If you have done it up to now alive then you might be collecting your first royalties as we speak. I bet you have logged in your reports tool to see how many sales you have. Sweet feeling hah?
Well truth to be told, Kindle publishing is a very nice business. But like in every business, the actual product is only one side of the coin. The other half is called marketing. And this is the scope of this lesson.
Just publishing your book in Amazon won’t bring much money back. If you want your books to be successful, you absolutely have to promote them as well.
Inside his famous book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, Robert Kiyosaki mentions at some point that the important thing in this business is to be a “best selling author” not a “best writing author.”
And you know what? I completely agree. The point here is to create quality content and make some money along the way.
Right, so, how we promote our newly published book then?
Getting your first reviews
First of all, in order to sell any book, it needs to have some reviews. Without reviews, it will be very hard to make any sales.
There are basically 4 methods to collect reviews. Let’s see them one by one.
Method 1: Wait for them
Although this is a fine strategy for getting reviews, it might not be that efficient. Waiting for a review could take very long and nobody is gonna tell you it will happen. The average review rate with this method is below 1/1000. That means, that for every 1000 downloads of your book, possibly 1 could leave a review.
So, although it’s totally fine to put a link at the end of the book simply asking for an honest review, don’t expect this method to have any real results.
Method 2: Contact top reviewers on Amazon
Another fine method is to contact some reviewers/influencers on Amazon and ask them for their reviews. Most of the top reviewers have their email addresses publicly available, so it’s easy to contact them if you want.
This method can work as well, although I can’t recommend it because it will take lots of time in order to manually outreach all these influencers one by one.
Method 3: Contact other publishers for honest reviews
This is somehow a more reliable method. What you do essentially, is to ask other publishers to give your books to each other in exchange for honest reviews. This is a method I kinda have used in the past with a success. Although it works, in general, this method isn’t 100% reliable.
Very often other peoples’ accounts get banned for leaving too many or too bad reviews, resulting their reviews to be taken down. And while you are very careful and strict other people aren’t. I have many of my books loosing way too many reviews because the other party didn’t comply with Amazon’s guidelines.
Method 4: ARC team method
The best technique of all is the final one. This is the method I use for quite some time now with remarkable and sustainable results. Contrary to the other methods, this one, will allow you to have a constant stream of reviews for all your books, without risking your account’s safety in any way.
Best part of all. Reviews are much easier to collect and maintain. OK, here’s how it’s done.
As you build your mailing list, you will need to setup an automation system in order to ask your subscribers if they want to participate in your Advanced Review Copy (ARC) team. This team will get all your new books in advance, 100% for free in exchange for their honest review.
As your ARC team grows, so will do the number of reviews you get for your books. But remember this is a long term strategy. Don’t expect it to happen overnight. Your primary target should always be to grow your mailing lists. Your ARC team will grow as a side effect as well.
Note: For the complete script template I use in order to ask from my subscribers to participate in my ARC team, visit the resources section.
General Review tips
Besides the methods explained above, I would really like to mention a couple principles here that you should always stick to them.
Tip 1: Reviews must be honest and authentic
The reviews you give to others and the reviews you ask from others should always be honest and authentic. Under no circumstances, you should ask for “fake” reviews for your products.
In case your eBook is of bad quality then you should expect bad reviews as a consequence. It’s not only unethical but illegal as well to try and manipulate the review system of Amazon. Instead of that, you should always keep in mind to deliver the best quality possible, and in exchange ask for an honest review.
Tip 2: How to overcome bad reviews
From time to time, even if your book is a good one, some people will leave a negative review. That is not to worry about too much. In either case, there is not much you can do about it.
All you can do is read the review and if it’s an honest review try to address the issues. After addressing the issues, make a comment on the original review saying that you have corrected any possible problems with your book.
If the review is a totally unsupported review, mark it as abusive and leave a comment on it mentioning that the points of the review are not supported at all.
KDP Select as a promotion tool
KDP Select is the special program Amazon has created for Kindle publishers in order to promote their work more efficiently. Every book is entitled to participate in KDP Select as long as you agree to sell it solely on Amazon’s platform for the whole period of 90 days. KDP Select includes two main programs. Let’s see them one by one.
Option 1: Kindle Countdown Deal
Option 1 is called Kindle Countdown Deal. Essentially with this method, Amazon will allow you to sell your book at a discounted price for a few days. This method can help you boost the rankings of your books quite significantly. In my opinion, although it’s a fine method to promote your book, in reality, it isn’t very useful. I hardly ever use it myself.
Option 2: Free Book Promotion
Within KDP Select this is the real deal. With Free Book Promotion, you will be given by Amazon the opportunity to give your books away for free, for a maximum of five days every three months. During these free promotion days, you will notice increased downloads of your books.
At this point you may be wondering, why the hell would I want to give my book away for free? Well, there are a couple reasons why.
First of all, you will make your book available to more people in order to learn about your pen authors. Secondly, it might be a nice strategy to collect more emails with a strong lead magnet, etc. This strategy is ideal for boosting your books ranking, even though free book ranking and paid book ranking are completely different. Free promotion strategy has many positive effects and it makes a pretty strong promotional technique.
Other promotional methods
Besides KDP Select, every publisher has quite a few more promotional aces up to his/her sleeve. Some of them are:
Book promotion websites
There are quite a few websites that would promote your books for free. Most of the times, these websites aren’t very effective but since they are free, you got nothing to lose, except a few minutes in order to submit your free book promotion.
Here’s a list of them:
- http://www.itswritenow.com/submit-your-book/
- http://www.sweetiespicks.com/submit/
- http://ereadergirl.com/submit-your-ebook/
- http://www.ebooklister.net/submit.php
- http://freebooksy.com/editorial-submissions
- http://en.childrenslibrary.org/contribute/featuredbooks_submit.shtml
- http://www.frugal-freebies.com/p/submit-freebie.html
For the full list of more than 50 free promo websites, please visit my advanced resources are here.
Facebook and Twitter groups
Besides promotion websites, there are many Facebook groups and Twitter handles that are ideal for eBook promotion. Some of these groups can have thousands of followers, giving your books some nice boost. For the complete repository of the Facebook groups I use in order to promote my books, go here.
So, this is all the major promotion techniques I use in order to drive more traffic to my books. I strongly believe that by using some or all of them, you will notice quite a big difference in your sales.
*As a final note, because you often ask me what is the exact methodology I use, the authors, the designers and the exact promotion techniques I utilize in Kindle Publishing, I decided to put together a thorough program, in which I explain in every detail (videos, scripts, resources), the exact same method I use to get these results.
In case you are interested, this is the program I have put together. Thanks!
