In today’s episode we’re tackling what did NOT work for us when it comes to keywords and categories, blurbs and reviews. We look at some of the most common mistakes authors make in these areas, and how you can avoid them as well as sharing the best tips and tools to help you get it right.

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 030: What NOT to do—Keywords, Blurbs and Reviews

Crystal Hunt: Hey there strategic authorpreneurs, I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani, we’re here to help you save time, money and energy as you level up your writing career.

Crystal Hunt: Welcome to episode 30 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. On today’s show we’re talking about what not to do when it comes to keywords, blurbs and reviews. But first as always, we’ll do a little check in and find out what have we been up to this week.

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: I want to give you another resource from one of the person that I’m following David Gaughran the self publisher expert just released a few weeks ago a course for self-publishers, how to start from zero.

And I want to show it to people that can see it on YouTube. Basically this is the logo, Starting From Zero. I started it actually, and it’s super-extra-interesting. I highly recommend if you are on the beginning also intermediate stage, and basically David really tackles every single aspect of the self-publishing process and he gives a lot of tips about every single step of the way.

I’m also recommending this course because there are also two books attached, and you know we love books and recommendations. One of these is another book that we mentioned a few times. Let’s Get Digital, again from David Gaughran, the latest version. And then the other one is Following, which is another free book that he is very generously giving away for free.

So this is really a course, that is free, completely for free. And really, I think it’s useful because it can level up your writing on the self-publishing side. And I do believe they did put a lot of works in it, so I really recommend it. On the planning and authorly business kind of things I’m actually planning on doing something a bit different with my lives. if you haven’t heard, I released one live on my YouTube channel every single week, in Italian, because I want to keep myself accountable, but also help other people in a process that is similar to mine, to self-publishing. So, and Crystal this is something I didn’t even tell you, but it’s an idea that came up a few days ago. I was thinking of, releasing every week, in this live, something like a report on what I’m doing, publishing wise. So in the next few months, now this is the end of September, and then the next few months I will be releasing quite a few content and I want to be transparent if I can, in that process. I want to try to see if releasing some data, what I’m doing for promoting the books, both on the Italian front and the English front might be useful to people. So I’m trying to see how can I implement that?

How can I share this resource and if it can be useful to people. So I’m just trying to do that and I’m just deciding what’s the format that is going to have. And now it’s your turn to shine Crystal. What have you been up to?

Crystal Hunt: Well I am in back to school writing mode. So I am working away on a whole bunch of different stories.

And I have been also trying to remember to balance that a little bit, cause it’s easy to dive back in and get super work-focused and forget the part where you’re looking after yourself as well, along the way. So I’m really trying as I’m settling into the full time writing, and without all the summer distractions of outside and everything else to be making sure that I am setting a really good kind of daily routine that includes moving around, doing some walking. If you’re seeing us on video, I look a little more tan than usual cause I have been outside in the sunshine a regular basis on each day, trying to get out to walk around and get some movement in there because I think it’s really great for thinking to be outside and there’s a park near my house, so I can walk in the trees and there’s lots of beautiful flowers that other people take care of, which is perfect.

And so I can really enjoy some time in the nature as well, as I like to say, that really does help with the creativity I find when I’m in a sort of generating ideas stage and digging into new projects it really does help to have a lot of outside inputs. And so I can listen to podcasts or music while I’m walking, or I can just think about what it is I’m going to work on next so, in between that just pacing around the house to keep moving. It’s easy to get lost in your story and kind of get stuck in your chair and then your body really starts to complain when you’re doing something for too many hours in a day. And I have learned that lesson the hard way, a couple of times already in the last 15 years of my writing life.

So this time I am determined to do better and make sure that I am building good patterns into my day so that my body can keep up with my brain. That is mostly what I’ve been up to. And what I’ve been reading is actually a really interesting book. It’s called The Antidote and it is by Oliver Burkeman.

The subtitle is: ‘Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking’, which is a really interesting exploration of what is wrong or doesn’t work about some of the ways that we have approached happiness as a society. And so he is really digging into some different ways of thinking about thinking and some different ways of thinking about your life.

And I’ve been using that to influence how I’m putting together my patterns in those days. And what I’m really noticing is that so much of our culture is about being really positive and looking to the future and setting all of these goals and none of that has necessarily anything to do with the moment you’re living in right now.

And so I’m really trying you to focus on enjoying the being of the writerly self and not just the outcomes of being a writerly person. And so instead of just being purely goal-focused on, okay, the next release has got to come out on this date and I have to hit all these deadlines and here are all these really specific, actionable, achievable, smart goals, which is great and we’ll move things forward, but you might not love the process very much. And because I’ve noticed so many people and peers and other authors that I work with and hang out with, get burnout really fast. And I’m a health psychologist by background so I should know better. But I really don’t want to hit burnout.

I want to have a plan 40 or 50 year writing career. I’m only 40, I’ve got some good years left. So I want to make sure that I’m setting myself up in a way that I can really keep doing this for the whole rest of my life, if that’s what I choose to do and not flare out and burn out in a two to five year period, which is what seems to be pretty common for a lot of indie authors who come at it like a business.

So balance is the key for this next little while. And I would highly recommend if you like the idea of self help books, but maybe you don’t love how you feel or how they, really focus on changing everything and all these rigid structures and all that kind of stuff this one may be you think a little bit differently about going through your daily life, which is interesting.

So I would highly recommend that. And before we dive into the meaty content of today’s episode, you how important reviews are in the book world and the podcast world is no different. So if you could leave us a review on whatever platform you’ve listening to this, even just a couple of words or a star rating, that would be fantastic and we will be forever grateful for your help in other readers, discovering us along the way. Thank you to all of our listeners who have left reviews you are already making a difference. More people are finding us. So thank you very much for that. And now it is time for you to learn from some of our mistakes. We are doing a bit of a Roundup today in three primary areas. So categories and keywords, blurbs, and also reviews. So let’s start off with categories and keywords. And what have you learned along the way about categories and keywords, Michele that you would like to share in terms of what did not work or what we should be avoiding?

Things to avoid with categories and keywords

Michele Amitrani: Yes. So as self-publisher, we know we have to get used to many different things. Keywords and categories are one of those things that, sometimes, I feel like it’s left out the most and I’m saying that because I did it and I’m in some point of my career, I did that and I regret it now.

Hence why we’re going to tell you the mistakes that we made and why it’s important for you also to understand why keywords and categories are important for you and your books. So the way I see it, and Crystal, if you have a different opinion on that, please do share it, keywords are the way a store like Amazon gets to know what your book is about inside and helps other people find it.

It’s not only that, it’s more complicated than that, but you can actually put keywords inside the file, the .mobi file or the epub file that you’re using and you’re going to upload on one of the other books platforms. It’s basically a way for you to let, Amazon in this case, because that’s the store that has the biggest and strongest, search engine, lets it understand what is your book basically about. And keywords are stuff and things that can be found in the title, in the subtitle of your, book in the description. So that’s one of the reasons why we stress the importance of getting those rights, and, since we’re talking about mistakes, I’m going to tell you a very stupid mistake that I made at the beginning of my self-publishing journey.

So as you might know, when you are in your Amazon dashboard, Amazon KDP gives you the opportunity to put a few number of keywords in. And, one thing that you shouldn’t do is putting keywords that your book already has, for example your name, that is already there, stuff on your title. It’s already there, the genre of you book, is already there. Those were the keyboards that I put in the genre, my name, stuff that goes into the title of my book. So all things that didn’t make any difference, and I’m still getting, trying to understand better how that works. I cannot honestly tell you with confidence that I am an expert in that field.

I think that’s basically a sub genre of self-publishing that needs to be a deep and a search even more deeply. And I think Crystal is going to have a bit more of an in depth analysis on that. But I do believe you should do your homework in that sense. So keywords is basically the way you give Amazon to let put your book in front of the right readers.

This is just one of the ways, is not on the way. And we’re also going to talk about categories, but I’m just add to the segment another mistake category-wise. I didn’t take full advantage of that and I’m still not taking full advantage of that, because again, if you go on Amazon, as of now, on your dashboard you’re given the possibility to be listed your book, to be listening to categories, but you could also request to Amazon to be insert in more categories in that if I’m not mistaken, Crystal, the number is 10 up to 10 categories. I didn’t do that and I’m still wondering why maybe it’s because on my to-do list are a billion different things to do and for some, the reason I put that in the very bottom, at the very bottom, but yes, that’s definitely another mistake. That’s more or venues you could put your book more categories. More way for different leaders to find your book and I’m kind of excited to find out a bit more about your process and what have you been up to in this regard?

Because I know you have been publishing for way more, which means way more mistakes potentially, and also more books and in different genres. So I think you can add a lot of value on that regard. So are the categories, keywords things you shouldn’t have done.

Crystal Hunt: There’s a few. I think perhaps the most relevant though is I started off, I just put in single keywords the very first time I published my book and I didn’t realize that you can actually use phrases, they are keywords or keyword phrases in there. And so that was really interesting because it really multiplied the power of things where I at first might have used one that was, ‘short story’ one that was ‘romance’ one that was ‘hometown’.

But you can actually combine those. You can have ‘short hometown romance’ or whatever, as a single keyword phrase, there’s actually quite a lot of, room to wiggle in terms of how many characters you can have and how many words you can have. I think you really miss an opportunity if you don’t cover more ground in there and I know that there are keywords, there are lists of keywords that you can use or keyword phrases that will put you in specific subcategories within each genre. So I’m going to use romance as an example again, just because I know that off the top of my head, but there are words like Christmas. If you use the word Christmas in your keywords, it will put you in holiday romances as a sub category.

And so there are some words that their whole purpose is to get you into a subcategory. Which might be helpful if you’re looking to be immediately in that category of the day you launch, maybe you put that in as an initial keyword, but once you’ve submitted to KDP and you’ve asked them to put you in the other categories you want to be in, you don’t need to use that as a keyword anymore.

So you can actually swap out those keywords and get a little more mileage. So you’re not doubling up, like Michele was talking about, you want to cover all that extra ground that you can. I think something else that we forgot as well, is that there are really different ways of looking at rankings. And this is our transition from keywords to categories.

And that is you need to think about your keywords from the perspective of what will somebody be searching for. And I think one mistake that we make and I have made in the past is to be too focused on one category of thing and not the other. So if you’re thinking about your keywords in terms of the genre of your book specifically, you need to also widen that up a little bit and think about what kind of heroin or hero do you have in your book, the themes, what are the settings? What are some of the main sources of conflict? Those are all opportunities for really strong keyword phrases. And you need to always be thinking from the perspective of your reader, the person who’s going to be coming to Amazon and searching for that information because it’s, what are they going to put in?

It doesn’t matter what you would put in to find your book because you already know how to find it. It matters what the person is going to think of as a word to search for. So we might put in strong female protagonists, whereas, a female hero of a story might be what someone else is going to look for because they’re not writers.

So not phrasing it in the same language as we have. So there are a couple of really great resources that can help you in choosing your keywords. And we’ll put a link in the show notes. To one of the articles from the Kindlepreneur. And I think Dave Jessen at Kindlepreneur is probably one of the strongest voices in terms of analyzing keywords and tools and things like that.

And he is the creator of Publisher Rocket, which used to be KDP rocket. And it is a really helpful tool in terms of breaking down what key words and categories you’re going to want to be using and he’s got some really great help articles. So rather than us trying to recreate all of that, we’re going to send you today because he is definitely a solid voice and has a ton of resources on the kindlepreneur.com blog.

You’ll find all kinds of things in there that are really helpful. And I think when we come to talk about categories, there’s a couple mistakes that we do tend to make. There is more than one way into a sub category, which is really important thing to think about. So what I mean when I say that is we often default to our specific genre at the top level of category.

So for Michele, it might be a science fiction or fantasy or if we drill down even further, it might be fantasy and then myths and legends as a sub category. But what we forget is that there is a category at the top level, that is fiction and literature. And underneath fiction and literature are subcategories for all of the other genres.

So I think it’s really important: don’t forget that pathway when you are sending in your requests to Kindle, to be in different categories in the Amazon store, make sure that one of the pathways you include is the fiction and literature, and then your genre and then your sub genre categories all the way down, because that’s two separate avenues of people accessing your books.

And I changed just that one thing at one point, when I submitted some extra categories, and I got a ton more downloads. It was really interesting to see how much of a difference that made so shout out to Dave Chesson since it was on his advice that I did that and, definitely for you worth making that change and also worth really reviewing your keyword phrases, every, don’t change them too often because I think they don’t have a chance to work. If you get in there and muck around with them every week, they’re not going to do really what they’re supposed to be doing, but I think reviewing them every three months o so is a smart thing to do and reviewing the categories as well, to make sure that you’re still, those are accurate and you’re up to date and where you want to be as well for that.

Do you have anything else you need to add in there Michele?

Michele Amitrani: No, would say just do your homework again. That’s very important reading articles like on Kindlepreneur really do help. I quote, I subscribe absolutely to what Crystal said about Dave. If there is an expert on that side, it’s him the course that he created on Amazon, even Amazon ads, because you have to be able to understand what kind of keywords to use. It’s also important. And so that, so I think what we have been said is that keywords at one point of another of your self-published career, you’re going to use them. You need to use them so I would say it’s better to learn them sooner rather than later.

Crystal Hunt: Absolutely. And so let’s talk about blurbs next because once somebody types in a keyword and they find your book listing and they click on it because they like your cover, because of course you’ve made none of the mistakes that we made with our covers, because we told you all about that a couple of episodes ago.

And so once they clicked now, your reader is on your product page. And what the next sort of point of contact is going to be is reading your book blurb or your book description and your sales text there on the online store. And so we will share some of the things that did not really work for us in terms of blurbs.

And I know Michele, this is one of your favorite areas. So I think you should dive in first and tell us a little bit about blurbs.

About blurbs and what to avoid

Michele Amitrani: Okay. Just going to let you know what I feel when I have to sit and write my blurb. It’s like somebody is shaking me from the very first seconds I start until the very, the very last second.

I have nothing against the writing, a great, mind-blowing description, but having to do that in 100 to 150 to 200 words, even less, if you’re good, if you’re really a Ninja of the description, is hard. And if there’s something that I’ve learned in the past few months, in my challenge, I have to release one new story every month.

That means that I already, at this point, released nine different descriptions. It’s really hard. And one thing that I’ve learned is that book description and again, you can be absolutely not agreeing with me, but for me, it’s a science. There are some things that you need to understand in order to make your product look cool on the description side.

And there are a couple of suggestion that I can give you, but first the mistakes that I made, one of the mistakes that I made, again, it’s connected to the fact that I didn’t do my homework and I’m stressing this fact that maybe too much, but it’s really that important. Crystal, David Gaughran, Dave, Nicholas Erik, those are all people that I had to study from, in order to understand how to craft an interesting book script, because before the mistake that I made was coming up with the first thing I thought was cool. Which is a sure-fire way to make a very awful book description. And I did that multiple times.

I did that in Italian with my science fiction series, which is one of the reasons why I had to make a makeover. I change it completely, every single one of them and I uploaded them every single time you want to save if you can, that process, that time save it, and, the important thing that you need to do is just learn the process that there is behind it.

And the process is very simple. That’s my suggestion is you go on your category, for example, I think my example. Okay? Mythological fantasy. Okay? What I would suggest to do I would go to a top 20 sold mythological fantasy on amazon.com. And then I would copy and past, by hand, I’m talking about longhand here. Yeah. Each and every single description. Okay. You can do the first time. You don’t have to do the first 20. But this is a suggestion I took from Nicholas Erik. Why doing this? Because when you are copying and pasting with your hand, each and every single word, something different happens in your brain.

You start understanding a process. And of course, because you are doing that with the top 20, those are the best book in that category. So the authors did their job so they know what they’re doing. So it might take some time, but I assure you is going to help you a lot. Now, I was discussing with Crystal a few weeks ago. She reviews the description, the blurbs of my stories. And she was noticing that there was something that was getting better. First I take less time in writing my address time for writing a description was five to six hours, five to six hours. I can write a short story in five to six hours, and now I was able to average it down around one hour and to one hour and 45 minutes.

Of course it depends on the story, but that’s something that she noticed and she’s following on that so she can say that. And the second thing is that I nail more things at the first trial. So there are some things that I’m supposed to convey in the book description. Now I do it for osmosis almost. I just know what is that is important for me to say in the first paragraph, in the second paragraph, and then in the ending paragraph, and there are distinction on fiction and nonfiction, but this is basically the biggest mistake that I made, was not doing my homework.

The biggest thing that I can suggest to you on that side to do is please read what is working in your genre and try to apply that as much as possible. The suggestion that I gave you don’t have to do it, copy and paste it with your hand, but you can also do it with word, but I just found that suggestion that was meaningful to me, find a way that works for you because your blurb is probably the most important thing after the cover.

And of course the content of the book. So that’s basically my 5 cents on that regard. Those those are mistakes I made, and those are the suggestion that I feel I would like to give her. I do know Crystal that you have been doing a makeover recently, so you might be wanting to share a bit more light on your process when you have to do something like a make-over kind of things.

Or even if you have like more generally speaking, something that you did, do wrong in the past and that you want to say to the listeners.

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I think before we jump into that, I just want to re iterate that when you’re doing your research, it is really important to look at what’s working in your category, but there’s some specific areas you can look at.

And so I think important is looking at how long are the blurbs in those categories, cause you’re not just looking at what they’ve done, but you’re looking at how they’ve done it. What is the point of view in the blurb? And does that match the point of view in the writing? Because sometimes a blurb will be in third person, but a book will be in first person.

Usually you try to match it up so that the blurb as an indication of what point of view the book will be in, but there is some variability on that, depending on what genre or sub genre you’re in. And what is the tone of the blurb? What is the format of it? Like literally, how are the paragraphs broken up? Is it longer paragraph short sentence, a little bit of white space?

Just throwing everything into one big clumped up paragraph is not easy for people to process visually. It just becomes what we call a wall of text. So I would say on the ‘don’t’ side, don’t put a wall of text up there. And one of the ways you can break it up a little bit and give it a little bit of formatting is you have to use HTML to make a bit of formatting in your book description.

The KDP publishing tool makes you put in little Beaky brackets with bold and things like that. If you’re not from a fond of HTML. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you probably want to go to the book description format or on the Kindlepreneur website, and you can use that to make your book description look pretty and then copy the code and just paste it right into the book description section, where you’re publishing your book.

[00:28:04] And that will save you a lot of frustration because often I think that’s what happens to people. They make a beautifully formatted blurb, and then they paste it in to the book description box on KDP dashboard and they don’t realize that what happens is all that formatting gets stripped out if it’s not an HTML.

So definitely use the tool it’s very handy. And I think also when you’re crafting that blurb, you need to think of three main things. So you really need to hook the readers by pulling them in and giving them a sense of what the story is going to be about but you don’t want to give away too much. You don’t want to reveal the key twist or the ending. You want people to have to read the book to get that feeling of satisfaction of understanding how the story ends. So you just want to limit enough to really get them interested. And I think there’s also a temptation to include in the blurb all the things that happen in a book.

So to be, this happens right the beginning, and then this happens to the middle and this happens at the end and that’s not really what’s going to interest people. What’s going to hold people’s attention is who is the main character, what do they want and what is standing in their way, right?

What is the conflict? What are the barriers? What’s holding them back? What is going to be the source of the drama and intriguing, interesting stuff that’s going to happen in the book? And so you really need to get at the essence of the story and not actually what happens in the story. You want them to read it for what happens.

The blurb is just, how is this book going to make you feel basically, what kind of adventure is this going to be for you? And that’s the really key part. And I think the third thing is that you need to not assume that people will know it’s a series. If it is part of a series, you really want to make that obvious in your blurb.

It’s tempting to think of a blurb as a sales pitch and to be phrasing it nice and broadly and you’re trying to draw everybody into your net and you want everyone to buy and read your book, except you don’t. It’s very counterintuitive to think like that, but really you only want the people who are going to love your book to buy your book.

Because the more of the right readers, you get the better, your reviews are going to be the more social proof you have, the better your ads will do, the more books you’ll sell and then it just creates this positive word cycle. But if you attract the wrong readers into your book, they’re not going to like it.

So you really need to make sure that you are filtering out the people who are not going to love it. That’s what your blurb is for if people don’t like first person point of view and your blurb is in first person point of view, because your book is great. Stop them before they buy your book and say how much they didn’t like it because it isn’t about them not actually liking your book, it’s about them not preferring the point of view it’s then. So you can do the same thing by indicating in your book description if there is, an unusual twist, like if you’re doing something that is off genre, maybe the story’s a little darker or maybe it’s a contemporary romance, but it’s sweet and has a happily ever after, and it’s not steamy, like maybe some others are in that category you’ve got to indicate that to your reader. So you get that filtered out in the moment. So I think those are three kinds of key things that you really should avoid when you’re doing a blurb and you should also avoid having only your own opinion when you are doing a blurb, it’s really good to get some feedback.

Use your critique group, use your online communities. If you don’t have one, come find us at thecreativeacademyforwriters.com and you can be part of our community there, and you can bounce things off people and get feedback on your blurb and really make sure that other people understand from what you actually put on the page, what that story is going to be about because as the authors, we are inside the story and so we often think we have perfectly communicated something through our blurb that we understand, because we know this story already. You have to remember people buying your book have not yet read your book. So you may have done the perfect job of describing that story and to anyone who has already read it would make sense, but you are selling it to people who have not yet read it.

So that’s your goal is to intrigue them enough, to entice them into your story world, where you can take things to the next level. And so now we’re assuming that you’ve put in some great keywords you’re in the right categories, the right readers have found you and your blurb has been so cleverly crafted and enticing that they have clicked and purchased your book.

And now they’ve finished reading your book and they’re leaving reviews. So we are going to talk a little bit about what not to do when it comes to reviews and sharing a couple of stories around how we’ve handled different things that are related to that. So Michele do you want to jump in there?

Michele Amitrani: Absolutely. I think one of the most important things is that you have to realize not everyone will like your book. It’s difficult. Take a deep breath. Okay. Now you’re in, you have to realize that it’s important, because, it’s one of the things that I think can make you or break you as an author.

I don’t believe there is one single author, very successful, that doesn’t a one star review or two stars review. I think it’s something that you have to internalize. Hence, it’s just the next thing that I’m going to tell you do not do not engage in a person that clearly didn’t like your book for reason that might be was something they didn’t expect or they really didn’t have to have do anything else, productive in their day so they just thought that they might, say something not super nice about your book. Just don’t engage as unfortunately many author do. If there was a problem in your book, for example, a formatting problem and for example, if this person pointed it out and you do find that there is a problem in the structure of your book, maybe a chapter was missing, or there was a major structural problem that, somehow it slipped through your attention, make sure to reach out, to apologize, after all, me and Crystal, we told you that you, are in customer service in this regard, you are creating stuff, but at the end of the day, these people are paying for your books. So you have to own it when they something you do wrong and you just have to nod and acknowledge that, and try to do better the next time. That’s a don’t. So engaging people that are clearly maybe trolling around or doing stuff that is not the most productive for you. One other thing that we explored a couple of times in this podcast is: you need to read your reviews.

That’s actually a part of the business of your Authorpreneur journey. And why do you have to do that? It’s because I, we think it’s one of the best way for you to understand what’s working and what’s not working, in your stories. Those are feedback from the readers. They can be very on the point.

Some of them can be very witty, some other might be a bit impolite or rude, but they are, feedback. So you should take them as such. One suggestion that I would, give you and that’s something that actually, something else that Crystal told me and I tried trying not to read those reviews at home, especially if they are maybe three stars, two one stars try to do that, outside, maybe in a bar or in the restaurant somewhere else where there are other people. And I actually noticed the difference. It does make a difference. So you don’t take it so personally, maybe it’s because it’s not just you, there are just in your head and you want to punch somebody in the face.

It’s just, it’s a different environment so you are maybe a bit more open minded in that regard. So try and see what happens. Don’t read the bad reviews alone in your house. Tried to do it outside and see how it goes. The other thing that, I think it’s important sometimes we spend, we spend too much time on going from one page to the other of our products.

So, for example, I have books in two languages in two different markets. So if I need to check for a review, I will have to go in several different pages for book one, my Omnilogos series, and two and three and four, there is actually a faster way, which is go to your Author Dashboard, and then see them, each and every one of them, one after the other, I think it’s just something important that saves you time.

Definitely these are my suggestion on what to do and not to do reviews-wise. But one take away, out of this it’s again it’s a business and there are customers that are going to be, not in line with your product. They’re not going to be happy about it. Try not to take it personally, try to make the best out of it and try if you can, to get what they’re telling you and if that opinion has been repeated more than once, twice, three times, and then definitely take a mention of that because it’s important for you I think it really can help you giving you a feedback, on your books and your next book is going to be better because of that. So those were my suggestion on the review sides.

How do you tackle, with people that don’t exactly enjoy your books? What do you do to them?

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I think there’s a couple things to circle back to you in there. One of them is that in addition to reading the reviews outside of your house, and you mentioned reading them all in one place on your author dashboard and the author dashboard we’re talking about is the Author Central Dashboard. So it’s not the KDP dashboard that’s not where they collect up all the reviews. If you have claimed your author profile in Author Central, they will gather all of those together. And I think the coolest feature of that is that you can say how you want them to be sorted. There’s a little dropdown on the screen, and you can say you want to see highest to lowest, which means it will show you all your best reviews, or you can say lowest to highest.

So if you are in learning mode and you want to find out what negative reviews were in there and what they were saying then you can click lowest to highest. It also sorts by all the new ones, since you were last time in your dashboard, which means you don’t have to look through all the old stuff again, you can see just what the new ones are.

And one extra important reason to be looking through those is that there’s actually fairly frequently that I find, once you start to build up a lot of reviews on your books and some of mine, like a couple of hundred a review, once you start to build up a whole bunch, you become a little bit of a target for spammers because they see that the books are popular and people are finding them.

And so you may find that some of your reviews are not real reviews at all. There may be like one star, two stars review that says, yeah, I didn’t like this book you should go read this other book instead and then there’s a link to that other book. And it’s really somebody who’s just trying to call them to their own book or who has been hired by another author to you try to drive traffic towards their own book.

And when you find reviews like that, or if you find a review that’s been posted that very clearly is not talking about your characters or your book, it’s actually the wrong information because that does happen sometimes you can just click a button that says request that this review be removed and you just explain why and you say, okay, this isn’t my book this is not what the characters are called this is junk review. And usually Amazon will review it and pull it down. And, that’s just really another reason why you want to keep track, because especially at the beginning, when you don’t have so many reviews, one review like that could really skew your star average, which is going to have an impact on your ads ability to work and on your ability to apply it for other promotions and stuff, because many of the promotions and sites require that you have a minimum of three and a half to four stars ratings in order to apply for those programs. So you do really want to double check. It’s also happens occasionally that something goes wrong with the reviewing functionality and a ton of reviews will disappear off your book but if you’re not checking that every night and then you wouldn’t notice.

And I know of multiple cases where, and this has happened to me as well, where I logged in one day and was like, wait, where did all they go? And there was, 30 or 40 reviews had been removed from one of my book and it was a glitch and I reported it and they said, oh, we’ll figure it out, and then a few hours later, they were back. And so if you’re not paying attention to stuff like that, things just disappear and you never really know what’s happened. It is really important to be paying attention there and I think I have had a couple instances where people have not liked how something ended in a book or found an error, the laws about, the laws about car seats changed actually. And so one of my older books, there’s a girl who’s I think she’s five at the time, and she’s not in a car seat because at the time that I wrote the book, that law wasn’t yet in effect. And so now the kids are a lot older that still have to be in car seats in the car and so that has changed and somebody was very upset that I was like being unsafe basically with a child in my book. And so I was able to reply and say: Okay, here’s, what’s going on. This has been fixed, like you can download it now. From here. And so that’s the only time when you really want to engage.

And usually when you’re engaging with people who have given you some kind of feedback or pointed out, just start by saying ‘thank you’ for taking the time to send this to me. I really appreciate you’re doing that. And then if something has been changed, then you tell them how it’s been changed.

I don’t usually advocate for people defending themselves against a review that isn’t good because that does not end well it’s someone’s opinion of your book they get to have whatever opinion they want. And even sometimes when they’re not correct, It does not help you to argue that. We had one of my children’s books actually years ago, was reviewed through a national service and the reviewer said several not very nice things about the fact that they really hate computer generated artwork in kid’s books. And actually the book was watercolour. So it had actually been painted, but the lady who did the painting is an animator and there was that feeling to it.

And so even though she wasn’t right arguing with her would not help because she’s stating a personal opinion. It’s not about being right. It’s about just letting people have their say and then learning from it and moving on. So I think really, you only engage with people when it is that you have done something wrong and you are apologizing because there’s not really any other situation where the person is going to appreciate you bouncing it back to them and being like, no, your opinion is wrong. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t know anybody who loves that. That is just something to keep in mind that really only engage when you are looking at it as a customer service opportunity to turn it around in some way, if you’re reaching out with a free book, that is A fixed diversion from whatever they pointed out or you’re just thanking them and reassuring them that you’ll fix it. You’ll look into it then. That’s really the only time that’s okay. Now it is time for everybody’s favourite curious jar. I am going to pull lots of pretty colours to choose from. Tell me when to stop.

So you need to tell us a story with the words, ‘fire’ and ‘silver’ in it. The story must contain two characters who have never met. You have 20 seconds to think, and then go.

Michele Amitrani: Go now.

Crystal Hunt: Pink one. Okay. Whoa. It’s a long one. Oh my goodness. Okay. improv time. So you need to tell us a story with the words, ‘fire’ and ‘silver’ in it. The story must contain two characters who have never met. You have 20 seconds to think, and then go.

Michele Amitrani: Okay. I think I have it. Fire and silver. And then can you repeat the rest?

Crystal Hunt: Your story must have fire and silver in it. And the two characters must never have met.

Michele Amitrani: Okay. There is a firefox that meets for the first time, a silver dolphin. They get to know each other and a friendship has begins, sorry.

And then that friendship blows into something more deep. And, but there is a problem. Like the fox cannot live on the water and the Dauphine cannot leave on the ground right? So the silver dolphin and the Firefox sit and think how they could solve this issue. So their love is at stake they either have to decide to move on and not to see each other again, or to find the solution.

So what’s going to happen? So the firefox it’s going on the human village and in this human village, there is a Hunter and I’m going to wrap the story now so it’s not going to get too long, it might be actually a he story that I didn’t use for my 12 by 20 challenge, but the firefox goes to the village, and convince a Hunter to build a, how do you call that in English? That building that can, be on top of the water?

Crystal Hunt: A boathouse or a float house?

Michele Amitrani: Yeah, something like that. So convinces him to build one of these and so the fox can go over water and the dolphin can go up and they can see each other, maybe.

That’s the some story that I came up with. Yeah. There wasn’t a lot of components and stuff. I probably should have taken 10 more seconds to think of the wrapping up, but yeah, silver dolphin and firefox meets and share the love together.

Crystal Hunt: There you go. You wrote a love story.

Michele Amitrani: That’s what I got. And I bought you like a minute or two minutes of time.

Crystal Hunt: Boy I was busy listening to your story.

Michele Amitrani: So it was interesting. Okay, then that’s what I’ve got. That’s what I can come up with 10 seconds. And we need to find, we need to find out the person that wrote that message, just so you know, because we need to corner that person and have a conversation with her or him. Okay. Now it’s your turn to give us the very best you got.

Crystal Hunt: Okay. I’m going to take 10 seconds to reset my brain because now I can see right now is a firefox and a dolphin.

Michele Amitrani: Yeah. I think it was on the fantasy side and we’re talking about kids book.

Crystal Hunt: Once upon a time on a mountain, far away was a silver dragon named George. George was quite lonely actually, there wasn’t a lot of other silver dragons anywhere to be found and people had become kind of unfriendly of late. They had heard all these stories about how dragons breathe fire on everyone and were quite horrible and were attacking villages and they’d seen, the Hobbit and, Smog was just really giving every other dragon, a bad rap. And so George was quite sad and what he really wanted was a friend.

And so he decided to go on an adventure into the nearby village to try and make himself a friend. So George pact a little dragon pack and a set off through the forest, crushing a few trees along the way and occasionally he would meet some people who would run screaming, but he tried to make friends with him, but he didn’t seem to understand what he was saying at all.

And every now and then he would try to talk in a little bit of flame would actually come out of his mouth so it’s possible that he did burn down like small pieces of the forest on his way to the village. But eventually he got there. And there was nobody left. Everyone had gone. The people that he had scared had run as fast as they could back to the village.

And the only person who was left was one small human and her name was Candice and Candice was sitting in the middle of her bedroom playing with a set of little plastic dragons. She had knights and princesses and dragons and the knight had been captured of course, and was being guarded by the dragon. The princess was about to do the rescuing.

And so when George appeared, she immediately sprang up with her little plastic sword that she had stolen from the prince of course, you didn’t need it. He was captured. And so she started yelling and running at George because she was going to defend herself and he screamed in his dragony way: “Wait don’t! Don’t!” And she stopped.

And then they looked at each other for a while and she tried to talk to him and she said, “What? Who are you? What do you want?” And he says: “All I’m looking for is a friend.” And because she was a little girl and not quite as deaf as all the grownups to other ways of speaking, she understood what he was saying. And she said: “Oh, so you’re not going to burn my house down?”

And he said. “No, not on purpose, only by accident, but maybe it would be better if we were outside for the rest of this conversation.”

And so she told the tight up prince to stay where he was and she abandoned her plastic dragons and they went outside and then they became friends. That’s all I got.

Michele Amitrani: That is way more structured than mine. I can see that you’ve been writing in this kind of genre way more than myself. Like it’s pretty good stuff.

Crystal Hunt: It’s a bit hazy around the conflict and the resolution.

Michele Amitrani: You know, for 10 to 20 seconds, it’s pretty good stuff.

Crystal Hunt: The characters have names anywhere you go that always makes it immediately more humanizing. We would love to hear your answers to the curious jar question, which in this case, it was an improv story, which you will get to type, or you can record yourself if you like and share a link to a YouTube video somewhere, that would be fun way to share your improv story, but it must contain ‘silver’ and ‘fire’ and have two characters. Those are the only restrictions and be fit for public consumption. Let’s just go ahead and put a PG rating on whatever we’re going to share on the public website.

Michele Amitrani: And or show notes, links to resources that we mentioned today, and for coupons and discounts on the tool that we really love please visit us at us strategicauthorpreneur.com.

Crystal Hunt: Be sure to subscribe. So you don’t miss out on our next episode where we’ll be talking about things that have gone wrong during the publishing process and what you can do to avoid having the issues that we have had. In the meantime, happy writing. And we can’t wait to hear your stories!

Michele Amitrani: See you next week.