Hi Nick, what are you doing to promote your books?

Graeme wrote: "Hi Nick, what are you doing to promote your books?"

Not enough, if I'm honest!

Marketing has always been the big struggle for me.

Do you want some tips?

Graeme wrote: "Do you want some tips?"

My ears are always open to constructive criticism and helpful advice, my friend!

Because you have a good tail of books, a potentially useful strategy is to only market your first book, and funnel readers through to your other books which will provide your ROI to pay for the marketing costs.

Your in KU, use your 5 days as single days targeting your first book as free.

Basic points.

[1] Put Location, Location, Location at 0.99 and market it as Free, on your promotion days. It's the free drink at the door to attract new readers who will pay bar prices for the rest of your books. $2.99 or 3.99 are good prices to attract follow on readers.

I would consider placing your full sized books at 3.99 and your small books at 2.99.

[2] Market frequently, like every 3 to 4 weeks.

[3] Do your promos on a single day, (i) set up the promo, (ii) set the free day in KDP. (iii) make sure you don't run out of free days, but with 5 free days per three month cycle you should be OK.

[4] Use the following sites in preference order.

[i] eReaderNewsToday (highly cost effective, i.e. lots of downloads for the cost)

[ii] BookBarbarian (highly cost effective, i.e. lots of downloads for the cost)

[iii] RobinReads (reasonable/good)

[iv] FreeBooksy (aka BargainBooksy) - somewhat expensive.

Now, the first three have policies of only promoting every 3 months/90 days, so running through a cycle where you use one after the other over a three month cycle will fit in well with them. Freebooksy is every 30 days, but since it's the least effective of the 4 don't worry about using them more often.

Because they are separated out, you can check their performance against each other.

[5] Bookbub - the big Kahuna of book marketing - if you can get on here, you can throw a free beer and pizza party at the local pub with the royalites. More cost to run, if you can get in, but worth three years (no joke) of advertising in a week.

I'm making approximately 50% more from KU subscription reads than I make from direct sales, as people who download my first book free have a tendency to then read the other books on KU.

I'm close to breaking even on ROI with this strategy, and my expectation was that I needed a 5th book to go to a +ve ROI.

Given the number of books you have, you may break even on this process.

The marketing will cost you approx $250 USD per quarter, or about $1000 USD per year.

If you get bookbub, you will spend more, but you'll go +ve ROI at the same time.

Cheers Graeme

The name of the game is finding your audience, not making $. But there is no sense throwing money away.

There are also sites out there that are a complete waste of money. Including giveaways on this site - don't do that. Giveaways are highly destructive.

Nice advice Graeme! We've sort of come to the same conclusion and strategy. Freebooksy though was waste for me - I ran BookBarbarian and got 1500 downloads with 1:30 real sales through the series. Ran a freebooksy and got fewer downloads, though still 1000+, and zero sales. Weird. I'll be running through 1, 2 and 3. And of course, hoping for a miracle on BB.

Good advice there, Nick!

Hi Adam, agree on all points.

Graeme wrote: "Because you have a good tail of books, a potentially useful strategy is to only market your first book, and funnel readers through to your other books which will provide your ROI to pay for the mar..."

Wow, a very detailed response there, many thanks!

Money is a little tight for me at the moment so paid advertising has been something I've shied away from to be honest, but if it gets the kind of results you describe I may have to try to squirrel some money away to give it a go!

Hi Nick,

I'm not breaking even yet, but I'm heading in the right direction. You need a good shelf of books to generate the on sales that pay for the advertising.