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any sort of giveaway carries a high reputational risk by acting as a tacit endorsement. So the organizer must believe, first and foremost, that the book is useful to their attendees.
One slightly sneaky trick is to research relevant events while your book is still being written, and coax a few organizers into becoming beta readers.
As Arvid explained to me: All of my “marketing” was just sharing the work I was already doing on the manuscript. You can write your book in public, chapter by chapter or section by section, and just continually release these things to an ever-growing audience of people. Nobody will compile it into a book and release it without you.
Most online communities will welcome submissions that are some combination of helpful, educational, interesting, inspiring, and sincere.
second “cutting room floor” document. Whenever you delete a paragraph, section, or chapter from your main manuscript, paste it into the second document. That pile of deprecated drafts and detritus is a perfect source of raw material for your content marketing.
share the research you’re doing.
Did you hit #1 on Amazon with your pre-order? Grab a screenshot and tell your story. Earn your first dollar in royalties? That’s a story. Get your fifth perfect review? Tell people!
review the options of what you might post: Share your writing, drafts, and excerpts Share your research and references Share your process and progress
I’d write a chapter or a section of my book, post it as a blog post, send out the same thing as a newsletter, and then read it aloud — plus a little extra commentary — as a podcast episode.
Speak directly to the reader’s situation and goals, explicitly listing the book’s promise and benefits to their life, using readers’ own words (from reader conversations and beta reading) where possible
Your immediate goal is to get 20-40 verified reviews (for social proof) as well as a steady, organic stream of daily sales and reviews (for Amazon’s algorithm).
For The Mom Test, I earn approximately $17 per paperback ($30 retail price, 55% royalties after accounting for printing costs), $7 per ebook ($10 price, 70% royalties), and less than $3 per audiobook (since they’re usually bundled into an Audible subscription). But due to the popularity of audiobooks, and despite driving less than 10% of my total profits, the audiobook represents over 30% of my “readers.”
And surprisingly, an audiobook doesn’t cannibalize the other formats as much as you would think, since plenty of people only buy audiobooks.
Record an audiobook — 20-30% boost to sales, 5-10% boost to royalties Submit the book to more platforms (iBooks, Google Play, etc., or distribute to all of them at once via a tool like IngramSpark or Draft2Digital) — 5-15% boost in total across all non-Amazon platforms For traffic on your own website or blog, sell the book directly as a PDF, MP3, and/or EPUB via Gumroad (or something similar) for 97% royalties — 38% boost in royalties for copies sold on your site vs. Amazon
Translate the book into more languages — proceeds can be significant (it’s a whole extra book!) but requires seeding a fresh audience for each language, so it’s more involved and time-consuming than it appears
My quick advice is to charge $20-30 for your paperback and $9.99 for your ebook.
The reason I recommend selling ebooks for $9.99 (as opposed to $20 or $30) is due to Amazon’s definitely-not-price-fixing policy of paying 70% royalties for ebooks priced at $9.99 or below, but only 35% for anything priced higher than that.
the broader point is that if you’re able to turn engaged readers into high-value customers, then the actual price and profits of your book hardly matter.
keep an occasional eye on social media for mentions of my books, jumping into the conversation when it feels appropriate.
For the past few months, whenever a reader asks a question, instead of sending an email reply, I record the answer as a public video on my YouTube channel[50] and send them a link. This requires slightly more time, but doubles as a permanent piece of content to help build my fledgling audience. As we’ve already discussed, the “trick” of sustainable marketing is to find ways to integrate and overlap it with whatever you’re already doing, and answering reader questions is a perfect fit for that.
