Book Marketing – Page 3 – Read First Chapter.com

Category: Book Marketing

Should You Advertise Your New Book on Amazon

What I Learned in my First Week of Publication:

sherlock-holmes-graphicOnce I finished my first Novel, Groomed for Marriage, I launched it on BookFunell to give it away in order to build a reader list.  My expectations were low; I would have been happy to have given away 50 copies.  Well, to my astonishment, I wound up giving away over 600 copies of the book.  These are people who chose to sign up to down the full book for free.

So when I published Groomed for Marriage for $2.99, I thought it was so cheap that maybe I would have at least a few sales.  Crickets!

So my first lesson was:  BookFunnel is great for giveaways and building a list of readers, but FREE it's own animal.

Switching to Plan B:

So then my plan was to let the two weeks of my paid book promotion on BookFunnel run its course, which would have given me the cleanest feedback.  I would have known how many copies I was able to sell from BookFunnel at $2.99 with no PPC marketing at Amazon.  But even if I waited, let's say I sold 5, that wouldn't have been enough for me to stick with BookFunnel for a paid book as I already learned about Free being it's own animal.

So I decided that as a new author, I wanted to explore Pay Per Click advertisements to see what was entailed.  I did the research and the purpose of these next few posts will be to share my findings and save you the research time.

Pay Per Click as an Investment:

I watched lots of videos on YouTube regarding Amazon ads.  Many people have been doing it for a long time and had great tips.  Although all of these experts stressed the importance of profit vs. return on investment, which of course is crucial in any business, I am choosing to see my first two months of advertising as an investment.



An Overview of your PPC Goals:

The best video I saw, geared for beginners, was the one below by Nomad Millionaire.  It is from 2018, but Nomad explains PPC from a bird's eye view  and this is important for beginnings to understand the strategy right from the beginning.

So you will need a credit card, your book information, a computer, and you will need to be logged into your kdp.amazon.com account.  You will be ready to launch your first broad campaign.

Crash Course in NomadMillionaire's video:

Pay Per Click is an advertising program offered by Amazon that allows users to bid for ad placements.  Amazon searches are all based on keywords and other secret algorithms.  By choosing to start with a broad campaign, you get to ferret out all of the keywords that Amazon already knows about your product.

Once you have 7 days of running this broad campaign, you can begin to look at the broad campaign and figure out what keywords and initiating click throughs and which ones are leading to actual purchases.  Those keywords you then will add to a manual campaign. 

Nomad goes a little bit into his 'pricing strategies' that you may want to listen to, but it will all come down to how much you are willing to spend.

Next post we'll pick up with actually starting my first broad campaign and see where it takes up in the 7 day watch period.



How to Submit Novel to CatholicReads.com

WHY SUBMIT YOUR BOOK TO CATHOLICREADS.COM

catholic-reads-logoIf you are writing novels with a Catholic or Christian theme or backdrop, you may want to consider submitting the book to CatholicReads.com for review.  They have a list of over 600 people who are signed up as already interested in Catholic books and Christian books.  This is a niche market and one that may be a good fit for your novel.

SUBMISSION RULES:

  • Book is priced at 50% off or less
  • Must be on a combination: ebook & paperback or Paperback and Hardcover
  • Sale period is minimum of 24 hours and maximum of 2 weeks
  • It can be on any online store or on your own website
  • Books don’t have to be religious, but they need to be Christian and Catholic friendly.
  • You can submit more than one book at a time.
  • If it is part of a series, you need to request that they review the first book.
  • If they don’t agree to review your book on the first submission, they are not likely to review any other books by the author. (Pretty harsh???)

WHAT DOES CATHOLICREADS.COM DO FOR THE AUTHOR?

Once they review and accept your book, they will send the book in one fo their emails that they send to the list of over 600 Catholic and Christian-friendly book readers.  This will lead to book sales, and/or author recognition.

Submission is easy, although it can be a little time consuming and it is best to know the rules and steps of submission which I am going over here for your review and convenience.

HOW TO ACTUALLY SUBMIT THE BOOK:

1. You need to go to their reviewers page (the about page on the website) and pick the person you think would most enjoy your book and jot down their name(s).  In other words, if you have a romance novel, you probably wouldn’t want a science fiction fan to be the one to read and review your book.

2. Email readcatholic@gmail.com with the submission line:  “Submission: Book Title”.

3.  DO NOT ATTACH YOUR BOOK TO THE EMAIL.  They will ask for it later in the process.

WHAT TO INCLUDE IN THE EMAIL:

1. Name of Book
2. Book Blurb (You may want to choose  your longer book blurb to give the reviewer a little more information that would convince them that your book would be a good read and a good fit for their reader base.)
3. Why you think it would be a good fit for the Catholic Reads audience.
4. List of the themes explored in your book. (Confession, sin, annulment, abortion, etc.)
5. If you think this book would be particularly fit for a specific reviewer on
our team, let us know. (Choose a person you think is a good fit for your book.  The reviewers are on the About Page of the website.)
6. If your novel is part of a series, you need to mention that as well.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER SUBMISSION?

They will contact you with a request for the book once the submission has reached the top of their list. You can email and ask what number your submission is on the list.

Once your book passes that process, then you will be contacted about submitting the copy of the book, AFTER the vetting process.

WHERE IN THE MARKETING PROCESS IS CATHOLICREADS.COM?

Because you will be offering the book for a reduced amount, it should be before you join Kindle Unlimited and you may decide to run this the minute you get it back from the proofreader and it is ready for final publication. This could be the first thing after the Proofreader is finished, as you are making the changes to the book as there is a waiting period.