By Books Author Denise Turney

Book marketing is not magic. Books don’t sell simply because you want them to. It doesn’t matter how passionate and sincere your intentions are. To sell your books, you have to take smart actions. You also have to recognize change. This article covers actions you could take to finally yield the sales you’ve been wanting and waiting for, perhaps for years. Knowing when to shift is a part of that success.

Book Marketing Keys – Consistency and Spotting Change

After publishing and marketing books for more than 20 years, I have discovered that consistency is key to successful book marketing. Another key is recognizing and adjusting to change in smart ways. Regardless of the marketing strategies that you employ, consistency and recognizing and adjusting to change play a role.

• As a beginning step, to gain more sells, get clear about the number of books you want to sell each day, week, month and year. Write it down. Clarity is a huge part of success. You’ll see this more and more as you continue marketing.
• Use a spreadsheet or another tracking system to build book marketing analytics. If you think this ties into clarity, you’re right. Details to add to the tracker include date, the number of books sold each day and the sales source (indie bookstore, Cushcity, Amazon, Mahogany Books, Harriet Bookstore, Barnes & Noble, etc.). Other details to include are the advertising and/or marketing resource used to gain these book sales. Book marketing resource examples are BookBub, Amazon Ads, AALBC ads, book festivals, speaking events and cultural fairs.
• Identify book marketing resources you will try. This is where your spreadsheet increases in value. As you monitor your marketing results, you’ll notice which resources are working and which need change. For instance, you might need to adjust ad spend on one resource or you find that you need to run a marketing promo using a different resource on a different day of the week.

Pay Attention to Book Marketing Spend

Consider completing free online trainings that book marketing resources (e.g., Written Word, Reedsy, Amazon) offer. If you join discussion forums at these sites, you can gain valuable insights and tips about ways to get more from these marketing resources without increasing your spending, which brings up an important point.

Pay attention to how much you spend to meet your book sales goals. Strong book marketing resources have sales spend analytics embedded into their reports. By adding these analytics to your main spreadsheet, you can spot trends and times when you need to shift fairly quickly, maybe within minutes of reviewing the data.

Really pay attention to your spend versus book sales. To experience successful book marketing, you (or someone you hire) needs to accept facts. This is no time for magical thinking. As shared at the start of this article, it’s not enough to want to sell a lot of books. You have to take the right actions, and generally not just once, but again and again.

It’s Time to Change

Let marketing spend head in the wrong direction for too long and you could start to feel frustration, anger and even hopelessness. Yet, it doesn’t have to go this way. And even if you already are in a situation where you’ve spent more than you’ve earned, you can turn the tide. You can choose again, making smart decisions, setting yourself up for better outcomes.

Should your marketing analytics show that you’re spending $50 a day on marketing but only earning $20 a day in royalties from your book sales, accept what you see. Shift. Adjust your spend, focusing on marketing resources that yield the best return-on-investment (ROI).

Add more free marketing strategies to your sales plan. This includes speaking events, book signings and handing out postcards, bookmarks, brochures and flyers at events that attract your books’ target audience. Just don’t continue digging a hole; shift. It’s a part of the book sales process.

More Book Marketing Strategies That Work

Here are additional book marketing strategies that work. Choose three to four when starting out, noting which strategies yield greater gains for you.

• Meet book buyers in person. Attending book festivals, writer conferences and cultural events are great ways to achieve this. To connect with book buyers face-to-face, you could also schedule speaking events. These are events where you are the keynote speaker. Looking for places to start speaking at? Colleges and universities, as well as social organizations, are places that seek speakers. In addition to teaching about a topic that your books are related to, you could read from your books or give a spoken word performance. Check online and offline event calendars, contacting organizers of events you’d like to speak at.
• Sell and sign your books at the end of the events. To continue book marketing efforts, encourage attendees to sign-up to receive your newsletter.
• Pass out bookmarks, flyers and brochures at events you attend. Add your author website URL to these marketing tools.
• Send postcards and snail mail to local booksellers, asking if you can schedule in-store book signings. After you schedule an appearance, start telling your family, friends and book supporters about the event, encouraging them to attend. You’ll see that the more you help businesses, book buyers, organizations and other retailers get what they want, the more they may assist you.

Surprising Way to Sell More Books

This next book marketing strategy might surprise you, although it shouldn’t. However, it took me years to fully grasp the impact of this strategy.

To continue selling books, keep writing and publishing quality books. This may be the single most important step in gaining more book sales. Similar to how recording artists have to keep coming out with new music, to enjoy a rewarding book writing career, keep creating and publishing new quality books.

Want a long, rewarding writing career? You’ll have to shift here too. Write enough books and you’ll discover that each of your books might not be a hit with readers, regardless of how much you market them. Instead of moaning about a book that’s not well received, shift. Start writing in a different genre, about different characters or in a different style that readers prefer more.

Stay Motivated, Stay Focused

And learn to spot trends and industry changes. Learn to recognize when a marketing resource or strategy is no longer working. Depending on how long you’ve been writing and publishing books, you saw this change when e-books first came out. Amazon and large bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders (remember Borders?) created change too.

If you refused to shift even while facing these changes, you might have seen your book sales drop, if not stall. To steer free of this, check your spreadsheet analytics daily. Just reviewing your analytics daily can help you know when to shift. It’s also a great way to avoid slipping into magical thinking (believing that you’re going to sell a lot of books simply because you want to).

Stay motivated through the changes and shifts by reading books that inspire and encourage you. Also, listening to tapes that help keep you focused on your goals is a way to win.