Five Ways to Market Your Book Your Publisher Won't Tell You (and Doesn't Understand)

Marketing books is a bit of a mystery. But it doesn’t have to be. With sufficient data to determine which marketing efforts yield the greatest returns and warrant further investment your book promotion can be a success.

Aggregate sales transaction figures are available to authors once the book is published either from their publishers, Amazon’s AuthorCentral or services such as Novel Rank and Sales Rank Express. This is great. But when it comes to accessing unit sales, sales by source or at specific price points – it’s so difficult it’s basically impossible.

Yup. That’s right. BASICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.

In this day and age, we were stunned. Much of what we do at Blueprint hinges on data – how many people view a certain message, how many people respond to that message, at what rate, how many people perform our desired action, at what rate, and ultimately, how much it costs to drive that action. And given that we work in digital marketing, we’ve become accustomed to having this data available in real time. We want data and we want it now!

Without all this available, we improvised by becoming an Amazon Affiliate. The Amazon affiliate program is a referral program where sites that discuss or review products direct visitors to Amazon to complete a purchase. Amazon then tracks the sales that come from these affiliate sites, and pays them a percentage of the sales they drive. The program allows one to create specific tracking codes to see the clicks, sales, sales rates and sales volumes by source.

While Amazon isn’t the only book seller out there, it does account for a huge proportion of online sales: 70%-to-80% market share for ebooks sales and about a 50% market share for printed books sold online. Since most of our outreach efforts were digital, this proved to be comprehensive enough.

2. Testing and Learning

So once the tracking is figured out – what’s next? We took a test-and-learn approach to marketing Startup Rising, investing in a myriad of areas to see which ones drove the most sales cost effectively:

• Microsite: We created one to showcase the book, provide information on the author, house press and events: Startup Rising.
• Email Marketing Program: We leveraged the author’s friends and family list, professional contacts, and sent messages through related organizations.
• Content Marketing: The author blogged/published articles on the topic and/or related topics across different websites.
• Social Media: We posted messages, press and graphics across the author’s Facebook and Twitter pages, and created a book specific page on Facebook.
• Paid Media: We tested search engine marketing, content marketing, banner ads, remarketing, referral links.

Each of these tactics had it’s own unique affiliate link, enabling us to measure results by technique and decide which efforts to keep running and which ones to pull back. In the game of digital marketing there are always winners and losers and our results showed this to be the case.

3. Connecting Directly via Email

Email accounted for 41% of our tracked sales at a solid 10% conversion rate. From charity 5Ks to Girl Scout Cookies, we’ve all done it. Tapping your Friends & Family reserve can never hurt. So it’s not surprising that an author’s personal network is the strongest, and tapping into it yields results. We also worked with likeminded organizations that sent emails to their lists. These emails also performed, but at a lower conversion rate: 5%. We know this because we dumped the author's email data base into Mail Chimp and measured everything, and each email was personal and from his gmail.

Keep in mind – style matters. Our approach to email was to be very informal, with a familiar tone and design to look as much like a regular Gmail email as possible – no graphics – with a personalized salutation. We divided Chris’ lists into different segments and tailored content to each. We also simplified each message to include one or at the most two asks, and embedded links to encourage recipients to share the message with their friends and family.

4. Browsing via Social

What’s the logical next step after hitting up your real-life friends and family? Social Networks. Social Network marketing accounted for 33% of sales across tweets, Facebook posts and notes or LinkedIn posts, with Twitter representing the lion’s share of social sales. Conversion rates varied for each: LinkedIn: 21%, Facebook 3% and Twitter 3%. These sales extended beyond the Chris’ immediate network and reached an expanded audience, so the lower conversion rates would be expected.

We also tested hashtags (#startuprising) and included images and videos wherever possible to improve social sharing rates. In addition, Chris was fortunate to get widely followed Twitter personalities to tweet about the book, further building awareness and contributing to sales.

5. Showcasing Your Content

The site itself accounted for 19% of sales at a 17% conversion rate. And while the site is an important place for learning more about the book and the author, it actually is just a layover on the way to Amazon.

Much of the traffic to the site continues to come from articles, interviews, and videos about the book. This sort of content marketing, combined with the guest blog posts and press, proves useful for building awareness and encouraging additional media coverage.

Conclusion

We learned a lot marketing Startup Rising. We gained more insight into which approaches to leverage and when. But of course, there is still so much to learn: we still weren’t able to track down to the keyword or ad level.

One day, we hope other authors—and publishers—will push for better tracking and more data from Amazon and others, since being able to test, measure, and optimize for more sales is truly a win-win for all.