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March 4 - March 10, 2022
You’ve got two potential approaches for selling your book before it is launched: Pre-order — they pay today and get it eventually, after it’s finished Early access — they pay now and get the current manuscript immediately, plus updates along the way and a finished copy once it’s done Both options are fine, and the choice mainly comes down to how many sets of eyes you want on the pre-launch manuscript (plus your comfort-level with technology, since the second option is more complex to set up).[21]
Successful marketing isn’t really about marketing at all — it’s about product design, testing, refinement, and ensuring that you’re delivering real value to your readers. But assuming you’ve already got that recommendable foundation in place, it’s time to get tactical.
People say that your first reaction is the most honest, but I disagree. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s a knee-jerk emotional response to something in your past.[25]
If you’re in the business of paid consulting or speaking, you can easily upsell clients by adding their logo to the cover and a custom foreword to the innards. I’ve sold five or ten thousand of these custom-branded books to a mix of corporations and universities, and they absolutely love it. Bundling books into your normal client services also offers some creative pricing/negotiating power since you can steeply discount one or other component while still ending up with a higher overall fee. Also, clients can sometimes pay for your books and services from two separate budgets, which helps
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Building an online presence, at its core, is a simple strategy: start writing.
But human beings are interested in other human beings and what other human beings do. By sharing our process, we allow for the possibility of people having an ongoing connection with us and our work, which helps us move more of our product.
As numerous creatives have noted over the years, the optimal career strategy is simple: Make things and tell people.
When folks started asking how to preorder my new book, instead of whipping up a landing page, I decided to try this alternative opt-in technique. There is no landing page or website for the book. Just a few photos and an email address! I sent out a few tweets telling people to email me if they were interested, plus one post each on Facebook and Instagram, for a total of 358 likes, 9 shares, and 25 comments. In 24 hours, 90 people had emailed to request a pre-sale link. And more keep coming in. It’s a lightly manual process, but it also means that I get to read every email folks send. Which
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These two decision-points make up the heart of your Amazon purchase funnel: Getting shoppers to click on your book instead of someone else’s (relies on your cover, title, subtitle, and reviews) Getting them to press “buy” instead of “back” (relies on your store page, description, and reviews)
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.[44]
