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Hello from Townsville, Australia!
How many wallabies can you find?
3 Secrets
1. How I’m marketing my own book
I love that I get to now use the marketing of my own book to further test and refine the ideas shared here.
As I write this, we’ve seeded 700 copies of Before The Bestseller since it’s launch on March 3rd. Our goal is to seed 2,000 copies by June 30th.
Our methods of seeding have been as follows:
200 Dave Chesson/Reedsy newsletter shout-out FREE
100 This list & connections build through it FREE
150 Amazon Ads ($3,953 ad spend)
50 Meta Ads ($1,000 ad spend)
100 Reader Seeding (contacting people 1:1 in the world of publishing and offering a free copy) ($800)
100 Assuming organic/word of mouth
Other marketing activities:
Kbookpromotions $625
Send2press.com press release $660 (put us on 50+ websites within 24 hours)
Total marketing spend so far: $7,038
Total royalties so far: $1,893
P/L: -$5,145
Posting the numbers so you can see me walk the walk, not just talk the talk. 🙂 Non-monetary benefits so far include subscriber list growth, doors opened with industry leaders like executives at Amazon getting copies of BTB, significant uptick in inbound leads & more.
What has been a waste of time and money so far:
We tested 10 different ebook promotion sites at a $2.99 ebook price. Almost all resulted in just 1-2 orders IF that. The lists we signed up for were as follows:
Bargain Books $40
Fussy Librarian $28
Booksends $80
Robin Reads $60
Kindle Nation Daily $140
BookDealio LLC $78
EreaderNews $45
I’m not saying these won’t work with a 99¢ fiction book but they certainly didn’t work with a $2.99 non-fiction book…
Stay tuned for the next update 🙂
2. Book Marketing with a $0 Budget: Some constructive feedback from Before The Bestseller is that a lot of the marketing activities require $$$ to get started.
Again, using the business analogy, would you expect to be able to launch the next Walmart with no investment?
Then why would you expect to be able to launch the next Atomic Habits with no investment?
I’m not saying it’s not possible but then you better be working 40+ hours per week to market your book. You either have to put time or money into the marketing of your book – you can’t do neither.
Most of you already get this so I’ll get off my soapbox and move onto some more helpful direction:
SO, here are 3 ways to market your book with a $0 budget.
1. Finding list of emails online of your ideal reader persona and offering a free PDF. Let’s say career service professionals at universities are your reader profile, then go to university career websites, find those people and their oftentimes public email addresses, and ask them if they’d like a free copy of your PDF. Expect that you may have 2-5% of people you email to say yes. Your goal here is to generate word of mouth by getting some initial readers. Be prepared to give away at least a few hundred copies before this method begins to work for you.
2. Pay attention to all the influencers in your space and find unique ways to provide them with value. Follow these people on social media look for a way to uniquely add value to their life. For example, I was able to build a relationship with Oren Kalff, author of Pitch Anything, by teaching him how to surf. Yes this is the long game and that’s why it works, people aren’t willing to really care this much and so it’s one of the few ways you can stand out.
3. Build a NL list. All it takes to get started is to message friends on FB/Instagram/texting and ask them what you’re up to and if they’d like to be included. I just started writing about the books I’m reading each week and tested this idea to build a new list of readers. I’ve messaged 100 people on FB so far and of those 27 said yes. This did not cost me any money, just the willingness to be rejected.
3. Event Seeding Messaging: Our next focus for getting BTB out there…
2 Links
- I’m releasing the entire audiobook for Before The Bestseller in 2 episodes per week over the next 9 weeks. Listen along here. Topics covered so far:
What you need to know before spending an hour or dollar on marketing your book
Make marketing your book much easier
Building your marketing team
Your Author Twin and Time Hacks
Email Lists for Authors
- If you’re published via ACX you can go to https://www.acx.com/marketing to get your promo codes which allow you to distribute free copies of your audiobook to fans and reviewers.
1 Quote
“We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”
— Chuck Palahniuk
with love and sincere appreciation,
Alex
BeforeTheBestseller | ShelfLife
alex@getshelflife.com
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