Home-Based Book Selling: Strategies Every Author Should Know | Book Launchers

Whether it's because of a quarantine or just a desire for comfort, sometimes you need to find a way to sell a lot of books without leaving your house. If you're wondering how you can get readers to buy or borrow your book while you're keeping yourself indoors, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie, the book broad from Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and and promote a nonfiction book that will impact your reader, grow your business and make you money. Our superpower is caring more about you and your book. And what we do differently is we work incredibly hard to get your book into readers hands when it's done. And the best part, you keep all rights and royalties and have full control over your book. Jackson, you can't be talking. Shh. 2020 is a year we won't soon forget. With no school and working from home, I found myself memorable moments with my three year old son. I wanna get down, I wanna get down. I feel happy. School's out, I don't wanna get it. I can spend quality time with my son. And as a company, we found ourselves accelerating plans to develop programs we've had on the schedule for a while, but weren't yet a priority. Like selling books without having to face any other people. Selling books without having any face to face contact with other people is possible, but it does remove some really tried and true methods of marketing your book, like speaking at live events where you can sell bulk amounts of your books, bookstore events, live appearances, conferences, and conventions. So the bad news is that these are some amazing ways to move large volumes of books. And if you can't meet people face to face, they're off the table. Not having that as an option isn't ideal, but the upside is that this is really only four major ways to market your book that you can't do anymore. And there are so, so so many more that you can put into action when you're at home. Before I dive into all the ways to promote your book, let me give you a golden blanket. I don't know, a golden wrapper to package up all of this to make it work. Even better. Create incentives to get people to buy your book during a period of time or buy in a certain quantity. For example, buy one copy and get a value add offering in exchange for your email address like spreadsheet that calculates how much money you need to retire or a menu plan for Paleo vegetarians, something the reader would have otherwise paid for. So it has that kind of value or buy three copies and get access to a one hour talk you gave that has a benefit. You have to make sure you sell the benefit of this Talk or buy 25 copies and get the exact templates you give to your high paying clients and access to other resources. Or buy 100 copies and get a webinar training for your company. Buy 500 copies and get five one on one calls. So on. Get creative. I'm just trying to give you some examples so that you can see that you need to create some sort of time based or quantity based incentive when you're doing other promotional activities because that's going to help people get that I got to do this right now. Feeling with that golden wrapper aside, here are my 13 ideas plus a bonus tip to help you sell books from the comfort of your couch. Number one video YouTube is obviously my favorite video platform, but if you haven't built an audience yet, live streaming on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube are also great options when you're getting started. I have videos here on using YouTube to sell books, so check that out. I'll link to it at the end. The primary tip I want to give you when it comes to YouTube is make sure your video is full of your personality. No monotone Marvins here. Hey, not all of us Marvins have a monotone voice and you focus on delivering some sort of benefit to your viewer. In other words, this is not a book promo, but it could be a tip from chapter one of your book. If you're locked in your house right now, why not commit to going live every day starting today? 2. Social Networking Social media is a tough way to sell a lot of books. I talked about that in a previous video. But social networking is a fantastic way to connect with folks who can help you sell books. Facebook and LinkedIn groups, for example, provide support and suggestions. So if you add value whenever you're in those groups, people will take notice and they'll probably be more willing to help you when you say, hey, I'm looking for people who are subject matter experts that want to write a book to have impact and make more income. Anybody have suggestions on how I can get in front of these kind of people that if you've been providing value to others, will get answers and support? 3. Corporate partnerships this is a juicy one and I think it's actually time I did a video on this one all by itself. So get our newsletter so you don't miss it. Go to book launchers.com game plan essentially a corporate partnership is any kind of arrangement where you exchange value for my first book, More Than Cash Flow, I gave a national real estate magazine a few hundred copies of my book to give away to new magazine subscribers, and in exchange they gave me advertising space in their magazine, which was worth two times the retail value of the books that I gave them. Other partnerships are where a company will buy your book in exchange for you doing something for them, like hosting a webinar, for example. And speaking of webinars, number four webinars. We've landed some of our clients webinars in front of major association groups, and those groups have actually bought copies of the book for those in attendance. And we've also had webinars that led to authors selling 500 copies of their book and getting paid speaking engagements from those attending the webinar. Whether you're part of this association or group or not, the big thing is making sure that you have a benefit to offer that particular group. When you know there's a benefit for their audience, reach out and see if they'd be interested in running a webinar to their group or where you teach something from your book that's of value to those folks. Number five your author platform, newsletter, social media, podcasts, YouTube, et cetera. Check out this video right here to learn all about this. Having your own platform is the number one way to sell books from the comfort of your home, and even a small audience can be powerful. Number six the platform of others Livestreams, podcasts, newsletters, social media. To me, this is the second best way to sell books. Think about who has your ideal reader in their audience, but they don't do the same thing as you. For me, with my book More Than Cash Flow, my audience was new real estate investors. My biggest promoters of the book were realtors and mortgage brokers. They bought cases and cases of my books to give to their clients, and many of them promoted my book in their newsletter. The key to this working is that your book must have a very clear benefit to a specific audience. This is my argument against people who always say that their book is for everyone. General books that don't have a clear hook or clear audience are very tough to market on other people's platforms. Numero7 paid advertising oh boy, this is a big topic. For now. I'm going to generally say we focus on Amazon ads for our clients, but other authors do those free plus shipping offers which actually bug me because it's not actually free. The book is not free people. Media mail in the US allows you to ship any book for under $3. So when you're paying 799 or 699, you're actually paying for the book and shipping, so that actually bothers me. But paid advertising to these type of offers actually performs very well for some authors. Also Facebook ads, Instagram ads, BookBub, BookSense, Book Butterflies. These are all places that you can do paid ads that may help you sell a lot of books. Number eight Book Catalogs We've actually had some incredible results paying for catalogs and pushes that go out to libraries and bookstores. We've found them through ibpa, but there's plenty of places that you can reach out to that might have these kind of catalogs or blasts that will go out to book buyers. Number nine Podcast Interviews I've got some videos coming out soon covering, getting podcast interviews, prepping for podcast interviews, and most importantly, do podcasts sell books? Ultimately though, podcast interviews are well worth it when you want to stay home and you still want to sell books. 10. Create a SlideShare presentation I've never tested this, but it comes up all the time on lists, so I wanted to put it here. SlideShare is owned by LinkedIn, so I know some SlideShare presentations do get a lot of traffic, and some Authors credit their SlideShare as selling a lot of books for themselves. So if you're into creating PowerPoints and shooting audio to go on top of it, SlideShare might be for you. 11. So influencer outreach A little shout out from someone with influence over your ideal audience can go a long way in selling books for you. Michael Brenner talked about influencer outreach in his Author Spotlight video. I'll link to that in the description below. Start asking early and ask many people. That's the secret to that one. Number 12 book review sites. We love NetGalley and Goodreads, but some niche sites perform well too. And frankly, there's bookstagrammers, booktubers. They're doing some great things too. We've worked with book thinkers in the past on Instagram. Check them out and some other genre specific reviewers. Look around your genre and find sites, paid and unpaid, and ask them if they would review your book. Number 13 make sure your SEO and metadata are accurate so you're selling books from searches that are already happening. Want to see me rapping about metadata? I bet you do. Okay, you probably don't, but I did it anyway and I'll link to that video again below. Now I do have one bonus idea for you. Pitch book clubs. Some of them meet in person, some are virtual, but you don't have to be there. Book clubs are a great way to get your book out into the world, but the trick is finding the right club for your book and getting your book into the hands of the person who will choose the book. Every club has a different method of choosing. Some vote while others have a leader who chooses. You don't need to be in that book club to get your book read by the club. We'll get into this more in a future video as we're starting to do this a lot more for our clients. Given what happened with Coronavirus locking us all into our houses. Whew. That was a long list. Now you can see there are no excuses for you to not sell your book. Even if you have to stay in your home. No travel. No problem. Your book can find readers with a little creativity and effort. Do you have other ideas for selling a book without leaving your house? Post them in the comments below and when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet noboringbooks and you'll be one step closer to being one of my beloved YouTube besties, joining the incredible ranks with some of the most fabulous folks like Benjamin Preston, Todd nyhome. Congrats on the launch of your book. By the way, that cover Rocks Self Publishing with Dale Phelps Strategies and Poetry from the heart. Thank you so much for your comments, conversations, likes and shares. You absolutely make my day now. New videos every Tuesday and Friday except in the summer when we take a break. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn those notific on so you know when a new video is out for you. It's been really lovely spending time with you and I would love to keep hanging out. Have you seen this video on metadata where I wrapped or if you're scared of that and I don't blame you, then this video on how to sell your book with video is a fantastic one to watch after you've seen these tips too. Either way, I look forward to seeing you on one of these videos.