Learn 3 Ways to Boost Holiday Book Sales

Today is a Hit Splits Episode for Author Audience welcome to the Author Audience.

Show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message, create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

So today I'm going to talk about three ways you can boost boost your sales this holiday season. And there are many other ways. And so I want you to be able to get access to a free training on this. I have a gift for you, a Christmas gift for you as well as access to a video training with eight videos on how to boost your holiday sales. So you can get it@shellyhits.com Christmas Christmas and you can download 1500 Christmas graphics as well as get access to that video training. But the first thing I wanted to share is that you can boost your holiday sales through holiday Blogging One of the most popular blogs Blog posts on my trainingauthors.com blog this last month was a post all about Thanksgiving Hashtags. One of the most popular posts on my bodyand soulpublishing.com site this last month was a blog post I wrote on 49 different scriptures all about Thanksgiving. So those were related to Thanksgiving. And yet you can also include blogs or blog posts about the holidays that are relevant to your audience. What would your audience be interested in? What kind of content would they be interested that they'd be searching for online during this time of year? Once they're on your site, have a call to action at the end of your blog post to get your book. There are so many different hashtags that you can also include in your social media posts that are trending during this time of year as well. What can you talk about that people are searching for this time of year? Then they come to your site. They may sign up for your email list. They add a call to action at the end to download something for free or about your book if it's related to that topic. That's tip number one. Tip number two is probably the biggest. It's doing a holiday promotion. This is something that we have done for many, many years. One of the best promotions that has worked for us around the holidays is around a print, print book. So you do have to have a print book in order to do this. And if you don't have a print book yet, you can still do the work to get your ebook into print before Christmas. How about that for a challenge, right? If you need help, come over to authoraudienceacademy.com and I'm there to help you. When you have a Print book. You have a lot of opportunities around the holidays. People love giving physical gifts. Gifts around the holidays, right? You know, it's nice to just buy a physical book. Some people will give a Kindle ebook as a gift. You can do that on Amazon. Did you know that you can give books as gifts on Kindle? But what I recommend doing is if you have print books, then you have leverage. Around this time of the year, I just sent out an email to my list for teen girls. Heather Hart and I wrote several books. I've written a book, Mirror, Mirror and My Beautiful. And then Heather Hart and I wrote several books together for teen girls, teen devotionals. And these are really good books for gifts. You know, moms, grandmas, aunts, uncles, youth pastors, you know, they like to give these books as gifts during this time of the year. So I just sent out an email and offered a bulk discount. If somebody wanted to buy our books in bulk, bulk to give to several people, then they can get a discount. So let me show you what that discount is. We said for bulk orders of 10 or more, we're offering books at over 50% off. And so normally these books are $12.95 to $14.95. And they can get these discounts. Prices include free shipping to US app addresses. And so we did for books priced $8.95 and up, it's $7.50 per book. And any books priced under $8.50, it's $5 per book. So we just sent this out and you know, they have to buy 10 or more copies. But this is a great idea, if you have a print book, to send something out around the holidays and to offer that print discount. Another type of discount you can offer for a print book is a BOGO deal. How many of you love BOGO deals? I do. It's like, wow, I'm getting buy one, get one free. Awesome. That sounds so fun. It's one of those deals that just sounds kind of fun, you know. And what we've done in the past is, I think it's through the Amazon Matchbook program we've been able to offer, if you buy the print book, you're able to get the Kindle version for for free. And so it's a Bogo. Buy the print book for a friend as a gift for Christmas, and then you get the Kindle version for yourself for free. Or you can say, buy the print copy, send me your receipt, and I will send you the PDF and Moby or epub files, you know, whatever type of digital file you want to send them, but they buy the print book and that print book ends up being a gift for somebody and you give them a digital copy for free. Or you can do an audiobook copy for free. If you have published your book, your audiobook on ACX and you have non exclusive rights, then you have the ability to be able to give that audiobook out as an MP3 file. And so I've done that before too, where if they buy the Kindle version or buy the print book, they get the audiobook file for free. So that's another bogo option that you can do this time of year. Another option that you can do is just discount the price for a limited time. So for a couple days maybe offer your Kindle version for half off or 99 cents. It's a little bit harder to offer huge discounts on print books. The way we do our print book bulk discounts is we actually have them pay us and then we send send them out through CreateSpace, because that is where we get the best discount. You could also give coupons through CreateSpace. So that's another option for a discount For a print book that you have published through CreateSpace, you can create a special coupon that your followers can use to get a discount if they order. From the Createspace side of it, there are so many different ways you can do discounts as well. You can also do group promotions. So Author Marketing Club does a different promotion many times of the year and they're ones that tend to do a Christmas type of promotion. So if you're interested in that, definitely tweet me and I'll send you out the link to that. But you can also just go to authormarketingclub.com and they have different group promotions. Or you can organize your own holiday group promotion of some sort. And then finally, I just wanted to talk about giveaways. It's just fun to have a giveaway. So maybe you do some sort of holiday giveaway, a holiday bundle or holiday package and you have a giveaway. Maybe you do it through rafflecopter.com I just recently got the Kingsumo WordPress plugin for my site and I'm looking forward to trying some giveaways through that to help it go viral as well. But giveaways are fun during the holidays too, and it's a way you can boost sales. So the first way was holiday blogging. The second way is holiday promotions and we covered a lot of different options there. The third way is through holiday graphics. Graphics Sell and engage graphics are so important right now, especially in your social media marketing. And I want you to go and download the 1500 plus Christmas graphics that I have for you as a gift. You can go to shellyhits.com christmas and you'll get instant access to those graphics and you will also get access to a video course on how to boost your holiday sales. And so make sure to go and get those. Those are graphics that you can use on your blog posts in social media. And you can use canva.com it's a free graphic site to use those Christmas graphics that you download and create fun, engaging graphics to post in your blog and on social media. It's just a great way to have fun, spice things up a little bit this time of year. You can also create graphics that advertise your books that have a holiday theme to it. So we've done this in the past and you know, that's something that you can then post on Facebook or Twitter or social media, wherever you're at or use in your email marketing. And so that is such a fun thing. Now those are three ways that you can boost your book sales during the holidays. Number one is holiday blogging, Number two is holiday promotions. And number three are holiday graphics. Make sure to download those graphics@shellyhits.com Christmas Merry Christmas. And go do some promotions. If you have a book published, you need to take advantage of the biggest book buying time of the year. Go and do it. Take action. Take one tip that I've shared today and apply it to your marketing and then let me know you have done it when you take action. Tweet me Elliehits, and I want to hear what you do to take action. This is the biggest book buying time of the year, especially for print books. And people are going to get tons of electronic devices for Christmas. They're going to get Kindles, they're going to get iPads, they're going to get smartphones. And when they do, guess what, they're going to get the Kindle app and they're going to want to go see what Kindle books are out there and they're going to start downloading books and buying books. And so you want your book to be out there and you want people to know that your book is available. We have tried different promotions at different times that have worked. Some have worked really, really well and some have worked, have not worked as well. But as far as doing free promotions around the holidays when everyone's getting their free Kindles, but those are things that you can try as well. People are going to be downloading a ton of Kindle books after Christmas, so between Christmas and New Year's, so that's another thing to think about. Well, I hope that you've gotten a lot of value and I want you to take action. Tweet me Hellyhits so that I can hear what you're doing and go and download that gift from me. Shellyhits.com Christmas I'll see you next time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.