There are a lot of strategies that you might be using in the past years. But do you know that there are these 3 Amazon KDP strategies that don’t work in 2023?
Mary had heard that having an email list for your readers was incredibly important when it comes to selling your books and getting them to go. The problem was that people kept unsubscribing from her list and marking spam.
So perhaps, the email list for her readers was a bad idea. Or maybe she was just using the wrong strategy. That's one of the reasons why in today's topic, we're going to discuss 3 Amazon KDP strategies that don't work in 2023.
Trying To Get Book Reviews
Mary is currently a college student who lives in Omaha Nebraska. She's writing in multiple niches and mostly just ones that she's interested in or can write in. She always had an enthusiasm for writing.
So, she's writing in romance, fashion, and then also a category of tiny houses. The idea is that we don't have to live in these gigantic houses but we can live in small container-sized houses instead.
She had a dream in her mind of maybe if she could get these books to sell and move along while she was sleeping, she'd be making money from it. This passive income would then support the different hobbies that she has. This might also be a possible professional or career move for her.
To stay in this particular area here where she's just continuing to focus on things that she's already interested in writing. I think her major was in writing or something like literature. But whatever the case was, she was so good at writing that it didn't create a problem writing in these different niches.
She discovered that she was trying this email strategy to get subscribers on her list. But then they would unsubscribe about as fast as they were subscribing to her list. That resulted in her having an awful lot of frustration and not being able to keep a list of loyal subscribers on her email list.
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What that meant was that she wouldn't be able to leverage this list in terms of getting reviews. Getting people to buy her latest books. She started wondering if maybe the people who liked to read her kinds of books just really weren't interested in being on the email list.
Being in contact and being asked to help with whether it's editing or getting advanced copies to leave a review. Or any of these other strategies that she had heard work for many other authors.
So, she tried a couple of things and she asked them why they were unsubscribing. They said, well your emails just aren't that relevant enough. They're not hitting things that are particularly interested in what she also tried.
That didn't help too much because she was like well, they're about what the different books are in. She also asked them if they could leave reviews but they weren't all that interested in doing that. Because they said this type of book that you're doing, we don't even care about that.
So, the person would subscribe because of the romance book they weren't interested in at all. In terms of purchasing or leaving a review on her books that were dealing with fashion or tiny houses were completely irrelevant to them.
She was beginning to get incredibly frustrated. Seeing that none of these strategies that she was doing, she was sort of doing correctly seemed to be working. So, she ended up reading a number of my blogs and she ended up grabbing a copy of my Self-Publishing Secrets Checklist.
As a result, by going through that list, she began to see some things that she wasn't doing. So, she booked a free discovery session with me so that we could take a deep dive into exactly what she was doing.
Targeting The Right Niche
What we found was the first thing she was writing books on and these are the 3 Amazon KDP strategies that don't work in 2023. The first one is writing books in multiple genres as opposed to staying in your lane. We need to make sure that the niche that you're targeting is one and not three.
In her case, it was three. She even had other niches. She was considering doing it and then all of these people were being pulled into her email list. And that's the second one, emailing people about offerings related to a book or something that they purchased.
That they simply never expressed in this other area. In her case, she was putting out books in the romance niche. And then sending emails related to romance and these other three niches.
The people on the romance would subscribe hoping to hear more from her about her romance books. But then they were getting these emails regarding tiny houses. It was just like this doesn't connect. So, it's this incongruity, it wasn't aligned.
There was the idea that the marketing that she was doing was out of alignment with the products and offerings that she was coming to the market. So, her books simply were misaligned.
She thought the idea was good. If I write about lots of topics, I'll bring in lots of people from different areas. What she ended up with was not a very engaged group of subscribers on her email list. This is a huge issue that many authors face when they're building an email list.
The final thing that you want to avoid in 2023 that she was doing is that she was not emailing her list often enough. Her readers need to be hearing from her at least once a week, maybe even twice a week.
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At a minimum twice a month or once a month. But it should probably be the absolute lowest you can go when you're building an email list. Otherwise, they mark you as spam and people forget who you are.
If they subscribe to your list in the first place when you're doing this, then when it comes time to say I got a new book out, would you like to leave a review on it for a free copy? The people on your list will tell you I don't remember who you are. Why are you spamming me?
In addition, to add insult to injury on this one. If you also happen to be sending these requests on a niche that they never signed up for. Like I'm not interested in golf and yet I was signed up for puppy training. And now you're sending me golf emails.
It makes no sense at all to the readers. You have to ask yourself; would you want people hitting you with emails on all sorts of subjects you sign up for? A fashion email list where you can get some tips and tricks.
Then comes tips on computer technology and computer programming. It just doesn't make sense. It's incongruence that creates a challenge on the email list and that was one of the things that she was doing.
These are the big 3 that people are doing. The key solution of course is doing the exact opposite. The most important is that email lists should only be targeting a single niche. And you're contacting your audience regularly.
That makes the difference. For her, it was initially just my self-publishing secret checklist that got her thinking through what she was doing. You also can grab a copy and start thinking it through.
Engaging With Those Who Are Interested
Grab a copy, it's free and we'll give you the secrets that you are not currently using that perhaps you can be. So back again to her situation, she decided she saw that her email provider had sent her a warning based on the number of people marking her as spam.
It is a huge no because ultimately as an author who writes books to readers, as doing email marketing, our goal is to ensure that the emails that we're sending are going to people who wish to receive them. If they don't wish to receive them, then we unsubscribe them from the list.
The way we can tell is they unsubscribe themselves. That's why you should use something like ActiveCampaign. It is the one I use where they're following all of these anti-spam rules.
It's very effective because they can just click unsubscribe. If they don't open an email in six months, I go in there and clean them up and just take them off the list.
Some of you may have been in that category where you quit getting emails from me one day. The answer is it's because you were not opening the emails. If you're not opening or responding or whatever to the emails then that's a way that you communicate that you're not interested.
And I like a hot list, a list where there are very engaged readers. People who want to receive these emails are getting them regularly. That will tell Google also that this is a good list and not put me in the spam folder.
So even if people don't consider it spam, it can be treated as spam. Just because you're sending it to so many people who are not opening those emails. So, we want to make sure it's a hot list.
This list is of people who are engaged with the topic that you're writing your books about. Whether it's romance novels or others. So, she decided okay fine she shut down all of the lists and she saw that most of her sales were coming through romance novels.
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So, she decided to double down on the romance niche and that her email list would only target that. She just simply removed all this email stuff from the other books and only the romance novel would bring people onto her email list.
What was the result? The result was the subscriptions started to go down a little bit. But the unsubscribes dropped drastically, people quit marking her as spam. She started sending out emails on a more regular basis.
She discovered people were opening them at a higher rate. So, they recognized who she was. They knew there was going to be value related to a subject they already said they were interested in.
She also moved over to ActiveCampaign as opposed to trying to send these emails out personally which was a terrible idea in the first place. But going to ActiveCampaign, made it easy for people to unsubscribe if they weren't interested.
Also, they will update their contact information as they need to do within ActiveCampaign, it's very very simple. So, this gave her quite a bit of hope. The thing is that she started seeing that when she asked for people to be advanced readers, part of her advanced review team.
She had sent him a copy of her book in exchange for an honest review of the book. These people are willing to do it. Because everybody on the list was related to her incredibly important romance novels.
Conclusion
These all started with the 3 things that don't work in 2023.
But then the other thing you want to keep around in mind, there's not just these three but there's a whole series. There are The 7 Deadly Signs of Self-Publishing.