Try These Marketing Strategies Now Before You Give Up Selling Your Books on Amazon
Book Promotion Strategies That Actually Worked For Me
Selling your own book is probably one of the most recommended ways to earn passive income online.
All you need to do is to write something you could sell to a target audience, upload the file on a digital platform like Amazon and then announce your new book through social media.
Based on my own experience, however, it’s not as easy as it seems. Besides the difficulty of finishing and editing your book, you’d encounter a big challenge in actually trying to sell your book to people.
Here are just some of the reasons why you may find it hard to sell your first book:
1. You have very few followers on social media.
2. You find out that most of your followers don’t actually want to buy your book.
3. Advertising your book is not within your budget.
4. Your advertising cost is bigger than your sales.
5. You find it hard to get good reviews for your book.
Those are just some of the problems you may encounter in promoting your first book. I know because I have tried countless ways of promoting mine, and many of my methods didn’t work.
In this post, let me save you time by recommending the actual strategies that worked for me.
Here are the book promotion strategies that helped me sell my books:
1. Having a permafree version of my book
This worked both on Amazon and Gumroad.
On Gumroad, I set the minimum amount of my book to $0 and let the buyer pay me a higher amount if they think my book is worth more than that. To my surprise, my book was even sold for $15!
On Amazon, I have two permafree books that are often Best Sellers on Amazon in its Top Free list. While I may not earn a cent for all those downloads, I do get purchases from the Paperback versions of the book that are not for free.
2. Having an SEO optimized blog post that receives regular web traffic for related keywords.
This is something that’s not easy to accomplish, but it’s definitely worth the effort. Once you’re able to get a web page that ranks high on Google for related keywords, you can put a link to your book there and expect consistent book sales as well.
3. Content marketing.
This may be similar to having an SEO optimized blog post, but the difference here is the frequency in writing and posting your content. I now try to write daily on Medium and Substack. At the end of my posts, I put a link to my book with a short description that could catch the interest of my readers. Of course the posts should be relevant also to the book you are selling.
What’s good with this approach is that if you do it right, your blog posts could also turn out to be high ranking pages for you later on! Imagine the traffic you could gain after accumulating all those SEO optimized content through the years.
Final words
Writing your book may be a lot easier than actually selling them. You need budget, connections, guts and a lot of time and effort to research the most effective methods for book promotion.
In this article, I wanted to be of help to those who may be limited in their budget for advertising, but who nevertheless wants to start selling their books. You can try the methods I have discussed that actually worked for me. I hope you find the strategy that could also work for you.
