[M T McGuire]

I’ve just thought, I know not everyone uses them, but Smashwords would be a good addition to the list of author pages as well as Gplay which I think Patty Jansen suggested.

Cheers

MTM

 

[CassieL]

We haven't sold promos yet, though, so for now, we just make everything we can find that's on sale available in the app, so folks don't have to sign up for multiple deals site emails.

I'm trying to think through how this impacts other deal sites. At least preliminarily it will boost their results because you pulling in their deals list for your site will make each of those promos look better than they would've done on their own assuming you have active users. But then if people really buy into what you're doing they will start unsubscribing from all the other list-based deal services to just use you, probably the smaller ones first. That could potentially put those smaller lists out of business. Maybe? If their lists are too small for people to want to use them. The death knell will probably come when you then set up a competing service with your own promos and thereby bury promos from other lists who have shrunk to the point that their own list doesn't justify the cost and whose own results will plummet.

Which means ultimately authors could be down to applying for a Bookbub or you and not many other choices. And there's no way for any list-based service to prevent you taking their promo lists for yourselves every day so ultimately nothing to be done to stand apart. Which means the more successful you are in your argument of one-stop-shopping for readers the more you eliminate the list-based promo market. So say two years or so from now that means authors are down to you, Bookbub (who is probably too big to do that to, but who may decide to compete with you if they feel threatened), CPC/PPC ads, and maybe one or two niche lists that somehow have subscriber loyalty...

Hm.

 

[SeanHinn]

I'm trying to think through how this impacts other deal sites. At least preliminarily it will boost their results because you pulling in their deals list for your site will make each of those promos look better than they would've done on their own assuming you have active users. But then if people really buy into what you're doing they will start unsubscribing from all the other list-based deal services to just use you, probably the smaller ones first. That could potentially put those smaller lists out of business. Maybe? If their lists are too small for people to want to use them. The death knell will probably come when you then set up a competing service with your own promos and thereby bury promos from other lists who have shrunk to the point that their own list doesn't justify the cost and whose own results will plummet.

Which means ultimately authors could be down to applying for a Bookbub or you and not many other choices. And there's no way for any list-based service to prevent you taking their promo lists for yourselves every day so ultimately nothing to be done to stand apart. Which means the more successful you are in your argument of one-stop-shopping for readers the more you eliminate the list-based promo market. So say two years or so from now that means authors are down to you, Bookbub (who is probably too big to do that to, but who may decide to compete with you if they feel threatened), CPC/PPC ads, and maybe one or two niche lists that somehow have subscriber loyalty...

Hm.

This is an astute observation. We've talked about this. Yes, it is possible that our growth becomes disruptive to promo list businesses. But that's not the goal - in fact, what we'd REALLY like to do is partner with the smaller promo lists, so we can all benefit as the whole thing grows. There are lots of ways that could be done that benefits everyone - the smaller promo list companies, our company, and most importantly, authors and readers. We haven't started outreach on that yet, as until we have enough momentum, we'll just be dismissed as an upstart. We think it is necessary for the industry to evolve, though - email, for the most part, sucks, and the ones who are making the real money are the email list providers - MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, et al. We're hoping that we can provide a free alternative to authors so they don't have to pay to maintain lists - they can just message their users on BookSniffer for free regularly.

I think there is plenty of room in the market for everyone, though. There's SO much demand for cost effective book advertising, the market is completely upside-down right now. When people are paying $1 a click to market a 99c book and try to climb the charts HOPING they break even, it's just insanity. I think the market really needs a cost-effective alternative, badly - the question is, which authors will help us build it? Those who do will be really well rewarded for it.

 

[Trioxin 245]

I think there is plenty of room in the market for everyone, though. There's SO much demand for cost effective book advertising, the market is completely upside-down right now. When people are paying $1 a click to market a 99c book and try to climb the charts HOPING they break even, it's just insanity. I think the market really needs a cost-effective alternative, badly - the question is, which authors will help us build it? Those who do will be really well rewarded for it.

Just an observation but it seems like you guy are saying one thing and implying another. First the original post about the 80 percent rejection rate on BB, and how its implied your going to beat it. Sure you could accept more for your curated list but if I am competing against ten other authors on that day what is going to be the realistic value of that?

You guys keep throwing out this one million dollar in advertising to be spread around. Its a great hook but what is its value? Whats the cut off date? Or number of users? Is it this first thousand, ten thousand users? If its insanity to pay 1 buck a click, how will your platform stop that rising cost? Are you going to cap it? Because if not, if five thousand authors have loads of ad spend to use from the million dollar giveaway, its going to soar past a buck a click.

This is not a knock and you do not have to respond but the plan for book sniffer seems to appease everyone. -We are going to stop the clutter for the end user by showing them hundreds of deals a day, plus a curated list as well as ads. For authors we are going to show improved open rates...somehow...because that really hasn't been explained why your notification will be better than ours.

The problem an author faces is being lost in the clutter. Or search engine. The screen shot you posted above shows a category of deals of 1 in 148.
Its the same problem all over again for the author. they are going to get lost in the clutter/search engine.

The thing about BB or any other list is simple. If chosen, your book will be seen alone (perhaps one or two other books beside it) by users of their list. With yours, it one of a hundred or more.

And with everything else new and shiny, people run to it, the cost skyrockets (ads) and its back to square one.

 

[SeanHinn]

Just an observation but it seems like you guy are saying one thing and implying another. First the original post about the 80 percent rejection rate on BB, and how its implied your going to beat it. Sure you could accept more for your curated list but if I am competing against ten other authors on that day what is going to be the realistic value of that?

You guys keep throwing out this one million dollar in advertising to be spread around. Its a great hook but what is its value? Whats the cut off date? Or number of users? Is it this first thousand, ten thousand users? If its insanity to pay 1 buck a click, how will your platform stop that rising cost? Are you going to cap it? Because if not, if five thousand authors have loads of ad spend to use from the million dollar giveaway, its going to soar past a buck a click.

This is not a knock and you do not have to respond but the plan for book sniffer seems to appease everyone. -We are going to stop the clutter for the end user by showing them hundreds of deals a day, plus a curated list as well as ads. For authors we are going to show improved open rates...somehow...because that really hasn't been explained why your notification will be better than ours.

The problem an author faces is being lost in the clutter. Or search engine. The screen shot you posted above shows a category of deals of 1 in 148.
Its the same problem all over again for the author. they are going to get lost in the clutter/search engine.

The thing about BB or any other list is simple. If chosen, your book will be seen alone (perhaps one or two other books beside it) by users of their list. With yours, it one of a hundred or more.

And with everything else new and shiny, people run to it, the cost skyrockets (ads) and its back to square one.

You're really hitting the nail on the head Trioxin; these are the things our team been strategizing about since this company was formed last year. As you might imagine, a great deal of ongoing metrics analysis will drive the answers to these questions - and we know that if we don't get the formula right, our product will underwhelm. So that's the job - getting it right. It's helpful to maybe note that our team consists of authors who have all gone from obscurity in 2017 to making a living as authors in 2018 to earning millions in royalties together through today, and everything we've done has been data-driven. There are some extraordinarily smart, experienced, and accomplished people on our team, and I don't just mean our founders, whose job it is to get these metrics right and make sure we deliver a superior experience for authors and readers.

With regards to bid caps - we will be setting prices to ensure ROI for the average author. That is a moving target, of course - some books will sell better than others with the same advertising - but in aggregate, an author can expect that they're not going to lose money on campaigns with us. We've even put together an idea of an ROI guarantee. It's premature to define exactly what that will look like, but we've got a pretty good idea on how to accomplish it. It might involve bid caps, it might involve giving credit for additional campaigns if one campaign underwhelms.

There will be different levels of engagement depending on the mechanism used to promote a book. For example, a direct message to Fantasy fans on a given day that X book is a curated and recommended BookSniffer deal with a device notification will get far better engagement than the rest of the "ordinary" deals that are just searchable on the list, and as for whether those rates are better than email - they just are. By a lot. As much as 8x better. Those engagement metrics will depend on the number of followers in a genre, average open rates, click rates, etc. Conversion rates of course will vary. But our curated message-driven deals will be minimal. CPC ads, when those roll out, will be set at a price that delivers results, not an open bidding system. Demand will inform pricing to some degree, but not as much as results. Yes, we would make more money with open bidding, but then we're just like everyone else, and it defeats the purpose of what we're trying to build. Remember that our mission is to build a company which gives cost-effective advertising options to authors and publishers. You would be reasonable to be skeptical as to whether or not that mission is just a platitude, but if you personally knew the people who've built this company, you'd know it's not.

All along, our plan has been to help other authors succeed. We all basically got really sick of what the market looks like and decided we needed to change it, because while everyone else says "there oughta be a better way", no one actually stepped up to make one. The big companies don't want a better way to exist - why empower more little guys? The little guys don't have the resources to build something. So we went all in together and did something, at great expense and long hours and 7 day workweeks for a year to get to this point. Which, by the way, is NOWHERE NEAR how far we want to go with our platform. We're barely in the top of the second inning, from my perspective.

We hope lots of other indies will pull out all the stops and help us build this thing. That's better for everyone than us just spending a ton of money on advertising to build an audience - we'd much prefer to give a free ads to authors than to pay Facebook or Google for the traffic. But we'll see how it goes, both paths get us to the finish line.

I really appreciate you for challenging us here. You're a critical thinker; we'd probably benefit a great deal by having someone like you on our team. Feel free to reach out if that sounds fun

 

[M T McGuire]

So I’m thinking that if you could manage a search algorithm that was as smart as say ... Spotify? Then I could see this being a game changer. It’s a big if though. Is this the kind of thing you’re aiming at? Not the Spotify corporate ethics, I mean, but a really smart algorithm that spots things people have enjoyed and offers them similar ...

 

[SeanHinn]

So I'm thinking that if you could manage a search algorithm that was as smart as say ... Spotify? Then I could see this being a game changer. It's a big if though. Is this the kind of thing you're aiming at? Not the Spotify corporate ethics, I mean, but a really smart algorithm that spots things people have enjoyed and offers them similar ...

This is a really big part of what we're building, MT. We've got a patent-pending machine-learning book recommendation engine at the center of all this. It will take time for it to get smarter - right now it's a complete noob - but yeah, since the very beginning, this has been something folks have been asking for, and I think we've invented something that has the potential to be groundbreaking. It's admittedly *the* hardest part of the whole thing on the technical side, but technology has come a long way, and our architecture is designed to accommodate some pretty fancy logic.

 

[Vinny OHare]

I'm trying to think through how this impacts other deal sites. At least preliminarily it will boost their results because you pulling in their deals list for your site will make each of those promos look better than they would've done on their own assuming you have active users. But then if people really buy into what you're doing they will start unsubscribing from all the other list-based deal services to just use you, probably the smaller ones first. That could potentially put those smaller lists out of business. Maybe? If their lists are too small for people to want to use them. The death knell will probably come when you then set up a competing service with your own promos and thereby bury promos from other lists who have shrunk to the point that their own list doesn't justify the cost and whose own results will plummet.

Which means ultimately authors could be down to applying for a Bookbub or you and not many other choices. And there's no way for any list-based service to prevent you taking their promo lists for yourselves every day so ultimately nothing to be done to stand apart. Which means the more successful you are in your argument of one-stop-shopping for readers the more you eliminate the list-based promo market. So say two years or so from now that means authors are down to you, Bookbub (who is probably too big to do that to, but who may decide to compete with you if they feel threatened), CPC/PPC ads, and maybe one or two niche lists that somehow have subscriber loyalty...

Hm.

Sorry to derail the thread. I am confused by this. Especially using the term "death knell". Every time someone comes up with something new people on forums come up with the "end of promo sites". It couldn't be further from the truth. Amazon ads, Bookbub ads, Facebook ads, etc They were suppose to kill promo sites. If anything they have helped us. It cut down on how many books were paying for a spot in our newsletters. Our readers love that. Our authors love that. It is a win-win. We are actually bringing 2 more book promo sites online this month.

Sean - It is really cool to see a new fresh idea, feel free to reach out if you ever have a question on book promotion sites

 

[Trioxin 245]

Sorry to derail the thread. I am confused by this. Especially using the term "death knell". Every time someone comes up with something new people on forums come up with the "end of promo sites". It couldn't be further from the truth. Amazon ads, Bookbub ads, Facebook ads, etc They were suppose to kill promo sites. If anything they have helped us. It cut down on how many books were paying for a spot in our newsletters. Our readers love that. Our authors love that. It is a win-win. We are actually bringing 2 more book promo sites online this month.

Sean - It is really cool to see a new fresh idea, feel free to reach out if you ever have a question on book promotion sites

"They were suppose to kill promo sites. If anything they have helped us. It cut down on how many books were paying for a spot in our newsletters."

Not sure how less income helped you? If your talking about de-cluttering the number of books in your email blast and this was an issue, I'm curious to know why you never addressed it.

The death of promo list sites is already happening whether anyone wants to admit it or not. Even vets will tell you that BB is still viable but not what it was a year or two ago. In fact a new replacement is already happening on Amazon and I am surprised no one is talking about it yet. Its going to be a huge game changer and kill most of the NL services overnight.

(Being dramatic of course but it will be the final blow )

 

[Lorri Moulton [Lavender Lass Books]]

The death of promo list sites is already happening whether anyone wants to admit it or not. Even vets will tell you that BB is still viable but not what it was a year or two ago. In fact a new replacement is already happening on Amazon and I am surprised no one is talking about it yet. Its going to be a huge game changer and kill most of the NL services overnight.

(Being dramatic of course but it will be the final blow )

Really? Can you be more specific? I'd really like to know if newsletters are going to be passe before I start putting one together at the end of the month.

ETA: Trying to tie these landing pages and all the rest in with my website is a bit of a challenge.

 

[Vinny OHare]

"They were suppose to kill promo sites. If anything they have helped us. It cut down on how many books were paying for a spot in our newsletters."

Not sure how less income helped you? If your talking about de-cluttering the number of books in your email blast and this was an issue, I'm curious to know why you never addressed it.

The death of promo list sites is already happening whether anyone wants to admit it or not. Even vets will tell you that BB is still viable but not what it was a year or two ago. In fact a new replacement is already happening on Amazon and I am surprised no one is talking about it yet. Its going to be a huge game changer and kill most of the NL services overnight.

(Being dramatic of course but it will be the final blow )

It wasn't really an issue because some days we would sell out and have to push the book to the next day. Emailing authors was a pain to move their books. There was a lot of moving parts happening to keep the newsletter focused. Once gmail started to cut off the emails all promo sites adapted. At least the smart ones did.

No one ever said anything about less income. Instead of 25 one day and 3 the next it balanced out to more to an even number. Oh and the vets that are saying newsletters are dead are using the newsletters. Don't pay attention to what you read on forums.

 

[Trioxin 245]

Me > Even vets will tell you that BB is still viable but not what it was a year or two ago.

You> Oh and the vets that are saying newsletters are dead are using the newsletters. Don't pay attention to what you read on forums.