The Basics of Book Marketing and Selling More Books.

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.

You know how there's the ABCs of different tasks? Well, when it comes to book marketing, it's not about the ABCs, it's about the T O C s. Hi, my name is Shelli Hitz. I'm the creator of authoraudienceacademy.com and I'm also the creator of the Author Automation System. This is a system that will help you sell more books without being pushy or self promotional and it will actually save you time so you can do the things you love. I'm currently teaching this system within authoraudienceacademy.com but I wanted to teach you what some of the just bare bones basics, foundational concepts are when it comes to marketing. Whether or not you're book marketing or you're selling products, there are a few things that you really need to know. And it really starts with toc. Now, as authors, we think of TOC as what table of contents. But this is not your, your table of contents. This, my friends, is something that can help you just understand the framework of what it's going to take to sell more books. So I have my trusty little easel here for a visual aid and I'm going to be writing on this as we go through this training. So the T, the T is where we start and the T is traffic.

So traffic is where most authors really struggle or maybe they just stop there. But traffic is driving new customers to your website, to your lead magnet, to your book pages. Finding new customers within the Author Automation System, I help you to find new customers on a daily basis that are interested in your topics and your books on autopilot. And it's not a tricky thing. I mean, this is something I have used since 2012 and it is free. It's not Facebook ads, it's not anything like that. It's a free strategy. So I'm going to be teaching this within Author Audience Academy in our Take Action Challenge this month. But it's also part of the author Automation system. But when it comes to traffic, traffic can be many things. So you can get traffic from the search engines, so you can get traffic from Google. My site, trainingauthors.com gets a lot of traffic from Google. You can get traffic from social media. I teach a lot about social media marketing because it's free and it's a great way to get traffic. You can get Traffic from permafree books on Amazon. You can get traffic from Amazon in that way. I have many books that are up like that. You can get traffic from guest appearances. So that is a huge way to tap into someone else's audience and get traffic. That way you can get traffic from your podcast on itunes, people searching for topics and so forth. So that's the T. And the T O C T is traffic. And there are so many ways to get traffic. But I like to teach you to work smarter and not harder. I like to teach you to set up systems. Yeah, it's going to take a little bit of time. It's going to take a little bit of work, a little bit of sweat equity to set it up. But once you set it up, it works for you ongoing. I love to teach you how to create something one time and let it work for you over, over and over again. So what are your favorite ways to get traffic and what are the ways that work best for you? Because like I said, I recommend working smarter, not harder. And that means using the 8020 rule. This is a basic thing and most people know it. In productivity and marketing, 20% of your efforts will produce 80% of your results. And so what is the 20% that will yield you the 80% of your results? That's one of the things that I'm teaching inside Author Audience Academy. What's the thing that works good for you or works best for you? We have toc. This is the basic building blocks of marketing. The T is traffic. I talked about all the different ways you can get traffic. O is offers. If you want to make more income, you probably need to start considering making more offers. Are you making offers? Offers is also part of my Build and Grow marketing map. It's the o in the GROW acronym. Build and Grow. Those two words are acronyms. It's all in my book 9 Strategies to Build and Grow youw Author Platform. But the O is offers. And so you have traffic. But then you have to make offers. Offers. You need to have calls to action. You need to make offers to that traffic. What offer are you making if your traffic is coming from Google on the search engines to your site? I get a ton of free traffic from Google to my site, trainingauthors.com that's where a majority of my traffic comes from. I have hundreds of new people coming every day. I have offers. A lot of what I offer on that site is my lead magnet. That's my free training. Building a book marketing plan. It's about 27 ways to sell more books. And I get quite a few signups just from that list every day. Offers can be free offers, they can be paid offers. But are you actually asking people? Are you offering them what you have? Are you asking them to buy? Are you making offers? So this is just some basic marketing 101. You have to have the traffic and then you have to be making offers. So offers can be your book, it can be your lead magnet. It could be a tripwire offer, which is somewhere between 7 and $97. It could be your core offer, it could be products of other kinds. But are you making offers and are there ways that you could make more offers? I just personally made $120 by simply offering a $10 product on the back end of my free 5 day live video challenge. It was a $10 product. So far I've sold 12 of them. It's not going to make me a millionaire and it's not going to pay our mortgage or our rent or anything.

Who wants an extra $120 today? You know how I made that extra $120 was simply by giving an offer offering that $10 product to those who signed up for the free challenge. So what kind of offers can you make? Are you making enough offers? Do you ever ask your email subscriber list to buy your books?

And you shouldn't be saying, buy my book, buy my book, buy my book all the time. Obviously you can go to the extremes, but then what I see is authors going from one extreme of never asking for people to buy their books, or the other extreme of annoying people to buy their books. So we want to find that happy medium. We want to find that place where we can have that happy medium. Now, the C is for conversions, and I made this green because you can show me the money. When you're making really good conversions, this is where you can make sales. You can make more money. Sometimes people have really, really good traffic, and the traffic is not the problem. Sometimes they're making good offers. They're doing it in a way that's in a relationship. It's not the bullhorn on the side of the road. You know, they're making great offers, they have a great product. It's solving a pain point. And the offer isn't the problem. Sometimes the problem is the conversions. And you know, once someone gets there, they're not buying. So what is the disconnect? What are the issues that are causing the disconnect with the conversions? Conversion is just basically the amount of people that see your book on Amazon compared to the number of people that actually buy it. So you should have at the, you know, bare minimum, around 2 to 3% conversion rate. I mean, it varies for everyone. Some people's conversion rates are sky high. Some of them are really, really low. But these are things we can improve. You know, we can improve our conversion rate. It can improve by our copywriting. That's something I personally am learning this year. I'm growing in the skill of copywriting and I am taking courses and I am doing things to grow in that skill. And that's writing to sell, writing to persuade, writing to get someone to take an action. And there are simple things you can do to tweak what you say, how to tweak your book description that can improve your conversions. Conversions. Basically you have to have a market that wants what you have. Maybe you're in a teeny, teeny, tiny, tiny market and you're like, I'm not getting people to buy my book, but Maybe there's only 100 people in all of the world that are interested in your topic. You have to have a topic that's broad enough that people are interested in and that they're willing to pay money for and then be able to draw them in to buy. So these are just the basics, traffic offers and conversions. And through the next few months, I'm going to be setting up what I call the Author Automation System. And I'm going to be setting this up and training and teaching it in authoraudienceacademy.com I'm super excited. I'm super excited to share this strategy with you. If you would like to be able to sell more books without being pushy and self promotional, I encourage you to join us. You can find out all about Author audience academy@authoraudienceacademy.com but I just wanted to share these basics. You know, you have to have traffic. You have to have traffic coming from somewhere. You need those offers. So don't be shy. You know, if you have something that's going to change someone's life that's going to potentially help them, that's going to be something that can make their life better, that can help them in some way. Don't be shy about sharing it, but don't over share either. Does that make sense? And then getting that conversion, getting them actually to buy, getting them to click that buy button. There's so many factors that deal in with that, but I'm excited to be able to share. This is just basic marketing, but so many authors miss this and it's interesting because I'll actually have author audience academy members in our private Facebook group ask me questions. And one author was like, Shelly, my lead magnet. Her offer, she's like, it's not working.

Help. And I get these cries for help, like these desperate Shelly, it's not working. What do I do? And I said, okay, breathe, tell me what the system is. I have to understand a little bit more to know if it's working or not. Said, what are your numbers? What are your conversion rates? She said, what do you mean? Can you look into your email subscriber service or whatever you use and see how many people have actually landed on that page and those that have actually subscribed? Well, she uses AWeber. So she went in, she's like, oh my goodness, I have like a 70 some percent conversion rate. So 70%, 70 plus percent of the people landing on her landing page for her lead magnet were actually opting in. I was like, that is awesome. That's off the hook, good conversion rate. So your problem isn't your lead magnet, your offer or your conversion rates. Guess what your problem is. Dun dun, dun, dun dun. Your problem is you need more traffic. If you're not getting the number of signups that you want, you actually need to look back and say, okay, it's not that I have the wrong lead magnet or the wrong offer. It's not that I'm not getting conversion rates. It's actually I need a little more traffic. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about how you can increase the traffic to that offer and then it's just going to increase if those conversion rates continue. Does that make sense? It's like, which piece of the puzzle isn't working? And sometimes you just need the insight to know, oh, like this is actually working. It's actually doing really good. And so many times we market blindfolded. It's like we're just shooting in the dark.

Trying all these different techniques and we don't even know. We're not even looking to see what's working, what's not working. If we'd only look, okay, how much traffic are we getting? Are we making those offers? What is the offer? And then what are the conversions? What are the conversion rates? It will tell us a lot about what's working and what's not working. You need a hungry market. If you want to sell well, you need a hungry market and then you need to have really good content. If it's fiction, you need to have a really, really good story. Fiction tends to Take longer to really perfect and to go through the editing and all of that typically than nonfiction. Nonfiction, depending what you're writing, it can be done a little bit quicker. But I always recommend you have an editor, but it depends on your content. And then I recommend that you build an author platform. I have thousands of people now on my email subscriber list and I can send out just one email or a series of two or three emails and sell hundreds of books. And yet if I didn't have that, it might not be that easy for me, even if I had a great cover, great content, all of that. So you need to be able to have not only a hungry market, not only are you solving a pain point, solving a problem for them, but also a market that has money to buy. They're willing to spend money to buy what you have that you're also at the same time building your author platform so you're not just depending on organic. Organic traffic from Amazon. You know, we're still working on driving that traffic to those offers. Yesterday in the Author Audience Academy group, I had one of my members ask about her funnel and ask about like her products. And oh my goodness, it ended up being this, this giant thing. I was like, it would be, this would almost be a really cool case study or a really cool thing for, for all the members. If you're an Author Audience Academy member, check it out because you could see my thought process and how I was working through it with her on her book, her products, her lead magnets, the whole Author Audience Academy or the author Audience funnel that I teach. And I have several podcast episodes on that. There's no magic number. I usually recommend having at least 10 to 20,000 words. So pages, it really doesn't matter in Kindle how many pages because people can make their font big, they can make it smaller. So I usually go by words because that way it doesn't get confused on like, well, I have an 8 and a half by 11 page and I have a 8 and a half by 5 and a half page. So everyone kind of has pages different. So I recommend at least 10 to 20,000 words. But it's something that marketing is something that you have to test, track and tweak. So you need to find what works for your niche, what works for, for your tribe, your audience, and do some research on the other books in your industry and see what is selling well. If it's only a 14 page book, there's probably because it's very specialized information they're getting right to the point they're answering the question and it's needed. People do like short Kindle books or short trainings because we live in a busy society. There's so much going on. So if you could answer one main question really quick, that can be helpful. I have a blog post on my site, trainingauthors.com I encourage you to go there. It's the pinned post on the homepage. So just go to trainingauthors.com, go to that post and it will give you my strategies. Normally, like right now, free KDP promotion days aren't working like they did in 2012. It's just not the same. But what I do recommend using them for is if you're a new author and you're working to build your author platform, you can have a book for free and in your book have your calls to action to an offer that's a lead magnet, a free training of some sort, a checklist, a template, something that they would really want that's related to your book and drive that traffic, that free traffic to sign up to your email subscriber list. That way you're building your tribe, you're building your list, and you can then email them when you have other books available. Another strategy that's really good with free days is if you have a series. So if you have a book series, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, you could have the first book in the series free and then at the end of the book, say, collect them all or read the next book in the series and have a link specifically where they can buy your other books. That can work really well as well. I have a couple different tools you can use to submit for your free days and there's a ton of different sites you can use, so just check those out on my blog post@trainingauthors.com so thank you guys so much for joining me on this training. This was a very basic marketing training on toc. No, I'm not talking about table of contents. I'm talking about traffic offers and conversions. Do you know what is working and what is not working for selling your books just by sometimes looking into a little bit of the details or you know, just really seeing like looking into your numbers. And I don't recommend getting obsessed with your book sales and your rankings and all that. That can actually lead you on a roller coaster, an emotional roller coaster. When your sales go up and your sales go down, your book rankings go up, your book rankings go down. I've been on that roller coaster. I don't recommend getting on that roller coaster. But you do need to know certain things and certain stats. And I'm excited to be sharing a lot more in authoridanceacademy.com through the author automation system. I'm not a huge fan of posting over and over and over in Facebook groups. Facebook is relational. When people are scrolling through their feed, you want to have something that catches their attention. Sure. But it's more casual. It's relational. That's why I love live video. This is me. This is me in my running shirt. Like, I didn't even get dressed up for you guys today.

But when you come to Facebook, I've seen some authors, they'll go into groups and they'll post the exact same post over and over and over and over and over again. I'm in the same groups they're in. I see that same post over and over and over and over, and it screams to me, spam.

Don't do that, please, please, please don't do that. Maybe find a few groups that are active in your niche that are really engaged. And if you want to build relationships in those Facebook groups, you could set a timer for like 15 minutes, go into that group and answer questions, become the expert in that Facebook group, become such a valuable resource that people are like, ooh, they have a book out, or their book's on promotion right now, or they have this thing going on, this webinar or this live video or whatever it is. Whatever your offer is, they're going to be more likely to want to do it. But if you're just broadcasting and just posting the same thing over and over and over in Facebook groups, please don't. I just don't think it's going to be very effective. What you can do is you can use trackable links to see how many clicks you're getting. So you could create a different link for Facebook groups just to see if anyone's even clicking on the link. I almost guarantee you if you post the exact same thing and it's just an advertisement, you haven't built relationships with anyone in that group, it's not going to be very effective. You can do this through the pretty Link Lite plugin. It will just basically tell you how many links you've gotten or how many clicks you've gotten on the link. There's a lot of different ways you can test it, but I don't recommend that. I have a training. If you go to sevendaysocial.com free, I have some templates for you that you can use on Social media. But in my training, seven day Social, I teach you how to set up different tweets and posts that will be able to bring consistent sales on an ongoing basis. And there is a specific strategy that I recommend. But like with anything, you have to test it for your niche, you have to tweak it. And it depends on who are your followers, how did you get them? Are they targeted followers or are they just bots, you know, that automatically follow you back and they're not even real people, you know what I mean? Like, sometimes that happens on Twitter. And are you really, are you engaging with your followers on Twitter? The more you do that, the more likely you'll have success with it. So it's like with anything, there's no that easy button. I wish there was. Like, if there was, guess what, we would all be making thousands of dollars every day through sales if there was just one little easy button we could push. But it takes a strategy. And that's what I really try to help you with is thinking like strategy, not like, let me just blast out my book and let me just pay fiverr to put my, my book on all these pages or whatever. It really takes a strategy. My very first blog and website for teen girls. I would get visitors from all around the world. So I would get emails from Venezuela, from South Africa, from Japan, and they would read my book and they would email me. And you tap into that global market if they read English. Another way is to get your books translated into other languages. So I teach this inside authoraudienceacademy.com but I had one of my books translated to Spanish. And then you can reach a different market. On the Amazon Spain site. People are going to be more interested in a book if it's in their language. So that's another way you can have different opportunities to connect with sites and things that are for that specific country or that specific geographic location. Have them do promotions for you. I mean, there's so many things you can do, but those are just a couple quick things that came to mind when you have a real relationship. I'm looking into your eyes right now. I'm standing here, I'm teaching you. I'm looking into your eyes. You're seeing me. I mean, this is just my running shirt that I'm going to be going out for a walk later. I'm just real authentic. This is me. I tell you what works and what doesn't work for me. I don't try to make it about how hype. And so I hope that through that we're developing a relationship where you're growing to know like and trust me and then you'll eventually want to invest with me in the trainings that I offer and in my academy. Authoraudienceacademy.com all right, well, I'm going to head off for my TOC training traffic offers and conversions. It's the basics. And I'm going to be heading over into my Author Audience Academy groups. So if you're an Author Audience Academy member. And I'm going to be actually outlining what the author automation system looks like and what we're going to be covering in the months to come. So I'm excited and I will see you guys later. Bye. Bye.

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.