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Observations and Questions about the mechanics of marketing self-published books
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Link to Amazon to generate new readers and sales. Link to your page for readers who want more who have already read your book. Different sites/opportunities will dictate what link you use. Be sure to also set up an email for your "author" correspondence and use an image signature that links back to your page as well as book cover art that links to Amazon.
This is something I'm worrying about too. I'm planning on a small advertisement to announce the launch of my novel on a forum I frequent. But I can't decide whether to send them directly to Amazon, or to my own website, or my direct-selling publisher. The publisher sells in all formats and there's no Amazon cut-- but that pesky Amazon sales ranking is so very meaningful. On the other hand, there are other ads on the site that direct traffic to Amazon just to skim money via an affiliate ID so some people on the forum immediately close Amazon pages in irritation.
If I had twelve sets of hands and arms, I still couldn't afford to cover all the potential forums there are out there, let alone the ones for my genre. Unfortunately, each one requires a separate understanding of how its people react to sales links. If the forum in question bashes Amazon, then don't link to it for that forum. I also like to present as many easy button possibilities as I can. Make sure every cover image is also set up as a sales link, plus put a text sales link and a link to your own blog/site in as well. You can set up a PAyPal account and offer to sell copies signed and dedicated from your own site, and make up some margin. I have never sold many books from the publisher's site. I don't even use those links, as my readers appreciate the opportunity that Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Kobo and others offer, to leave a review of comments. While you're at it make sure you have a twitter account and an RSS Link set up on your own site. I don't have time for Facebook, but that's just me. Good luck with your launch. P.S. Don't forget your local library and local booksellers/newspapers who will gobble up a press release about your book launch!
Heh. Luckily, my publisher is handling much of the marketing, since I have a baby due 5 days after the book launch. :-) The ad and the particular forum site is something I have general experience with so I'm handling that, but one of the advantages of having a publisher is letting them handle the publicity and I'm delighted to let her do it. I just really hate having to decide between 'more money per sale' and 'more promotion per sale'.
@Chrysoula. I am so glad to hear about the baby!
I think it depends upon how your book has been rated/reviewed on Amazon. If you have a strong response there, I think it would make sense to send people directly to Amazon. Those reviews are free marketing to help customers make up their mind. The first thing I want to know when buying a book is how it was received by other people. If many people say the author can't string together two sentences in a row, that's important. Authors in need of free marketing tools, check out the following page - http://bookclubreading.com/?page_id=434
Twelve hours into day one of freebie, 354 downloads. That took a week on Smashwords. And one sale I will consider a cross sale.
For what it's worth, I've continued to experiment. Two days of sending approx. 100 clicks per day direct to the book pages on Amazon produced 1 sale. Using a 50/50 mix to my web page vs. book pages on Amazon does significantly better. Amazon click through was about 0.5%, mix click through is about 2%. If I take all of the clicks to my web page, it doesn't change much.Your experience with the freebie is interesting, Virginia. I'm going to give Kindle select a try with my next book.
This is really interesting stuff. I have just been debating whether to reduce my tweets so that I don't have to do some for #nook, some for Amazon US some for UK, some for #iTunes - and send them all instead to my website - where there is loads of information and the opportunity to buy from anybody.One thing that I have been intrigued about, though, is the use of Twitter. I wrote three blog posts on the subject recently, and got really useful feedback. So I've written another post called _
Using Twitter: Are you a writer, a brand or a salesman?
How we use the marketing tools available to us may change according to how we see ourselves. If anybody is interested and would like to comment please visit the blog here
I just read your blog post and commented on it, Rachel. You raise a lot of the same questions that I've been struggling with, and I think you're reaching similar conclusions.I'm using some guess work but I figure most Twitter users spend an hour or two a day at Twitter, so I try to get one tweet per book into each hour, on the average. Given the number of tweets that cross my screen in an hour, I don't think I'm overwhelming anybody. I hope not, anyhow.
Don't overloook using Hootsuite or a similar service to schedule your tweets -- it puts more hours in your day.
I agree - I use SocialOomph because I can actually create queues that I can just use over and over (if there are enough tweets to avoid spamming). I have different queues for different markets according to time of day, and the number of tweets per day per subject. But I need to clean it all out now and start again as there is a danger of leaving it to do its own thing and becoming tedious.I also use Tweet Adder and Tweet Deck - I wrote a previous blog post on the tools (part III of the Twitter for beginners) because obviously nobody can just sit and tweet all day!
Thanks for the feedback - I really appreciate it.
Hi Rachel,Got a question about Tweet Adder. I downloaded a free trial copy, but couldn't find the registration code needed to get started.
I watched a YouTube tutorial on getting set up, but ran into the code wall first thing.
Any ideas?
Chris wrote: "I think it depends upon how your book has been rated/reviewed on Amazon. If you have a strong response there, I think it would make sense to send people directly to Amazon. Those reviews are free..."In my marketing experience, make a prospective customer's response as simple and direct as possible. If you want them to perform an action, give it to them with a cherry on top and one click to see it through. It works for any product, books as much as jeans or cosmetics. Put the twitter follow button right up there where they can see it, and the Like Box, too. I'd also recommend getting a your book-specific discussion group started on Amazon to increase the buzz and give yourself some feedback.
Richard,as someone who made a living at sales and marketing for most of my working life, I agree with what you said about making it easy for a customer to buy.
That's why I decided to direct all of my twitter leads to my book pages on Amazon instead of to the book pages on my website. What happened was that my sales decreased.
For every 100 page visits to my web page, I sell between 2 and 3 books, and virtually all of those sales go from my web page via a link, to the book page on Amazon. That's the one the customers chose, even though there are links to Nook, Sony, iBooks, etc.
When I sent the traffic directly to the Amazon book pages without passing through my web page first, my sales dropped to one book for every 200 visits, or about 25% of the close rate I see if I send them to my web page.
As a sales and marketing person, I can come up with a lot of theories about why that may be so, but the results are there.
Remember, when a prospect clicks the link in my tweet, he doesn't necessarily know it leads to a book. The tweets are teasers. I think when the prospect sees the Amazon page first thing, it's a turn off. The prospect was curious about how the woman's clothes got on the yacht, or whatever. The Amazon page doesn't relate to the teaser. When the first stop is my web page, the prospect sees the book, some information about it that ties to the teaser, a display of my other books, and then decides to click one of the buy links, or not. The ones who do click the buy link click Amazon, but they've already decided to buy my book before they get to Amazon, so they've been sold, and they know what's coming next.
If my tweet said, in effect, "buy my book," with a link, I'm sure the results would be different. My effort is intended to attract the attention of someone who may not be consciously shopping for a book and encourage them to buy my book.
I think that's why the results are not consistent with the "make it easy to buy" model.
Anyway, I just wondered if anyone else has had similar experiences. I think Rachel has, maybe.
Just an update. I had 863 free downloads of THE MAZE in the two day freebie and one cash sale since. I had 71 free downloads from UK and one sale after the freebie ended I've had three UK sales since September. I sold two books in the whole month of October. I sold thirteen books yesterday. I think I have to say the Select program was good for me. I hope book four is ready to go up as soon as the ninety days ends.
Marsha wrote: "Hi Rachel,Got a question about Tweet Adder. I downloaded a free trial copy, but couldn't find the registration code needed to get started.
I watched a YouTube tutorial on getting set up, but ran i..."
Hi Marsha - for the free version, I don't think you need a registration code. I'm pretty sure that I didn't. But I upgraded fairly soon when I realised what it could do. A lot of the features won't work in the free version (for example, I don't think you can set up auto follow of another Twitter account and things like that). If I remember correctly, there are limits on the numbers of things that it will do in free mode - but I found it was enough to try things out.
I also remember that I had a couple of problems that they responded to relatively quickly - but the biggest one was that it wouldn't talk to my Twitter account because it was set to https. I had to go into Twitter and turn this off.
I hope this helps?
C.L.R. wrote: "Richard,as someone who made a living at sales and marketing for most of my working life, I agree with what you said about making it easy for a customer to buy.
That's why I decided to direct all ..."
I think this is really interesting! I have tended to send people straight to Amazon, but have tried to make my website more interesting recently - with a virtual tour, a reading group guide, sample chapters etc. I currently only send some tweets to the site - those that I class as my "all formats" tweets - but I have lots of tweets that are teasers for the book. I'm going to try this CLR (sorry - don't know your name!) and see what happens.
The only pain is that I uploaded all my revised tweets yesterday - so I'm going to have to do them all again now!
I'll let you know what happens.
I'll be interested to see how it comes out, Rachel. My name is Charles, by the way.I realized as I wrote the post last night that I need to refine my tweets, as well. I've just alternated between Amazon and my website, but I'm going to make sure that teasers all go to my site, and "buy this book" tweets go to Amazon.
It's more fun to write. This stuff reminds me of work.
Thanks for sharing your results from the Kindle Select freebie, Virginia. It seems to work for you. Congratulations.Now I have to finish the next book, so that I can try it.
I know what you mean about work, Charles - but strangely enough, I really enjoy it because when I decided to do this last November, I had no followers (well - 9!) no website to speak of ... absolutely nothing. And now I can see the results of my hard work - which is extremely gratifying.And strange as it might seem - I love it!
However, I'm just about to refine my site, because I don't think there is the perfect landing page for tweets. There's HOME - but that has a mix of stuff on it, there's HOW TO BUY but that's as bad as sending to Amazon. So I'm just going to tweak a bit and see what happens!
Thanks for the tip.
You're right, Rachel. It is fun, even if it reminds me of work.Interestingly you and I apparently got into this at about the same time. I've had the website/blog since I published my first book a little over a year ago, but it languished in neglect until last November, when I finally started to work on Twitter, and I've met some interesting folks on there.
It's been satisfying to watch the followers, the website visits, and the book sales all increase. From an arm's length perspective, I still find Twitter strange, but it's a great marketing tool.
My generic tweets land on the home page/blog, but I have a separate page for each book, with info and buy links. That's where I send the teaser responses. It's still evolving -- I'm not happy with it, yet.
Charles, I like the deferred direction aspect of how you drive the traffic. Can you clarify what content you put into a tweet teaser? Are we talking about Q&A, where the potential reader has to click for the answer? Are we talking about related topics where the potential reader is directed to a subject in a book excerpt?
My own tweeting has been set up to draw readers into my own blog posts on my site. It hasn't been all that effective in terms of sales, but I build site members.
I usually use direct Amazon links in postings on other sites, in ads and in email signature graphics. I had hoped to build product sales through establishing a brand, using my blog posts as reference as a trusted resource, but I may need a more direct approach -- I also wonder if genre has a lot to do with it.
I don't know what Charles is going to answer, but I often put little teasers from the book as quotes in my tweets. For example :"It was clear from the precision of the planning that this was no crime of passion. It was an execution."
And then a link. I've had pretty good click through rates, but I'm not sure they convert to sales.
To be clear, I am doing extremely well in the UK, but I have been trying to tempt the US readers. All of these tweets have been linked to the Amazon US pages, and I've had maybe 60 click throughs on a good day. But they haven't translated to sales.
It's more difficult to tell in the UK, because my book is much more visible - so picks up sales that way.
I've just tried an experiment though - all tonight's tweets are going to my website, where I've just built a special landing page that I hope will work. I'll let you know!
So, you are just using excerpts from your book pitch? That sounds like a plan. How do you gain followers to broaden your market reach?
Ah ha! I need to point you to my blog post about using Twitter! It has 3 sections about how to make the most of Twitter (from the very basic stuff upwards), and then I wrote one recently entitled "Using Twitter : Are you a writer, a brand or a salesman?" The easiest route to finding them is via my website at rachel-abbott.com - If you go to the site, the blog is clearly marked - but in terms of getting new followers, I'll tell you what I do here.
First, I bought a piece of software called TweetAdder (there are others, but this is the one that I chose). It wasn't horribly expensive.
With TweetAdder, you can ask it to find all the followers of another Twitter user. So I chose a few authors who I think write in a similar genre to me. I found their Twitter page (and hence their Twitter handle) and then I asked TweetAdder to find me a list of their followers. Some have massive lists, so I restricted it to a reasonable number. Then I tell TweetAdder to follow those people. Some - maybe 20% - follow back. TweetAdder also 'unfollows' people who don't follow back within a certain number of days.
I don't overdo it - probably follow 200 new people a day, out of which I get maybe 40 new followers, and the others get deleted 4 days later. But I've built my following from 9 to about 1600 in a couple of months. And I know that they are all people that like books - generally the sort of books that I write.
If you want any more info, just send me a message and I'll do what I can to make suggestions based on what I did. I'm not an expert, but I've had some pretty reasonable results - whether my technique was right or wrong (and I do know that some think it was wrong!).
Thanks! Wrong? What does that mean to a marketer?The new venues available to Indie Authors for marketing have lives of their own, and it can be difficult to find a way to tie in that doesn't sap your available time until your creative juices are dried up. I'll pay a visit to your blog.
Richard,I can't add much to what Rachel said. One popular teaser tweet for my thriller, "Bluewater Killer," is "A sexy woman with a straight razor, a psychotic man, and a classic yacht. #Suspense in paradise. Bluewater Killer." The link takes you to http://www.clrdougherty.com/p/bluewat... I'm not completely happy with the landing page, yet,but it's working.
You mentioned genre earlier. I suspect you have something there, although the results for my nonfiction book on sailing are consistent with the ones for the thriller. In fact, it gets fewer clicks, but a higher sales rate, which I put down to the fiction vs. nonfiction difference.
I'm going to look at TweetAdder; I've been doing that manually, with about half of your success, Rachel. Your blog is great!
Thanks Charles - glad you like it. There are lots of tools to make your life easier. I use Social Oomph too - but only to create "queues" of tweets, so that I can tweet different things at different times of the day. TweetAdder only has one queue.Let me know if I can help with anything that I have managed to do!
I've been using Hootsuite for the of scheduling tweets. It does a good job for me, at an inexpensive price.I've downloaded the demo for TweetAdder, and searched a couple of folks that I thought might be good targets, but I was surprised at how many spammy looking followers they had. I like the power that's there in TweetAdder, but it appears that it would require a good amount of planning to avoid just building bulk without adding value.
Do you make an effort to screen follow candidates, or just take them as they come? It may be that I'm overthinking the problem.
By the way, I'm going to follow you, and I'll retweet some of your tweets. Maybe it'll help with your U.S. sales.
You've already helped a great deal, just working through all of this. It's nice to find someone else trying to take an analytical approach to the puzzle!
I'll follow as well -- we all need to stick together!
Hey, Rachel,I've been reading your blog about Twitter and learning a LOT! Thanks for taking the time to help us new authors get started.
C.L.R. wrote: "Richard,as someone who made a living at sales and marketing for most of my working life, I agree with what you said about making it easy for a customer to buy.
That's why I decided to direct all ..."
Boy, this post made so much sense to me and made me realize how much I need to redo my blog or perhaps invest in a website. Thanks!
Someone had to comment to me on my blog to put up photos of my book covers. I felt so dumb. Another time I was told to make the follow button more obvious. I think I had it way at the bottom.
To go back to Charles' comment - I just take followers as they come. Within TweetAdder you can tell it not to follow people who just use the default image, who put a url in their profile text or who have no profile text. I use TweetDeck which shows all my new followers. TweetAdder will automatically follow them back for me, but if I see something I don't like, I just unfollow.That, incidentally, is the only reason that I use TweetAdder instead of HootSuite. I think Hootsuite has a much nicer UI, but it doesn't show you new followers (or didn't last time I looked), and so I decided against it.
I'm glad that some of you like the blog posts - I'm going to do another one as soon as I get a moment about how to ask for a review. You would not BELIEVE some of the requests that I have had! But that's for another day.
Have a good day (and good sales!) I should be following you back by now - but if I'm not let me know and I'll check it out.
As an initial test, I split my links 50/50 between Amazon and my own page. On my page, I was getting between 1 and 3 visits per tweet, depending on how many followers I had, and how many people retweeted my tweets. I changed the Amazon links to my own page, and immediately doubled the page visits, confirming to me that people are following those links. I can get traffic data on my own page, but not on the others; hence the design of the test.
So, here's the question. Which links should I use to optimize sales?
Option 1 - all links lead to my page. My ebooks are on Amazon, Nook, iBooks, Smashwords, etc. On my own page, if a visitor is looking at a book, links are shown to all of the online sellers, so the visitor can choose. Most choose Amazon; that's no surprise. That's why I was sending half of the traffic to Amazon before I started experimenting.
Option 2 - all links lead to the book in question on Amazon. The visitor can buy with one click. That's one click fewer than required if I link to my page.
My instinct is to send them to my own page, because there I choose exactly what to say about the book, I show covers for my other books (or others that I choose), encouraging cross-sales, but somewhat under my control, and, if the reader happens to be a non-Kindle person, I haven't irritated her by sending her to Amazon. I worry that by sending all clicks to Amazon, I'm depending on Amazon to close the sale for my book, before the customer has decided to buy it. That leaves Amazon free to provide a plethora of distractions in the form of other books, special deals, etc.
I'm interested in the thoughts and experiences any of you may have had in this area. Let's figure it out.