Self Promote and Succeed Chapter 12: Does Money Solve All Book-Selling Problems?

Chapter 12 does money solve All Bookselling Problems? Let's take a stack of your hard earned dollar bills and light them on fire, shall we? That's how running paid ads can feel. I get it. I've spent a lot of money on ads that didn't produce results, and the reality is that when it comes to book marketing and book selling, money alone won't be the only thing you need to succeed. If money were the only thing you needed to sell books, it would actually be easier. Of course, financial resources absolutely help, but unless you're fine with taking a match to your money, there are fundamentals you should know first. And one of the most important fundamentals is that the answer to almost everything in marketing is you won't know if your selling tactics are any good until you test them. Another author's proven formula is not necessarily the ticket to your audience or your book. Consider the first few hundred dollars you spend on ads as an investment in your education, not money that's going to bring an immediate return. And know that ads amplify only what is already happening. In other words, if your book is not selling at all, you need to fix fundamentals first. More ads won't solve the problem as far as those book fundamentals are concerned. We'll touch on them here, but that is really what Self Publish and Succeed was all about. If you haven't read it, then it would be a great resource. If you have read it, this will be a quick refresher. One size does not fit all. If there were a guaranteed way to sell books, publishers would be a lot more profitable, books wouldn't bomb and we'd charge a lot more for our services. At Book Launchers, many of our authors started without much of an existing audience and have gone on to incredible results. A documentary feature, a TED Global ideas talk, a thousands of books sold in bulk purchases, dream publishing deals, and so much more. We get results from most of our authors, but it's never one thing that works for every author, and it's never only what we have done. It's also rare that anything major happens after one month of marketing support. In many cases, the real results came six months post launch or longer. Book marketing is a team effort that requires the author to be involved as much as anyone else over the long haul. Don't believe anyone who claims to have the proven system or promises you overnight success. Fundamentals first, paid marketing second. Make sure your fundamentals are strong before you start paying for ads. This is important no matter what bigger picture, goal or strategy you pursue. Speaking of your bigger picture goal. Paid ads are a good tactic for almost every goal. It's just important to understand your desired outcome. Growing your audience Selling books and driving leads into a funnel for a business or product. But before you spend any money, let's make sure your book is ready for the paid ads Spotlight A sales page needs to convert viewers into book buyers when you send people there. If you're driving traffic to a page and your book isn't selling, you have to fix that page and stop spending money until it's fixed. This could mean changing your cover, your book description, getting more reviews. Remember, we see 25 reviews as the first real tipping point for a book's performance, or even revising the first 20 pages of your book so they pop For a reader, conversion is the most critical variable when you pay for ads. When people land on the page, do they take the desired action you want them to take? Do they buy a book or give you their email address? That's what conversion is, and that's why you should care about a reader's experience on your book's sales page. If your book's already selling even a bit, then paid ads can add fuel to the fire. If you're using paid ads to try to ignite a fire that's never been lit, the wood might be wet and you could be wasting your time and money. Test One Thing at a Time it might be tempting to try to run ads everywhere right away, especially if you are impatient for results. But in the world of books, tracking is imperfect. You likely won't have strong tracking on all the platforms. As a result, you will not likely understand your results or be able to pinpoint where tweaks would help. When you test or add or remove one platform at a time, you're able to notice when something starts working because sales will increase. This is because people almost always need multiple touch points. Maybe they saw your ad, then heard you on a podcast, and that was enough for them to make a purchase. Or it could be someone was told about your book over dinner and and then your ad pops up the next day. In other words, rarely does any one thing trigger a book sale, and it's impossible to really know what works and why. Through a process of elimination, you can discover whether a sales increase is due to an ad or not. Adopting a marketing approach that layers tactics one at a time can help you identify what creates tipping points and what doesn't do anything at all. We'll cover a few of the tactical aspects of ads in this book, but please know that entire books are written on each of these subjects. To truly do it well, you should read books by Dale L. Roberts or David Goughgren that go into more depth and provide more detailed instructions. Amazon Author Central Amazon Author Central is a free tool that Amazon has given authors to increase their visibility, create their author brand and sell more books. It also ties back to ads. Once you've created your account, just just head to Google and ask for instructions on how to set up your Amazon Author Central account. You will see your books for sale on Amazon and links to view your profile on a variety of Amazon pages in different countries. From your account you can access NPD bookscan data including sales sorted geographically. You can also use your account to follow the Amazon sales Rank and customer reviews of your book. Whether you've already set up your Amazon Author Central page or not, I'm going to run through some best practices along with some do's and don'ts. Best practice 1 Upload a professional author photo do not post a selfie. Get a professional photo. Best practice too include your well crafted bio, ideally a version with keywords. If you have multiple books available for sale, I recommend using a more general bio that covers your credentials, awards, degrees, fun facts and what's relevant to your most recent book. You should also include social media and website links here. Amazon encourages you to upload your biography in other languages, so you may also want to look at using translations and double check them for accuracy. Just to be sure. Link your books to your account. Ideally, your author page should list all editions of your book. Used copies of out of print books may still be available if someone lists them for sale. Many customers appreciate being able to find them, so Amazon makes that kind of sale possible and doesn't remove them from your author page. If a book is incorrectly attributed to you, you can contact Amazon support to have it removed. Just look for the contact links in the help section of your author account. There are other things you can do like linking your blog feed, uploading images and adding video, although it appears video is disappearing from platforms in some countries. Best practice 4 Add your editorial reviews to do this, select the Books tab and choose the book to which you want to add reviews. Select Add under Editorial Reviews and follow the instructions when you're done. Don't forget to preview the review to make sure everything looks right. Then make sure you hit Save. Once your profile is created, check back every three to six months to give it an update. Check all your links and make sure they're still working. Then add any new content you think should be there Sales Data when you've got promotional activities on the go, you want to be able to view the sales data easily. This is where you can do it for Amazon. To view your sales data, go to Reports Marketing. Once you're there, two specific reports are worth checking out. First, you'll want to review your Amazon Sales Rank report, where you can see your books in all formats along with how they rank. The second thing to look at, which I think is even cooler, is the Bookscan report. I like this one because you get geographic breakdowns. For instance, let's say I had a big buyer for one of my books in Cincinnati. If I ran ads or planned live appearances, I might use this information to focus on areas where I have an existing fan base. I can leverage the momentum that is already there with some kind of event or promotion. An Amalgamated spot allows you to see your customer reviews first by format and then by Amazon site. In other words, you can you can see activity on different Amazon Marketplace sites in one place. This is a cool feature. In addition to all of these great Amazon Author Central tools I've shared, Amazon also has a way to make your page look a little more appealing using what it calls a content. A Content A content is a visual section on your book sales page that can include charts, photos, quotes, and other graphics or visual images. It's displayed in a section called from the Publisher, which appears below the Book cover Description and Buy button, but above the section for reviews and product details. It's really intended to support a buyer's decision to buy the product by making your page more attractive and engaging. A content lends a visual punch to product listings on Amazon, and that can't hurt your sales. If your book is published or on pre order through kdp, it's eligible for a content. Because Amazon is ever evolving, I recommend checking their latest how to upload information. For our purposes, let's think about what will appeal to your ideal reader. This is intended to sell your book, so the copy must pop and the images must be appealing. If you're not going to invest in making that happen, skip the A content and remember this should supplement your book description and book cover. Don't include a picture of your cover, they have that already. You could include enticing quotes from inside your book or images that aren't on the COVID but fit with the content and will entice a reader. You can also add powerful reviews or blurbs. Avoid promotional or time sensitive language. Words and phrases like free bonus or on sale today are not going to get approved. Leave out your book's price too, and don't include any links or copy that direct users to any site other than Amazon. Look at other authors in your category for inspiration if you need ideas. This is an evolving space, so it's best to check around for the latest trends and ideas Amazon Ads if your goal is to sell books, you absolutely must be running Amazon Ads. For most authors, Amazon Ads is a smart supplement to every bigger picture goal. Amazon Ads work. It's putting your book quickly and easily, and often more affordably than many other advertising options into the hands of willing readers. We run Amazon Ads for our clients at Book Launchers based on what we've learned through educating ourselves and our own experience about what works and what doesn't. Here are three tips for giving Amazon Ads a go Set your budget at five or ten dollars a day this is an easy thing to fear, especially if you've done Facebook ads. Facebook seems to magically spend your budget every day, and it doesn't matter if you get results or not. Amazon won't spend your budget like that. We actually find it challenging in the early days of running ads on a book to get enough clicks to hit that modest budget. That's because Amazon's ads are charged on a pay per click basis. You only pay when people click, and you're not setting your click rate anywhere near what you might pay on Google for a click. It can take a lot to hit a $5 per day budget because you're setting your click rate at something like $0.15 to $0.50 per click. Click now. If you set this too low, you won't get enough data to make decisions that will help you optimize your ads. Consider your initial costs an educational expense, not a financial investment. You need data to educate yourself and make decisions, and it's rare you're going to get a positive return on investment on your first month of running Amazon ads. However, if you're not getting a positive ROI after 60 to 90 days, that needs a close review Understand Advertising cost of sales ACOS ACOS is the percent of attributed sales spent on advertising within 14 days of clicks on your ads. This is calculated by dividing total spent by attributed sales. If you've got that at 100% or less, it is a good thing, but it doesn't mean you're making a profit because it's not considering your royalty rate, only the sales price. When you get an ACOS of 50% or less, your ads are likely profitable and it's time to spend more money because you're making enough money to reinvest it into more ads to generate more sales. A high ACOS doesn't mean ads aren't working though. If your overall book sales do well, keep ads going because they will likely be impacting your overall sales and turning them off will cause sales to dip. Tweak them and try new things to get better results, but a full shutdown could hurt your overall sales. We've seen authors turn ads off because the results don't seem great and then their entire account sales seize dips again. This is because there isn't one thing that sells a book and ads aren't always the thing that leads to the sale, but they can contribute to it. Amazon ads are simple in principle, definitely much simpler than Google or Facebook, but even so, you have to know how to get that roi. The biggest thing you really do need is to manage your ads and spend time tracking them on a weekly basis at a minimum. In terms of must have tools for running Amazon ads Besides publisher Rocket, I also highly recommend you grab Brian Meek's book Mastering Amazon Ads. There are also Facebook groups and Amazon courses to guide you along the way. Paid Ads for Social Media Platforms of course, you can run paid promotions on Facebook or other social media platforms for your book too. For a nonfiction author, the best play for social media ads is almost always to drive traffic to an opt in page rather than a book sale. If your goal is only book sales, you will likely want to skip social media ads completely. As a nonfiction author, if you're hoping to grow a platform or business with courses, consulting or high end offerings, then your book could be a tremendous entry point for your entire funnel. In that case, whether you sell your book on social media or even give it away for free, social media could work really well for you. One tactic many marketers use is a free plus shipping funnel or something similar. The ad is designed to first collect contact information using a small fee to cover some of the costs, and then upsell the buyer into much higher paid and higher margin offers. You'll typically see these offers at $7.99 to ship the book to a reader. This doesn't break even for the author, but the goal is the connection to the reader and the upsell on the back end. That's why knowing your number one goal is so important. A social media ad strategy isn't going to turn your book into a bestseller, but it might help with obtaining contact information and back end sales. It can also contribute to book sales in the long run because you'll gain a platform and and you can leverage that platform to grow book sales. Most authors benefit from running ads that lead to email addresses if they have good offers on the other side of that connection. At the same time, ad costs are so expensive that you would be very hard pressed to get a strong return on your investment with running ads direct to a book sale. Fiction authors who want to hook readers into a series do it with some success, but their ad costs might be lower than nonfiction authors who compete with businesses buying ads for the same keywords and similar audiences. We run Google and YouTube ads to a video sales letter and have a video ad that sells self publish and succeed. It gets people to visit selfpublishandsucceed.com where there's an offer to buy a book and get some bonuses. We don't make money on this sale at all because our ad costs plus the printing and shipping costs are higher than the $18 we charge, but it gets us contact information for the same cost as a normal opt in. So we continue to run these ads. It's a business strategy more than a book sales strategy, which is my point. Apply only the tactics that help you achieve your goals with your book. Now, there's another book platform that you should know about as an author, whether you seek featured deal promotions or ads, and that is bookbub. Bookbub. You likely have heard of bookbub featured deals. These almost mythical features have been known to sell more than 1,000 copies of a book in a single promotion. While not always true and definitely not always a strong ROI, BookBub featured deals remain a coveted prize. It's understandable given that they email millions of readers daily and that the lists they send out are curated for those readers they move books. But for nonfiction authors, the return isn't always there because the fee for a BookBub deal can be greater than $500 while your book sells for 99 cents. This really requires that your book is set up to lead into other money making opportunities or serve as the entry point into your ecosystem of books and other materials. My book, More Than Cash Flow, landed an international featured deal many years ago. It barely broke even, but it sold almost 500 ebooks. We've had a couple of clients land BookBub features, but their costs were not recovered by book sales or royalties. BookBub, at its core, is a book discoverability site such as similar to Goodreads. Its purpose is to help readers find new books and authors. BookBub also has features that help an author market their book through deals, ads, new release announcements, and more. They have a subscriber list of close to 3 million. Of course, not all 3 million subscribers get notified of every deal. Bookbub curates their lists so readers only get what they want. At the time of this writing, 1.4 million subscribers were interested in general nonfiction, 2 million were interested in biographies and memoirs, and so on. Typically a BookBub deal is 99 cents, but sometimes $1.99 or $2.99 ebook deal will be featured. The book must be priced at least 50% off its normal retail rate for this promo, but you probably need to get closer to 90% off to be accepted. If you it also has to be the best price that has been available for the last 90 days, so be mindful of the impact other 99 cent sales you may run can have on your books acceptance here. If you've never submitted for a feature deal, here are a few things to know about the process. First, be flexible with your dates when you apply for a feature. If you have a preferred time frame, submit at least one month in advance. Every application is reviewed by a human who is familiar with what the BookBub audience clicks on and purchases. That person looks at the same thing a buyer looks at, including your book's cover, book description, editorial and consumer reviews, and any awards you've won. If your book is widely distributed, which is their preference versus being exclusively on Amazon, you need reviews in different places so that they feel good readers will want your book. Second, you likely will want to accept their Featured deal, but BookBub won't put a mark on your book if you choose to refuse a proposal. Sometimes you may be asked to go into a different category or offered an international deal, and it's okay to say no if you don't think it's a fit. Third, there is a comment field in the submission. Use that space to highlight things that might not be obvious. If you've won some major awards or you have an endorsement from someone really big, this is the perfect place to put that. A really killer editorial review could be highlighted here too. Don't repeat anything that is obvious on your book page, like your book description, but leaving this field blank is a missed opportunity. Remember, you are appealing to a fellow human being. Finally, mark your calendar to resubmit after 30 days if you are rejected, and you likely will be rejected many times. Many authors submit for years before they finally get accepted. You're competing against some heavy hitters to get those few coveted feature deal spots, including traditional publishers and big name authors. It's not unusual to be rejected. Make improvements to your product pages and your platform and keep trying. In the meantime, you don't need to abandon bookbub. It's a big player in the book ad space, but it's important to go in understanding that bookbub is very different from Amazon or any other platform. Shake off the idea that it's going to function the way you expect, and be ready to start fresh. The best resources I found on BookBub ads are from BookBub itself and author David Goughgren. I'm listing his book on the resources page@self promoteandsucceed.com Here are a few other things to note about BookBub, especially if you're used to running ads on platforms like Amazon. Their ad traffic is driven by featured ad newsletters, which means the traffic comes in waves. You see a spike and then nothing, and another spike and then nothing. Their audience is also more drawn to fiction than nonfiction, so it's not super lucrative for nonfiction authors. It's also highly visual, and your ad performance will be really dependent on the quality and appeal of its appearance. Be ready with a bunch of images and test them out. The good news is that it's easy to start with all formats and platforms and turn off the ones that aren't working for the images, but keep the ones that are. My excitement with BookBub ads was largely related to the fact that I could promote audiobooks directly with them. There aren't a lot of platforms to do this, of course. My first time doing these ads, I found that after spending $325 on audiobook ads, despite strong clicks, I had sold about five books. The click through rate was doing really well on this one ad, so I left it. After a month. I dug into the data and realized that even if 100% of the audiobooks sold on Apple, I where as a result of the deal, the ROI was abysmal. It definitely takes some persistence to get the ads working and some spreadsheet work, because the tracking is even more imperfect with bookbub than it is with other platforms. This is improving slowly, but it still requires spreadsheets and affiliate links for the various platforms so you can track which ads perform and which ones don't. One last thing to note for BookBub is that the targeting is based on authors, not your ideal reader. With social media ads you might target demographics or interests. With Amazon you may target keywords, but with BookBub it's based on authors. This means you have to figure out other authors who appeal to the reader. You want to reach. What I discovered, however, is that it's actually less about the authors themselves and more about the number of their BookBub followers. This is not as directly correlated to the popularity of the author as you might think. Take Joanna Penn or David Goughgren as examples. We target their books for Amazon ads for self publish and succeed. Their readers will like that book and it goes well. This is BookBub, not Amazon though, and their follower numbers are too low to do much, so I have to widen the list to more high profile writers like Brene Brown and Tim Ferriss. These authors are not a direct fit for my audience, but they have a lot of followers and are better performers than the more niche authors. At the end of the day, only ad space at market giant Amazon works well for authors of all stripes. BookBub may or may not be for you. Paying for book sales is a great strategy when your book is already selling well. If you have a budget for testing different ad platforms and running ads, you will likely find a place that works. Just remember, when you test ads, focus on conversions and try one new tactic at a time you to succeed in the long run. Let's move on to public relations and other types of exposure to help you build that brand and get your book out to more and more readers. Chapter Summary It's a quick summary of the paid promotional options discussed in the chapter. To download this, visit self promoteand succeed.com Chapter 12 is done.