On way way to Virginia the girlfriend to meet my parents – wish me luck!
3 Secrets
1. This is the first year Amazon Ads will be automatically showing up on the Goodreads platform!
Our very own Steve Sarner (former Goodreads exec) mentioned to our team last week how insane the increase in traffic to Goodreads is this time of year. If you haven’t run Amazon Ads before…now might be the time.
2. Early on, when I had no team, very little resources, and even less time, I learned that I should focus on activities that pay off in multiple ways.
I knew that if I started my podcast, I’d only stick with it if there were enough reasons to keep going, especially when it was pretty much just my Mom and a couple team-members listening.
Those reasons for me were:
We’ve now produced a weekly podcast almost every week since 2021. The math is simple. The bigger the potential positive outcomes are, the more reward you relieve for every second spent on an activity, the higher the likelihood you’ll actually stick with it.
Opportunity to learn from the best in the world at book marketing by interviewing them.
Opportunity to build relationships with authors who might want to work with us (half of our first 20 podcast guests ended up being clients. We’d spend an hour getting to know each other during the interview and then afterwards they’d ask, “so what is it you guys do”. After answering them they’d often follow up with, “oh, can we actually set aside some time to talk about what that looks like”).
Opportunity to spend more time with people who have never heard of us and our work and maybe even build a following. Besides increased desire to keep going, there’s also a higher chance that activity is successful because only one of the 3 opportunities needed to happen for me to find that activity worth it. If 2-3 of the reasons paid off, then I just multiplied the outcomes of the time I spent doing that activity. It takes time and consistency to build a platform, so choose the marketing activities that are valuable to you for 3 reasons.
3. I don’t recommend promoting your book on LinkedIn with paid advertising, as you’re competing for clicks against huge software companies that can afford to pay $5 per click on an ad.
For most authors, building a LinkedIn presence organically is the way to go.
2 Links
- Before The Bestseller episode out with guest Nir Eyal of Hooked (500,000 copies sold). This week we talked about the psychology of distraction and habit forming products. Next week he comes on to tell us how he moved so many copies. Listen here.
- One thing I was impressed by with how Nir writes is how much time he puts into confirming and explaining the research behind what he talks about in his books. https://paperity.org/ is a multidisciplinary aggregator of open access journals and papers. Whatever your field of study, Paperity allows you to browse relevant research without hitting a paywall.
1 Quote
“If it is to be, then it is up to me”
—Doug Evans on Before The Bestseller
