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| "Taste and See" available for free at http://amzn.to/1RB4jtk Article by Lorilyn Roberts |
NOTE: This article was posted last year, but it's still relevant today. Hopefully I can help authors to make wise and informed decisions when it comes to book marketing.
Is It Worth Hosting a Book Launch?
Is it worth the financial
cost, emotional energy, physical labor, and mental stress to host a cyber-book
launch in today’s ever-changing, highly competitive book market world? If
anyone were in a position to answer this question, I suppose it would be me. I
lead a Christian book marketing network, the John 3:16 Marketing Network, and
have been involved in many book launches over the past three years. In 2013, not
counting the book launches I coordinated for other authors in the network, I
hosted three book launches of my own:
One in March, one in August, and one in December. For the most part, I
conducted the launches using the same methodology with each, with one
significant difference for the December launch which I will explain later. Some
of this will be technical because I want to give hard facts and real data. If
you want to be encouraged, inspired, or challenged, read another one of my blog
posts. If you want the raw facts, read on.
First, what did I do that
was the same for each launch? For all
three launches, I had at least twenty reviews of my book. I advertised on
similar sites, and I list some of those sites and point out the ones that were the
most helpful below. I was featured as a guest blogger on eight to twelve blogs
for each launch. I had a book trailer for each book. I posted on Facebook and
used Twitter extensively. My followers were roughly the same on both accounts
for all three launches. I have over 27,000 twitter followers on @LorilynRoberts
and 19,999 followers on @John316Network. I’m not sure how many fans I have on
Facebook—more accurate would be the number of people who saw my posts, and that
was proportional to the Facebook advertising I bought. I advertised at http://bit.ly/Lorilyn_Fan_Page and http://bit.ly/John316FanPage.
To be honest, the $800 I spent on Facebook advertising I could never correlate to
a spike in sales on Amazon. (Please note the figures I am giving are for sales
from Amazon U.S. Kindle).
I also used Rafflecopter
to promote all three book launches.
The launches were all sponsored
by the John 3:16 Marketing Network. Authors in the network sent out Facebook
and twitter posts promoting the books. In each case, other books by authors
were being launched at the same time as mine. The launches ran from the 1st
of the month through the 16th. I am including figures for the whole
month on each launch because some of the promotions I ran did not occur until
after the 16th.. With the August launch, I will include the
September figures because they were significant.
There are a lot of
variables in terms of which books are more successful than others, not even
based on content or quality. I am assuming the books are good or else we
wouldn’t be launching them. The books must meet certain criteria to be
considered for a launch. Despite my experience and involvement in many
launches, I realize now, painfully, that I can’t cookie cut a launch and tell
an author, if you do A, B, and C, your launch will be successful. What works
for one person may not work for someone else. In my case, all three launches
yielded vastly different results. Let me give the figures, and then I will see
if I can address some of the variables.
How many books did I sell
with each book launch? I checked my KDP report from Amazon for the following
figures.
In March, I launched a YA
fantasy novel, Seventh Dimension – TheDoor.
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| Free on Amazon Kindle |
I sold 393 books for 99 cents
in March. In April, one month after the launch, I sold 154 books. In May, I
sold 104 books. In February, before my launch, I only sold 31 books. I did do
some pre-launch promotions using KDP Select where I gave away several hundred
Kindle copies of Seventh Dimension – The
Door for free. Basically, as a result of my book launch, for 90 days
following the launch I sold 651 books. Some of those books were priced at
$2.99. I tend to raise the price after the launch to see if I can carry over
the sales at a higher price point. Clearly, as a result of my book launch, I
was able to sell more copies of Seventh
Dimension – The Door than I had previously.
Before February, my sales had been dismal, so I won’t go back and give
you those paltry figures.
My sales of Seventh Dimension – The Door, continued
to be around a hundred each month, until December. For December, I have only
sold 34 copies. Actually, sales of all my books are down for December.
Let me go to the second
book I launched, Children of Dreams, AnAdoption Memoir.
I had given away about 20,000 copies of this book on a
couple of previous “free” promotions through KDP Select. But I had sold very
few copies at $2.99. I had never listed it at 99 cents. So for the August launch,
I reduced the price to 99 cents. In August, using the same promotions I had
used before on Seventh Dimension – The
Door, I sold 2,462 copies. In September I sold 1,694 copies, and in October
I sold 856 copies.
There was one thing
different about this launch, however. I was able to feature Children of Dreams on BookBub, but it
wasn’t until after the official launch, so that meant the high number of copies
I sold spilled over into October. The September 20th advertisement forced
me to keep the book at 99 cents through September. To increase my chances of BookBub
featuring my book, I reduced the price of Children
of Dreams on Smashwords to 99 cents, and their distribution system reduced
it to that same price on other sites as well.
After BookBub featured Children of Dreams, however, when I raised the price back to $2.99 on Smashwords, the websites they distributed to wouldn’t, despite Smashwords and I both contacting the noncompliant sites. I ended up having to unpublish Children of Dreams from Smashwords to get the price back to $2.99 on all sites. Amazon wouldn’t increase the price, insisting they wanted to price match it to everyone else’s.
After BookBub featured Children of Dreams, however, when I raised the price back to $2.99 on Smashwords, the websites they distributed to wouldn’t, despite Smashwords and I both contacting the noncompliant sites. I ended up having to unpublish Children of Dreams from Smashwords to get the price back to $2.99 on all sites. Amazon wouldn’t increase the price, insisting they wanted to price match it to everyone else’s.
The bottom line is I lost
control of the price of my own book. I doubt that I will ever reduce the price
of Children of Dreams to 99 cents
again on Smashwords. But I did sell
about 1500 books through Smashwords as a result of the BookBub promotion.
On
Amazon, during that three-month period, I sold 3,012 books (again, I’m not
including Amazon sales through Canada, England, et cetera).
For December, however, I
haven’t even sold a hundred copies of Children
of Dreams, so whatever spike I had in August from the book launch and
BookBub promotion has run its course.
Now, this brings me to my
third book launch for 2013. I launched a children’s picture book, The Donkey and the King.
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| Free on Amazon Kindle |
The launch ran
from December 1 through December 16. A couple of my promotions ran after Thanksgiving,
so I am including those numbers in the total. I am currently running a free
promotion on this book that started the day after Christmas, so my official book
launch numbers on this launch run from about November 26 through December 25. I
sold 74 books at 99 cents.
I also spent more money
on the December launch. With it being a children’s book at Christmastime, I thought
I would probably sell more books and recoup my costs. In reality, my December launch was a big
disappointment compared to my previous two launches.
Where have I advertised
on my book launches? I will give all the
places I advertised for The Donkey and
the King because I paid for more advertising with this book than with the previous
two books:
http://tracker.kindlenationdaily.com/tracked-books
(promotions at bookgorilla.com)
The Donkey and the King was featured on all the above sites. I
submitted it to BookBub and ereadernewstoday.com and they declined to feature
it.
Now, a few comments are
in order. BookBub declined to feature my
Seventh Dimension – The Door book
also. They did feature Children of Dreams
and that significantly impacted my total book sales.
If you can feature your
book on BookBub I would recommend it.
While the fee was around $300, I made close to $2,000 in sales, so I
covered my cost in advertising. The problem is BookBub is very selective about
which books they will choose. If they accept your book, you are almost
guaranteed to sell a lot of books. You aren’t just buying exposure, which is
what I tell myself when I spend money for advertising that produces no
measurable sales.
Ereadernewstoday.com declined to feature The Donkey and the
King, though they did advertise Children
of Dreams and Seventh Dimension – The
Door. They take 25 percent of the profits, so I am sure they keep track of
those books which sell well and those that don’t. They aren’t going to feature
your book if they don’t think they can make money off your book. In each case,
I did sell some copies as a result of advertising with them, but I don’t know
what those numbers were. I only know I sold copies because they sent me a bill
for their 25 percent fee afterwards.
Which sites out of the
ones I listed above do I recommend besides BookBub? The site I recommend as the best is http://www.fkbooksandtips.com/for-authors/.
I have advertised on this site with six different books in six different genres
at different times of the year and have always seen a significant spike in
sales that I can directly correlate to their advertisement. Which other sites
would I recommend? Based on my most
recent experience, none.
The fact is, since I lead
a network of authors that promote book launches, right now I am reluctant to
direct any launches for others or host my own launch. If I can’t come close to guaranteeing
that an author will hit best-seller status in his main subcategory, then I
can’t in all fairness recommend a book launch, must less charge for it. And while the charge is not high, any amount
seems unethical.
Now, that brings up one
more variable. We have used the Rafflecopter for all the launches since April.
Everyone would have a free opportunity to win the grand prize (by law this is
required), and all a participant had to do was give me his email. That way, I
could contact the person who won. I also used the Rafflecopter to build my
opt-in list. For full disclosure (also legally required), I used the business
model of Rafflecopter so that people knew they were opting in for my very
infrequent e-zine. For each launch until December, I picked up about a hundred
new subscribers. I also included a few options, like follow me on Facebook and
Twitter, and garnered a few more fans.
But if you bought the books being launched, you would get ten chances to
win whatever prize we were offering, which varied. One month it was a Kindle
Fire. Another month it was a $100 Amazon gift certificate.
For December, however,
the Rafflecopter was handled differently. We had seven books launched and
offered a $200 Amazon gift e-card. We used a mommy blogger service that
featured our Rafflecopter prize on 25 mommy bloggers, all of whom had to have
at least 2,000 followers. We did not feature buying the books on the
Rafflecotper as an option. The options were for people to follower the mommy
bloggers’ on Facebook, twitter, and their blogs, and in return, the mommy
bloggers featured our books on their blog.
I know we had thousands
of readers who saw our books on the mommy blogs. I had a few options I included
for the network but I did not include any option as mandatory; e.g., that you
had to sign up for my opt-in list. My
options were basically to follow the John 3:16 blog and my personal blog. And
the coordinator for the mommy bloggers set up a link on Facebook so that
prospective readers could follow us on Facebook.
The numbers were
mindboggling on the social networking sites. Basically, we doubled our numbers
on both blogs. I wished I had written down the exact figures before and after,
but I didn’t think the result would be so dramatic. The followers on my blog at
http://LorilynRoberts.blogspot.com
were about 180 before the launch and they are now at 399. On the John 3:16 blog at http://John316mn.blogspot.com, we have
500 followers. We had about 250 before the launch, and we picked up about 500 fans
on Facebook. We also had more than 21,000 entries on the Rafflecopter, five
times higher than the next highest number of entries on a previous launch.
I paid $100 for the coordinator’s
fee. Based on the fans and followers we picked up, the cost was well worth
it. But how many books did we sell with
all that exposure? Well, I don’t
know. But my sales were dismal and only
one author out of seven reached best-seller status. Her book was for young
adults, and I can’t make the correlation that her success was tied to the mommy
bloggers. I have a feeling her boost came from the promotion I sent out to my
opt-in list on the last day when she reached best-seller status. My readership
includes a lot of YA readers since I write in that genre also, but it’s hard to
say. I am thankful that for all the work put into the launch by myself, Joseph
Young—who handles the landing page—and the many authors in the network who
contributed their time and effort into hosting and tweeting the December
multi-author book launch, that one author reached her goal.
Who is the coordinator
for the mommy bloggers that can work magic with social networking, even if all
that tweeting and Facebooking doesn’t translate into book sales? She is Bobby Anne. You can find her at www.BlogWithMom.com
and www.AdvertiseWithBloggers.com
and www.AdvertiseWithBloggers.com
I have asked myself many
times, what can we do to make the launches more successful? How can we guarantee success? After all, that’s what the John 3:16
Marketing Network does, is we launch Christian books.
We already have a lot in
place, with three years’ experience hosting book launches. An author has to
have ten good reviews for starters. He has to have a good book cover and a
well-edited book. I also make sure an author is ready to launch—does he have his
book categorized properly on Amazon? Did she include relevant search words when
she uploaded her Kindle book on Amazon? Is the Author Central page filled out
with a bio, twitter feed, blog feed, and book trailer? Does the author even have
a book trailer? Hosting a launch is
intense and requires a lot of preparation.
After my experience with
the December book launch, I can’t guarantee even with a great book, advertising
on professional websites, being hosted on many blogs by John 3:16 members,
lowering the book price to 99 cents, having fifteen or more rave reviews, being
featured on multiple blogs with large followers, and tweeting to thousands of twitter
and Facebook users, that an author can sell enough books to cover his cost. And
no businessman worth his reputation would recommend someone spend money on
something with doubtful profits. Is it worth it? The way the book market is now, I don’t think
so. I know others will disagree with me, but I don’t come to this conclusion in
a mindless vacuum. I have data to support it.
Today I can’t tell you
how to have a successful book launch at a price most of us can afford. So I am
not coordinating any launches until I do know. That means members in the John
3:16 Marketing Network can host their own launch if they are risk takers, try
different approaches, and see what works for them. I do recommend this: You must individualize your launch. I don’t think you can use a “one size fits
all” style launch anymore. I get emails in
my inbox all the time, listen to how this author sold thousands of books and if
you do what he did, you can, too, and you pay some exorbitant price to see how
X author sold 10,000 copies of some obscure book of which I’ve never heard.
To be honest, sometimes I
am tempted. Maybe they know something I don’t know. Hopefully I have become
wiser—wise enough to know that whatever they did most likely won’t work for me,
and there are no shortcuts or magic formulas to make my book fly off the shelf.
If they sold so many books and made so much money, why do they want to charge
for the information anyway? The reality is, I think the best way to sell a lot
of books is to write a lot of books. And when I say a lot, I mean like twenty
or more. And that means I need to write more and market less, and quit worrying
about launching books. If I couldn’t achieve best-seller status on one of my
books, how can I help anyone else anyway?
In the meantime, book marketing
is changing every week. What works today may not work tomorrow. Advertising
sites come and go. They are a dime a dozen now, it seems, and even if they
aren’t expensive individually, you can spend a lot of nickels. I never set out
to spend $800 on Facebook advertising. You get caught up in the moment, hoping
that this time something magical will happen and those dollars will produce
sales. While I can say I have never gone into debt advertising or selling
books, I do regret some of my foolish choices and hope by being transparent and
open, I can save you a few bucks by not repeating some of my mistakes.
My intent has never been
to make money off marketing. I am not a marketing guru, but I do care about
Christian authors. My goal with the John 3:16 Marketing Network has always been
to provide an environment for authors to help each other—by being informed and
sharing what works and what doesn’t. My advice right now is to save your
marketing dollars and focus on writing.
I also don’t think it’s
sufficient to be featured on a blog to promote your book. You need to be
featured on a blog with followers interested in your type of book. And that
takes research—a lot of research. If the blogger writes books, you might need
to read one of his books before approaching him to host you on his blog. It has
gotten that competitive.
If I sound too negative,
I don’t mean to be. I am excited about the future as I have several books
rattling around in my head that I can’t wait to write. And once I am ready to market them, there
will be new ideas to embrace and fresh paths to discover. And that makes
marketing exciting and new all over again. As a person who gets easily bored
with the status quo, I wouldn’t want it any other way.
My newest book Seventh Dimension - The City, A Young Adult Fantasy, Book 4 is currently featured on Amazon Scout - something knew I am trying for marketing. If you want to help me, you can click on "nominate" at bit.ly/LR_KindleScout. If Kindle Scout offers me a contract, you will receive a free Kindle book when "The City" is published. Also, you can read the first 5,000 words and tell me what you think - leave a comment here and even if I don't win a contract, I'll send you a free ebook when it's published.
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