[BPN] Major Amazon & Group Changes Expires 27th June
19 Jun. 2023
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The Video above contains important information that you need to action ASAP expires 27th June, 2023
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TL;DR
The Book Publishers Network group was created after the Publish and Profit Facebook groups were shut down. John has developed launch software and tools to help members promote and sell their books. However, Facebook has become an unreliable platform with many issues. The group plans to transition to a paid subscription model with resources like training, guest speakers, and new tools. Members will have different subscription levels. The changes will help members sell more books by focusing on promotion and sales after launch, not just publishing. Amazon has also recently made changes like reducing the number of categories, making launches more difficult and requiring more accurate category selection. John's software has helped members navigate these changes.
Your options include:
- Do Nothing – Facebook Group will be archived and won’t be able to launch books or access resources, but remain on Book Alerts
- Join Authorverse now and pay $49– launch books and access resources and access new best seller training.
- Join Authorverse later and pay $99– launch books and access resources but NO access new best seller training.
Key Moments:
- Amazon recently made significant changes to their category system, reducing the number of categories authors can choose from and removing the option to request additional categories through customer support. This makes it harder to rank well and gain visibility.
- John has developed software to help authors research and select the best categories for their books, which has saved authors a significant amount of time and effort.
- The Book Publishers Network Facebook group will be archived on Facebook to be replaced with AuthorVerse.club and a new platform for authors and publishers.
- They plan to create a paid subscription model to fund ongoing resources and tools for members, including webinars, guest speakers, and a chatbot.
- Facebook is seen as a declining platform, with many users getting banned or frustrated by issues. The new platform aims to provide more control and vetting of members.
- Choosing the right categories and gaining initial rankings in those categories is important for ongoing book sales on Amazon.
- Special launch support and software are still valuable given the increased difficulty of Amazon's new category system.
- John has spent a significant amount of time and resources developing tools to help authors and publishers launch successfully and sell more books.
- The new platform aims to provide a place for members to share expertise, promote services, and help each other beyond just book launches.
- International rankings can still be improved through techniques like deleting and re-adding categories.
TRANSCRIPT
Wonderful. Everybody, thank you for joining us. I am Everett O'Keefe, and this is John North. So you were getting the international connection. It's some early, early hour in Australia or something. Right, John? Or did I get that? Yes. Like the better than night.
It's 9:00 AM in the morning, so it's not, I'm not awake now, so it's pretty Well get me outta bed by now. So. All right. Did we did we get you pre or post handball? No, no. Not tomorrow. Tonight. So it's Tuesday, Wednesday. All right. Fair enough. So it is great to see everybody here today. We're gonna talk about some changes that Amazon has tossed out to us last week or two weeks ago without any warning that we're aware of and a lot of changes going on there.
We're gonna talk a little bit about the book Publisher's Network. And some changes that we're need to put in place in the Book Publisher's Network. We're also gonna talk about the Evolvepreneur platform and some changes there for those familiar with that platform for researching categories on Amazon and tracking launches and all of that.
That's been really such an important part of what many of us have been doing. It's great to see everybody here in the group. And as we go, feel free to use the q and a function to ask questions. We'll do our best to answer them. So first, just a quick backstory. The book Publisher's Network, of which many of you are members, started on a Sunday night, about 10:00 PM Pacific time, when I got this random message from John North that said the publish and Profit Facebook groups were done, they were shut off.
They got booted. Yeah, we all got kicked out, all the shirts got kicked out and everything, and we thought. Wait a minute. We need to do something to help to support all of these publishers and authors. And from that within hours the name of the group, the logo of the group, the Facebook group, the everything of the group was created.
I didn't know I was gonna spend a Sunday night doing that with John, but we did. And since that time, John has been just absolutely fantastic in sharing his launch software and setting up notifications and doing everything to support this group of publishers and authors. And over time it's grown.
It's really, really grown, but at the same time, participation over time has dropped and that's understandable. Fewer and fewer people are on Facebook. Not all of us are publishing books anymore. And we get distracted. And so engagement in the group has gone down over time and really wanna look at this as a way to move beyond Facebook and and if necessary, have a smaller group, but a more active and engaged group so that we can help each other more and more.
And that really was put to head two weeks ago with Amazon increasing their printing prices, changing category handling, changing how international launches may work, all of those things. So John, I'm gonna just tell you, I was on vacation all last week and John said, Hey, we need to do this thing.
And I'm like, John, I'm on vacation. And he just took it on and just ran with it. So, I am gonna hand it over to John now and he's gonna kinda walk us through where, what's going on, where we're headed, all of that fun stuff. And I'm just gonna provide, I'm supposed to provide color commentary or something along those lines, so no high expectations ever.
That's it. So John, take it away. Thank you Everett. And yes, it was an interesting Sunday night. I must remember, I can't remember what year it was. Was it 2019? I, I, it seems like it was 19 or 18. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. So it's four, five years. So happy anniversary. Anyhow, so I'm gonna share my screen to make sure we can share my screen.
I haven't used the webinar software for a while, so let's make sure it works properly.
I'll let you know when it shows. I'm just gonna know which button to press here. PowerPoint slide. Okay. Let's just give that a, can you see my screen? It's coming up. Cool. It works. I see a book Publisher's Network logo. There you go. And interesting enough, we never changed that logo. We never did anything.
Never. So that's pretty good. Better than that.
Okay, so a little bit of blurb about me and Everett, not that's basically what we, I gleaned from Amazon. So we've both basically been Wall Street Journal bestsellers and, and USA Today we did joint venture there, which is pretty cool. So we've done a lot over the years together. And I think part of the reason we wanna do the group today is everything is all part of being together.
It's about, you know, trying to leverage each other's knowledge and abilities. And I think that's one of the things that I'm finding with social media, particularly nowadays, isn't really doing it anymore for me. So I think you'll find a lot of people feel the same way. So, so that's us. All right. So today we're gonna talk about book publishing in 2023.
I don't even believe it's 2023. My son is 23, so he is born in 2000. So I can always remember his, his birthday our new Duke group direction, and we're gonna talk about Amazon changes and we'll hold that till last so that basically I get to tell you everything else first. So that's the, that's the, the price of attendance really.
Okay. All right, so let's just talk about some stats. I was, I was reading a magazine bizarrely, which is got lots of interesting stats in another thing. Everybody reads those magazines and know really, but I was reading this magazine. I said, mystery and romance and science fiction are 350 million in 2011.
89 million in 2019. So look at the growth of that thing. All right. And you just gotta go to Amazon and see how many shirtless guys are on that website. And you know that, remember USA Today, we got beat all the shirtless guys. That's right. We got beat by the shirtless guys. Yeah. And even smashed with always the hot steamy romance fiction.
Exactly. And that's what sells, right? Romance and science fiction sells. So just so you know, and we do none of that. So basically it's sort of like a whole opportunity. Random Penguin Ringland House alone publishes 85,000 titles a year, which is the largest number of titles published by Major Publishing House.
That's incredible. Yeah. And the big five dominate book publishing market in terms of revenue from book sales. So they, but they only published about 10 to 20% of the annual titles. And we're talking about this before where we thought that. To me, before self-publishing existed, most people would've you know, gone through a publisher.
So maybe there's only about a hundred thousand titles you existed 20 years ago per year. That's an expansion of the marketplace and basically there's a massive amount well say and put that in perspective if, if if the Big five, which are soon to be, become the big four, I keep hearing that there's gonna be some they're gonna join some ME emerging mergers, but if they're publishing 10 to 20, that means all the independent publishers and self-publishers are publishing 80 to 90% of the titles out there.
Mm. Which shows you, for those of us who are doing publishing, how big that market is and why we are never worried about competition. Mm-hmm. Amongst each other. And that's what allows us to support each other so openly because, There's so much business out there. We're not worried about soandso or Soandso stealing our business or our market share.
No, it's massive. So just double check something, something mentioned about making the screens full screen. Are they full screen to most people or is that something it's a little, it's it only takes up a small portion of my screen and I've got a really big screen. Okay. Maybe I've done the wrong share.
Let me just stop and start it again. The button to do that. Cause it's not really specific on the.
Screen there. I might just share the desktop and be done with it.
How's that? You know what it was doing? It was show. That's much better. It was showing your preview, it was showing the note taker or whatever, control. Oh, right. Okay. Like it. Alright, very good. Much better. Have note yourself. The option doesn't work. All right. Okay. So non-fiction count, 88% of the books published each year.
So even though you look at romance fine, six 88% of non-fiction books, which is our gig mostly, although we do do some. I love that. I love that number. Mm, thank you. And I love that number cuz that's all of my target market. There you go. On. So calculation on Google is this 130 million books published globally.
So these numbers are very interesting when you start thinking about it as whether it's real or whether there's, you know, like not everybody really knows, but obviously think Google would have a good idea. I can't think, I just don't understand how that can be. But it is talking about globally.
Globally. Yeah. It's a crazy number. So that's a crazy number, particularly in China. Actually, one of the biggest publishing when I was looking in in the stats was China. It exceeds us in terms of publishing numbers in some cases. So there are more people. 2022, 12.2, 12.25 million eBooks are estimated beyond Kindle.
That's a lot of login issues. If you had 12.2 Google login, imagine that. Can you imagine that number coming through your website? Trying me crazy. I podcast and audiobooks experienced extraordinary growth. And we're seeing that with podcasting and with the audiobooks, they just sell fairly well.
So that's a untapped market that most people don't tap into. 4 million titles a year. They reckon 1.7 million are self-published. So that's huge numbers. When you think about if it was a hundred thousand, 20 years ago, the imagine amount of numbers are coming through, and both Twitter, Facebook and Twitter declining in users.
Instagram isn't really growing and TikTok is obviously growing. And I don't like TikTok, but at the end of the day, it's a case that there's a social media apocalypse, if you like, coming soon too. I think the, the, the giants are now starting a big. Big tech war and, and you are likely to be in the middle of all this.
So also, the other thing that happened in 2022 is print paper prices went up three times in 2022. And so Ingram's actually now wondering if it's even worth selling to bookstores and libraries due to the print costs. So they're actually considering whether it's even worth doing that's on print on demand.
So basically what's happening is the, the bookstores are all doing small quantities of books. And it's just not worth the cost because the price of the other end. Yeah. You know, and most people don't know that. You know, a store like Barnes and Noble, they, they can hold the books for, there's a set period, I don't remember if it's 30 days or 45 days or whatever, and then they can return them for free at the publisher's expense.
Yes. And they have dedicated staff at Barnes and Noble who their job every day is to pull a list. Of the books that are gonna run out of that window in the next couple days to ship them back to the publisher at the publisher's expense. Mm. And then turn around and reorder them back in so that their inventory sitting in the store is always returnable.
Mm-hmm. You think about what that costs the publisher to handle. Also too, by the way, if you're in Ingram, note to self when you publish a book on Ingram, don't tick the make sure you tick the destroy your return. Don't return buttons because you'll get a big bill. You'll suddenly get books in the mail and you wonder what's going on, and they charge you for every single one of they send back to you.
So if you're not gonna, will play that game properly. Don't, don't tick. That box got so many, have we got so many fixing bunions with that surgery books that, I dunno what to do with them right now.
All right, and freight costs fuel with rising fuel costs is most significant fit for issue ever faced by publishers in the general market. So this is mostly for the people out there that are printing volume books, like you say, in publishing environment, but also it means a significant cost to us because of what it means is Amazon just increased their prices, so therefore there's a flow on effect to the user and would like spend the money.
Now major publish is now trimming their new book, offering some delaying production in the hopes of prices will come down. And there's also some pretty interesting barcode changes coming as well which I didn't really get into, delve into too much in the reading, but it's quite significant what they're doing.
Which basically means that they'll wanna return those books and get the new books with the new barcodes on 'em as well. So you can have a huge con concept of getting rid of old books as well. So that sounds like the subject for a future call. Yes. So let's talk about the book publishing network and how it works.
So typically what happens is when someone wants to launch a book in our group, they go to the quick ad and they actually add the book, and they put the ASI in in it. If you don't know when, as i n is, you'd probably come to the wrong meeting and you need to go somewhere else because you dunno what that one is.
It's like you've bit in trouble now cause you don't even know how to publish your book. Right? But it's the Amazon stock code essentially. You do some research and add some books that launched. You set a launch date. At the time we auto posted in the group, we sent out an email blast to say, please buy this book.
We also have some social media posts and we also have an Amazon sales page. At the same time, our book monitors and tracks the, the results. We also take screenshots. We actually also take screenshots for the books that you may not see. So basically if you're a software user, Amazon software user of ours, you can access those screenshots.
If you can't, you can't. But we do have them there. If you ever rejoin, you can actually get 'em back for a period of time. It could be about six months. So some group statistics since we started, and I think it's 2019, I'm guessing that's the number cuz that's when all the campaigns seem to be in the system.
We've done eight 14 campaigns. We've had 881,000 clicks on the bot book page. We've launched, we've got 6,446 bestseller rankings, like categories. USA is 2,700 Canada's 78. 78. Australia's nearly 1,505. Nearly 500 in u uk. That's, that's fantastic. Hang I don't, don't leave that slide yet. I need to do something real quick.
So that is let's see, where is it? 27 30. They say Don't do math. Live, right? No. 14 the same. The suspect. Yeah. So I know that's not right. Yeah. So, oh, it's 6,000. So 64 46 bestseller categories? Yes. Between 814 books. So on average, that's about eight categories per book. Oh, good. That you got the same number as me.
7.91, actually, but Oh yeah. I didn't, I didn't even see it over there. Dang it. All right. That's fine. I was enjoying you doing that math on the fly there. Oh my gosh. So even, even trying to do my phone math on the plate. I know. And that calculator's worth, do you know why there's no calculator on the iPad?
Why? Because apparently when Steve Jobs said, if you, if you're gonna do it, you're gonna look good cuz it looks horrible. What if it was big and stretched on the iPad? Oh my gosh. They said the developer if you can't make it look nice, you know we can't do it. So he said stuff. Yeah, but he also said there was no use.
He also said there was no use for a six inch phone. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. But anyway, that's why they've never done it. So there's no calculator on know that. Very annoying. We digress. So about a hundred buy clicks per per book page, roughly, if you would do the math here. Alright, so about a hundred people click on the buy links on average on a launch.
And. This number doesn't quite make a lot of sense to me, but some of these statistics are that people could be multiple clicking and stuff like that. We've gotta dig into a bit deeper, but we've had about 60,000 visit visits to these book sales pages over the, since 2019. So nearly 60,000 clicks into those pages.
So it's fairly significant kind of traffic. Not 22 million like Kendall. But anyway, you know, so, so however, some books keep on going, and I think this is Natalie's book, right? They've had 1,759 page views. Wow. And so that, so that means she's using that sales page. Yeah. On a regular basis. And not just during launch, but just always using that sales page cuz you were so nice to create this system to create.
An automatic sales page. Yeah, and I've got thousands of books in there cause I also had other books as we're going. The funny thing about it is, and I had calls to talk to Natalie about this cause I said, Natalie, just be careful you don't you use that url. That was at the top of the page there because not you can see it on the screenshot, but if you do the individual button clicks.
I get in trouble with Amazon and I got know I got in trouble. They sent me an email and said, do it again and we'll ban you. Because basically you're not allowed to supply those direct links, those affiliate links anywhere, but your website can't use it on social media. Can't advertise 'em on tv. Can't use those links anywhere.
And so we said, and we, we stated on one of the apps, do I think we said on the bottom of the screen, now don't do it. Take the top page, which is obviously what Natalie's doing. Cause I thought it was Natalie, but it wasn't attractive all the way back and. We're still not quite sure, but I have no control over people using those links.
Right. But someone kindly put my affiliate link in, in hundreds of clicks. So thanks for that. But you also got me into trouble, so, so, but anyway, that's a big number and that's means that people use, and some people, there's other numbers in there too. Other people use it as their ongoing sales book page, because it's got all the links in it.
So it's of use, I guess. So a bit of analysis of the group. Out of 450 members, there's about 470 there, but I think 20 or 30 of them probably shouldn't even be there. We're gonna boot them out because there just seems to be odd profiles and things around about 6% do casual launches, which is people are just kind of staying there.
Like a bit of insurance policy when they're doing their next book. About 2% of publishers. And about 4% of them buy books. So there's 88% interest in that number's back. The 88% is unknown. We don't really know exactly what's going on with those people. And so we also track the click. So when someone clicks on the email links, congratulations Jim Butts.
We need a prize for Jim. Cuz Jim doesn't launch any books. He's a Facebook supporter of everyone in the group. He's, that's incredibly, he's bought almost five, I think it's check together and buy Jim some buy Jim some Amazon gift cards. Because I think at the end of the day, fact, I think I might even send you an Amazon gift card actually.
Because I think, and then cause bill. This is a bit screen Bill and Everett List Bill's here. Yeah. So and then, then Everett of course, and I think China and Sage. So there's quite a few people on that list that actually, I don't think really buy, really launch many books. There's some that are do. So it's interesting that there's still a bit of a stick rate on that.
Well, and also, and also just as a defense, there are a lot of like This only represents people that bought through their email notification, correct? Not on the website. So all the, not through the Facebook notification. So if you happen to get a Facebook notification, you clicked it and you went and bought a book that doesn't show up here.
So all, all that to say, for instance, I doubt I'm number three. I think there are other people that have bought more books than me, but they've bought them directly through Facebook. Cuz I know for instance, Natalie and Becky have definitely bought more than, there's always the same people in Facebook group that put the comments almost.
Yeah. So, yeah, like I know the people, so many of these people are such passionate supporters of everyone in the group. So that's part of the problem is that we don't, you know, we're not necessarily tracking everyone and that's part of the issue today. So, so 814 launches however, about 0.05% of the Facebook group's account for the book buyers.
Not a huge number in that comparison. 60% tell us from what I can glean for the stats and stuff probably buy from the post or being tagged and about 40% buy from email alerts. But the numbers is probably 15 to 20 maybe on a book launch, maybe something like that. If you're really, really pushing my kid to 30, at the end of the day it's, you know, not high anyway.
We have about 130 registered book alerts, so there's people who get emails and buy the books off the emails, and some people aren't in the group, probably about 40. So we're still delving statistics. I, I've got a lot of stuff out from this. We probably invested about a hundred thousand dollars on the development of the platform and ongoing tracking costs because they're, we track over 4 million records a month, so it's quite an expensive kind of gig.
Just, yeah, let's talk, let's, in fact, let's talk about that. I, I, first, everyone needs to recognize John has footed the cost of all of this. There wa there was a time where he and Mike Koenigs were partnering in to support the publisher profit system, but there came a time where that financial connection ended.
And John has supported this and developed it and poured tons of money in it, and I can't, the crazy number of hours. Especially all the times he's been banned by Facebook, banned by Amazon, banned by whatever, simply because he was trying to create an easy way for us to click and get sales. I've been getting the arrows in the back.
Yeah. Yeah. So John's been taking all these arrows in the back and shielding us from getting them. And that's just been amazing. I would've given up long ago. In fact, I want you guys to know I actually developed a piece of launch software. Back in 2016 or something like that, and then got it going and then quickly realized what a mess I had just gotten myself into.
And I said, I don't think I want to be in this business. But John's taken it on and just, I'm just, man. Thank you John. Thank you. Marriage, you get as a full on marriage, this thing. So so we'll get into that a little bit more as well. So Facebook, just some interesting stats. The favorite, favorite Social media platform for 35 to 45 demographic I think would hazard a guess that most younger kids think Facebook's for old people.
And they just do it to keep their grandmother happy when they put the photos up there. That's true. 7% of Gen Z users quit playing to quit Facebook in 2023 and 25% spend plan to spend less time on the platform. I think I, you know, just casually as we've talked, even with our business accelerator group, with our mastermind group, fewer and fewer of us are spending time on Facebook and it, it, it is definitely seems to be a dying platform.
So many people are so frustrated that they've gotten outright band, shadow band. De platformed or just all the, like, how many of us, we've all been spoofed at least three or four times. And it's just so brutal. So tech has not shown a very good track record of looking after your data. And 80%, 80% of American Facebook users think platform protects their privacy and data, which means that the others don't.
And actually I was talking to a guy yesterday who had a present when first started with Microsoft, who, who's running Azure and the new AI chat stuff, and they're saying, you'll load our data up to Amazon, up, up to Microsoft and, and you know, your, your data will be safe with us and four people in the room.
The question kept coming up, can we really trust you with our data? And so I think that's the thing that's really come out of all this is that not understanding in the fact that they've also had a lot of problems with all that. They also don't know whether they trust with the data as well. And that's obviously an education thing, which is good.
And of course our Facebook engagement making is very low. 55 pace folks, zero comments, zero reactions. So and it's like you're talking to yourself and it's like a graveyard out there. So So this is the conclusion that I came to and we spoke about this with Eric, is that the Facebook group is, has low engagement and my, my thing's not fit for purpose.
It's way too, too much in one place. It's too confusing and it's distracting for most people would wanna just come and do what they need to do. And I got banned numerous times. I ran two Facebook profiles so that I can post into the group and everywhere else. It seems like Facebook doesn't like you posting stuff like that in terms of book launching and things like that.
Yeah. You get shut down from posting in your own group. Yes. Which I realized it wasn't my group. It's their group. Funny enough, both of my profiles got banned on the same day, even though they did not connected, and they both got released on the same day. So I've now, since being a Gemini and having two profiles is kind of like it's right.
And we have no real control over the group. It's not really our group, it's Facebook's group. So when I say I can't post my groups, not my group. And we're on the risk of revealing strategies. Anyone that's not really properly vetted as well which could, you know, with great power comes great responsibility.
And there's no easy way to grow or reason to be honest, to grow the group. I, I think also it occurs to me there literally one switch away from none of us being able to communicate to each other. Yes, yes. One button press, in fact, I, my LinkedIn profile got turned off four days ago and I dunno, I'll get it back.
And so all those communications, those messages are gone. So yeah, funny enough, you can't it Facebook group's a little bit like the mafia. You can't leave it. So what happens if you want to shut down a Facebook group and delete it? You have to exit everybody out. You have to exit everyone one by one, and then leave the group yourself, like close the door on the way out, and then it'll delete it.
Otherwise, it has to be paused. So you don't leave either. So this is the kind of plan we came up to, and there's a little bit to it, but I'll get through it a little bit, is migrate to a purpose built platform over the next couple of months. So we actually don't have all these problems that solved one of the major things.
And at that time, the probably would be deleted. Well, I actually wanted to leave the archive cause I don't really got the time to sit there and delete 5, 4 70 people. But we'll archive it I think cuz what it means is it still has a lot of stuff in there that's that's, that's needed. We'll change a paid subscription model to encourage development ongoing resources, and we'll get to that directly.
We're gonna a whole regular meetings with guest speakers and things like that to sort of help educate people and keep them in a, you know, in terms of what's going on in the industry and things like that. We plan to grow it and grow the bias for the launches. So if we can grow the email list and stuff like that.
And I'm talking to another Company that runs a lot of their own platform for authors. We encourage these guys to kind of join us and get some information and buy some books. And we all, it all works for us. We get those books out. Wanna build new tools, like we've got a gift card campaign thing that we've kind of specked out and build up a mock off of that, which means that you could gift people books and you could actually do an ongoing thing as well.
And that's a really difficult thing to do on Amazon typically. But it'd be a really great way to grow your, your ongoing sales. Continue to develop the Amazon software, which is a monster. In terms of that, we have a lot of things we wanna do with it. Very useful monster. Yeah. Build some JVs and partnerships with other author groups as we discussed to try and get some more traction for us.
I think our position in the marketplace isn't how to teach someone how to publish a book. I think our marketplace in the marketplace is how to launch a book. Make ongoing sales and maybe get reviews and things like that. So it's what's post-launch? What happens after you publish this book? That's the most important part of the book.
Publishing the book is all wonderful and pretty and shiny and great, but the reality is if you don't actually promote it, what was the point of it? So I think that's where we sort of fit in our marketplace. Launch the book, get Off the Good Ground, and I think there's plenty of other resources out there about publishing a book not nearly as many for doing what we do because exactly the common biggest question I get is to people is how can I sell more books?
How can I get more reviews? That's the two biggest things that people ask and, and most people just ignore those questions. Focus on what happens after the book is published. That's obviously, that's what we're talking about, promotion and sales. And also build our own bookstore. We'd kind of have our own bookstore, but I'd like it to be a lot better.
Almost like emulate Amazon. Cuz I think we could provide a lot of additional marketing and, and that kind of thing in terms of after the book's launched. So we wanna do three levels so you can pick your own level and like, this is not a prison, so you can leave. It's, it's not like at Facebook where you've gotta leave the group.
A book buyer, which is people that basically get alerts in the book. And there's that percentage of people who just buy the books and don't really wanna be involved in launches and probably don't need to hear all this stuff anyway. Like, they don't really care, they just wanna buy the books. That's fine.
And we'll figure out a way to kind of reward them and stuff like that, which we're working on so we can, we can kind of reward people to buy books one way or the other. A member who pays annual fee for access to the group and resources so that someone's getting paid to do this stuff, at least.
And we've got the member pro, whatever you wanna call it, the Amazon software users that have actually used the Amazon campaign software which is a vast majority of the people probably in that group that actually are active. Anyway, so I'm gonna try and play this video, hopefully work. This is the working in mockup of what we plan to do.
So we want to create our own group, and this is kind of, and I'll see if you can see that. Okay. Does that work? All right. Can you see that alright? Yeah. Okay. I thought I'd just video cause never do live demos and webinars. It's not a good plan. Something will always go wrong. So basically, you know, have, we're building posts and stuff like that.
They can have access to files, access to videos that are going on launch history. So they actually see what happened in the launches and who got what. Their campaigns is essentially what they do when they add this. They're gonna run through quickly knowledge base in terms of finding information courses, and the last couple of more settings orientated.
But the idea is that you can just see exactly what's going on by the book and do those sort of things that you need to do in terms of that. On the, on the right hand corner is something interesting that we're working at the moment is an AI brain chat bot, and our plan is to be able to train that chat bot on everything to do with the book publishing area.
And so therefore, you just ask the bot for help. So how do I load my category on Amazon? How do I do this? How do I do that? That chat bot would actually basically give you the answers. And it's quite amazing. Fantastic. So that's part of the technology that we're building on. So we're building a new group functionality and we're also building a new chat bot functionality that integrates into our platform.
So I think it was great because it'll be like, it'll be a info, info resource, a launch resource, a Category, research resource, and, and it can grow from there. One, stop shop, shop essentially but also make it really clear what you've gotta do. So if you wanna buy a book, you just click on the link. If you wanna engage, you do whatever.
Cause most people, very few people posting that group anyway they ask a few questions which could be handled differently. So really posting is not a big thing. It's more about doing the job. You need to go in and get it done, get out. And that's really what we want to think of, rather than have worry about stuffing around, trying to figure out which post you're look at.
Okay. Next slide. Next slide that you stopped at. Alright, so What we decided to do, I said we're gonna say never get a disaster, A good chance to not do something about it. So basically we decided to launch a new branded version of this because I think biggest problem is, is Book Publishers Network isn't quite what it is.
It's kind of confusing. And then most of the people in the group, like people sitting casual wants that really publishes their really authors. And so we need to kind of figure out how we handle that. So stage one is to reintroduce a new branding, which is gonna call it Author Verse. We're also working on another brand called Publisher Verse.
But the idea is that we kind of focus on growing it as author, the authors, the existing people in a network are gonna benefit from that. And I think what we will be able to do is connect people together as well down the track. So, As we bring in more and more authors and people looking for editors or, or whatever, you know, marketing, that kind of thing, those people can be part of that e ecosystem.
So basically we wanna rebrand an author versus club, and that site's now live and charge a $49 fee per year. Now, I don't think it's an unreasonable amount to ask. And also it means that it verifies you exist and you're not some sort of hacker in, in Bangladesh trying to get into our website or something.
So, but that offer expire on the 27th of June and we'll be raising the price of $99 per year then when we go to the general venture public. So this is like a window opportunity and when the window closes, you window slam shut. As far as I'm concerned, if you have Amazon existing software, anything I'm talking about here will be automatically free.
It's all part of that level. So don't worry about that. So PE so people who currently, who currently have paid for access to the Evolvepreneur Amazon launch re research and launch software. We're, we're, we're grandfathered in. We've got a free, free membership for the, for author verse. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.
Part of that process. And that's probably a significant portion of the people that are on here. Yeah. Yeah. And we're not necessarily willing, necessary too much about making too much money outta this in this process. It's about validation. It's about verification about knowing our customer. And then from that point onwards, once we start growing, what's a different story?
However We got a whole bestseller training and I'll, I'll show you a little bit of what's going on with that directly. But we hold that bestseller training, but only with the paid members and Amazon subscription members from this point onwards because what we don't wanna have happen really is have that information.
It's quite valuable yeah. Up to the general public. So when the new ortho members come in, they won't give that information. They'll have to upgrade to get that. And as I said, new members won't get access to that training. So the Amazon apocalypse, so-called then my Amazon changes the category request system instead of 10, they have three.
I have no idea why they thought 10 was a good idea in the first place. But anyway, I I agree. What number did they, someone just have a, a brain freeze and come up with a number? I really dunno what happened there. Well not only that, so for everybody, you guys just, this has been part of our ace in the whole right?
Is Amazon would give you, it used to be we could pick two categories for our Kindle. And by the way, Ingram Spark and the other tools still only allow two categories, but they could say you could get up to 10 if you request 'em through customer support. So what a nightmare that am Amazon created for itself that suddenly it's got a very small percentage of people that are savvy enough and know this to go in request 10 categories, but it was always our ace in the hole.
I say always. What has it been, six, seven years that we've been allowed to do this? Many categories maybe. Cause in Mike's MBA had two when he first started. Remember, you can only have two. And then when we did our launch, we only have three. Yeah. So anyway, they've cut this to three now, right? They've cut it, they've cut it to three, and they removed the customers service component.
Now you can only do it through the K D P app. So when you log in and you're creating a book or setting up a book or editing a book, that's where you can change the categories. And at least in theory, no longer through support at K D P that has caused problems or que and questions about, especially international, because they don't let you choose while you're doing this.
You don't get to choose your categories for these other countries in a granular fashion like we could through customer support. So this has caused some interesting things. Fortunately, John has tested the system for us and has come up with some pretty cool things. So the good and the bad news, right?
The good news is less categories means it's less competition of authors and publishers dunno how works anyway. So in some respects people used to get these best sellers because they could go choose a category and get lucky. I think that makes it tougher to do. And I know that probably 90% of people on Amazon dunno what they're doing with, with categories.
I can check any book and I can find them that there's big holes in it. So it means it probably improves their chances. Having good categories, ongoing sales is a secret of growth on Amazon. By the way, if you don't realize this, if you can get your categories launched, even if you don't sell many books and you get, keep re-ranking in the top 100, you're gonna keep getting found.
Most people don't realize that and they say, why don't I selling your books on Amazon? Nobody can find them. It is possible doing international law with secret method. We found the bad news is launches need to be tighter and category selection needs to be more accurate, right? So you've only got three.
You have to make sure that they count. You probably need more sales on the day to get good results. And you need to prime the book a bit beforehand because what I found was that the ranking process is much, much slower now. And so I suspect Amazon's done that to slow down these launches. So basically if you don't have.
You don't really prime the pump early. What will happen is it'll, it just won't rank straight away. And you'll sit there for, for a day worrying. And I found that like the UK took nearly two days to rank. So the game's changed a little bit in terms of that, but then it's also got harder, which is good for us cuz we, we were born outta days when it was harder, right?
These guys have never experienced that. So basically now you have to basically go on Amazon's system, edit the book. It's kind of elaborate process they've got running here. Go to the details page, click on edit categories. Choose up to three categories, which is you can't search categories, you've gotta plow through their list.
This is gonna be fun to teach someone. Save and continue. Save and continue. Make sure you submit the book cause you don't submit the book, nothing happens. And it takes about one to three hours to change it, so it's very fast. I was surprised and often I even get an email and it's changed so. If anything it's faster.
But I don't know how people are gonna handle doing this. So again, I think it's harder, which is probably good for us. Yeah. And no keyword, you know, you can't search the categories by keyword or anything there. There's no way there, of course, to see how many sales are happening in the categories.
What other books are in the categories. Nothing like that. You know, how they're ranking what it's gonna take to get, number one, you can't get any of that data from Amazon in their categories. The only good news that I see there is that they are the actual categories by all by all appearances.
Same set. It used to not be right. It, it used to be bicep codes, and then they would interpret the bicep code into their category system. Now at least you are seeing the exact categories to make choices from thing. You just dunno anything about em. The, yeah. The other thing too, kind of bizarre thing that's been happening is that a lot of kind books have book print categories and it's not categories I've ever chosen.
So when I've looked into deep, I think why these got book categories in them, So, I presume you kind of stuck with 'em now, but one of the things we noticed was most existing books still have the old categories. So it looks like if you got those categories back in the day, you probably still got them. But you, so like my example, I've got four categories sitting in the US store and, and still eight in the in this Canada store.
For some reason, Canada Canada's got eight there. So, but you see there's only three ranking. And so at the end of the day, it must then go back to the old system. The highest number ranks first. So when you look at that 11,000, 6,000 and 14,000, but I've got a, I've got a couple I've submitted up there that haven't gone through, so that looks like it's pretty good, like it's pretty right.
The other 1 97 piece. Yeah. So the numbers are rights at just to start, the high number comes down, and then rank those three in a sequence. That seems to have been fixed a bit, cause that used to be a problem. It used to be very random, so sometimes you didn't get the one, so it might've cleaned things up a little bit.
New books can end up with more than three and even might did the launch. I managed to get four. This is actually a screenshot of, of a book we actually launched after the apocalypse and took longer, but they took longer to rank. And we say, look, one to three days per country sales per country two to three days before launch.
I would say, You wanna get? So we ran a test for international bestseller. So I had this book that I wrote actually when I went to the conference when the Instant Customer, which we all went to when, when Mike did the old bait and switch and changed it to publishing from, suddenly we went from software to publishing.
And I, I bought this, I wrote this book, which I, I can't even remember the title. I can never remember the title so long. And so I actually, we published it quickly cuz I needed a book, a brand new book. I needed to test it, see what would happen. And it had to be fresh. It couldn't be, something was already there cause I wanted to see what were happening when we changed the categories.
And so as a result, it's fairly small launch. We didn't do a lot of, of, of sales of books. We've got 10 number ones and, and 14 hot year releases out of that. And we got four in Canada again. So it looks like Canada's the hotspot and ranked fairly well on Amazon. 27,000 bsr. So, Basically the system works.
It still works. It's not like something's completely broken. In fact, with anything, it's working better than it used to. Particularly the category loading system. And you just to prove a point, that's basically just to show that it was the 8th of June so that the, the Amazon actually, you know, changed all these things on the 4th of June.
So I'm not not telling anything that didn't happen in that situation. So that was sort of the, kind of the rankings we got. So it's still possible. Running international campaign requires a slightly different process and slightly cumbersome and and complicated. And we're still learning about, you know, the scenario.
So really type, sort of group communication against findings. We can't just go, Hey, go do this and let people loose on it because. Could very well be. We don't know. No one knows Amazon and even Amazon doesn't know, or you've asked questions and they don't answer the questions. I may not think the block decide.
So whether they know or they don't dunno. I dunno. No, not something we just, same category. But by the way, Natalie also did a launch post changes. She said she ended up with 10 bestselling categories in the USA and hitting in four in Canada. And it said, she said it was a USA centric launch. Now, keep in mind, remember your book, even though you don't pick international categories, it's still gonna show up internationally.
You just don't know in what categories and you have no way to, you know, in unless you're using John's tool. You don't, you can't research those categories either to determine which ones you even want to be in. Yeah. So, but it's interesting. Thank you for sharing that, Natalie, because. Any launch we do until we have some numbers behind us.
Everything is anecdotal. Don't, we're starting again. Fresh Stop. Yeah. Number six, we, yeah. And especially for us who are publishing books for others and, you know, and we're representing, Hey, we can do this for you. Now by the way, just as a case in point, there's some in our community that guarantee their best seller launches.
There are others that don't. I don't, I never have, and I've always just said, To the client. You know, I don't control every variable. We don't guarantee the results. However, we also haven't failed since 2014. That's usually enough. They don't need, I, I, they don't need me to guarantee anything, and fortunately, we haven't had to.
We, we always say that we, we guarantee it, but we guarantee to get it done. We don't guarantee your money back or anything like that, so we'll keep you going until we get it done. I've ever had that once where I had to keep going and going and, and that's when we discovered that Amazon was up to something about four months ago.
And that was sort of like the starting point. We discovered a lot outta that launch. It was good, but it meant that we had to do it again and again. We did it three times and we finally got there. So that's the only one I've ever had to keep doing. And that's because his categories an absolute mess. He had book categories and, and I think it's part of the problem when that book category gets into the mix, that ranking system where it's numbering off the BSRs completely goes out the window.
And so what's happening is that book has locked them in and they can't get out of that gate. And so getting rid of that book category finally fixed it after three attempts and it took weeks to get Amazon to remove them. So hopefully this cleans things up. So a little pitch for the software, just so you know how it works, cause some people won't know, is that we come up with three things that are does, right?
Very clear. Find good categories. To make sure your pre-flight checks are right. So make sure the categories are loaded and stuff, which comes in more important. Now when you have 10, you can, you can wing it with three. You can't wing it. And you need to accurately know that before you launch. And there's no easy way to do that unless you start making book sales or something like that.
And also supercharged and launch, which means gets some book buys and things like that happening. So all those sort of things have to happen to make it work. And so that's what we're focused on doing. So if you're in existence, John, your soft, your software has saved me and my team. At least a thousand hours.
Well, I reckon 600 man hours over that last event we ran for Mike would've been easy calculation of time saved in that event alone. It's hundred people in the room. So, yeah, I can't the reason why you would've do it any other way, and I've seen other people do it, other do it manually, unless maybe they're just into that.
But I'm not into it. I don't wanna sit there taking screenshots and mucking around with categories and they're getting stressed about a launch. I've got better things to do in some respects. I'd rather works. And so that's basically bestseller app, app app. We rebranded that and that's a separate offering that we run out to publishers and people like that.
And so that's a kind, kind of price of membership to get the secret. Really, it is a secret at the end of the day in terms of what we're doing. And so we wanna make the ultimate tool. We still think it's better than most of them apps out in the marketplace because we focus on the launch. Most of 'em focus on all the other stuff around it, a lot of manual work and stuff like that.
You could essentially do this in an hour all up and get paid well to do it. There's no people can't do it. So special offer if you join by the 27th of June, you can buy, you can join $49 which will include the Amazon bestseller training. So the reason we didn't show you the day, all the increase of it is, but I had to finish documenting.
It took me about 40 hours of work to get to this point. And I wouldn't mind getting paid for that. But the reality is, is also it has to be properly communicated and managed and also vetted. So we don't wanna list stuff out in the marketplace really. Cause I don't think most people are gonna figure this out.
If they do it's gonna be hard for them to manage it because without the software, they'll have a hard time figuring it out. That will also give you better access to the new platform and access to other further further training and, and me calls so we can actually load this up and give you much more value.
And it means that we can actually start developing the group module I wanted to do for some time. And option two is if you join and buy the best seller secret out, you get that free membership anyway as part of the deal. So the website called Club, and I put this last slide so I know I'm not to click.
So you got. Three options, do nothing. Oops, I fixed that problem. Obviously didn't do nothing. Facebook group will be archived, won't be able to launch books or access the resources, but you may not book with it. So if do nothing, nothing much will happen. Probably won't matter to you in terms of not doing the He matter.
I join the author, $49 for the year. We'll wait and join for $99, but you won't get the best seller software assets comparison chart for you here. So basically the major thing here is that the software obviously tracks or launches and has access to that bestseller training. That's essentially the, the main components of it.
Excellent. Now, John when do we I know Barak was asking when we can get where, when will we do the international training? Is that gonna be on the 28th? In that webinar or at some other time? Yeah, we'll be, yeah, we'll, we'll the plan was to do the training on the 28th, which gives me a week to prepare it and get the slides and everything and, and finalize process.
So I took some videos of things that I was doing. It may also give you a bit of homework as well to do some testing when you side and get familiar with it. Yeah. And also what we found was Amazon categorically said that you couldn't do this, even though I didn't really ask them that way. But you know, they basically said, you can't do what you're saying, and I did it anyway.
And so, That's pretty useful. Yeah. And I'm glad you did. And, and that's the thing is with the benefit of numbers here, we can develop a trend and know what will work and what won't work versus just getting caught in a glitch, you know? Yeah. Or exactly. Or something like that. And also it means it is, that comes along, we can actually find out from other people and say, Hey, look, you know, let's refine this, tune this.
So it gives us some competitive advantage. Again, cause those people know about it anyway. And people do know it dangerous cause they don't understand their vocabularies anyway, so yeah, it's a great opportunity. Well, well John, I'm, I'm just super grateful for this and for the work you've done. And again, everybody, you guys need to know John's just for just crazy numbers of hours into all of this.
So I'm excited about this because it's gonna give us a platform that we have some control over. We can speak openly in, we don't have to worry about, you know, the am about the, about the Facebook gods just blocking posts or kicking people out or whatever. Also that means that, you know, if there other people that you want to invite in, you know, that that's something we can do and vet properly.
Where also some affiliate programs as well, people wanna invite people on that. So we can probably do some affiliate programs for that. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And that also means that if you have something that you would like, that you think you can offer to the group, either sharing your expertise in posts or if it's appropriate to do some sort of a webinar or a campaign of some kind, that also can be vetted and and perhaps brought, so we just think it's gonna be helpful for everybody.
And I'll be honest with you, I know John's talked about. Grandfathering people in for the $49 per year package. I've dev, I've so much benefit from the software. I'm, you know, yeah, I guess I get it for free. I'm jump, I'm gonna go pay, well donation back, which there's a question here from Karma as well.
So my answer is the $49 is like entry level if you like, you know, so if you think about v i P seats in general kind of seating however, we do have $150 a month option as well. So for people wanna casually come in, do a launch, and then bail out again. They can basically come in, pay $150 for that one month and they can try the software.
Essentially, that's what we're gonna build in. It's available now. So when you go through that option, if you scroll on that page down to the bottom, there's a three option sitting there, and you can actually just buy $150 and do your launch. And then once you're done, you can cancel. The other thing I was thinking of doing too is, is people who are in the software, they've got special skills and stuff like that.
Part of these group meetings which I'm in networking group now, that works really well. Every fortnight, they have a meeting where they bring in two of the group members to do a presentation of what they're doing. Some people have something to sell, some people don't. But it's very useful cuz it shows the expertise of those people that they don't typically get to showcase.
And so part of that is what we wanna do with those monthly calls is essentially say, Hey, come Emett, can you come along and present what you do here and your expertise area? Which means that the group will get the benefit of that and obviously, you know, get some business outta it as well. Joe John, on the pricing there, and you talk about 150 per month, if someone wants to come in, just get it for a month in order to do a launch or whatever.
People pay me to do category research and it's not, we don't do a bunch of a la carte stuff because most of ours is all packaged. But when I've got clients that I want to help, but they're really not able to do, like, let's say they kind of wanna d i y a bunch of stuff, but they know, they just can't trust themselves on the categories.
I've charged frequently 500 bucks to, to do their categories. It's by my price. Yeah. And I, and I'll do that in John's software. And it's easily worth the that and, and the time. So I'm just super, super grateful for that. Well, the other one that I do too is I'll, I'll do a book audit. And so what I'll do is I'll run the, so run the campaign software over the top, not actually launch it, just do a book analysis and then come back to with better categories.
And we, when we did that with our client books and we, cause we published the books on their own kdp. We can submit the category we like and we even prove sales exponentially cause of the fact that we kept on buying those categories. So just post-launch, going back to your client base and going, Hey look, let's do a book review on your book that you launched a year ago.
Let's charge you $500 for a book review on that. You know, it's not a bad idea because Yeah, just say, Hey, categories have changed. Is this where it really, really belongs? Could it be improved? Natalie had a good question there. Do we start paying after our membership from Evolve expires? Or we need this new membership to do launches.
My membership runs out in September. No, that's okay. Everything runs as normal. One of the things we're introducing, we're testing at the moment is part of the problem is that we discovered this is once the category is loaded, we don't kind of go back checklist still there. So what we've built in as a lead to all option, which basically deletes all the categories and then does a fresh start.
And that's really useful because that was confusing me because I think about why these categories really there. And so that's about the only thing that we're gonna do. We've done that. We've probably implemented differently in the software, but pretty much didn't take, make any changes, if any, made it better.
Barrack asked about how do you make sure we rank internationally? And really that's about that training we're gonna do cuz we need to finish off that training. The fact is, you know, you can do it is probably a big thing because I think that was the biggest problem is can you do it? Yes you can.
But it requires a bit of, of art and training in it. And we need to keep that information tied up. I don't want that getting out for the general masses, to be honest. Does anybody have an I'm just cur kind of curious. Does anyone have an international launch this week? If so, maybe put, just put your hand, you know, say yes.
Say yes. Me in the question launch? Yeah, if you've got, if you are I'm curious. Yeah, if you've got launch this week and you need some help, probably raise a ticket in the system and we can sort of step you through that so we can help you out there. We can give you enough information to be dangerous and get it done.
I think when we do the training it'll show you do much better. But there's a couple of things, things you can do to kind of get yourself through that quick one. Got it. Alright, well, so through the ticket system will be the way to go then. That's great. Yeah, just like I said through the ticket system.
And if you, as long as you paid either $49 or your current subscription member, we'll help you after that. And Natalie July 9th, you'll be, you'll be just come to the, come to the meeting on the 28th. You'll be set for July 9th. I will record that anyway. See, always have access to it as well. I'm glad to it.
We'll find everything else. Yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, John, thank you for putting everything together and everyone thank you for joining us and hopefully learned a bit about what's gone on with Amazon and the group. And we're gonna try, just try to use this as a. As a core, as a core to create a, honestly, a better, more engaged, active group outside of Facebook.
And so do make sure to go to Author Verse Club and register there. And we, you know, we'll, we'll we'll see you there. And then we'll also see you on the 28th for that bestseller training that at 4:00 PM Pacific Time on June 28th. Better get to work. Yeah, man. Dude, you've been at work. He was just rubbing it in while I was on vacation last.
Yeah. Well, I'm gonna make you build the Eiffel Tower and you know, the new Space station and plotted away. I'll come over you next time. Yeah. All right everybody, thank you so much for joining us. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.