The writing world is never short on advice for how to turn your passion into 25,000 words that will become the next great bestseller. But what do you do once you’ve written that book? No matter how great it is, marketing to your family and friends will only take you so far. You’ve uploaded your book to several online sites, but what’s the next step? Get a Facebook page? Start Tweeting?
Yes, you should. But if that’s all you do, you’ll have a nice piece of virtual real estate and a few virtual friends, and not much else. You don’t want to just write a book (if you did, you’d call it your diary and hide it under the bed). You want to sell your book.
To do that you must start by putting yourself and your work out there. There are many techniques for selling books. Some of them are the same whether you are selling an e-book or a paper book, and some are different. We’ll start today with five tips to increase your e-book sales.
1. Use Kindle Select. This program requires you to upload your book ONLY to Amazon. If your e-book is already available in other markets, take it down. This may sound count-intuitive, but there are a lot of good reasons why you should focus your e-book sales on Amazon. A few of them are increased royalties and increased marketing opportunities.
2. Check the Price. Your e-book should be listed at $2.99. Yes, there are e-books out there that are selling for more, but if you are an unknown author, or have only a small following, price your book to attract new readers. If you’re Nora Roberts or James Patterson you can sell your e-books for $12.99, but even these well-known authors reduce the price on their older editions.
3. Check Your Categories. Is your book listed in the best categories? Do some market research. Look at other authors who write similar books. What categories do they use? How large are those categories? Try to find a sub-category that has fewer titles. It will be easier to climb the rankings in their. For instance, if you’re a mystery writer, “crime” is a very large category. But “women sleuths” is a smaller category with less competition. Obviously, you’ll look for the categories that best suit your book.
4. Lower Your Price. Now that you’ve set your price at $2.99 I want you to lower it. Yes, that’s right, I want you to offer your book for .99 cents in special promotions several times a year. Using the Kindle Countdown Deal program, you can offer your book for .99 every 90 days. This will increase your sales ranking, giving you more visibility.
5. Now Give it Away. Yes, you heard me. Now that you have lowered your price to a ridiculously uncomfortable level, I want you to give it away! Not all the time. Just for a week. This sales technique works particularly well if you have two or more books published. Offering the first book in a series free will bring you new readers who will want to know the rest of the story—and will pay to read it.
6. Advertise Your Giveaways. If no one knows you’re having a sale, how can they buy? Make sure you let potential readers know your book is on sale. There are dozens of book promotion sites that send emails with alerts to books on special. The best-known, and most expensive is BookBub, but don’t stop there. There are lots of others.
Need Help jump-starting your e-book marketing campaign? Contact Open Door Publications for custom marketing campaigns.
Six Tips to Market Your E-book
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