Book Marketing Tactics Round-Up

Hi Folks,

I'm sure you are wondering what I'm doing here on a Wednesday post instead of Rachel. Well, after last week's blogging ate three of Rachel's mornings, we have come to the long-building conclusion that we're both blogging too much. Books aren't getting written and that means Things-Have-To-Change(TM) around here.

We're still going to update everywhere Wednesday with new advice and helpful posts, but Rachel and I will be alternating who's up each week.

Anyway, there's been a lot of requests for marketing posts and, as I'm always asking for post requests, I'm going to try my best. Marketing is a HUGE topic ya'll. People get degrees and spend lifetimes perfecting it as a skill. In a way, we're always talking about marketing here in some form or another.

Since "marketing books" is too big a topic, I'm instead going to list and talk about every single book marketing tactic that I know of. It's going to be a,

Book Marketing Tactics Round-Up

We all need some practical, effective, actionable information to sell books with. While there's loads of abstract marketing strategy we need to talk about, books still need to sell and we all have work to do. SO, let's focus on the pragmatic stuff today and I'll have more abstract strategy talk for ya'll on another day.

What, specifically, can you do to market a book?

I'm going to try to list things in the order of power/importance they will have on your book's sales.

0. Write a good book, write another good book

You knew I was going to say this right? ^_~ Having a good story, well-told is the foundation. 

Marketing will just make a bad product fail faster, but a good book will enjoy word-of-mouth recommendations which are still one of the strongest and best form of marketing around. A really good book will have opportunities beating their way to it. (Kindle Big Deals aren't offered to bad books. Awards sell books too. Etc)

Launching new books is the second best thing an author can do marketing wise. Nothing sells books like selling new books. So yeah, primo marketing advice is to write, write well, write better, and keep writing.

1. Title, Cover, Blurb, First page

We've talked about this a lot. These are what get customers to click, to sample, to buy, and to read. I cannot emphasize their importance enough as fundamentally powerful marketing tools.

If your book isn't selling well, but has good reviews, then maybe you should consider changing these elements around. Check out my post on relaunches and rebranding for more.

2. Back Matter and Front Matter

The front and back of your books are powerful tools, but limited. There's not a lot of space here to work with. Here's what Rachel and I consider to be sorta minimum best practices right now.

For front matter,

• have as little as possible, get people to the story asap.
• include your blurb. Kindles don't show the blurb. People will often add or buy your book and then read it months later. You want to remind them, then, why they were excited enough to buy it. Remember, it's not about sales, it's about earning readers. (and retention rates!)

For back matter,

• thank the reader ^_^
• ask them to leave a review. This one trick will double, triple, or even quadruple the number of reviews you get.
• ask them to join the newsletter
• hook them on your next book (if you have a next book, or a pre-order if you have one of those)

3. Reviews
Good reviews sell books and build careers. Endorsements and recommendations are the primordial forces of marketing after all. Items #0,1,2,3 in this list will help you get reviews on websites that sell books. Beyond that though, it's worth the time to court reviewer sites, bloggers, and such.

Reviewers lend their own reach, voice, and authenticity to a book's online profile. They help provide links, google search results, and direct traffic/sales.

It takes time to build good relationships with reviewers, but it's worth it. You literally cannot buy this kind of press. When going for reviewers, here's a few guidelines,

• Don't be pushy or obnoxious
• Make things easy for them (provide many formats, media packet, timely responses, etc)
• Don't attempt to influence the review, not even slightly
• Don't give them crap if the review isn't as good as you wanted
• Honor their efforts with your own links and press for their review site/account/page/blog...

Know that, when you ask someone for a review, you are committing to whatever they put up. If they don't like your book and say so online, too bad. You don't have to link to their bad review and you don't ever have to send them another book again. Silence is the most and best you can do with a bad review. 

While having a good book is important, you also want to court reviewers who you think would genuinely like it. Not only will they be more likely to say yes to reviewing the book at all, but you'll stand a better chance of getting a good review. Lastly, it's rude to waste people's time. So don't send books at reviewers just cause they have a large audience.

Ideally, reviewers are also your fans.

4. Website

Believe it or not, the author website is pretty good at selling books. Especially when you have a blog or other content marketing paired with it to draw traffic. Rachelaaron.net + Pretentious Title have sent a total of 5000 people to Rachel's Amazon.com book buy pages over the last year. Going by our affiliates data, that's about 2000 book sales in total. That's not chump change.

At the end of the day though, the author website is part of the marketing foundation. It's not just for people finding you and your books online, but it's also a crucial tool for many other aspects of online marketing. 

I've an entire post about all the features a good author website brings to the table. Please check it out.

5. Author Newsletter

Are you gathering your readers into your own private newsletter? If no, then get started. This is a very powerful marketing tool that allows you to cheaply and effectively market directly to readers. It's so essential that I'm sure you've all heard a lot about how you have to have one these days. 

There's a lot of different formats for these things. Some people use them like a blog, emailing the list with content every week/month. Others, like Rachel, only use it for big announcements. Both ways are fine, but there's a golden rule you need to know about newsletters.

Don't waste people's time.

Remember, this is email. If people click to open, that's already a big leap of trust on their behalf. If you then waste their time... BAM! Unsubscribed. You need to grow this list, which means that your every message needs to be valuable / entertaining enough for people to (a) open and (b) stay subscribed.

We use mailchimp.com for Rachel's new release mailing list, but there's lots of good free and paid offerings out there. I should do a post on these, it's a huge topic. For now, make sure you get one that comes with (as an option for later if nothing else) automation options. You'll want things like welcome letters and such as your list grows and you desire stronger features.

Tips for growing your list,

• Ask. You have to tell people about it! You have to ask them! Almost no one will sign up if you don't ask. As I said above, asking at the back of the book works super well.
• Don't waste people's time. This is important enough to say again. Ask yourself, "is this wasting their time?" every time you send out an email to your list.
• List bait works awesomely. I'll have more data on this later, but the #1 thing we've done this year to increase newsletter signups has been the Mother of the Year reward for membership/signup. It's more than doubled the monthly growth rate (so far).
• Team up. Other authors often team up to collectively email using their combined lists. This is a powerful tactic that can get a lot of new customers and also new sign ups. 

6. Bookbub and Email Marketing Services

Newsletter marketing is strong stuff marketing wise. It's no wonder then that there are tons of email marketing services out there that you can pay to use. You'll probably never have a 2 million person email list, but Bookbub will send you out to theirs for a couple hundred bucks.

Anyway, you all probably know about Bookbub.com so there's no introduction needed there. Getting your book featured on Bookbub as often as possible is a great strategy. It's tougher every day though and it's also expensive. (Totally worth the cost IMO)

If you'd like some alternatives, check out my NDFL Mega Fall Promotion post. I've tried and listed a lot of smaller email marketing services there. They might sell hundreds, or merely dozens, of books, but they are easier, cheaper, and efficient. That was by no means an conclusive list though (I didn't try the Fussy Librarian or Kindle Nation Daily). You should definitely search for more.

These services are all very useful in getting actual sales for you and helping you build momentum on your career and series.

7. Author Team Ups

We've never done a boxed set of books, and Rachel doesn't team up with folks often, so I don't speak from a lot of experience here. Teaming up with other authors to run signings, hangouts, promotions, newsletters, write books and publish boxed sets is a powerful tactic. I've heard no end of success stories about these methods so I would be remiss in not mentioning them.

Romance rocks the team ups!

Business-wise it makes sense to me. Why reach 1000 newsletter subscribers when you can team up and suddenly reach 10,000? Getting 5 authors together can make for a pretty big hang out audience. A good multi-author promotion can work wonders through your combined reach and appeal.

How to get in on these things? I'd start by cruising kboards.com, but often times you need to network with other, similar to yourself, authors. If you are particularly gung-ho about these, go make one happen. Authors are all pretty easy to contact what with everyone being publicly on social media and such. Most are eager for promotion opportunities as well.

Don't know who to contact? Why not start with authors who show up in your Amazon.com also-boughts? You know you've got something in common.

8. Appearances
Any sort of guest post, interview, podcast, video event, signing, blog tour, and so on. Appearing in a place other than your own blog and social media. These sorts of events are very handy in that they leverage someone else's audience. Ideally that's an audience that is fresh (hasn't heard of you) and is receptive / appropriate for you to appear in front of.

Rachel's about page is a good example of these kinds of things.

Honestly, this stuff can be a mixed bag of success. Getting featured by someone big can result in a great boost of traffic. Medium and small sites will contribute also, but it's easy for these contributions to be invisible to you.

While we generally take an "it all adds up" philosophy here, but the gotcha on appearances is that they take time. Often they take more time that many of the other things I've mentioned above. A written interview, for example, might take a day to fill out.

Appearances are probably one of the most fun types of marketing though. It's not all about coldly calculated ROI after all. Just be careful about letting appearances get in the way of your writing. We see a lot of authors fall prey to that trap.

Note - Conventions kinda fall into this area but not always. Rachel has an entire post about this topic so please check out Writing Wednesday: Are Conventions Worth It?.

9. Distributors

Amazon.com is pretty much a given for all authors, but every store front you can get your book on is technically more eye-balls and more sales. Readers don't overlap between distributors a whole lot, which is good for finding fresh eyes, but it's troublesome because you almost have to build your readership on each sales channel separately. Be prepared to invest time and effort to succeed with any bookseller.

Anyway, the main reason I wanted to bring up distribution as a marketing tactic is because there's various marketing options here beyond just putting your book up on a new bookseller.

For example, Kindle Unlimited. While KU makes you Amazon exclusive, it puts your book into a much smaller pool. This increases exposure and reduces competition. Pay-outs, despite everyone's moaning, are still pretty darned good. Rachel makes more money from KU some months than from regular sales.

Another example would be Kobo. I loved the Kobo panel at RT2016. Mainly because Kobo really wants to work with you, the author with the good book, on promotions. Aside from coordinating launch promos and other sales events, one bit of advice I heard was to apply to be in Kobo's monthly 30% off sale. Applying is easy and authors are encouraged to apply month after month. Getting in that sale brings in a lot of positive exposure and builds readership on Kobo.

I have on good authority that both B&N and the iBookStore both have author promotion teams that you can email from within their portals. Both are looking for launch events and sale events to promote if you give them your time, effort, and book. They, like Amazon, also sometimes do their own big sales events and a working relationship with these promotion teams can help you get in on that stuff.

Pro tip, you are much more likely to succeed with these promotion teams if you make sure to give them enough advanced notice. The number 1 suggestion I heard for getting this kind of help was lead time. A month or two out ideally so that it can be planned and fit into the promotion team's schedule. Last minute requests for launch promo help is often just not possible for them.

Last, but not least, you can use Amazon's KDP count-down deal feature. This places your book on a special count-down deal page and everything. Right by itself that's good for boosted exposure and sales, though I'd recommend you pair such an event with a Bookbub or other, external promotion at the same time to maximize the punch.

There's more of these kinds of interesting options out there than my examples of course. So I'd encourage you to explore. Hopefully though, I've made my point that the booksellers have some great offerings.

Warning - stay away from Google. I'm not mentioning google books here because they can change your books' prices without notice, permission, or warning. This causes a price match on Amazon and other sites. If you have a book on Google, your entire empire is effectively at their mercy. Google decides your book is $0.99 for the month? Well, I hope you didn't want any royalties that month and I hope you didn't have any other sales planned! They don't care if they blow your 60-day Bookbub prerequisite.

We've actually talked to Google reps about this, but got no good answer. .(Google call us with a better one!)

10. Social Media

Wow! This is #10! That's almost the bottom of the list. YUP. For all the importance placed on social media, it's terrible at selling books. We've done a lot of experiments with social media here and conversion rates are terrible on every platform we've ever tried. (1000 to 1 or worse!)

IMO social media suffers from a huge case of preaching to the choir.  Most authors only reach people who already know and like them. Now, some folks are really good at getting their marketing message to transmit outside of their own bubbles. If this is you, great. If its not, then social media is going to have a very poor ROI for your efforts.

Facebook is a bit of an exception, in that author pages are a great place to build fandom. Again though, if you don't do it naturally, you will likely be in for a bad time.

11. Paid Ads
You can also just engage in paid advertising. The best marketing is free, but money buys eyeballs from lots of places. Amazon Marketing Services, Goodreads Ads, Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Twitter for Business, and so on, are all examples of paid ad distributors that can work for authors.

If you want to try these out,

You need to measure the results

While you need to measure the results of any advertising (time is money friend), measuring these methods is essential. See, really making them work takes R&D. You have to try, experiment, research, learn, and refine. It's gonna take spending some money and eating some losses until you learn how and where to market your stuff.

I'll be open about this, our experiences here have been universally rough. Everything I named above, except Facebook ads which we haven't given a serious try to, has been a loss. I've been doing R&D as I'm advising you and I've been having a terribly unsuccessful time with it.

IMO this isn't because these places don't work. It's because we here have a poor product funnel. Rachel has 11 novels (not counting 2k to 10k) out but the low royalty rates on the 8 NY novels nukes the return on any advertising investment we make.

This'll change as she writes more indie books though. I am very much looking forward to having a completed, 5-book, Heartstrikers series to play with for marketing purposes



12. The Weird Stuff

There's more to marketing books than I've covered here today. This is just a list of popular places and methods that I've encountered. There's endless opportunities out there. I haven't talked about YouTube at all, because I know and hear very little about it (publishing wise). There are guys out there who make power point presentations for free or sale to promote their non-fic platforms and do so very successfully. There's also running a podcast or internet radio show. There's Google groups. There's email courses. There's so so much.

Thank's for reading

I hope that, while we weren't talking strategy, I have given you a good list of workable tactics you can pursue to promote your own books. Later this year, I'm hoping to have new and better information for you as we are wrapping up some major experiments this summer. Data is still coming in though so it'll be a bit on that.

We'll have plenty of other business posts in the mean time though, don't worry! Not like there isn't a shortage of things to talk about in this industry.

Anyway, next Wednesday's post will be Rachel on writing. As I said at the top, we're going to be alternating  who does the Wednesday post.

If there's any topics you'd like me or Rachel to talk about here on the blog, please feel free to leave them below. We're always working hard to find information that is useful to you. You can also just hit me up on Twitter, that works too! (@TravBach) Rachel's social media links are here as well if you want to get live updates! (Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Google+)

Thanks again for reading, and I'll see you all next week!

Sincerely,

-Travis