How To Market A Book For 399 Bucks
Ran across this story from the POD-dy Mouth blog:
It is about how BookSurge, a competing POD publisher bought out by Amazon last year, sells a service where for $399 a New York Times bestselling author will write a custom review.
This sort of “marketing” service makes me ill, as it is an unbelievable waste of money. Author advocate MJ Rose explained why this is so a few years back.
But I shouldn’t criticize without offering alternatives, so here is what I’d do if I had $399 earmarked for book marketing.
#1 - Set up a blog on Wordpress.com (or, if you are a BookLocker author, ask for a free one - like this author did).
Cost: $0
#2 - Fill the blog with content aimed at attracting the target audience for the book. I’d get at least 10 posts up on the blog before I started publicizing it. I’d try to post once a day, but not less than once a week.
Cost: $0
#3 - Register the blog in as many blog-specific search engines and directories as possible.
Cost: $0
#4 - I’d register the blog in subject-specific search engines and directories.
Cost: $0
#5 - I’d work on getting links from related sites.
Cost: $0
#6 - I’d buy 20 copies of my book at the author discount, then find 20 bloggers willing to review the book.
Cost: about $250 (including cost of book and shipping costs to each reviewer)
#7 - I’d open an account on Overture and Google Adsense, buy $50 worth of advertising on each, and run test campaigns.
Cost: $100
#8 - I’d do a WebRelease through WebWire, after I wrote a press release with a good PR hook.
Cost: $49
I can’t guarantee doing these things will get you book sales, but I can guarantee you’ll have more to show for your $399.
but I have only one question. Is it any more or less benificial to promote and sell a tangable product rather than an eproduct??
Comment by carl hughes — February 4, 2007 @ 11:49 am
The beauty of selling e-products is there is no physical product, you never have to post anything to anyone, unless you are ofcourse seeling them on cd or dvd.
Another grest thing about them is they can be viral, this means you can have beck end sales created for you by the very people you are selling too.
Comment by Cap — March 8, 2007 @ 3:42 pm
Dear BookLocker People,
This is REALLY SOLID advice and I appreciate it. This kind of value-added assistance to customers (me) is what innovative, information age businesses, such as yours, do best. I am a freelance journalist based in Europe and I have been thinking about a non-fiction business book for the US & Canada market that really needs to be written, published and efficiently marketed. But I have some experience in publishing this kind of title for a big company and I know it something that is most profitable if it is revised and updated at least once a year. (Then re-marketed to previous buyers.) That way it can generate a disproportionate number of repeat sales. Each annual revision build’s the title’s strength as a brand identity. It is a strategy that works but the mainstream business publishers don’t seem to “get it” this year. So, naturally I am thinking of self-publishing. I appreciate your being clear and specific in your marketing suggestions. Great work!
Reg Crowder
http://www.mediabistro.com/RegCrowder
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Comment by REG CROWDER — March 22, 2007 @ 5:02 am
Too right, you can do quite a bit of marketing For $399.
Comment by James Hunaban — May 4, 2007 @ 9:29 am