Unlocking the Secrets of Book Marketing

Even with 50 collaborations (including 2024 scheduled publications) and 16 solo publications, with two more to come this year, marketing seems to be a slippery thing to catch.

I’ve got down the creativity, formatting (another difficult area for many to master, by the way), graphics, and cover design. But marketing? Who knew? Clearly, those raking in the royalties.

I do okay, royalty-wise, but I desire to reach a higher level of achievement. So, how should I market my books?

I’ve run ads, and here’s the thing—views or impressions don’t convert to book sales. Not at the level of impressions I’ve received, say up to 30K. Yet, a friend with 6 million impressions revealed that books were sold nearly daily during the ads’ 30-day run. What the ad cost to get those numbers is unknown to me, but it made me think about a presentation I created when I was a bi-weekly content writer for an online magazine.

After researching how to grow my Twitter following in 2019, I learned that roughly only 20% of your following is online at any given time. Only 3% of those may see your post (impressions). Finally, only 1% of that group might reply, click to read, or go to your site (engagement). And, if you’re promoting a new release or simply creating a post, how big must your audience be to get one person to click to read or go to Amazon?

Doing the math based on those percentages, you need a following of 15k to have 3k online when your post goes out, and of those, you might get 90 impressions, and 1 person might engage with your tweet. That’s not even calculating a buy rate if the post was linked to Amazon for a sale, which at a 1-person engagement level wouldn’t result in any sales.

Of course, viral posts and the number of impressions received via X (Twitter) Ads break these rules regarding the impressions and engagements. So where is my time and money best spent?

The truth is, your book must be seen by hundreds of thousands, better yet, millions of people, to attract buyers. How do we increase the click-through rate? Is there a better way to increase the likelihood of a sale?

There is, and one method is optimization. Yes, optimize your Amazon author site and each book’s description. How do we do that?

Sign up for my newsletter to find out what I’ve learned about book descriptions. I’ll also share what I believe to be a little-known tip on this subject.

Thanks for reading, and please leave a positive comment and share if you enjoyed this issue. And, to learn about my latest events and new releases, subscribe to my website at julie-kusma.com

with determination,

Marketing Apprentice, Julie