Want to Sell More Books?

Steve Miller  was kind enough to acquiese to my begging and guest post on the topic of book sales. Thanks Steve!

  

Want to Sell More Books? Try Giving Some Away!

I’m a low profile author – not a celebrity. I don’t have a national column or a radio show.

Neither am I a social media maven. I have a blog, but it sucks. I seldom post and few people visit. I don’t post regularly on Twitter, Facebook or my blog.

That’s why it’s rather remarkable to some that I’m very pleased with my book sales. The more I studied low profile authors who sold lots of books, I found that there were ways to sell books that didn’t take a lot of time and money. Giving away ebooks is one way that works for some. Here’s how it recently worked for me.

Giving away books, whether to get reviews or to stoke word of mouth, has always been recommended for marketing books. John Kremer, one of the most respected book marketing experts, used to recommend mailing out at least 400 or so books to key influencers. Yet, back when all books were made out of paper, that might cost at least $2,400 when you add postage to the printing costs. 

Today, with e-books, we can give away books at no cost to the author by pressing a couple of buttons. Here’s how it worked for me in the last four weeks. 

May 8th and 9th I offered my personal finance book, Enjoy Your Money! How to Make It, Save It, Invest It and Give It, free for two days as a Kindle. (You must sign up for KDP Select and agree not to offer it anywhere else as an e-book for six weeks.)

I didn’t do anything else to promote the giveaway (some tell me I should have mentioned it more places), except to mention the giveaway on a book marketing listserv and a book marketing forum, although that didn’t seem to garner much added attention. No other special promotions were going on for the book, so I think I’m safe to say that the resulting increase in sales was due solely to offering it free on Kindle. 

Here were the results:

• 16,000   copies were downloaded free in those two days.
• After  the free days, sales increased significantly. It had been selling a bit less than one per day before this campaign, but began consistently selling 12 per day after the campaign. That’s more than a 1200%   increase!
• Four   weeks after the free event, it still hovers between #1 and #2 in the Kindle   store for “Real Estate,” #5 for “Careers” and #7 for “Investments.”
• This   bumped up our income from Amazon books by about $500 last month, and so   far, the sales remain steady on the new plateau. 

Here are some of my reflections:

1. It doesn’t work this well for all books. I have several other nonfiction books that I’ve offered free, some of which are selling more than before and others for which I see no discernable long-term impact. Other authors are reporting this “works for some, not for others” phenomenon.

2. I’m not sure why it works for some books but not for others. It may be important which categories your book rises in. Is it a popular category? Is there a lot of competition in that category? It may also be important how high your book rises in overall giveaways, since some sites and blogs seem to mention books that rise to a certain level in the rankings (like top 100 free Kindles).

  

3. I saw no discernable decline in any sales (except for the two days it was free; when obviously, nobody was paying for my Kindles!), so I don’t see a big risk in this.

4. I assume my landing page (Amazon page) was important to this. Since I already had almost 30 reviews (average five star), people who found the book could easily be convinced that it was worth downloading free during the giveaway or purchasing later. 

5. I don’t believe it worked to passively get reviews. I got a new reviews, but it probably came because when I alerted the forum and listserv, I told them I’d love reviews. From my experience, the great majority of people don’t give reviews unless they’re specifically asked.

6. I didn’t see any international sales. In fact, only two people downloaded a book free from a combination of Italy, Spain and France. 86 downloaded a free book in the UK and 11 in Germany, but I didn’t see any resulting sales. E-readers and e-books may still be catching on in some of these countries. I’d assume English books aren’t as popular as Spanish in Spain.

7. It seems that offering them free for two days gave them more traction than one day only. (You can offer it free for a total of 5 days during a 6 week period.) Three days may have been even better, but who knows?

On   the first day, 96 people downloaded the free Writing Conversations. On the second   day, over 2,400 downloaded it.

 

 

On   the first day, 327 downloaded Enjoy Your Money. On the second day, over 17,000   downloaded it.

 

 

8. I didn’t see immediate, corresponding better sales for my paper books. I really thought that some customers would read part of Enjoy Your Money on their Kindles and think, “The paper copy would make a perfect graduation gift!” But interestingly, I didn’t see an immediate increase in paper sales.

9. I’m seeing a longer term growth in paper sales. The first week of May (before the free campaign), I sold three copies of Enjoy Your Money in paper, compared to 16 the first week in June. That’s a 500% increase! I’m assuming that this increase is due to the free campaign last month. Perhaps people download scores of free books to their e-readers, but don’t get around to actually reading them until later. Or perhaps it has something to do with the resulting improved rankings in categories. Who knows?

10. It was both cost and time effective, costing me nothing monetarily and taking about five minutes to set up. 

I’ve got a lot to learn about giving away books, but if we all begin sharing our experiences – both good and bad – perhaps we can learn:

• How to decide which books might do best
• How to manipulate our categories more effectively
• Which blogs and sites should be alerted prior to a giveaway
• The minimum number of reviews we should have up prior to a giveaway  

 Any experiences or thoughts you’d like to share?

About the Author
J. Steve Miller writes a wide range of books on topics ranging from personal finance to philosophy of religion to writing and publishing.  Sell More Books! helps low profile and debut authors narrow down which marketing methods might work best with their unique strengths and books. Publish a Book! helps authors decide on the best self-publishing company. Social Media Frenzy questions standard recommendations concerning social media and recommends alternatives. Over 1500 people a day visit his website for teacher resources on life skills and character education.  He loves hanging out with his family, giving talks, caring for his 106-year-old granny, and doing weird stuff like spelunking. Connect with him at www.enjoyyourwriting.com .