Book Marketing Blogs

Book marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. That’s a great metaphor—one that rings true for many authors who suddenly find themselves on an endless journey of book promotion. But it’s not the only sports-related metaphor that applies.

Slow and steady may win the race, but many trainers advocate high-intensity interval training (HIIT) to build fitness quickly.

Discount price promotions are the high-intensity interval training of book marketing.

To recap the sports metaphor, high-intensity interval training is doing segments of using short bursts of intense activity, combined with spells of lower or medium-intensity work. Experts say that interval training a faster way to build fitness than simply trudging at a moderate pace for 30 minute son a treadmill a few times a week.

The periods of intense work create unseen, metabolic shifts in fat burning, insulin resistance, and cardiovascular fitness. The follow-on, unseen benefits are the real payoff.

In book marketing, running a discount book promotion is like doing a quick sprint in book sales. You focus your efforts in a week or less and discount the price so you can be “all-out” on book sales.

Like the sprinter, you cover more distance during those short bursts—in this case, selling more books. But the real benefits come from the lasting effects of those short-term sales.

Defining Success

Most people evaluate the success of a book promotion based on how many books it sold and whether it paid for itself. The financial issues are usually top of mind:

• How many books did you sell?
• Did you earn more in royalties than you spent on promotion?
• Did you earn at least as much as you would get from baseline, full-price sales?

Focusing on the direct Return on Investment disregards those hidden benefits, like the metabolic magic of high-intensity interval workouts.

The long-term success of your promotion will take more time to measure. You need to ask questions like,

• Did the promotion reach the right people—those who will appreciate the book?
• Will people who bought it actually read it?
• Will they review it and/or recommend it to others?

Those questions are harder to answer. You may not know for a while. But that’s where the real magic of book promotions kicks in.

The “Metabolic” Benefits of Discount Book Promotions

What happens when you get the book into the hands of hundreds, or possibly thousands, of people who are your target readers?

Let’s look at some of these unseen benefits:

• If you managed the promotion to appeal to the Amazon algorithms, your book may continue selling at an elevated rate or some time after the price resets. That’s like fat-burning that keeps happening after you stop exercising—a lovely bonus!
• Over time, more people will leave reviews for your book, which then helps it find even more new readers.
• Getting the book into the hands of its ideal audience results in more recommendations, more positive reviews on other platforms, a growing email list for you, and more.

Adjust Your Workout for Your Fitness Level

Back to that sports analogy: If you haven’t gotten off the couch for a year, your “high-intensity” sprint might be much slower than someone who has been training. There’s a reason that gyms keep telling you to “consult your physician.”

The same thing is true for book discounts. Starting too aggressively isn’t hazardous to your health, but your results will depend in part on your existing platform, your budget, and your book. You may not hit it out of the park on your first attempt.

The good news is that you can start small. Experiment with setting the price down for five days and sending the right readers to the promotion. Once you’ve done that, you can try a bigger promotion—perhaps investing in a book promotion website or running a few ads alongside your other efforts.

The end game isn’t just book sales—it’s building your book’s overall readership and audience. And that will help to sustain all the books that you write.

For More on Book Promotions

If you’re interested in trying this approach to building your audience, check out my book marketing webinar. Watch the replay for $25.

Watch the replay here

Today’s guest post is by Karen Ferreira, an illustrator, owner of Get Your Book Illustrations, and the organizer of the  recent Children’s Book Mastery summit. This is based on the second part of a conversation she and I had about book marketing.

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As a keynote speaker at our conference, Children’s Book Mastery, I interviewed Anne Janzer about the best ways for new writers to market affordably and effectively.

In this article, I share the highlights of the second part of our interview. (Read the first half here.)  In this part, we discussed:

• Using free or discounted books to boost audience and book sales
• Best practices for discounting books
• Getting results with BookBub Featured Deals and ads

At the end I asked Anne about her top tip to help authors succeed. Make sure to read to the end so you don’t miss her answer!

Part Two of the Interview

Using free or discounts to boost audience and book sales

Karen: I wanted to ask you about how an author can use free or heavily discounted books. You already spoke about using free books to give sales a boost. How does it actually boost your audience to give the book away?

Anne: You can offer your book for free to specific individuals, but giving it away  free to the world at large hasn’t made as much sense for me. Free promotions may make sense if you have a series. You can give away the first book in a series and get readers for the rest.

I’ve done a lot of heavily discounted promotions, offering the book for 99 cents. If you see a $10 Kindle book, you might think about it or add it to your list. If it’s 99 cents, you may think, “This sounds good enough. I’ll give it a shot.” See what the price point mentally does to the buyer?

I believe its more beneficial to discount a book for a limited time to 99 cents rather than having it always at the low price. If it’s always 99 cents, that broadcasts: “This is a 99 cent book.” When it’s 99 cents for only two weeks, the discount is more motivating, and that gets book in more people’s hands. Remember what I said about your first thousand readers? The sale puts you closer to that. It gets you reviews from people who love the book.

Asking for reviews

Anne: As a side note, if anyone ever reaches out to you by email and says, “I love your book,”’ your first email back to them should be, “That’s so nice of you to tell me. Would you mind saying that in a quick review on Amazon, because it helps readers find the book.” Give them the why.

Karen: Yeah, I think a lot of authors might think, especially if you’ve been around for a little bit, that ‘everybody knows’ that reviews are important, but a lot of people have no idea how important they are.

Best practices for discounting books

Karen: What other best practices have you found when you’re using a discount to get the best results?

Anne: It’s not enough to simply set the price to 99 cents. You have to send a lot of people to the sale—they won’t find it just because it’s on a Kindle countdown deal.

I use a few paid discount promotion sites where you can list your book and they’ll promote it to people who like your genre. These are sites like Bargain Booksy (or Freebooksy for free books.) The granddaddy of these sites is BookBub, which can send a huge amount of traffic to your book sale.

If you have an email list, send them the news of the sale. If you have a friend who emails to people who are in your audience, ask them to share the news. Use social media. Try to send as many people as you possibly can to the book’s page while it’s on sale.

If you get sales over several days, Amazon algorithms will pay attention. If you have a one-day spike and then sales just drop off, Amazon’s algorithm thinks that’s a fluke and doesn’t change anything. If sales stay high for several days, the algorithm notices and jumps on it, because Amazon wants to sell books.

Karen: Okay, nice and I think it’s really good that you mentioned you have to aim for a few days at least, that’s really, really key.

Getting results with BookBub

Karen: I want to ask you about BookBub. You mentioned a couple of other sites as well, which I think is great. And I think definitely for everybody watching to go look for sites similar to BookBub. There are quite a few, as you say, and you can get the word out for free on a lot of these sites.

But BookBub, of course, is the mother of them, I would say. I know you’ve used it, and what is your advice to get the best results with that?

Anne: They will charge you a category-specific fee, which can be a large fee. They’re very selective about what books they take. Your book usually has to be published for a while and have some reviews before BookBub will feature it. BookBub wants to make sure that it’s promoting high-quality books to its users.

I have applied for all sorts of BookBub deals. I’m in the nonfiction world, and my books end up in the self-help category, which is not a perfect fit. I’ve only ever gotten international, non-US, English speaking markets. It still works for me. I’m totally great with that.

When you apply for a Featured deal, there’s a small area to add your own comments. I would make whatever pitch you have for your book in the form, because until I started doing that nothing happened. Say, “My book won this award” or, “This is going to be really timely in February for your readers, because there’s an event going on and people might be interested in this.” Add whatever pitch you can make to help them figure out why this is a good time that they should accept your book .

I’ve also used BookBub Ads. When I discount the price and get an International Featured Deal, I will then run ads on BookBub. These are not as effective as a BookBub Featured Deal, but they do move books.

There is a wonderful book about, running BookBub Ads, from David Gaughran. It’s a Kindle book, about five bucks. (BookBub Ads Expert.) You can build your skill set by reading the book, and do some experimentation. To run the ads you have to spend money, but it doesn’t have to be huge amounts. Think of it as an investment in your skills, more than an investment in the actual advertising costs.

Karen: That’s really good advice and I think it’s excellent advice about putting your little ‘story’—why they should accept your book. So, as you mentioned, do try to get reviews, etc. But I think it’s excellent what you’re saying, don’t take it as an end-all, take it as a learning experience, because I know some people have had fantastic success with BookBub, but obviously, it’s not guaranteed either.

Anne: Success is not guaranteed. Most people I’ve talked to have had at least a break-even success with BookBub. At least they’ve earned back, in royalties, the money that they spent on the investment. That has been my case with my BookBub feature deals, even in assorted international markets. But, learn from everything. Be curious about what’s working and what doesn’t. Figure out what works for you. That’s the most important thing. You have to understand your royalty per book on each platform, and how much is it going to pay off. There’s a little math involved, but the general idea of book marketing is that the money you invest should come back in royalties.

Karen: Thank you for that, I think that’s very useful, and it definitely gives a down to earth kind of viewpoint, which I think is really good to have.

Top tip for helping authors succeed

Karen: So then, what would be your top tip for helping children’s book authors succeed?

Anne: My top tip would be to indulge your creativity. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. You’re going to drive yourself insane if you just try to be like everyone else.

Be creative. Do the things that fit your skills, that you’re comfortable with. Think about what’s different about your book, about your audience. Where is your audience? Do you have a different, creative way of reaching out and finding them? Because that is your task–lining up your book with that audience. It’s not selling as many copies, it’s selling as many copies to the people who are going to love it. That’s your task.

That takes creativity, and learning. It’s a learning curve.

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Karen Ferreira is an illustrator, award-winning creative director and owner of Get Your Book Illustrations. She helps self-publishing authors get amazing, affordable illustrations.

She has spent many hours learning about self-publishing and enjoys helping others succeed in this field.

 

Today’s guest post is by Karen Ferreira, an illustrator, owner of Get Your Book Illustrations, and the organizer of the  recent Children’s Book Mastery summit. She and I had a lively conversation about book marketing strategies as part of that summit, and she has contributed a two-part series of blog posts based on that conversation.

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As a keynote speaker at our conference, Children’s Book Mastery, I interviewed Anne Janzer about the best ways for new writers to market affordably and effectively.

Anne gave such powerful insights and ways to change your fundamental outlook on promotion and marketing, I wanted her audience to benefit from it too. In this article, I share the highlights of our interview.

In the first part of our conversation, we covered the following:

• Why you have more resources available to you than you thought
• Ideas for low-cost ways to promote your books
• One extremely powerful strategy to use as the basis for all your marketing

(Part two will contain the second half of our conversation, including Anne’s top tip to help authors succeed.)

Your Real Marketing Budget

Karen: New authors often don’t have a big budget or almost any budget for marketing and promotion. What are some of the best free or low-cost ways that they can promote their book?

Anne: Before we get into the actual ideas and tactics, which will vary for different authors, I want you to think differently about your budget. I want you to envision three buckets: time, money, and skills.

Most of us focus on the money bucket. When you’re starting, this bucket may not have much in it.

But there are two other buckets. One contains your skills; and these are the things that you already know how to do or are good at doing. Think about what you have in your skills bucket right now.

The third bucket is your time—time you can invest in either marketing the book, or in building your skills so that you can market the book effectively.

Those are your three buckets. The best use of limited marketing dollars might be buying books on Kindle and learning a skill, then trying it out. That’s a small investment in money, and a larger investment in time, which will build skills for the future.

Your overall budget is larger than you think, because you need to account for your skills and your time.  A lot of marketing activities don’t take much money, but they take time. Contact your library to go give a talk, so you can work on your public speaking skills, for example.

No matter which bucket you’re investing from, whether you’re spending money or time or learning something new, try to do things that help you build your platform and capabilities.

Anne: One of my favorite, relatively low-cost marketing strategies is to give the book to the right people. Just give the book away. The cost to you is the cost of your book, plus possibly the cost of shipping. Simply give your book to someone with a handwritten letter. For a children’s book author, it might be: “I know you speak to fourth graders who are going through this situation. I’ve written a book about it. Here’s a copy, please let me know what you think.”

If you do that for 5 or 10 people who are really in the target zone for your readers, and a few of them come through, you can end up moving a lot of books over time and building a valuable relationship. That book marketing strategy has nothing to do with running ad campaigns and sending emails and all of that. Every indie author can do this.

Karen: Nice, yeah, I really like that, that’s actually a very different way to look at it, but it’s brilliant.

Abundance Mindset and Strategic Generosity

Karen: Then you have a couple of fantastic articles about having an abundance mindset and being generous and strategic. I think you’ve already started touching on it now, but can you kind of just explain that overarching concept?

Anne: This is so important to me because I talk to a lot of new authors, and I know that a lot of them come from a space of wanting to get as much as they can from the sales. They’ll say, “I don’t want my book going into the library because someone might check it out and then not buy it,” or “If they buy this other author’s books, then they won’t buy mine, so why would I promote that authors books?”

That’s what I call a scarcity mindset: the idea that there’s just a fixed number of book buyers in the world and when someone else succeeds, you lose.

It’s not like that. Books and ideas spread, and the more that you get your book and your ideas out into the world, the more success you’ll have. Your job in marketing your book is not to sell as many as you can and to get as much money as you can. Let’s reframe that concept.

Your job in marketing your book is to get your book in the hands of exactly those people who are going to love it the most—as many of those people as possible.

I have a belief, not grounded in any science but in personal experience, that when you sell your first thousand books, good things start happening. Now, a thousand seems like a big number. So the question is, how do you get as many copies out there as soon as you can?

That’s changing from the urgency of “I’ve got to cling on and grab every sale I can,” to, “How can I make my ideas, my stories, abundant out in the world, so people will find me, they will know me and it will grow?”

That’s what I’m trying to get at with the mindset of abundance versus scarcity.

I’ve been on this author path for about five years now and this is where I’ve ended up: My happy place with book marketing, is to be generous and strategic.

Every day or every week, I think ‘What can I do that is generous and strategic?’ If I’m generous without any strategy, I’m going to burn out. I will spend no time on my own work, and that’s not good. If I’m always strategic, it will start to feel like I’m using people. People sense when you’re always taking, and after a while they will get tired of you. They don’t want to always hear, “Will you buy my book?”

Be creative about finding ways to be both generous and strategic.

Free or Low-Cost Ways to Promote Your Books

Anne: Many  generous and strategic tactics don’t cost a lot of money. Let’s look at what some of them might be. I already gave the example of giving away a book, just to the right person. Another one, and this is one of my favorites, is reviewing other authors in your genre, in your niche.

If you’re a children’s book author, read other children’s books and write reviews of them. You can just write reviews on Amazon or if you want to increase the strategy, write a review on your blog.

If you really want to make an impact, do this for new books. If you can’t afford to buy new books all the time, there’s a site called Netgalley where you can sign up to be a reviewer of books. Writing reviews is generous to the author, who could end up being a friend or a companion who helps you. It is generous to your readers, if it helps them find other books that they love.

Important safety note: Don’t review a book if you don’t like the book. Don’t write scathing reviews!

Writing reviews is strategic as well, because now you have content that you can share across your social media platforms. If you’re doing social media, you’ve got things that send people to your blog that’s not just about your own books. You’re making an offer: “Hey, here’s another book you might enjoy.” You’re attracting and talking to the audience of people who are interested in the same kinds of books that you write. You’re building relationships with those people.

Another idea is writing guest blogs on other authors’ blogs or other blogs, or doing podcast interviews, which is so much fun.  Again, it’s generous for the podcast or the blogger. You help share the news about what they’re doing, and it’s strategic because it’s connecting you with possible readers or buyers of your book.

If you’re just getting started, start with a smaller podcast, with fewer listeners. You get your feet, you learn what feels comfortable, and then work your way up the list.

Also, consider joining a group of other authors in your genre, in your area, and helping them. What I’m doing right now is talking to you about book marketing. I don’t sell anything related to book marketing. I don’t sell book marketing services, I’m not trying to sell anybody anything. I want to help other authors, genuinely. I have another group of women authors that write in my genre and we are constantly helping and supporting each other. We ask each other about cover designers or editors, and share information about book launches. All of this builds relationships and ultimately those relationships can be hugely important to your book marketing, because these people then will step up to help you on their terms, when you need it.

The corollary to ‘be generous and strategic’ is this: when you need it, don’t be afraid to ask for help. That’s the hard part. We want to just do our thing and then put the book out and be done. It’s not enough.

Karen: Right. I guess you have to come to a point where you really do realize that doesn’t work.

Anne: It doesn’t work. Publishing a book so much bigger than one person and one book. When you approach book marketing the way that I just said, it is not scary, it is fun.

Be curious. Experiment. Ask yourself: “I wonder what would happen if I just called this business that makes something for my target readers and tell them I have this book. Maybe they want to offer it to all their customers.” I mean, think outside the box. What does that cost you? Nothing, except maybe shipping a book, and the discomfort of stretching your comfort zone. If it works, it has a big impact. Be creative and fearless, at least when it comes to your time and your effort.

Karen: Nice, be creative and fearless. I think that should be a slogan on someone’s wall.

(Read Part Two of this interview.)

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Karen Ferreira is an illustrator, award-winning creative director and owner of Get Your Book Illustrations. She helps self-publishing authors get amazing, affordable illustrations.

She has spent many hours learning about self-publishing and enjoys helping others succeed in this field.

I often speak about book marketing to various groups of writers. Sometimes the writers all belong to a single genre (like Sisters in Crime). Sometimes everyone is self-publishing, but writing in different genres. And sometimes, as at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference, people write in all genres, following various paths to publication.

Here’s the catch when speaking to diverse audiences: a tactic that works for one author won’t necessarily work for another.

Heck, the same marketing tactics don’t perform evenly across my own four books.

Tactics are highly specific, but strategy has a broader reach.

There’s one book marketing strategy that works for every writer, no matter how you’re published or what your genre: be generous and strategic.

Generous and strategic

The and is important.

• If you are generous without being strategic, you will burn out.
• If you are always strategic and never generous, others may burn out on you.

Find those marketing tactics that meet both requirements and that fit easily into your life.

Here are a few suggestions that I offered a recent, mixed audience of writers:

1. Show up as a podcast guest, offering valuable information to listeners while helping the host reach a broad audience. (Guest blogging can do the same thing. )
2. Review other books in your field, then share those reviews on your blog and on social media. That’s generous to the other authors and readers, and strategic in building a relationship with those readers. If you cannot afford to buy the books, consider signing up as a reviewer on NetGalley.
3. Sign up as a potential source on HARO (Help-a-Reporter) and help journalists and bloggers by providing useful content and expertise.

Each of these tasks is relatively easy to do and has no up-front financial investment. Each gives you valuable information to share with your email list, on your blog, and on social media. And each potentially expands your reach and builds ongoing relationships with others in your field.

Plus, they’re fun.

Being generous is rewarding in and of itself; being generous while building your author platform is even better.

Don’t forget the email list

Your email list can (and should) be generous and strategic as well.

I send every-other-week updates to my Writing Practices list.

Ideally, these updates provide value to the readers. I also offer drawings for writing-related books on this list—another act of generosity.

Strategically, the people on this list support me and send me their writing problems. I benefit from the regular blogging deadline and the forum for writing about different topic areas.

Do you have other examples of generous and strategic marketing strategies? Share them in the comments.

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