365 Days of Actionable Book Marketing

To catch you up if you haven’t been following, I decided 2016 would be my make or break year for my book career. I’ve been pouring effort into traditional publishing for fifteen years and ten books. Last year I made the decision to self-publish for the first time. My strategy was spotty, all over the place, and yielded unveven results. But I was researching, I was paying attention. What I learned was there is a marketing component to self-publishing that has to be understood and planned for with a regular production schedule. Being “busy” doesn’t necessarily accomplish anything, and with today’s plethora of options, it’s easy to be busy and accomplish absolutely zero. Welcome to my world.

I decided that for the first month of January 2016, I was going to throw myself into this by blogging about 30 Days of Actionable Marketing Initiaves. It was a ton of work, and most days I just didn’t feel like it, but wow. It was worth it. The result: a a 1000% increase in book sales, a Bookbub that produced over 26K downloads, 30+ reviews, #1 spots in all my free kindle categories, an average KENP of about 1000 pages read per day, a pretty consistent jump in most of my rankings—though not high enough to be rich (booksales jumped from basically bupkiss to 60 books per month), nor is my 250Kish rank across titles as visible as you want to be (Top 100 is the sweet spot; close to is going to mean great sales numbers), I’m convinced that these increases are incremental after big pushes like Bookbub or a successful FB campaign, and that I’m on my way: Hence the 365 day approach. We. Shall. See.

These initial gains are small, but they are consistent. And enough evidence that a properly targeted effort is worth it. But who has the time and money to waste these days? This is why I’m putting this research together into a blog, and later, a book, so that self-publishers like myself can pick up this quick reference guide and see what’s worked, in what manner, and with what tips, tricks, and preparation, so they can learn from my mistakes, and hopefully get to the reward radically quicker for it.

In the beginning, the venture was exhausting; I have two kids under four, a far-off husband, and had just moved house and city. But if I knew anything about myself, it’s that I need a schedule with a deadline. I loved the idea of only “actionable” marketing initiatives counting for my daily quota. But, to do things right, sometimes more than a day is necessary. All the time in the world, however, will get you lazy and slow, and so, for an entire year of this challenge, I decided to make it a 3-day actionable deadline. This means I’ll be starting one new initiative each day, and juggling more than one actionable at a time so I’m crossing as many items off my DONE! list as possible each week, while putting in the legwork it takes to get some more complicated items done right.

The good news is, once you get into a routine, get all your login credentials organized, your blurbs all worked out, and learn your way around the technology of the different platforms: Facebook Power Editor (not the most intuitive), Draft2Digital, KDP backend, WordPress, etc, and get plugged into regular industry newsfeeds (podcasts!), you get on a roll and your time is much more efficiently spent. By the end of the first month, I could accomplish most tasks in under a half hour a day.

So. Expect a weekly post here to keep you updated on the progress of my three day actionables and latest must-try marketing recommendations. I will be honest and open with my results—because whether favourable or poor, that information is worth its weight in gold if it saves you time or money.

MARCH

DAYS ONE-THREE:
Read up on Facebook advertising. Mark Dawson at Self Publishing Formula seems to be the guru in this space, so I have a lot of time for his advice. I highly recommend his free three-session FB Ads webinar, which when I get around to taking it, takes a lot of the mystery out of the platform. Make sure you sign up for the FB group he offers, too. The insight from my fellow authors using the platform has been gold. Too bad I wasted time trying it on my own first!

Signing up for a course and even taking it is one thing, but it isn’t actionable. So, what did I do? I tried my hand at some ads based on some initial takeaways. MD really recommends using landing pages to give away a free book, or chapter, or other bonus materials to readers who sign up for your mailing list. I am going to do this, but it is going to take a while to learn this new platform and work out what to give to readers and how. So, in the meanwhile, I tried my hand at some direct sales ads, using the examples of successful ads he gives with his course, and promoted my new book, ON FIRE, at its sneak-preview, limited time price of $0.99. See my first go here:

 

Results:

As you can see, it’s got a crap relevance score (10 is the best), but the cost is relatively low per click at .36 cents. I had very little idea what I was doing here, and because I’m not yet using pixels (something I’ll need my lead pages to do), I can really only judge efficacy through sales numbers. So far it’s consistently slightly elevated from prior months. Not enough to pay for, so I’m keeping investment low ($5 per day, which I often haven’t reached) until I get the right formula. You can cancel at any time, it just takes a click to do so, so don’t freak when you see $100 spending limits.

What I mostly did was learn the interface, play with my ad copy, and get my initial look at how to target audiences with interests. You need to play around, but here’s my first time saver, which I later discovered: you can conduct a facebook search for fans of your pages by typing in something to the effect of: Pages liked by Women who Like Daniella Brodsky, Novelist. There are all kinds of permutations to this, and each one will point you to pages that are liked by your fans. Aha! This is my next test focus. Here’s a great article by Jon Loomis that breaks it down. I’ve read that the best way to target is to create a custom audience based on your mailing list; so far my sample is too small to do this, so I went with the interests. But here’s another gem I unearthed: you can create a custom audience based on your facebook fans! You can exclude people who probably aren’t really fans, but maybe more like friends, or family by using the “exclude” option and choosing locations (say most of your friends live in your small town), or other identifying demographics (your school, work).

Some takeaway tips from both MD and my various readings (see links below):

• Choose “Clicks to Website” as your objective
• Use desktop only display for ads
• Use tightly targeted age groups to test (5 years)
• Remember that your audiences are defined and edited only at the ad set level, so if you are going to be tinkering with audiences, you’ll have to keep typing your ad. I haven’t found a way around this (if you have please comment here!), so keep all the details handy so you can fill out the ad creation fields quickly (have gotten it down to a minute or two).
• The interests fields are tricky. Build in some time to understand how to search them. I’m still wrapping my head around the possibilities.
• Use Power Editor, rather than the “ads manager” function to make ads. I find this by typing “power editor” into my Google search bar.
• Ads Manager is good for looking at your results.
• You may think you intuitively know who your audience is, but a look at the pages your fans like may surprise you. Be open to the data. That’s the beauty of this platform. If you learn how to use it, it’s meant to remove the guesswork.
• If your ad keeps being rejected because of your budget, play around with tinkering with your spending limits on all levels (campaign, ad set, ad), because as far as I can work out, there are multiple places you have to fill out the same information. Argh.

With my latest backlist release, ON FIRE, I decided to test “going wide,” which means using all the available distributor platforms, rather than selling to amazon exclusively. To date, I have been unsuccessful in editing my converted file to be up to the standards of my amazon version. I’ve wasted a lot of time changing margins, centering chapter headings, and learning how to convert scene breaks (two returns AFTER your initial return). Can’t see why it’s so difficult; but once I learn the quirks so I avoid them the next time (probably will just have my conversion person do these epub conversions, too), this should all be pretty smooth. This is certainly not an actionable item yet . . . Today I also sent out ON FIRE to Beta Readers. Got some annoying items off my todo list: Having website updated and getting access to my mailchimp email list so I can get this thing going this year.

Here are some of the interests I’ve been playing with for this particular book:
Interests: Chick lit, Sophie Kinsella, Helen Fielding, Marian Keyes, Jenny Colgan, Jane Green (author), Chicklit Club, Chick Lit Plus, Novelicious, Shopaholic (novels), Sophie Kinsella Novels, Fiona Walker, Liane Moriarty, Lauren Weisberger, Can You Keep a Secret Sophie Kinsella, Adele Parks, Ps I Love You Cecelia Ahern, Jill Mansell, Jojo Moyes, romcom, Lesley Pearse, Lucy Diamond, Meg Cabot

Be back soon with more to report.