This is the latest in a series of periodic updates of the Nimble Books Marketing Playbook.
When I think about marketing books online, I often think of principal components analysis, which is a mathematical technique that is used to reduce the dimensionality of a data set. When you have a phenomenon that is described by a large number of factors, PCA is a tool for identifying the smaller number of variables that account for most of the variance. PCA is often surprisingly effective, sometimes reducing dimensionality from hundreds to single digits. The same concept works for marketing books online: although there are a great many variables, just a handful seem to explain most of the variation.
There are four major variables that you can influence before publication:
- Get the positioning right. Are you providing a substantial benefit addressing specific interests of a well-defined audience that likes to buy books?
- Maximize keyword discoverability. Discoverability = the intersection of strong keywords with few competing titles.
- Maximize quality.
- Take a strong point of view.
There are four major variables that you can influence after publication:
- Get as many readers as possible to write “real name” reviews on Amazon. Anytime anyone says something nice to you about the book, ask them to repeat it in a review. Reviews appear to every prospective buyer at the point of sale and are free.
- Update your email signature, your byline, your blog, and your webpage to point to the book’s Amazon.com detail page.
- Sign up with Amazon Connect, Amazon’s marketing service for authors, and create an Amazon blog for your book. But only do one post to the blog, and update it as needed. Knock yourself out on that post, because it’s the only place on your book’s detail page where you can speak directly to the customer and where you can modify your message in near real time.
- Send as many review copies as you can to prominent journalists and bloggers who are actually likely to review the book. When there is a good review, plug it in your blog entry (see item #3). I can also incorporate pull quotes in the “editorial reviews” section of the detail page, but I am limited to 20 (!) words, which usually requires severe, Rex Reed-like truncation.
That’s it! This relative handful of activities seems to explain most of the variation in the efficiency of online marketing for Nimble Books.
In a future post, I will list just a few of the dozens of demonstrably cost-ineffective marketing tools that have been devised to separate authors and publishers from their money.
