Best way to market book

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TheRemnant

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So i wrote a book called ancient path: 1700 years of compromise in the church. Its published on Amazon. I dont have a budget or extra money to spend on a huge firm to help push my book. Social media seems to be a bust for me as well. So what have you all done to market your book. I have 0 following or social media influence. To be honest im at a loss. Im not pushing this book for a platform. But I thinks the contents are important. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. God bless!
 
First, welcome to the site! We're glad you're here. ::D

Not having a presence on social media is a negative. My advice is to put yourself out there more and make friends and relationships. Take it from an introvert! If no one knows your name, it's hard to sell your book.

Do you have a website or newsletter? This will help as well. You really don't want to "pay" to get your book out there. Paying for a self-publisher that charges is called a vanity publisher. Not good. There are other companies. Draft2Digital (D2D) charges a percentage based fee. You might check out IngramSpark as well. If you signed up with Amazon be handle your book exclusively, then you'll have use another next time. They will also publish to Amazon. Hope this helps a little. Others can fill you in more than I can. ;)
 
This is in niche (narrow) genre, so it's going to be a challenge to find/attract readers. Perhaps you could pitch it to a traditional Christian publisher, as they would know how to find those readers.

Otherwise, you'll need to build a platform on this subject matter. Unfortunately, you chose to publish under a penname ("The Remnant"), and provided no information on who you are and what qualifications you have to write about this subject. You'll need to somehow convince potential readers (who are likely pretty choosy) that you have the necessary expertise to write about this. Otherwise, they'll move on to someone else who has the credentials.
 
Accord64 said:
This is in niche (narrow) genre, so it's going to be a challenge to find/attract readers. Perhaps you could pitch it to a traditional Christian publisher, as they would know how to find those readers.

Otherwise, you'll need to build a platform on this subject matter. Unfortunately, you chose to publish under a penname ("The Remnant"), and provided no information on who you are and what qualifications you have to write about this subject. You'll need to somehow convince potential readers (who are likely pretty choosy) that you have the necessary expertise to write about this. Otherwise, they'll move on to someone else who has the credentials.
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TheRemnant said:
So i wrote a book called ancient path: 1700 years of compromise in the church. Its published on Amazon. I dont have a budget or extra money to spend on a huge firm to help push my book. Social media seems to be a bust for me as well. So what have you all done to market your book. I have 0 following or social media influence. To be honest im at a loss. Im not pushing this book for a platform. But I thinks the contents are important. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. God bless!
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Hello! If you are looking for a no-cost way to build a platform, I'd check out Wordpress or Wix! They both have free options to create blogs, and I personally really like the way you can build cute emails on Wix. Brett Harris is a huge advocate for the email list route to publicity: he suggests something along the lines of this.
- Create a Poll Monkey or Google Form that asks if the viewer would be interested in joining your email list, then asks for their email if the answer is "yes', then asks if there are other people they can suggest
- Send the Google Form / Poll Monkey out to your friends and family - they're your biggest cheerleaders, after all!
- You manually enter the email of anyone who says "yes" into whatever email list platform you're using!
- Then, you can contact the emails they put in the suggested box, explain who you are, and ask if they too would be interested. It is possible to automate a lot of this for minimal effort on your part!
If you want a tool specifically for email lists, lots of people use Kit (formally known as MailKit), so that might be worth checking out. Hope this helps, and best of luck with your book! 😁
 
I'm not very helpful, as I'm in the same boat. But ... let me offer some "Welcome Aboard" cookies. They're gluten free, calorie free, sugar free. I don't recommend licking the screen because they're also taste free, depending on what you're been eating sitting in front of your computer.

cookies.webp
 
@lynnmosher had some good ideas. I will say THIS: I'm including a snip below of my lifetime sales on all 30 of my books over time. The bump in 2019 is because of a short giveaway. The results in 2020-present are ALL because of low-level marketing on Amazon Ads. Amazon allows you to set up ads, and place 'bids' on each 'presentation' (your book image in a potential buyer's face while browsing or searching for something. These are the 'Sponsored Ads' that show up at the top of your Amazon browse results). You may get 1000 views and only ONE click. The recommended bid is .39, so if a click happens, you pay 39 cents. If they BUY from that click, you make a profit, hopefully, if you have set your price high enough to realize a profit yet low enough to prompt a buy.

My figures of sales are quite low, even with the ads, because I have a $$ cap each month of $25 across all books. The bad news is that with the cost per click (ALWAYS use a CPC not a CPM (cost per view)) but the good news is that with 10 clicks I almost ALWAYS get a buy. This about pays for the ads, so it's a break-even, I got readers out of this.

If your cover is AMAZING, your ad text is RIVETING, and your first couple pages sell the book, you might net 1 buy per 5 clicks. If your cover is garbage, your ad text dull, your first page boring or off-putting, you won't get any buys no matter how many clicks.

SO, I SUGGEST THE FOLLOWING:
1. Make sure your niche market book is set into the PROPER CATEGORIES on AMAZON or anywhere else you want to sell it.
2. MAKE sure your first page, introduction, elevator pitch, all grip the reader, whether it's a novel or a textbook, a devotional or a wake up non-fiction for the elect. You have a message, a story to tell, something important to say, give a reader that wants what you want a message from your gut, put some passion and fire in there.
3. Make sure your cover is professional looking. You can make one with Paint.NET or GIMP, which are free, but craft a cover YOU would want on a book you paid good money for. There are plenty of good free image sites out there, and some you can pay a low fee for, that license and protect you from copyright violation issues (if your book doesn't get much spread, it may never hit anyone's radar, but we want to avoid any appearance of evil, and you wouldn't want that to bite you by just doing a Google Image search. You can also use your OWN camera and take pictures around your neighborhood, park, etc, or get a friend to allow a few images of their family at dinner, in the park, etc. A pic you took is ALWAYS your property, if you have written permission from the people in it.
4. Join the Bryan Cohen Amazon Author 5-Day Ad Challenge Facebook group. When he has a free 5-day program, it helps you craft a decent ad verbiage, identify your niche categories (that go on your Amazon book setup page and ALSO on the ad categories), and walks you through setting up your first low cost ad. At the end of the first month, you may have spent 5-25 bucks but you SHOULD have sales to offset that.

I will leave you with the following, though - look at the image below. I hardly sold ANY books for YEARS before I started investing in advertising. It was a hard decision to make, but it isn't charged until there is activity, and if you produce a product people WANT, you SHOULD at least break even.
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MisterChris said:
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Thanks for sharing this. You use "break even" and "offset" a few times in your helpful reply. This kind of paints the picture that after an ad campaign, you sold some books, but were also out some marketing money as well. I have two questions for discussion that you or others can dive into if you like ;)

1. Was there profit for you in this? If so, was it every time? You mentioned a 25$ spending cap on ads, so am I reading it right that you sold more than 25$ about 12 times in 6 ish (from 2019 - 2025) years, with your peak giving you about 50$ profit for that campaign?

2. Did this lead to sales during non-campains (due to happy customers, word of mouth, reviews, etc), or do you only see activity when an ad is running.
 
I've only been leveraging ads since midyear 2022. See below for a lifetime snip of that.
If you just took the Amazon Ad Dashboard report (across all ads, all books I advertised) it looks like I'm an idiot and I spent twice what I made:
1757369107429.webp
However, that's nowhere near the picture. This report (above) only gives Sales info for the clicks that IMMEDIATELY convert to a sale. You have to then look at the ACTUAL SALES on Amazon, the Royalties page, to get a better picture: (I'm not proud, and this is a hobby business for me, so I don't mind you seeing how much I've brought in on that:)
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If you will look, above, the graph doesn't really get any kind of consistent uptick until midyear 2022, and after that I've consistently sold $15 or more per month, except in those months when I let the ad campaigns drop off. And even when the campaigns were dead, I still had SOME sales coming in.

There's probably a 'sweet spot' here, where more investment would produce more sales, until some point where more clicks DON'T produce more sales. If you are getting LOTS of clicks (>10) with no sales, you have to examine what keywords you are using, or whether your cover doesn't sell the book, or whether there's an issue with the front or early matter. A CLICK indicates INTEREST. But it usually averages about 10 clicks to 1 sale.

Of course, the usual warnings:
If you set your BID to $39/click, you will definitely win the bid, but you better set a monthly cap or you'll be facing thousands in marketing fees and losing your shirt. If you set your bid to 30 cents, but don't set a cap, you can lose your shirt then, too.

That FB Group I mentioned gave a lot of good pointers.
 
Thanks for all the details. I feel I am in a similar boat to the OP. Not only does social media not really work for me, it feels very forced when I have tried it anyway (read trainwreck). I even tried a few Christian writer Facebook groups, but they were very toxic. I'm hopeful my book will help people, but I also have to realize it may help dozens rather than millions, but that is still a worthy calling! There is still that chicken/egg conundrum of how do I reach those few without helping them to find it? (and how do I afford all the costs of producing, if I'm not selling?)
 
So, if you elect to publish on Amazon as most writers DO, and publish eBook there via KDP, it DOES allow you to leverage the category tree, in fact it FORCES you to assign multiple categories for your book, because Amazon doesn't like wasted space and dead books any more than you do, so they try to position you for sales. Because they get more than you do when your eBook is sold.

Category selection is pretty critical, and they unfortunately don't give a lot of granularity for Christian authors. It's getting better each year, but still not perfect. There's a tool, however, that you can use to discover the best categories to use. It's on BookLink (https://www.bklnk.com/) under the menu dropdown 'Author Tools' submenu CATFINDER. This allows you to paste in an Amazon ASIN from a book VERY SIMILAR to yours, and get a list of all the categories that book uses. If it's popular and sells well, and is close to your book, it's a good idea to put the best of those categories into your author book definition page, and then when you place ads, you can drop MOST of those categories in for your ad to appear.

For example, my best-selling book is a devotional on the Names of God, and it's a year-long devotional, so I looked up the ASIN on 'My Utmost for His Highest', another year-long devotional, along with a few other solid devotionals by well-known teachers, and made sure my book categories aligned with where their categories intersected. Please note that you have a list of categories on book setup for PAPERBACK and ANOTHER for eBook, which is good because the categories are all different for those two types.

By selecting good categories, when Christian Joe Public goes to Amazon and searches for Devotionals on Names of God, mine comes up. Also on yearly devotionals, Family devotionals, Men's Devotionals, etc. On your BOOK setup you are limited to 3, on your ads you are only limited to their list of categories. Once Joe sees my book, I want my cover to have a positive professional effect on him, and the ad verbiage to make him want it. That will prompt a click, which takes him to my page to buy. There, Joe will look at my elevator pitch, and if he likes that, he will click on 'look inside'. If he likes what he finds in the first couple devotions in there, he will click BUY, or since it's Kindle Unlimited, he may just start reading it.

I get about $5 per month just off people reading these devotionals page by page each day. Not everybody uses KU, because it costs money and not every writer signs up for it. But I get multiple pages read every day, which tells me there are at least that many families reading through it during the year. KU page reads don't net a lot to the author, but it does add up.
 
I think I'm going to give this strategy a whirl.

I tried Amazon ads. It was a utter waste of money. But capping per month and the CPC and just let the thing run seems like a worthy investment to try.
 
I once made the mistake of using CPM, and setting a cap of $50 for the month. When I clicked Submit, within 30 minutes it had eaten up all of that $50. I had 32,700+ page views, and with that about 30 clicks, and 2 buys. Those 2 buys netted me about $10, which made it a $40 loss. You can see easily that if I HADN'T put a cap on it, within one day I could have lost thousands. So it's best to be careful, and put reins on the stallion. :-)
 
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