The Nimble Books Marketing Playbook

This is the latest in a series of periodic updates of the Nimble Books Marketing Playbook.

We focus on a set of marketing activities that have proven to be cost-effective in our online context.

• Product. Only products available for purchase make money. Planned, delayed, conditional,  hypothetical,  and incomplete products generate no revenue.
  
• Positioning is always key in any type of publishing, and even more so online, where Amazon’s publicly released statistics show that “category browsing” is extremely important. As a rule of thumb, a book needs to be in the top five of Amazon search results on its topic to sell well online.
  
• The author should have a platform that can drive readers to the book: remember the 3 “Bs” – byline, blog, broadcast..
  
• Editorial quality is almost as important as positioning, and equally indispensable.
  
• Keyword and title surfing — we use Amazon search traffic data and search optimization techniques to make sure that title and subtitle have the most commonly used keywords and title phrases for the topic.
  
• Update your email signature, your byline, your blog, and your webpage to point to the book’s Amazon.com detail page.  This may seem simple-minded, but it is free and has wide reach.
• Generating positive, “real name” customer reviews for your book at Amazon. These are far and away the most cost-effective online marketing since they are free, at the point of sale, and affect all subsequent transactions. Authors: every time a reader gives you a compliment, ask them to write a review!
  •  We’ve observed that when a book reaches the milestones of 1, 5, 10, and 20 or more reviews, each step seems to increase its sales performance. This can be measured by watching the percentage of “customers who purchased this item.”
  • Interestingly, negative reviews don’t seem to hurt that much, especially if the book is on a controversial subject. Some of our books that were not especially well reviewed nevertheless have sold quite well!
  • But there’s no reason for authors to put up with unfair or ad hominem reviews; Amazon will promptly remove negative reviews unless they are actually focused exclusively on the content of the book, which is unusual, since there’s usually some spite involved.
• Review copies are a very cost-effective method of generating demand for a book. We do try to be cost-efficient and only send them out to reviewers who have expressed a specific interest in the particular book. We also require authors to use our online system for entering contact information for review copies. This greatly expedites what can otherwise be a time-consuming process.
• Author blogging. We can show you how to pipe one feed of your articles to your Amazon Connect page, the Nimble Books website, and your own website. We highly recommend that authors participate in Amazon Connect, as it offers the only way to update a book’s detail page in near-real-time.
  
• We provide the author with the PDF full text of the book for email distribution at the author’s discretion.
  
• Excerpts of one or two chapters length are available to relevant online publications.  
• Foreign rights availability is announced at Publishers Marketplaceand pursued through our agent and direct contact with publishers.
  
• Amazon Search Suggestions and Listmania are worth doing, although I wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours on it.  These programs  ”save” active book-shopping customers who would otherwise be elsewhere in Amazon, and put them on the book’s detail page.
• Direct discounted sales from the Nimble Books website
  
• Direct sales by the author. We will sell to you  at a favorable discounted rate so that authors who wish to do so can “hand-sell” to their heart’s content.
  

Things we don’t usually do, because they are not cost-effective for us:

• Place our books in traditional bookstores, where the terms of trade require as much as a 55% discount and nearly unlimited returns.
  
• Buy newspaper, magazine, or online banner advertising.
  
• Buy spaces in library or bookstore mailing mailings.
  
• Pay author promotional or travel expenses. Occasionally we may be willing to chip in with a nominal payment to help with a worthy project.
  
• Print or PDF brochures, flyers, and posters.
  

Things we’d like to try:

• Podcasts
  
• Youtube-compatible book trailers
  

We are open-mind but data-driven in our approach. Any and all ideas are welcome.

Related posts:

1. Book Kismet: you hold the fate of books in your hands
2. Welcome to the Nimble Books Author Events calendar
3. Why Publish with Nimble Books?
4. Pay-per-conversion Marketing Partnership Program
5. Numeric Impact of Specific Marketing Events on Nimble Book Sales