Hi there 👋

Welcome to another edition of the weekly Reedsy marketing newsletter! This is actually a pretty special one for us, because it’s the first I’m sending through our very own email marketing service (yes, we quit MailChimp as well).

If you ever bookmarked any of the links in my previous newsletters, you'll soon discover the side effect of this move: those links will probably stop working. The good news is, I’m working on turning my marketing newsletters into a book, so you’ll soon have all that sweet content in one place.

Now, my last couple of newsletters were all about the Google Play store. Today, we’ll continue our tour of non-Amazon retailers with… Apple Books!

A rebrand and new publishing options

I wanted to focus on Apple this week because they recently announced a rebrand: they now have a dedicated landing page with articles just for authors. More importantly, they opened up new ways to get your books on the Apple Books store.

Until recently, it was common knowledge that you needed a Mac to publish direct to Apple. Well, that’s not the case anymore: you can now use their online, browser-based portal, in combination with iTunes Connect (which is also browser-based). 

That’s not to say this process is “easy,” by any means. Luckily, however, we’ve published a post on our Reedsy blog that walks you through all the steps — and included some pretty handy tips for setting up your book for success! You can read it here.

A store curated by human beings

Now, as is customary for my weekly newsletter, I’ll share some more advanced tips here that will be exclusive to our subscribers. But first, I highly recommend that you read that post I just mentioned because it explains how visibility works on the Apple Books store. In particular:

• The tolerance of Apple Books readers for higher prices;
• The huge advantage given to pre-order sales on the store; and
• The effectiveness of “free first in series” (similar to Google Play).

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a deeper look at how readers find books on the Apple Books store. 

The first thing to know about the store is that it is only really accessible from the Apple Books app — which you can only get on an Apple device. If you have one, you’ll be able to replicate my analysis below. If not, you’ll just have to trust me.

This is the current homepage for the US Apple Books store desktop app. Notice that big carousel banner at the top? It features “curated” sections or promotions. 

Curated by whom, you might ask? Well, by the Apple Books merchandising team.

And that’s really what sets Apple Books apart from Amazon or Google Play: visibility on the store very much depends on human curation, rather than algorithms. So your ultimate goal on Apple Books should be to catch the attention of their merchandising team — they’ll unlock a whole new world of possibilities. (Of course, to do so, you’ll first need to sell a bit on your own, which is what my other tips will be for.)

You’ll also find several sections below that top banner. For example:

• Bestsellers: similar to the “Top Charts” (see below), but with a slightly different algorithm;
• Read It Before You Watch It: books that have been adapted to film/TV;
• New This Week: new releases of the past week;
• Limited Time: under $4: a selection of discounted books, manually curated the Apple Books merchandising team;
• Coming Soon: books on pre-order; and
• First in a Series: free: also manually curated by the Apple Books merchandising team.

Apple Books charts and rankings

What’s not so different from other stores is that bestselling books still get the lion’s share of visibility. “Bestsellers” is often the #1 section on the main “Featured” page, and the next two tabs in the top navigation are also all about sales:

• Top Charts: similar to Amazon, the top charts are split into Paid and Free, and rank the books by number of recent sales; and
• NY Times: the books in this week’s NYT fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists.

Categories and subcategories

A more interesting thing about the store is how it handles categories. If you’re a reader looking for books in a specific category, you have to use a somewhat hidden drop-down menu in the right sidebar of the homepage, or go to the “Categories” tab in the top navigation bar.

The categories menu will only list broad, top-level categories, like “Mysteries & Thrillers” or “Sci-Fi & Fantasy.” If you select one, you will then get “Collections” that allow you to drill down into more niche genres:

Some of these collections will bring you to what is essentially a subcategory page, with similar sections to those on homepage: “Bestsellers,” “New Releases,” “Free Series Starters,” etc.

Other “collections,” though, are manually curated selections of books that meet certain criteria. That’s the case for the “First in a Series Science Fiction” collection, or the “Science Fiction Essentials” one. 

Again, this goes to show the importance of the manual curation, as well as the prominence of “free series starters,” which are featured pretty much everywhere in commercial fiction genre pages.

Some top-level categories, like History, don’t feature collections for subgenres. Instead, they have dedicated sections:

Of course, if readers are searching for books in a specific niche genre or topic, they probably won’t use the “categories” list — they’ll just use the search bar directly. 

Which is why we’ll look at how search works on the Apple Books store next week.

Until then, happy writing, and happy marketing!

Ricardo  

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