How to Sell 500 Copies of Your Book— 6 Tips
Sales is mostly about persistence with following up. The rest is just being smart with strategy and offerings.
#1. Upload your video to social media instead of copy and paste
Social media is not great at selling books. I try to say that as often as possible. But there are things you can do to help engage the right people and drive traffic to your book page.
Facebook doesn’t like links from other websites. It gives them less priority than their own original content. Which is why you should upload your video .mp4 directly to Facebook rather than copying and pasting your Youtube link. It displays in the feed more organically and provides some promotional boost to your friends and followers so you’ll get more views.
Here’s what I mean:
You should always mention days left in the book campaign — 30 days left. This manufactures some urgency and gives people a deadline to buy.
Like this:
#2. Automate your personal sales emails
This one requires a bit of tech savvy. Sales ops is a set of activities and processes that make your sales strategies effective and efficient. What you need is something to help automate your personal outreach.
I might recommend sales ops software like SalesHandy.com, which integrates nicely with your Gmail. It’s cheap to use for one month ($20/mo) and will pay for itself if it helps you sell just one book.
What you do is create a pre-written sequence of emails which are scheduled to send out every couple of days, one-by-one, automatically. Once someone responds or opts-out it will stop sending the rest of the sequence. This basically automates your persistence following up with people who haven’t responded to your emails and keeps you out of the spam folder.
For everyone who does respond, you’ll see it show up in your Gmail inbox. It’s your job from there to make sure they take the next steps to buy your book.
See what SalesHandy looks like here:
Not tech savvy enough for sales ops software?
As an alternative you can use a cheap email newsletter site like Mailerlite.com or Mailshake.com or Yet Another Mail Merge (Google Sheets Add-on). You may be able to accomplish the same goals if you create an automation sequence and use plain text instead of an HTML format (newsletters are going out style).
#3. Make sure your pitch is short
I’ve written about this before. It’s a bit heart-breaking when I see all the book pitches wrapped in bland marketing newsletters hit my inbox. Which is why the plain text sales ops software I recommend above is effective.
Whichever approach you choose, keep it short. It’s good form to offer a sample chapter each time or to watch your book video, and let them know where to find it.
This email is the lengthiest you should go:
#4. Sell bonuses with many copies included
The above email mentions the bonuses. Although it would be wise to go a bit deeper and mention what one of those bonuses are and why the person he sent the email to would benefit.
In a 30-day book campaign you should not be asking anyone to buy just one copy. You should always be selling your FREE bonuses which include 5, 10 or 50 copies. Why? Well first, if you’re crowdfunding preorders on Publishizer then the more copies you sell the more publishers will be interested.
Secondly, many people will say no. But they’ll often default to buying something as a lesser option: a single copy. If you start out selling people a single copy then there is no lesser option for them to default to if they say no.
Case in point:
#5. Offer up a discounted ebook the last 10 days
Print copies are what you want as many people as possible to buy. $20 per copy is discounted from retail price and still gives you the needed credibility for publisher interest. But your ebook can be used in a strategic way to sell more copies quickly.
With only 10 days left, offer a new bonus for a $9 or $15 ebook. And then send an update to everyone announcing that it’s only available until the end of the campaign. This works even better if you have already Sold out of your single copy print bonus to show you have some good demand for the book.
Your ebook will fly off the digital shelves:
#6. Have an influencer interview you on Facebook Live
Keyword here is influencer. Often times, authors will do their own Facebook Lives and get excited at the views or comments. But I haven’t seen that translate into book sales. Third party validation moves people a step ahead in the buying process.
Just like selling your bonuses you should create a list of people to pitch in email and try to get one to agree that your book topic is a benefit to people and their followers.
Your interviewer should be vouching for you to their community and discussing the impact of your book. Put that link in the description and let them know the goal. Vishen does this below by saying “If Rajesh hits 500 preorders he gets a publishing deal.”
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Got another tip to add to this list? Leave me a note below with your best suggestions, then check out these other great resources on crowdfunding your book for publishers:
https://medium.com/publishizer/tagged/book-marketing
Cheers,
