How People Really Decide To Buy Your Book

via How People Really Decide To Buy Your Book

From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children’s books

People judge a book by its cover. However, as every author knows, that’s not the only thing that makes them buy a book. Tucker Max recently explained in The Writing Cooperative what else influences their decision in a post we should all bookmark. As he points out,

Almost every potential reader will judge whether or not to buy and read your book before they have read one single word inside the book.

He then continues to explore the unconscious process of choosing whether to buy a book or not, breaking it down into a handy list, listed in order of what readers will consider, from first to last:

via How People Really Decide To Buy Your Book

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A Writer’s Guide to Firearms: before the Modern Age

A Writer’s Guide to Firearms by William R. Bartlett

Part 6: Firearms before the Modern Age

Prologue by William R. Bartlett

Thank you for all your kind responses. This is the final part in my Writer’s Guide to Firearms series and here I’ll discuss weapons for those who may want to write historical fiction. The development of firearms has continued, but, for the last century-and-a-quarter, give or take, it’s been fairly static with no dramatic changes. In that time, weapons were loaded with a brass cartridge containing a primer that ignited the propellant, i.e. gunpowder, and a projectile, also known as a bullet. One way or another, the cartridge was inserted into the chamber, the trigger released the firing mechanism (either a hammer hitting a firing pin or a striker) that hit the primer, which ignited the propellant and the resulting expanding gasses drove the projectile out of the barrel. These weapons had one thing in common: the self-contained, metallic cartridge. For our purposes, we’ll refer to all weapons that utilize this cartridge as firearms of the modern era…

 

via A Writer’s Guide to Firearms: before the Modern Age

Infographic: How Color Can Boost Your Book Sales

via Infographic: How Color Can Boost Your Book Sales

An Obituary: Todd Bol, creator of Little Free Library, dies at 62

…Bol repurposed wood from his garage to build a dollhouse-size library in the shape of a one-room schoolhouse. He decorated the structure with a steeple and a tinny toy bell. He painted the library red, using bright white paint for its wood-shingled roof, and crafted a glass door to secure a few of his parents’ favorite books.

Then he set the library outside his home in Hudson, Wis., atop a wooden pole with a sign reading “Free Books.” And he waited…

via An Obituary: Todd Bol, creator of Little Free Library, dies at 62

Infographic: Sell More Books Using the 6 Principles of Influence

via Infographic: Sell More Books Using the 6 Principles of Influence

https://icecube.asia/influence-in-online-marketing/

So, you’ve Moved your Books to KDP Print. Now What?

Nicholas C. Rossis

Last month, I shared here the details of moving my books from CreateSpace to KDP Print in 3 easy steps. I also promised to see if there’s anything else you need to do next. Amazon has done all it can to ensure an easy move but it turns out that yes, there are still some issues and possible glitches that require your personal attention in order to ensure that the move goes as smoothly as possible.

Here is a checklist of things to check for after moving your files:

• Create Space had fewer keywords than KDP. You can now add more keywords to your paperback.
• KDP Print offers two categories — one more than CreateSpace. Put this extra book category to good effect!
• Check the rights for your books. Specifically, if you are the sole editor of your book, check All territories – worldwide rights for it, as this will…

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This Halloween, Escape to Greece with an Evil Witch

Nicholas C. Rossis

This month, Amazon bestselling author Effrosyni Moschoudi is releasing her new novel in four compelling kindle episodes. If you’re looking for a cracking good read to enjoy this Halloween, this is a great choice!

Lizzie waited twenty years for her return to Corfu…

Lizzie is not your average tourist. She may have just arrived on the idyllic Greek island of Corfu, but her mind is not on having a good time. Far from it, Lizzie has a daunting task to undertake: to claim back her twin brother who was kidnapped twenty years earlier on her previous visit. In a cave. By an evil witch.

When Lizzie sees her brother again, she receives the shock of her life. The witch has tricked her… And, as if this weren’t enough, a handsome local steals her heart to complicate her life even further…

“It’s a step up from Mills and Boon – much…

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KDP Keywords Revisited

Nicholas C. Rossis

Readers of my blog will no doubt be aware of the importance of the categories and keywords your book uses. From using Amazon categories to increase your rankings to the perils of using keywords like Free, Bestseller, and Kindle, they can be used to optimize your book page. But, as I often say, book marketing is like building on quicksand: everything changes every other month.

No, it’s not that keywords are suddenly any less important — in fact, quite the contrary. It’s just that the way Amazon uses them to identify which books to display when a reader searches for a book to read seems to have changed lately.

Amazon Keywords, The Old Way…

As David Kudler of The Book Designer explains, it used to be that you could use natural-sounding phrases of two to five words for your keywords, especially those which returned between two hundred and a…

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Monster-Spotting in Medieval Maps, Part II

Nicholas C. Rossis

The Psalter World Map, c. 1260 Photo: Atlas Obscura / Public Domain/Wikipedia Commons)

East is placed at the top. The sun and moon hold lush forests. Jerusalem is the center of the world. And dragons hold the globe up at the bottom. But there is one aspect of the Psalter World Map, created in the 1260s, that is even stranger: a line-up of grotesque men located near Africa, two of whom have faces in their chests.

Blemmyae

These monsters, called blemmyae, were actually based on the writings of Classical authors such as Pliny the Elder. In The Natural History, penned in 77 AD, Pliny wrote of the members of a North African tribe who were “said to have no heads, their mouths and eyes being seated in their breasts.”

Over 1500 years later, authors were still talking about these chest-faced men. In Othello, none other than Shakespeare wrote…

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Amazon Advertising: The Machette Effect

Nicholas C. Rossis

In my recent post, Amazon Releases Amazon Advertising, I mentioned an app I use called Machete. I promised to expand on that in a future post (i.e. this one).

Machete is an Amazon Advertising (formerly Amazon Marketing Services or AMS) add-on. You install it on your browser and it transparently adds some extra features to your Amazon Dashboard. When I first used it, Machete was little more than a way to track your sales through time and edit multiple keywords at once. Not a game-changer, just some nifty little extras. At $25/month, it wasn’t worth it unless you were constantly tweaking your Ads, which is why I’ve never mentioned it before.

Recently, however, Machete has made two dramatic changes which have led me to this post. The first one was to introduce a great new feature called Bid Optimizer.

1. Bid Optimizer

This lets you optimize your keywords…

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