Marketing books - it's not all about creation...
An early Sunday morning a quick blather about marketing books.
So - I tool out an ad for The Cleaner with BookBub, a very powerful marketing company based in the States. It's a solid premise: they've spent time (and a lot of advertising money) building up a list of subscribers who want to be informed when eBooks are going to be made available at special prices. Then, using that list - which has 1.5m subscribers now - they sell slots on a daily email to authors who want to publicise the deals that they are offering.
They are expensive: depending on the size of the genre list you are targeting and the price of the book you are selling, it can be over a thousand bucks. Unfortunately for me, my books are in their most subscribed categories - thrillers - but since I was offering The Cleaner for free I got away with a comparatively miserly $100. Deal!
The promotion was on Friday and, as before, I was blown away by the response. The Cleaner was downloaded nearly 27,000 times in the States and, since it has been taken off deal and put back to its usual $5.99 price I've seen 80 sales, with a very noticeable boost to the other titles in the series.
This has tied in nicely with the other tactic I've been using. While we were away in Spain earlier in the year, I used the couple of hours a day that Freya slept to knock out a 17,000 novella - 1000 Yards. It's a prequel of sorts, introducing Milton before everything goes bad for him. I made the book free on Barnes and Noble and Apple and waited for Amazon - still the only player in town, really - to price-match it. Now that they have, I've been seeing a steady flow of downloads: 21,000 this month alone. The book is fast and punchy and ends with the first chapter of The Cleaner plus links to where it can be picked up. It's (very pleasingly) gone to #1 in its category and is getting a steady amount of reviews and, obviously, is funneling readers into the rest of the series, for which they seem happy to pay.
Things are going very well at the moment. The key to driving home the advantage is to put out new content, all the time. I've written two novels and a novella this year, plus significantly re-editing The Imposter. I'm halfway through another Milton and I'm confident that it'll be finished before Christmas. That's certainly the most productive I've ever been but, then, when you have a tangible effect in income and positive reviews that tell you that your readers are enjoying what you're doing, it's not hard to find the motivation to write.
Which reminds me...
So - I tool out an ad for The Cleaner with BookBub, a very powerful marketing company based in the States. It's a solid premise: they've spent time (and a lot of advertising money) building up a list of subscribers who want to be informed when eBooks are going to be made available at special prices. Then, using that list - which has 1.5m subscribers now - they sell slots on a daily email to authors who want to publicise the deals that they are offering.
They are expensive: depending on the size of the genre list you are targeting and the price of the book you are selling, it can be over a thousand bucks. Unfortunately for me, my books are in their most subscribed categories - thrillers - but since I was offering The Cleaner for free I got away with a comparatively miserly $100. Deal!
The promotion was on Friday and, as before, I was blown away by the response. The Cleaner was downloaded nearly 27,000 times in the States and, since it has been taken off deal and put back to its usual $5.99 price I've seen 80 sales, with a very noticeable boost to the other titles in the series.
This has tied in nicely with the other tactic I've been using. While we were away in Spain earlier in the year, I used the couple of hours a day that Freya slept to knock out a 17,000 novella - 1000 Yards. It's a prequel of sorts, introducing Milton before everything goes bad for him. I made the book free on Barnes and Noble and Apple and waited for Amazon - still the only player in town, really - to price-match it. Now that they have, I've been seeing a steady flow of downloads: 21,000 this month alone. The book is fast and punchy and ends with the first chapter of The Cleaner plus links to where it can be picked up. It's (very pleasingly) gone to #1 in its category and is getting a steady amount of reviews and, obviously, is funneling readers into the rest of the series, for which they seem happy to pay.
Things are going very well at the moment. The key to driving home the advantage is to put out new content, all the time. I've written two novels and a novella this year, plus significantly re-editing The Imposter. I'm halfway through another Milton and I'm confident that it'll be finished before Christmas. That's certainly the most productive I've ever been but, then, when you have a tangible effect in income and positive reviews that tell you that your readers are enjoying what you're doing, it's not hard to find the motivation to write.
Which reminds me...
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