4 strategies, 4 successes

Measuring different marketing strategies for selling books

March is shaping up to be a good month. I Implemented 4 strategies at the same time, and as luck would have it, all four worked. Tracking the success of 4 simultaneous changes is a little tricky, and I did have to make some assumptions and guess work, but overall things worked.

New release

This first one isn’t a strategy per se, it's simply what happens when you finish a book. How and when you publish is a strategy. I published the newest book in combination with the other strategies and they all amplified each other. The release of a new book always carries with it momentum that you need to capitalize on. 

Prior to your book release you need to be pushing pre-orders, sending out newsletters and advertising the book. Between the downloads that occur from the pre-orders, and all the Kindle Unlimited readers diving into the newest release, you’ll get a surge in Amazon’s rankings. That surge will help organic reach. This can carry momentum from several days to a few months.

If you write a series, your newest book will also cause an increase in sales of book one. First time readers, seeing that you just published book # whatever, will go to book 1 and work their way up to the current release. This is the best case scenario, as you just sold several books by advertising one book.

Promo Stacking

As I mentioned in Promo Stacking, I tried Promo Stacking for the first time. For the full details check out the article.

The TLDR, it’s working. The book I featured for the promo stacking was from a different series than my new release. This makes tracking sales increases a little easier. Since the time of the promo event, the books in that series have jumped about 10k in the rankings. Meaning that books that were #25,000 in the Amazon store are currently #15,000 in the Amazon store. It’s only been a few weeks, but I can see rankings changing from book 1 to book 2 on to book 3, and so on. 

No telling how long the effect will last, but it's enough to make me participate in the next one. I’ll do my best to get an estimate of how many of the original 8k downloads converted into new readers of the series.

Tiktok

Yup, the rollercoaster ride that is TikTok came through for me. I had several videos reach from 5k to 30k views. Comparatively speaking, it's not a lot. But for authors, assuming you get the videos in front of your potential readers, 5k-30k is more than enough.

Just like with the new release, a TikTok video will not only sell the book its advertising, it will sell the first book in the series. And if the reader really likes it, they’ll jump to your other books as well.

Typically I only post 1 TikTok video per day. There’s a lot of debate over how many videos to do, but I’ve found that when TikTok works for me, it's at a rate of 1 video per day. The big thing to remember for books is that you need to get the video in front of your readers, not just any viewer. Quality over quantity. 

Given the ever changing algorithms in TikTok, don’t get comfy when you get viral videos. They could stop on a dime. When they’re working, keep making videos of similar design. When the ride stops, don’t get upset. Just be glad you were able to use it to your advantage.

Regular, Boring Advertising

On March 1st, I changed up my Facebook and Amazon ads. Ad fatigue is a real thing and you need to monitor your ads on a daily basis for fatigue. I don’t have a rule of thumb for you on how long ads can work for. I’ve had some make me money for months, others flop on day 1. For on this, read Marketing for Authors.

When you see a surge in sales due to TikTok videos, promos and new releases it’s easy to forget about your base advertising. Don’t. When the surge effect wears off, sales will decline back to their base level. If you’ve neglected your ads, then the decline will be greater than you expect and you could spend months playing catchup, trying to get back to your old baseline.

Net result

All of these combined resulted in a 2.5x increase in sales for the first half of March. (These are rough estimates, as the strategies overlapped on the same books.) TikTok was the biggest contributor, roughly 50% of the increase came from the combined TikTok videos. The new release was second, accounting for roughly 30% of the increase. The promo stacking was the remaining 20%, with new ads maintaining my base sales. 

If you ask authors, most will tell you the thing they hate the most is marketing. The problem is, for most of us, if you don’t do it, you won’t sell books. Only the big name authors have fans who sell books for them. The rest of us have to learn to market our own books, and it can be an ever changing game. You have to be willing to dive into different strategies, and learn how to effectively use the tools. You have to be willing to look at new avenues of getting your books in front of readers. If you stop, sales will decline. If you never start, your books won’t ever make it off the ground. Marketing is a necessary evil of indie publishing, and once you get the hang of the different ways of promoting your book, you might even find it fun.