Sunday, August 14, 2022
Ask any self-published author who has sold more than 10,000 books in a year and they will tell you that marketing a book is different. The margins are small, the marketplace is crowded, recurring revenue is practically non-existent, and the options for paid advertising (profitably) are very limited.
What works for other types of businesses doesn't work quite as well for books.
But that doesn't mean that all hope is lost for self-published books and authors. It just means that other strategies will need to be employed in order to accelerate sales. This article simplifies those strategies and will give you a clear path for marketing your book.
Before you start marketing your book, it is important that you do a bit of pre-work that will set you up for success over the long term.
While there are dozens of things you can do before you begin marketing, these 3 things will be the most critical:
If you want to have any hope of ever selling your books in a bookstore, at your local Costco, or somewhere else that isn't Amazon then you are going to need a self-publishing printer or formal publisher to do so.
That's because Amazon is a competitor to all other sales channels, and a well-hated one at that. If your book is printed by Amazon... these other sales channels (especially bookstores) have absolutely zero incentive to place your book on their shelves, as doing so would support the competitor that is trying to wipe them off the face of the earth (Amazon).
So, as an author, you should make it a point to use a printing service that is friendly to bookstores and other retailers. IngramSpark is one of the leading providers of self-published printing services, and gives authors the ability to print in bulk or on-demand. Pricing per book is about the same as is seen when printing through Amazon.
*Note: This doesn't mean that you can't use Amazon for print-on-demand for your books sold through their site. It just means that you should have a second printer, like IngramSpark, set up so that you can also sell your book through other channels.
One of the first things any self-published author must do when going to market and sell their book is set up a new sales page (a website) for their book.
The reason that this is such an important step is because many authors make the mistake of using Amazon as their book's only sales page, and it hurts their book sales immensely.
While there is nothing wrong with having your book listed on Amazon, it is important to understand that Amazon is just one of many sales channels. There are other places to sell your book that will be just as important, and you'll need a website in order to tap into these other channels.
That's because a good website for your book allows you to:
Website sales, book stores, book clubs, and affiliates offer you powerful distribution channels that can help you sell thousands of additional books per year (off-Amazon)... yet, most authors overlook them.
For reasons that we'll cover in more detail in the sections below, these sales & distribution channels should be a part of the core marketing strategies for your book. So, to set up a sales page for your book that helps you to sell across channels, it will be best to set up a website that enables you to:
There are a few software tools that give you all of the above listed features, but a favorite of most authors is Clickfunnels because it can do all of these things while being easy to use and affordable (it costs under $100/month at the time of this writing).
As is mentioned in most every post that we do here at SIMPL, anyone who wishes to market a product or service must follow "The 7 Laws of Marketing". Authors are not exempt from these laws and must take the time to learn them.
So, before you rush ahead to the next section where we outline the details for how to market your personal development book, take 10 minutes to read and understand the 7 laws of marketing.
Once you've done that then you can move on to the next steps for marketing your book.
After you've taken the time to do your pre-work, you should be ready to start marketing your book. This will be one of the most exciting times of your journey to becoming a best-selling author.
To make the marketing process easy, we've outlined the strategy in a series of phases that you can implement sequentially (one after the other) or simultaneously (all at the same time). These phases are:
So, without further adieu, let's get started.
One of the best ways to increase book sales across all sales channels is to get people talking about your book. The more "buzz" you can create, the more sales you will see.
When people mention your book on their podcast, link to your sales page in their blog, post a review on social media, or interview you for their channel, it will give a boost to your sales unlike anything else.
But these things don't just happen all on their own. To get people talking about your book you'll need to follow a very specific marketing strategy.
Here's how to do it:
One of the unique things about books is that people tend to buy them after they've heard about the book from someone else. That's not to say that they won't browse and buy, because they will, but that it's unlikely that they will randomly come across your book to do so.
There are quite literally millions of books on the market, and it is unlikely that buyers will find yours if they've never heard about it or had it placed in front of them.
Given this fact, successful book marketing strategies do not focus on marketing to end consumers (the people actually buying your book). Instead, they focus on marketing to the people who might talk about, share, distribute, or promote the book. This concept is a major shift in strategy for most authors, but is one that is necessary if you want to scale the best seller charts.
Famed marketing author, Russell Brunson who wrote Traffic Secrets, DotCom Secrets, and Expert Secrets, calls this the Dream 100 strategy.
How the dream 100 strategy works is simple:
To follow the dream 100 strategy, all you have to do is find the people with audiences in your niche and add them to a list. Once you do that, then you can move on to step 2 below.
*Note: while we're calling this list of people the "Dream 100", it does not need to be exactly 100 people. It might be 30 people or 3000... you can choose how many people you want to add to it.
Once you have a list of all the people who have an audience in your niche, it will be time to make contact with them. The best way to do that as an author is to share a copy of your book with them.
You can go to their website to find a business address where you can send a copy of your book along with a personal note, or, you can contact them via email or direct message (DM) to ask them if you can send them a copy of your book for free.
When you send them a copy of your book, include a letter to introduce yourself, provide an honest compliment that is relevant to them, and make a humble ask of them.
In this ask, you might make a gentle request that they:
Or, if you'd like to get a head start on step 3 below then you might ask if you can:
If any one of the people from your dream 100 list takes you up on the ask that you make then you can consider it a win. That person is then associated with your book, and you can leverage that in all of your marketing moving forward.
Obviously, the biggest goal with this approach is to get them to make a reference to your book in a communication or post out to their audience. That's a best case scenario... but it might not happen right away.
So, take the time to find ways to help them in one way or another. As an author, you are skilled in the written word and might:
With the written word, there are many ways that you can help your Dream 100 in exchange for some promotion out to their audience. All you have to do is get out there and do it. Earn promotions from them and you will get a much better return than almost anything else.
After you've shared your book with your dream 100, the next step in your marketing journey will be to work your way in front of their audience.
What this means is that you do a bit of work to make yourself visible to the people that follow them. After all, their audience is the group of people who will be buying your book, so it doesn't hurt to get your name in front of them.
That's because, when people begin to see your name and profile (or website) they will look you up, follow you, search for your book, and buy. This will happen even if your Dream 100 person never promotes you directly.
So, in addition to some of the activities mentioned back in Step 2, you can get yourself in front of your Dream 100's audiences by being active where they are active.
That means that:
One thing to note with this step is that it is a long game approach. It's not something that you're going to start doing this week and then see a huge boost in sales. It just doesn't work that way. You'll need to be consistent over time, for at least a few months, if you want to see your sales skyrocket.
*If you'd like to go deeper into all the ways that you can get your Dream 100 to talk about your book then grab a copy of the book Traffic Secrets.
While bookstores have taken a big hit over the last 10 years, they are still around and thriving. Places like Barnes & Noble, Costco, Target, and even locally owned book stores still make up around 40% of the market for book sales in the US alone.
That means that if you're book is not on their shelves or in their online store then you are losing out on nearly 40% of your potential sales.
But that's not the only reason to get excited about bookstores. They also offer something almost magical for most authors - curated selections. In a nutshell, this means that they carry fewer titles on their shelves and have staff that personally recommend books to visitors.
What this means for you is that if you can get on a bookstore's curated selection list then your book has a chance to take up a larger percentage of the 40% market share than it does of the 60% of books sold on Amazon.
Why? It's a numbers game really.
At the time of this writing, there are an estimated 9 million books for sale on Amazon. NINE MILLION. With this volume of books, the chances that your single book will take up even 0.0001% of sales is unlikely. In bookstores, however, there are only about 10,000 titles available on shelves at any given time.
Go ahead and do the math for yourself and you'll see just how much more potential bookstores have for your book than Amazon. Taking even just 1% of 40% is light years better than taking 0.0001% of 60%.
So, if you'd like to get your book on bookstore shelves, here's how:
When bookstore buyers want to buy a book directly from an author, they need a way to do so. That's where a wholesale page on your website comes in handy.
This template has a wholesale page all set up and ready to tailor using your book's information.
Once you've made this page specific to your book, then all you have to do is link to it from your main sales page/website in the menu at the top.
As we talked about in the "Pre-Work" section of this article, bookstores don't want to (and typically won't) buy your book if it's printed and distributed using Amazon. For that reason, it's best to set up a print service like IngramSpark that allows you to print on demand.
But that's not the only reason to use an independent printing service. The other reason is because many have a robust book distribution network that simplifies the ordering process for bookstores.
Think about it this way, bookstores don't really want to buy books directly from 100 different sources. They want one centralized place where they can buy any book that they want and stock it on their shelves. That's what distributors do.
So, to make it easy for bookstores you can make your book available through a distributor.
If you haven't already added bookstores to your dream 100 list, now is the time to do so.
That's because bookstores can be some of the best referrers of your book: They have a ready-to-buy audience, can always use a helping hand from a friendly author, and have an incentive to sell your book (it is their business model, after all).
When you add them to your dream 100 list, and treat them with just as must care and attention, they can become the biggest champions of your book. The chances of them stocking - and showcasing - your book dramatically increase.
Many people are motivated by an incentive, so why not give them one to promote your book for you? By offering to give people a commission for every book sold through their unique affiliate link, you can give them an incentive and substantially boost your book sales in the process.
Now, if you aren't familiar with affiliate links, the best way to describe them is as a link to your website that tracks clicks and sales from a specific person. Whenever someone buys your book after clicking on one of these links, the sale is credited to the "owner" of that link.
To provide an analogy, it's kind of like commissioned based sales, but for the online world.
The best part about this strategy is that it costs you next to nothing and gives your book a huge boost in both visibility and word of mouth. For that reason, it is a strategy that you shouldn't pass up.
Here's how to do it:
The cornerstone of affiliate marketing is software, like Clickfunnels, that allows you set up a sales page for your book and then generate unique links for your affiliates.
Using this software, all you need to have is:
The software will do everything else for you: It will assign affiliates their unique link when they sign up, track their clicks and sales, and tell you exactly how much is owed to them.
Here's a template that has all 3 of the things listed above set up already. If you use it then all you have to do is update the pages with your book's information and you'll be all ready to go.
Once you have set up your affiliate software and associated pages, you will need to add a link at the top of your book's website so that people interested in becoming an affiliate can sign up, login, and get their link.
One great source of referrals for any book is existing customers. That's because the people who have purchased your book are often the most likely to refer it to others... especially if you give them a reason to refer it (by paying them as an affiliate).
To do this, all you need to do is three very simple things:
By mentioning your affiliate program to people who buy your book, a percentage of them will sign up and begin making referrals. This is in addition to any who would have otherwise referred after reading the book.
The biggest reason for setting up an affiliate program is undoubtedly so that you can offer your Dream 100 and other referral sources a way to get compensated for their recommendations.
By this step in the process, you have everything you need in place to run a great affiliate program. Now all you have to do is go out and ask the people who have audiences in your niche (your dream 100 & others) if they would be interested in promoting your book in exchange for commissions.
Here are a few types of people that you might ask:
Once you begin asking, people will begin promoting... and your book sales will begin increasing. It's a beautiful thing, really.
While much of this article has pushed you to seek sales beyond Amazon, ignoring the world's largest retailer would be rather silly for any author.
With ~60% of the market share for books, Amazon is a key component of any good book marketing plan.
Here's how to get your book to stand out from the crowd of books on their site:
An easy hack of the Amazon algorithm is to have people buy your book and then reimburse them.
The reason for this is because when someone buys your book on Amazon, the algorithm credits it as a sale of the book and increases your Amazon author rank. This in turn will increase the position of your book in Amazon's search pages - giving it more visibility, more clicks, and more sales.
But that's not all. It also triggers the "others who bought this book also bought" feature in Amazon's algorithm. What this means is that for all of the other books that the person has purchased on Amazon, your book will now be shown in the recommendations section on each of those product pages. This is kind of like free advertising.
One of the cornerstones of Amazon's algorithm... is reviews. If your book doesn't have enough of them then the algorithm assumes that your book isn't good and pushes its rankings back to a place where very few people will ever see it again.
Conversely, if your book has lots of reviews - even mediocre ones - then the algorithm assumes that the book is at least worth talking about and ups its rankings. Given this, it makes sense to ask everyone under the sun to review your book.
Here are a few ways that you can ask for reviews:
By unapologetically asking for reviews, you will begin to get them. As you do, your book's rankings - and sales - will rise.
One of the most timeless ways to increase your book sales is to become a speaker. Many of the best selling authors over the last 50 years or so have sold a good majority of their books because they spoke.
That doesn't mean that you have to join a speaker's circuit to sell books, though. There are many, many, ways to speak on the topic of your book that pretty much anyone can do.
Here are just a couple:
Local association chapters and groups are often overlooked in most book marketing plans... but they shouldn't be. These groups are gold mines for up and coming authors looking to make a name for themselves (especially for authors who also consult or coach in their niche).
Here's why: each of these groups boasts hundreds to thousands of members who all have an interest (professional or personal) in the topic at hand, and the group leaders need content to keep them engaged. A big challenge that they have is finding new and interesting presentations for their meetings and get-togethers.
That's where you as an author come in. You can offer to present via webinar to dozens of these chapters across the nation, and in doing so fill the group's need for new and interesting content (and your need to get free marketing to thousands of target customers).
Podcasts have skyrocketed in popularity in recent years and are a great way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche. Being a guest on another person's show gives you immediate credibility with their audience, and hosting your own show solidifies you as a thought leader in your space.
That being said, podcasts are also a great way to boost content creation for all of your marketing efforts - recording one podcast show can fuel months worth of social media posts alone.
So, whether it's your own show or someone else's, speaking on podcasts is an excellent way to give a healthy boost to your book marketing efforts.
Last on this list of strategies, but not least (by any means), using book contests is a great way to help your book "go viral" and boost your sales.
By offering a prize for action - such as sharing a video testimonial for the book or posting a picture on social media while holding your book - you can exponentially increase your book's visibility in the marketplace.
The best part with this strategy is that you don't even have to fund the giveaway up front. You can make it where the giveaway is "activated" only after a certain number of books are sold.
Here's how to do it:
The first step in doing any kind of contest is to decide what you're going to give away. Ideally, what you choose is going to meet the following criteria:
Once you decide on a giveaway that meets these criteria, you'll be ready to put your contest out into the world and watch the marketing magic happen.
The best way to fund a book contest is to do so using a portion of sales. That way you're not on the hook to pay out of pocket if sales don't match up with your expectations.
By creating "contest activation" criteria, you can set aside a portion of each book sale and apply it to the prize. Once your certain threshold is hit, say 10,000 books sold, then your contest is activated and you will be able to give out the prize.
People love to see contest winners with a big ol' grin on their face. They also love the opportunity to become one of those winners the next time the contest runs.
For that reason, it makes sense to make a big deal about who wins your contest. Share pictures and video anywhere you can... and then run the contest again!
Any time you run a contest or giveaway of any kind, make sure to consult with legal counsel to make sure you're staying on the right side of the law.
While laws in most places allow for businesses to run contests and giveaways for their affiliates (and even for customers), there are often specifics for how things must be done. It's always a good idea to know - and follow - these laws so that you keep yourself out of trouble.
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