 Disclaimer: The views expressed in this review are those of the reviewer and not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing. The reviewer was not paid or offered any inducement for this review but was provided with a free review copy.  Cooee Baby is a book that works on many levels. If you just want an adventure story, then great. Five stars all the way. It really works as adventure. But on the deeper level, as a story about a neuro-divergent young woman, there is a lot going on. I’ll cover some of the nuances later in this review. Athena Fernandez is the neuro-divergent young woman. Her real first name is Awhina, but she doesn’t like it because people don’t know how to pronounce it, so she changes it, and to everyone other than her parents she becomes Athena. Early in the story Athena is diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome*, which is one particular syndrome on the much broader autism scale. Not only is Athena neuro-divergent, however, she is also a brilliant scholar, with a particular talent for maths and sciences. This takes her to Cambridge University where we start to get a real insight into her personality. This is something I will again return to later in this review. After graduation with an honours degree, and starting to prepare her PhD proposal, Athena’s mother offers her the opportunity to go on a five-week cruise around the islands of Indonesia. This is not your normal “floating gin palace” type cruise but is on a much smaller ship where more time is allowed to experience the diverse cultures that will be encountered. I don’t want to give any away spoilers, but I can’t tell you about the key story point without revealing some of what happens, but I’ll try not to tell you too much. Athena is involved in a swimming accident that threatens her life. It also disfigures her. She is rescued and taken to Papua where she is treated by the shaman of a local tribe, the Walukek. She is then kidnapped by a neighbouring tribe, the Suamu, who are in a perpetual state of war with the Walukek.  The author, Charles Moberley There is always a risk in placing a European in a situation like this that they succumb to “white saviour” syndrome, trying to modernise the indigenous people for their “betterment”.
This was common in 19th and early 20th century literature as it reflected the colonial values of the day. Fortunately, author Charles Moberley doesn’t succumb to this in Cooee Baby and Athena does nothing that would change the culture of either of the tribes with which she lives. Indeed, the culture of the Suamu is central to the plot. So, having said at the start of this review that I would award 5 stars for this book as an adventure story, why have I only awarded 4 stars? The answer is in the development of Athena’s character within the story. Asperger’s Syndrome doesn’t make the person intrinsically unlikeable, but Athena’s character I found very hard to engage with. Her overbearing mother and emotionally absent father must, therefore, account for a lot of her behaviour, rather than her neuro-divergence. Because, despite all her bravado, Athena is also very vulnerable. Her outspoken and sometimes obnoxious behaviour is, in part, motivated by her feelings of vulnerability and this isn’t explored in any depth. It means that the picture we get of Athena seems to be incomplete. She behaves like a spoiled brat a lot of the time, but her neuro-divergence doesn’t account for that. While Athena may suffer from Asperger’s, she is also capable of analysing both her own behaviour and that of others, which means that beneath the surface she does understand emotions and their functions, but we are offered too few glimpses of that part of Athena’s personality, which means that she remains, largely, unlikeable. I didn’t expect some damascene conversion from Athena, in which she changed her behaviour significantly. That would not fit with her neuro-divergence. However, she is portrayed as a person in possession of complex analytical and reasoning skills, so I would have expected her to develop an understanding that the way people act towards her is a reflection of how she acts towards them. But that insight is lacking. There is also Athena's resilience. People on the autism scale are not known for dealing well with the external environment. They often try to shut out the world. But not Athena. She may be frightened, but she stares down her assailants with a bravery that Jack Reacher would nod his head towards. That too, I feel, speaks of something deeper in her character than can be accounted for by her neuro-divergence. It was this quality that finally won me over and kept me reading the book. But, if you can get past that characterisation, this book has a great deal going for it. As I said at the top of this review, it is great as an action adventure and if you can read it that way then you are likely to enjoy it immensely. To find out more about “Cooee Baby” by Charles Moberley, click here. * According to the charity Mencap, Asperger’s Syndrome is no longer a term used by the medical profession to describe Athena’s form of neuro-divergence. The person after whom the disorder was named (Hans Asperger) had strong connections to the Nazis, which is why the term has fallen out of favour. If you wish to be politically correct you would now describe the condition as an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) If you have enjoyed this book review, be sure not to miss out on future blogs by signing up for our newsletter. We’ll even give you a free ebook for doing so.
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 Most Indie authors know that selling books in a series is more profitable than selling stand-alone books. But it isn’t all plain sailing, and we’ve just come across a couple of things you should know about how Amazon handles series. If you publish your series using KDP then you can create a series page on Amazon. There are a couple of advantages to this. First of all, the series page doesn’t have any advertising on it, so when people click a link to it, they will only see books in your series, not ads for other people’s books. Secondly, at the top right of the page there is a button that allows the reader to buy the whole series with a single click - and some readers do that. So, instead of selling one book at a time, you sell the whole series in one go. That means that all the books in the series move up the sales ranking in lock step. It also means that all the titles appear in the “also bought” lists that Amazon shows readers.  The “1 click” button is also “smart”. That means if the reader has already bought books 1 and 2, they won’t be included in the purchase. Also, the price for the rest of the series is adjusted accordingly, making the rest of the series appear cheaper. In addition, if any of the books in the series is reduced, maybe because of a Kindle Countdown Deal, the overall series price will be adjusted accordingly. So far, so good.  But there are a couple of things you should know about. The most significant one is that if you don’t publish through KDP, you can’t have a series page on Amazon. Using publishing sites like Draft2Digital (D2D) allows you to set the books up as a series, just like on KDP. D2D will also sell your books on Amazon, if you include them in your selection of distribution channels. This also applies to some other self publishing sites. BUT Even if you have set the book up as a series on D2D, it won’t create a series page on Amazon. So, you lose those advantages listed earlier in the blog. Yet another reason for using KDP! But some people have an aversion to using them, but that’s their business.  The second significant issue affects authors that do publish using KDP. When you create a series, Amazon assigns an ASIN to it, just the way it assigns an ASIN to the individual books. If you use the link to the series page in your marketing and end matter (which you should for all the reasons given above) then the link will include the series ASIN. So far, so good (again). The problems arise when you add a new book to the series. Amazon deletes the old series ASIN and assigns a new one, because it identifies the extended series as a new product. That means that all the old links you have been using are now invalid and if readers use them, they’ll get a “page unavailable” notice.  That means that when you publish a new book in the series, you must change all the links in all your marketing and end matter.
The new ASIN won’t go live until the book goes live and there’s no way of knowing in advance the precise moment when the series ASIN will change, but it will probably be within 72 hours of publication of the new book. It would be unethical of us to claim credit for telling you all of the above, so here’s a link to the YouTube video where we made the discovery. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  The Amazon algorithm hates spikes in book sales. There, now you know. Authors used to use a technique called the “book bomb” to get their books selling, but no one talks about those anymore. A book bomb was a splurge of advertising and promotions on a single day to send a book zooming up the sales rankings, so it would get noticed. But Amazon decided it didn’t like those sorts of spikes, because they weren’t sustainable in terms of sales. If all the marketing was happening on a single day, sales soon started to drop off on subsequent days. Part of that is because of the way that Amazon calculates sales rankings. A sale is counted as a whole number on the day it’s made, but the next day it is only counted as ½ a sale. The day after that it is a ¼ of a sale and so on until the fraction becomes so small it is meaningless.  That is why you can be riding high in the sales rankings one day and you’re pondlife the next. So, Indie authors had to find a new way of getting the Amazon algorithms working for them that didn’t create a spike but created a trend instead. What they came up with was the stacked promo, or promo stacking if you want to express it the other way around. A well-planned stacked promo campaign can gather you a lot of sales over a longer time period, which creates a trend and gets the attention of the Amazon algorithms. They can also be used in conjunction with Facebook and Amazon ads  That’s because Amazon wants to sell books because selling books makes them money. And the easiest books for Amazon to sell are the ones that are already selling because the author is promoting them. So, if your sales are creating an upward trend, as they should be over the period of a stacked promotion for a discounted book, the Amazon algorithms will do two things. The first is that they will start to include them in their recommendations listings. You know the ones in the carousels that appear on the sales page for books and act as competition. That’s the “recommended for you” list and the “also bought” list.  That’s basically free advertising for your book, as a lot of people buy from those lists because it saves them having to do more searches. The second thing it does only applies if your book is subscribed to Kindle Select, the driver behind Kindle Unlimited. A lot of “wide” authors don’t know this, but if your book is in Kindle Select and its starts to sell as an ebook, then it will be recommended to Kindle Unlimited subscribers for them to download. This is because Amazon assumes that if people are buying your book, other people will download it for free on KU and that justifies the subscription price Amazon charges. That is more free advertising and the majority of 6 figure earning authors make most of their money this way, not through sales of the ebook.  But if you just go for a sales spike, none of that happens. Do stacked promos work? All I can say is that we have just run one for our book The Magi and yes, it worked. How much does it cost? The most expensive book promo site is BookBub and their Featured Deals start at around $100 (£80) and can run as high as $1,000 for the most popular genres. I think it is fair to say that you need to be selling quite a lot of books already if you want to book a slot with them. But many sites offer far cheaper packages than that and they also have a significant reach. They start from around $20 and I don’t think any charge more than $100, but check their prices for yourself.  Unsurprisingly the best sites are much in demand, so plan ahead. You need to be looking at least 30 days ahead if you want to secure a slot on a specific day or in a particular week, but for some genres you might have to look as far ahead as 60 days. There are so many book promo sites, how do you know which are good, which are bad, and which are scammers? I’ll provide a link at the end of the blog to another blog by book marketing guru David Gaughran, that lists sites he has used personally, and we have also used some of them. You can trust all those sites. But by all means check with other sources if you don’t trust us or David Gaughran. In fact, I recommend that you do. So, there you have it. Stacked promos are great for promoting your back catalogue on a tight budget, but they also work well as a promotion for a new book in a series, where you can list Book 1 at a heavy discount (99c or even free), Book 2 at a higher price and the latest book at full price. Basically, you are building a pricing ladder to encourage the reader to climb down deep into your series and you can do that for anything from a 3 book series to a 10 book (or more) series.  RESOURCES
For David Gaughran’s blog on stacked promotions, including the best sites to use, click here. For more information on making the Amazon algorithms work for you, we recommend David Gaughran’s book “Amazon Decoded”. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  When is a book not a book? When it is a Christmas Gift. This blog may be a little late for you to do anything with the content right now, but we hope that by passing on its message it gives you something to think about when marketing for the next year. If you already have a marketing plan, this is something that you can add in and if you haven’t – why not? Those books aren’t going to sell themselves! Fail to plan - plan to fail.  As regular readers will know, we are great advocates of advertising, both on Amazon and on Facebook, so we thought we’d like to share a bit of a success story with you. You could call this a “case study” but that makes it sound a bit fancier than it was. We have one book in our catalogue that makes it ideal for a certain type of person. We’ll get to the details in a moment, but we’ll start with the “back story” first. We noticed back in December 2023 that sales of the book picked up quite considerably and we sold more copies that month than we had during the previous 11. Being curious sorts of people, we wondered why.  We had almost no data that we could analyse, because the growth in sales was “organic”. We hadn’t advertised the book and we hadn’t even promoted it that much, so we had no idea who had bought it. But we did have one very important bit of data. All the copies sold were in paperback, not ebook format. That was what gave us our biggest clue. Asking a few contacts in the book marketing world brought us the suggestion that the copies were being sold not as books – but as Christmas gifts. Yes, of course they were books, but that wasn’t why they were being bought. They were being bought so that they could be wrapped up in nice Christmas paper, to be given to someone else. The buyer had no intention of reading the book themselves, which is very unusual in the book marketing world.  So, in our marketing plan for November and December 2024 we decided we would aim not at the book buying market, but at the gift giving market. Not all of it, of course. That market is huge and not everyone who buys gifts is going to buy a book as a gift. But there was still quite a large segment of the market that we could aim at. We estimated the market size to be in region of 2 million people. OK, so how did we arrive at that figure?  The book in question is aimed at golfers, of whom there is an estimated one million in the UK. But we weren’t going to be targeting the golfers, we were going to be targeting the people who would be buying Christmas gifts for golfers. That is likely to be a much larger figure, when you take into account spouses/partners, children, siblings and friends. In creating our ads, therefore, we didn’t use our normal approach of saying “This is a great book for all you golfers” We changed our approach entirely and said “This is the ideal gift for the golfer in your life”. That affected the way we targeted the book in our advertising. We are looking primarily at Facebook and Amazon ads here.  The crossover was in pricing. We reduced the book’s price to make it a little bit more attractive to gift givers who were on a tight budget. That would also make it more attractive for children to give to parents, uncles, aunties etc. In our Amazon keyword targeted ads we also used keywords related to Christmas gifts. Christmas and Xmas were included in all the keyword phrases we put into the ads. But on Facebook it meant we didn’t try to target golfers, as they weren’t the people we were trying to sell to. We left our targeting as wide as possible, so that anyone who was buying a gift for a golfer might consider it.  In terms of the graphics and the advertising text, we also focused on the gift giving opportunity. The image next to this para is one of the ones we used. As you can see, we magnified the gift giving potential of the book as well as pointing out the price reduction.* In the ad’s primary text, we also focused on the gift giving opportunity, making more of that than we did of the content of the book. Non golfers would hardly pay attention to the book’s content. They probably read little, if any, of it before they wrapped it up.  So, to the results of the advertising campaigns. Immediately after launching the ads at the beginning of December sales weren’t any better than they had been throughout the year, but they got better rapidly. As the month progressed and people started to run out of time to buy gifts for their loved ones, sales started to accelerate. In week 2 of the month sales doubled. In week 3 they quadrupled and hit their peak over the weekend of 20th/21st December, which was pretty much the latest date by which delivery could be guaranteed in time for Christmas. Part of the slow start to sales we experienced at the beginning of the month we think was down to the Facebook algorithm “learning” who it should show the ads to. After all, we hadn’t given it a target audience to work with. From its scan of the images and text we used it probably thought it should be showing the ad to golfers. But it would then have learnt that the audience was much wider, which was when we started to see the acceleration in sales.  So, the lessons we learnt:
While this blog has mainly been about marketing for Christmas, it also suggests opportunities for selling other genres of books at other times of the year. For example, selling romance books in the run up to Valentines Day, or selling books as birthday gifts at any time of the year. There are many different days throughout the year dedicated to particular causes or events (Hint: May The Fourth Be With You) and many of those offer opportunities for specially targeted sales campaigns. *Editor’s note: the book is no longer available at that price. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. |
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