In this solo advisory video, Julie Broad (founder of Book Launchers) explains why influencer marketing alone cannot drive book sales for self‑published nonfiction authors. She opens with a high‑profile case where a $10,000 TikTok influencer campaign yielded only three sales, then contrasts it with a response that attributes the failure to a lack of supporting marketing, not to the platform itself. Drawing on two recent author anecdotes (Amy Chan’s $44k launch and Kirsten Bell’s $100 Instagram post) and a five‑year internal analysis of over six figures in Amazon ad spend, Julie shows that successful campaigns always coincide with other promotional activities. She distills this insight into five actionable rules: (1) stack influencer work with email, podcasts, ads, etc.; (2) first convert your existing audience; (3) prioritize smaller, highly‑engaged creators over massive follower counts; (4) understand true influencer costs and aim for organic relationships; and (5) budget for multiple sequential campaigns rather than a single spend. She also mentions a tool (Author Launch Kit) for finding and outreach to influencers. The overall message is that influencer marketing is an amplifier that works only within a broader, multi‑pronged marketing ecosystem.
Chapters
An author spent $10,000 on a TikTok influencer campaign and sold— drumroll— 3 books. The influencers were probably not the problem, though. We just pulled 5 years of our own Amazon ad data at Book Launchers, and every campaign that performed had one thing in common. So if you're a self-published nonfiction author wondering whether influencer marketing works for authors and whether you can just pay somebody to fix your book sales, this video is for you. Hi, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and your host here at BookLaunchers.tv. Book Launchers' mission right now is to help 100,000 books be discovered by 2030. And influencer marketing? Well, that can be part of it. It does work. And big publishers have people whose entire job is influencer campaigns. But it doesn't work on its own. I mean, honestly, nothing in book marketing works on its own anymore. Everything requires a multi-pronged approach for true results. If there really was just one thing that worked, I would focus our entire business on helping authors with that one thing. But most things work together, not in isolation. Every dollar you spend on an influencer is an amplifier, and an amplifier needs something to amplify. Here's what I hear from authors in a lot of cases. One will say influencer marketing is a money sack. I don't have the money for it. I'm not falling for it. I don't know who to pay or how to pay them. The other one is, I have money. I'll just Pay an influencer with big following and get them to sell my book. All right, and I'm gonna explain why using 2 stories that just came out of Jane Friedman's latest newsletter. The first story is about author Amy Chan, who published an itemized account of the $44,000 she spent launching her second book. One line item was $10,000 for a TikTok influencer campaign, and according to the conversion report, it produced 3 book sales. That post went viral, at least in author circles, and I understand why. It reads like proof that BookTok is a con. But author and platform coach Lee Stein published a response, and her argument is the one that I think we have to pay attention to. The campaign did not fail because BookTok is fake. It failed because sponsored posts underperform organic ones and because Chan had not converted her own fans and readers first. The other story— well, in April, Kirsten Bell wrote about paying about $100 for a sponsored Instagram post from a Bookstagrammer with more than 100,000 followers, and the post sold But then she looked closely at who the followers actually were, and they fell into 3 buckets: fakes, Bookstagrammers, and authors who had paid for the exact same service. I actually did a video about this a while ago and said very similar things. But ultimately, that's not influencer marketing. That's just getting on a bad treadmill with a price tag. Now, we also went back through 5 years of our Amazon Ads campaigns and We analyzed them. What works? Is there a consistent thread? And this is over 6 figures in Amazon ad spends. And we were trying to figure out if something separates a campaign that performs from one that doesn't. And I did expect it to be something about the keyword strategy or bid structure or targeting. But the single common denominator of the campaigns that did well was that the author was doing other things to promote their book at the same time. The ads were never the whole plan. They were one input in a busy machine, which lines up with what Amazon's been changing. Amazon is not going to feed your book into the also bots and the recommendation engine if your traffic is only coming from one place. It wants to see interest arriving from multiple directions. So think about what that means for the $10,000 influencer campaign. If influencer money is the only thing you're doing, the platform has nothing to confirm it against. 3 sales is not a BookTok failure. It's an ecosystem failure. So here are 5 rules that you should follow before you pay a book influencer a single dollar. Not 5 reasons not to. But it's 5 reasons so that if you do choose to spend money, it's going to give you a return. So number 1, stack it or don't do it. If an influencer campaign is the only marketing you have running, don't do it. Save the money. Paid attention only converts when it lands on top of organic things like your email list, your podcast guesting, your articles, your content, and then you could do ads and reviews and all those things are accumulating. Influencer campaigns can work for brand awareness, can move people to buy a book, But people rarely buy something the first time they hear about it. So you're building awareness, not necessarily sales. And so that means you have to have multiple campaigns and multiple things. Number 2, convert your own people first. This is the rule Amy Chan skipped according to the response to her announcement. The people who already follow you, they open your email, they read your first book, they're the warmest audience you'll have access to, and they don't cost you much to reach. Very few of our successful authors even pay influencers for their success. They're using their grassroots momentum to build on the things that are working— their lists, their local community, and some media. Ultimately, if you're not willing to become part of the community and make your own content, then it's going to be hard to build that grassroots momentum. So before you pay anyone, ask yourself whether you're converting your own audience first, because if the people that know you aren't buying, then paying somebody else to promote to their audience isn't gonna work either. Rule 3 is aim smaller, A lot of people pursue the big number influencer, but if you see a creator with 50,000 followers, but they're really targeted to the people that you want to talk to, that's probably going to be cheaper and easier to connect with than the people with millions of followers. Follower count is only one side of a coin, by the way. Engagement is the other side, and that is something to pay very close attention to. Again, we've talked about it before. You can have a couple thousand really engaged people following your videos or your posts, and that's gonna be worth more than 100,000 people because— that aren't engaged, because engagement really, really matters. Now, the hard part of all of this is most of this data and information, with the exception of our own Amazon ad accounts, is from the fiction world. Now, the good news is we do have a tool that can help you find, target, and craft your outreach to influencers. You can check it out at authorlaunchkit.com. It's inside of our Author Launch Kit, and that will help you find influencers And even figure out what connection point you have with them. All right. Number 4, know what you're buying and what it costs. A study from PR by the Book, they researched rates for a client and found posts ranging from $200 to tens of thousands of dollars. The information in that post was actually kind of interesting to me. I get approached all the time for people to advertise on YouTube. We have over 80,000 subscribers and people are often going, I'll pay you $100. I'll pay you $200. for a post or a video, it costs me more than $200 to edit, let alone create the video and all of those things. So a lot of times I think there is a mismatch and a misunderstanding of how much it costs to create the content. And so ultimately, this is why I think it's best to build your own audience. But, you know, some people have been willing to invest a lot more in the videos. Some companies have been— have offered up to $800. To have a dedicated or even a mention in a video. So when you're approaching influencers, know that they have other offers, but they're varying widely. And they may tell you it's gonna be $200. They may tell you it's gonna be $5,000. Whatever it is, before you even approach them, think about what it's worth for them to endorse your work. And ultimately, if you can, I always recommend you create an organic relationship with them, which takes more time. But I think an organic mention can be worth more than a paid mention, and it won't cost you anything but your time, and you might even get a great ongoing mutual beneficial relationship from that. Okay, and by the way, most influencers and also a lot of the reviewers that we work with do not want a PDF. Part of this, what they do, is going to include a physical picture or a video of the book. So plan to send them physical copies. And yes, it costs more, but the results are so much better. There's also a version of paid influencer marketing that people have run for years without calling it that, and that is BookTok. It's more common in fiction, but there's nonfiction influencers too, and you are not paying for a post, you're paying for a sale. Number 5, budget for 4 campaigns, not 1. This one came out of that article. Amy Chen's $10,000, well, that was for 1 campaign, and in digital marketing, there's always the learning phase and then a conversion phase. Then you scale. If you hire an ad company, they're going to tell you 6 to 12 months before you see a return. Influencer marketing is an alignment strategy that builds on ads and all the other things you're doing. So the question that you need to ask yourself isn't necessarily, can I afford an influencer campaign? It's, can I afford sequentially doing multiple influencer campaigns on top of everything else I'm doing? If the answer is no, spend the money somewhere else where it can compound and try to connect with influencers organically. Again, often an organic mention is worth so much more anyways. Paid traffic to a book with weak positioning, thin metadata, and no proof is just a quick way to lose money. So make sure your book is discoverable and is performing when you send traffic to it before you start paying for that traffic, whether that's ad traffic or influencer traffic. Influencer marketing is not a shortcut around doing all the work that you need to do to market a book. So do the work, and when it's working, buy the multiplier. I'll see you in the next video.
