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Reader, If you’re in need of a good laugh, check out this misguided book covers:
Thank you to Ed Rush for sharing today’s laugh. You can check out his books here. Okay, now back to 3 takeaways: 3 Secrets Depending on how long you’ve been a reader, you may have heard me tell the story of 8-million-copies-sold The Cafe on the Edge of the World. well…. I found out last week I’ve been telling the story all wrong! up until now, I though he personally foot the bill to print all 10,000 initial copies…which was wrong. SO here’s the TRUE story of how John Strelecky seeded his first 10,000 copies of The Cafe on the Edge of the World… John did footed the bill for the first few copies but DIDN’T give them away for free. He actually SOLD them, one by one, in person. Whatever proceeds he made, he would re-invest them into the printing of more copies. Then, he just repeated the process, printing copies, then using the proceeds to print the next round. If you have the budget, you CAN STILL give copies away for free BUT if you aren’t working with a large budget, you can use sales proceeds to fund the printing of a few more copies. It does require you to have meaningful and selfless conversations with your readers in person-that’s the only way you’re going to get them to like you enough to actually outright buy your book. So there you have it – you don’t have to spend thousands printing books up front. P.S. If people aren’t willing to buy your book from these in-person conversations, you’re either making it too much about yourself-or it might be time to ask yourself if you’re written the right book yet. 2. Value-Add Versus Annoying I was at NamaSteve Cliffside Yoga in Pacific Beach recently (if you know, you know) and a lady walked by handing out little sticky notes. On one side was an inspirational quote or words of positivity, and on the other side was the title and Amazon link to her book. This is value-add marketing. She was pushing notes of kindness and just asking people if they wanted one. Contrast this with a BBQ I was hosting at a communal cookout space a weekends ago. A guy walked up and began to pitch everyone on his AI book. It was really awkward. Be the first—not the second. 3. An interesting secondary effect of a high Amazon BSR (bestseller rank) There’s more to ranking well in your Amazon categories than meets the eye. New reader/influencer/BookTok blogs are popping up everywhere… All of these blogs NEED content to make themselves seem legit to readers and use these top books to attract greener authors to sell on collaborations. “If we did a shoutout for [INSERT TOP AUTHOR IN ANY GENRE] then clearly we must be worth it for you to pay us for a shout-out.” The truth is, a lot of them create their organic content by seeing what’s already selling well in various niches on Amazon. By posting about the top books, they believe this makes their pages seem legit. The better Before The Bestseller does on Amazon, the more we’re seeing it organically show up on these book reviewer blogs and pages. (like this one) There’s a strong correlation between showing up at the top of your category and how much organic content gets created about you. 2 Links
1 Quote “Content marketing is really like a first date. If all you do is talk about yourself, there won’t be a second date.”
Alex P.S. Know someone who needs help marketing their book? We offer a $500 referral bonus 🙂 |