Tag Archives: keywords

3 things I’ve learned about book marketing

In the nearly six years since I created Elephant’s Bookshelf Press, one of the things I’ve had to work on the most has been my book marketing skills. Mind you, since part of what I’d reported on in my day job as a journalist was nonprofit marketing and fundraising, I thought I was starting my company with a solid knowledge base.

Perhaps I was, but it wasn’t enough.

When I was reporting on nonprofit marketing, Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist. The World Wide Web was still in its first decade. Email marketing was in its infancy. Direct mail was king.

Oh my, how the marketing and advertising world has changed!

These days, if you’ve launched an ebook and/or a paperback, you need to be able to boost the book’s visibility all the time. Building awareness requires a well-stocked toolkit. If you’re like me, with a spouse and young kids and a full-time job that keeps me away from them for several hours every day, that toolkit needs to have everything handy and charged up.

I want to share a few ideas about tools I’m using now that are either relatively new or new to me.

To be honest and open, I don’t have any affiliate relationships with these groups (well, I just created my Amazon affiliate relationship this week, but I don’t exactly know how to use that tool yet and I don’t think my mere mentioning of it will do anything that puts money into my account). But down the road, I might do that kind of thing. Again, building affiliate relationships is a potential tool, but I’ll discuss that sometime down the road when I have a better idea what I’m talking about.

Anyway, to the tools: One: Advertising. This may seem obvious, but a lot of authors don’t advertise, and at least as many don’t advertise enough. Honestly, I’m not advertising enough either.

But where to advertise? Sometimes the choice is made for you. For the latest EBP book, Lost Wings, we just launched a countdown campaign, and with it, an ad through Free Kindle Books and Tips. I’ve advertised through that side before, but part of the reason I chose it this time is because it allows books with few reviews to be advertised there. At the time I scheduled the ad, we only had two. I really appreciate that, since so many EBP books are anthologies, which often don’t receive many reviews. And while Lost Wings has nine reviews as I type this, and I have additional ads scheduled for later, I’m sure I’ll use FKBT again in the future.

Two: AMS ads. Yes, this is another type of ad, but it’s inherently different from a book blog ad. It targets different people (people searching for books, rather than readers who signed up for a list to get book ideas pushed to them). I’ve been playing around with these a lot in 2017 and have had some spectacular successes and some total failures. So far, most of the ads have been related to keywords. But I’m experimenting now with the product display ads. Again, I’ll talk more about those down the road once I have some experienced to speak from. But if your books are being sold on Amazon, AMS ads are a must in my opinion. Let’s face it, Amazon is the biggest online bookstore in the world. But if no one can find your book when they’re looking for something, then you owe it to your audience to bring it to their attention.

Three: KDP Rocket. I’ll probably sound like a paid shill, but I’m not. My approach to advertising changed as soon as I bought this product earlier this year. It has simplified my searching for keywords and enabled me to hone my selection process. I’ve learned how to improve the keywords I select for my books through Kindle — and the keywords I chose anywhere, for that matter — and I’ve started to rethink some of my book marketing overall. Once again, I’ll talk about that more down the road, but to give you a sense of why I’m so pleased with KDP Rocket, let me share this:

Our anthology Tales from the Bully Box was released in 2014, and it did ok when we launched, and then it quickly languished. I tried various things to bring it back to life, but they didn’t work.

One of the authors of a story there, Sarah Tregay (who also did the beautiful cover for Bully Box — and Lost Wings, too!) told me she’d been told good things about the book by a friend of hers who was using it in a school setting — which was what it was made for.

That made me smile, but I wasn’t quite sure how to take advantage of it. Then I learned about KDP Rocket, looked into it, and ended up buying it. The first book I tried it on was Bully Box. Within weeks, my AMS keyword ad campaign resulted in doubling the sales of the previous year in a single month.

I realize we weren’t talking about major sales of Bully Box in 2016, but I continued with the AMS ads and using KDP Rocket to craft the keyword selection further. And now Bully Box is the most successful paperback book in the relatively short history of EBP! We’re also paying more for advertising than we ever have, but when they result in success, they’re clearly worth it.

What are you using to boost sales of your books and finding success with? Please share!