes in first for results (occasionally Amazon does).

One thing about Draft2Digital’s approach is that it’s one universal link and the reader is automatically directed to their home country’s retail site. Another is that you could simply use this one link instead of linking to all the stores (domestic and international) where your book is for sale. I know that my book is listed in at least twenty stores, counting all the retailers that my aggregators are distributing to. Some of these online stores go out of business, but if you click the ‘rescan’ button at D2D, it automatically repopulates and removes expired links. In fact, I recommend clicking ‘rescan’ a couple of times, anyway, to make sure all of the links are populated.

Even if you are a Kindle Unlimited (KU) author who exclusively distributes through Amazon, this is useful. As D2D explains: “But lest you think UBLs aren’t for you—as a KU author the advantage you get from using UBLs is globalization—which is a fancy way of saying that we’ll find your book in every Amazon marketplace, worldwide! So you can paste the URL from, say, your product page at Amazon.com, and Books2Read will find all instances of the book on Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.everywhere-else-you-can-think-of! This allows readers to go to the Amazon store that matches their region, without the need to create a separate link.”

You don’t even have to be a Draft2Digital author to use the service. As they put it: “In fact, you don’t even have to be a Draft2Digital author to use it (though we’d really love to have you). All you have to do is visit Books2Read.com and paste your link to get started. If you want to edit your link, you can create a B2R account, or log in with an existing Draft2Digital account.”

For the UBL button on my website, I chose the text to read “international” since I had the US links and retailers listed on my page already.

Do you use UBLs? How do you help international readers find your books?

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Six Marketing Tips for Pleasing an International Audience

September 18, 2017September 16, 2017Promo Tips

by Zsofia Macho , @maifosz

While some factors are outside our power (like the preferences and trends of a particular market), there are things you can do to influence your international success as an independent author. This article does not aim to give you general marketing tips: there are plenty of guides on building a consistent brand across platforms. (Just to recap: be everywhere that counts and use the same picture and colours so people easily recognize you.) I am, however, giving you some very specific tips authors should consider in terms of branding.

Creating globalized blog content

Having a blog is a powerful marketing tool most authors utilize and readers of this blog know a lot about. If you aim for a global audience, though, bear in mind that people speak a different English everywhere.

Writing for an audience that speaks English as an additional language is a profession with its grammar guidelines to make machine translation easier – if you are a fiction writer, you probably don’t want to go to that street, but if you write nonfiction, you should consider not using many idioms like the one I just have.

Even if your main target is English-speaking countries, consider not only that British spelling could look old-fashioned and pompous for a considerable chunk of your audience, but that you can’t treat certain cultural themes and items as ‘norms’.

While I’m not saying that you should ditch your style just to become more easily understood, you could consider using ‘international friendly’ measurements: while I only have a rough idea about one ounce of something, one cup is clear and saves me from doing a Google search, wander off and never come back. (The same goes for dates: if your readers can’t easily figure out if 03/05/17 is the 3rd of May or the 5th of March, they’ll probably go elsewhere.)Continue reading

Considering Our International Audience

October 24, 2016October 25, 2016Business of Writing

Photo credit: Karen Roe via Visualhunt.com / CC BY

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Are your books available to an international audience? I’ve found that my international sales have picked up after I implemented a few tweaks.

First off, do you have an Amazon Author Central profile on the international sites that support them? Be aware that, depending on the site, you may need to create a new login (instead of using your usual Amazon login), and that some sites don’t have all the features that others do. You can use Google Translate to help you with a bio, etc. (my recommendation would be to go very basic with it) or you could pay a translator at a site like Fiverr to have your bio inexpensively translated.

USA
UK
Germany
France
Japan

Amazon India also has an Author Central, but our profile populates automatically there.

Here is the list of international Amazon sites (not all of them offer Author Central):

Australia

Visiting the sites can be very helpful, in terms of figuring out our international pricing. Let’s take Mexico as an example. I visited the Amazon Mexico site (translating the page to English with a click of my mouse), and searched for my genre, cozy mystery, in the Kindle store. I sorted the results by popularity and could see that the most popular in that category were priced between 114–$123 peso. According to Google’s currency calculator, that’s between $6.04 and $6.51 US dollars. For me, that’s a bit high. I also saw on that page books as low as 0.00 and 38.41 peso, which is $2.03. Better.

So, instead of just basing the international prices on our US prices, we can look on the sites, see which books are selling well, and price accordingly (or at least use it as a guide).

Another thing to consider is our international print distribution. Although Amazon does a great job distributing ebooks to foreign markets, it’s good to evaluate our approach for print distribution. Printed books are expensive overseas because the shipping costs are exorbitant.

One alternative is to use IngramSpark to fulfill international print orders. They have printers all over the world and distributing print on demand from these printers helps to defray the readers’ shipping costs. As David Penny wrote in his article for the Alliance of Independent Authors a year ago:

Ingram has facilities in the US, UK, France and Australia, and services other territories through partner arrangements. As of 2015 there are partners in Germany, Russia, Poland, Brazil and South Korea. By the end of 2016 they will be putting in place partner arrangements in South America, South Africa, China and India.

You can use the same interior and cover PDFs you uploaded to CreateSpace to upload to IngramSpark, but because there are some differences between the two businesses, you may need to get your spine tweaked (I believe there is a difference in page thickness). If you go this route, you’ll want to opt out of expanded distribution at CreateSpace. Additionally, you’ll need an ISBN for your book to be published by Ingram (not the free one that you may get from CreateSpace). There is, as well, a set-up fee for IngramSpark of $49 a book, although there are frequently coupons to reduce or waive that cost.

Personally, I’ve found going on IngramSpark worth it. Last month I netted twice as much from them as from CreateSpace.

Additional reading and resources:

A Facebook group called The International Indie Author, headed by writer Mark Williams. You will need to ask permission to join.

I’ve referred to this article by Giacomo Giammetteo before, but it’s such an excellent overview of CreateSpace vs. IngramSpark that I’ll list it again: Watchdog: Ingram Spark vs CreateSpace for Self-publishing Print Books .

Have you got Author Central profiles for the different international Amazon sites? How do your international print sales look? Any tips that I’m missing?

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Photo credit: Karen Roe via Visualhunt.com / CC BY