4 Most Efficient Ways to Promote Your Self-Published Books
Marketing tips for non-fiction authors
The problem with self-publishing is that measuring ROI is so tricky, that it’s almost impossible. The biggest retailer is Amazon, and it is notoriously tight-lipped about their numbers and metrics. So, it’s fricking hard to come up with some metrics in the first place, not to mention calculating an exact ROI.
I’ll share four tactics of mine, but first a word about what I write, because a genre can have a big impact on your marketing tactics.
I write non-fiction, personal development books in English. Most of the time, my main bulk of income were royalties from Kindle. In the past year or so, this changed into 55% Kindle, 40% paperbacks and 5% audiobooks. My books are available in stores other than Amazon, but they rarely make more than 1% of my royalties.
The Tactics:
1. Book Launch
Of course, in each launch I use a variety of promotional tools, but the launch itself is a promoting strategy. For a few years, it was my best strategy.
Every few months, I had been publishing a new book trying to make a big impact with it. And the rising tide lifts all boats. When a new book is selling well, readers check out your whole catalog. All your books experience a boost.
2. Promo Sites
Giving a huge price discount and notifying plenty of people about this was a known tactic for a long time. The trouble with this method is that it’s fricking hard to coordinate all the pieces in the first place: the price drop, meeting requirements of promo sites and a right schedule. Plus, another big downside is that you can never track exact results.
If you can get the support of a gorilla (BookBub), the effect is quite obvious. If you sell hundreds of copies on the day of the promo, the correlation is evident. But when you have a spot at a dozen smaller promo sites, the effect is less spectacular and you have no idea which site did the best job.
Only if you cannot leverage tactics #3 or #4, try promo sites or use only those that have a proven track record for your genre.
I almost abandoned this tactic. The only promo site worth its salt in non-fiction is Buck Books. I ran 3 promos with them in 2017, each time including 3–4 of my books, and I was able to make my investment back in the promo day, which is unheard of.
3. Email List
If you don’t have an email list, start building it. Steve Scott made a detailed study a few years ago, and he concluded that email marketing provides the best ROI and best results.
If you have a small list, well disregard that, ALWAYS try to leverage lists of other people. No matter where you are in your author journey, you can do that. And it will make a huge difference.
I remember when Steve Scott sent an email broadcast about the launch of my 5th book. I started from a free promo, and the book was downloaded several thousand times. After the free promo, it skyrocketed in paid ranks, was briefly at #1 spot of the Time Management category and at the first page of bestsellers in that category for long months.
4. AMS Ads
Is it really that cost effective? Frankly, I don’t know. AMS stands for Amazon Marketing Services. Their reporting for authors truly sucks, big time. However, I still get some data from it; enough to say that my ROI is positive and probably around 200%.
What is more, it is the only of the tactics that I can do all year long. And it makes a huge difference in consistency of my sales, which every self-published author can surely appreciate.
If I take into account the time spent on learning how to operate the system, researching for keywords, clearing the raw data to obtain a neat list of keywords ready to be pasted into an ad campaign, maintaining Excel sheets with keywords lists, this ROI is even lower.
But I have good news for all authors: you don’t have to do it on your own. The only thing that Amazon got right with their advertising system is that you can create a manager’s account and someone else will run the ads for you.
And the consistency of sales is a true luxury for self-publishers.
