Metadata Makeover Challenge-Runaway Inequality by Les Leopold

The Makeover Challenge series looks back at a previously released book to see how it can be improved. Today’s subject is the metadata associated with the book Runaway Inequality by Les Leopold, published by Labor Institute Press.

About the Book

Runaway Inequality challenges its readers to build a common movement to tackle the sources of increasing income and wealth inequality. It was originally published in 2015 and revised and updated in 2016. AuthorImprints did the eBook conversion in 2015 and setup eBook distribution, including metadata optimization, with Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble.

It has sold more than 40,000 paperback and eBook copies since 2015.

Why a Makeover?

By late 2016, print and eBook sales had tapered off just as the U.S. political climate was reflecting many of the principles discussed in the book. Sensing a renewed interest in the subject—from voters in both political parties—Labor Institute director and author Les Leopold reached out to ask “…what can we do to reinvigorate sales?”

Results, observations and takeaways

I recommend changes to store metadata—categories and keywords—be done in conjunction with a promotion. In our case, this took place during the week of 24 April through 29 April to coincide with President Trump’s 100th day in office.

Looking at the screen shot below you see we reached a high of #3 in the Labor & Industrial Relations category, just behind far more current (and best-selling) books such as The Radium Girls. We also cracked the top 10,000 list of paid books in the Kindle Store. (A week later, the book was still #6 in the Labor & Industrial Relations category even though it was off-sale.)

For the week, we had 78 unit sales of the Kindle eBook, 5 in the B&N Nook store, and 1 in the Apple iBooks store (it rarely sells in either store).
The print book is distributed by Chelsea Green so those numbers take a little longer to gather. But looking at BookScan (free with AuthorCentral), print sales jumped about 50% during the sale week and for one week after.
Mailing list subscriptions also increased, by approximately 20% based on prior weeks. In some ways, subscribers can be just as valuable as book sales. It’s a chance to speak directly to people, often over a much longer time frame, to continue your marketing efforts.

Scope of makeover and circumstances

It’s always a challenge to re-boot a book that has been out for a while. In fact, sales had been bumping along for months (no surprise). The eBook was priced at $9.99 and the clear majority of sales were coming from the Kindle store.

When Les initially approached me about marketing ideas, he was leaning towards a price drop and adding the book to KDP Select, Amazon’s 90-day store-exclusive program.

As a not-for-profit, he had recently applied for and received a monthly Google Adwords budget of $10,000—free advertising he was using to drive people to the book’s website. The Labor Institute team was in the process of fine tuning their campaigns but clearly, they needed something more.

What did we change?

I proposed the following:

1. Promote the idea, instead of the book. The political climate was creating a national interest in its topics and I figured that would be a draw. Asking someone to share their email is an easier proposition (especially when they haven’t heard of you before) than forking over 10 bucks to buy a book they hadn’t heard of until just recently. Then, armed with an email, you can more easily build a relationship over time.

2. After thinking about the price, and looking at its competition on Amazon, I recommended leaving it at $9.99. This is an established author, with a well-researched book, and 46 reviews with an average of 4.8 stars (at the time my consult began).

3. We decided not to make the eBook exclusive to Amazon. Even though the sales were concentrated with Amazon, exclusivity went against the ethos of the subject. It made more sense to offer readers a wide variety of purchasing options since we were also marketing broadly.

4. Since we were programming the revised edition of the eBook, it was the perfect time to run a promotion. The most notable near-term event relevant to the book was the President’s 100th day in office milestone so we settled on that as an excuse for a sale.

We would manually reduce the price to $4.99 during this period and promote it with a few daily deal sites. (Our choices were greatly limited since these websites normally specialize in books priced less than $2.99, something we had to figure out well ahead of time.)

5. I thought the book website, as well as the Institution’s website, could use several improvements. These ranged from SEO changes to integrating a way for visitors to buy the eBook direct from the website. We’re still working on some of these. (100% of the profits from book sales go directly to the Labor Institute so selling direct can have a meaningful financial benefit.)

6. The final step in the program—and point of this article—was to review and update the store metadata: categories, keywords and description. I also found that Goodreads metadata needed updating, notably the cover was missing, so that was updated as well.

Online bookstores have varying levels of metadata support and among them, Amazon’s is the most robust. As such, it is constantly changing and being updated to reflect the interests of shoppers (and sales! They’re a retailer, after all). Here’s a summary of what I changed:

Description

I felt the description text was fine as is. The book has sold 40,000 copies so something had to be working. But the formatting was not inviting and we wanted to tell people about the half-off sale.

Using the free Pretty Amazon Descriptions formatting tool, I added italics, bold and made the bullets look professional. I also used a larger font heading to call attention to the fact that the price was half-off through 29 April, and a closing call-to-action (“Scroll up and click to buy now.”).

Keywords

Keywords change over time and some of ours were no longer being used by readers. We also felt that other terms were more popular in 2017 and/or would bring us different readers. We removed:

Wall street reform
inequality
income inequality gap

And replaced them with:

wage gap
labor relations
economic inequality

(Btw, Google Trends is a great way to validate the popularity of search terms. It is interesting to see how they increase or decrease over time.)