TOP 3 BOOK MARKETING TIPS to Sell Books (Calculating ROI, Become an Expert, Strategy over Tactics)

I wanted to share my top three marketing tips things that I wish I had known that if I could go back in time I would tell myself they might be different from your top three marketing tips but after being in this writing and self-publishing industry for three years now I just seriously these are my top three things that I would share that I hope will help you guys that's my goal here is just to be like I just want to encourage you these are the top three things that I wish I would have done better and so without further ado let's jump into it and just FYI since there's only three they're obviously going to be very big picture because I don't have enough room to do my usual detailed like step by step by step by step although I probably will still be very detailed that's just who I am the first one is pay attention to the ROI and so a lot of people ask me what is ROI it is return on investment it's just a business term for your return on investment and when I first started out that was still very much a high concept thing that I couldn't really wrap my mind around I don't know if I'm using high concept correctly but whatever ROI is actually pretty dang simple it's not always easy to calculate and it doesn't become simple when you bring it to certain things but the concept itself is actually pretty simple for example if you spend five hundred dollars and you only make 250 the return on investment is minus two hundred and fifty dollars it's horrible however to use that same five hundred dollar initial investment and then you make five thousand dollars from what you invested in your return on investment is now four thousand five hundred dollars so that is an amazing return on investment the trick is when you actually apply it to certain things like for example cover design let's just say 250 because coverage can be less than that in a lot more than that and so 250 is an easy number the problem when you're calculating ROI then is how do you know what your cover is returning to you like how do you actually know how much money you're making back on a cover you can already see that it's a little bit tricky because how do you actually calculate how much of your income you're turn of the money came from the cover itself it's like how would you even know honestly I don't know but you can calculate kind of the bigger picture so like taking the book itself for example and if you put money into the editor and you put money into the cover designer and maybe you put in a little bit of money on formatting or proofreaders or that kind of stuff and say that your total that you put in was a thousand that's your investment as long as you can make at least a thousand dollars you're breaking even if you make more than a thousand dollars you had a good return on investment or at least you had some and if you make less than a thousand dollars then that is a bad ROI if that makes sense I'm not using this language perfectly please don't judge me but the idea is that a lot a lot a lot of authors including myself have made very large investments and if it's actually an investment that's what I'm talking about I'm not talking about for fun things like if you're just doing character art for fun for yourself because you love it and it's like you're it's more like buying shoes then no big deal that's fine but if you're actually making an investment in your wanting a return on it that's what we're talking about and so a lot of authors will pour pour pour tons of money into a book like maybe they do $2,000 editor a thousand dollar cover design and that's three thousand dollars you know plus all the other things and then their book typically books like a really really good royalty is four dollars a book and so you know they might sell even if they sell a hundred books that would be about four hundred dollars and so you can see that the initial investment of three thousand or whatever and then the return on investment of four hundred dollars that is bad ROI so what I mean when I say pay attention to the ROI is to basically ask yourself whenever you're going to purchase something what is going to be my return on investment so again just to bring up character art because it's a really easy example I have done character art and I loved it it was very much fun for me but at this point so far I haven't used it for anything but it's for fun and so there is zero return on investment for me so like again I compared it to buying shoes because it was just for me it was for fun but if I was actually buying character art for like a business purpose and I'm like I hope that this makes it was I think twenty to twenty-five dollars so I hope this makes my twenty five dollars back it's not gonna happen and so when you approach other things like your cover design or your editor or formatting or proofreaders or whatever else buying a camera for YouTube whatever else it might be if you take the time to look at your return on investment beforehand and figure out you know what that would need to look like to make your money back it might change your mind you might make a much smarter business decision and decide not to purchase that particular thing for example this YouTube channel now makes me money so I did finally invest in this camera that I'm using right now but for a few years I just use the camera on my macbook and I still probably will use the camera on my phone and things like that and i still use imovie to edit and so i just think that your return on investment is basically do you want to be profitable i hope that makes sense let me try really hard to apply this to books and i'm gonna try my best to give you one more good example but it is really tricky like it's going to be so case-by-case so do the math for yourself but this is just an example so let's say that your books make a four dollar royalty and so just so you know for my books that's kind of on the high end and I think in self-publishing is higher than traditional publishing so let's say four dollars royalty per book and let's say that my goal is to sell as a newer author I would say a hundred books would be a fantastic like a pre-order sales goal and that could be a really really big goal by the way depending on like how big your audience is and how like comfortable you are with marketing but anyway I digress it's so four dollars times 100 books means that your ROI is about four hundred dollars I don't know if you call it ROI until you've spent and you've done the investment and then you get the return but anyway you get the idea so you're thinking okay roughly I think I'm gonna have four hundred dollars in income then you know what your initial investment should be and in my opinion it would probably be four hundred dollars or less if possible now that might not always be possible to make something really quality but you can try really hard and then you can know okay I might not make all my money back but you have that knowledge going into it so pay attention to the ROI my second biggest marketing tip is one that I struggled to put into like a one-liner but I would say if I could really nail it down it would be don't spread yourself too thin because if you are anything like me you probably are you know subscribe to newsletters and you're listening to people's advice and you're picking up marketing strategies and whatnot so every single one of those people in places are saying you know you have to do a B and C to succeed and you have to do it or you want to exceed and then somebody else is like well what about de f and then somebody's like G is actually the number one way and somebody else is like hij is really how I sell and you have to do this to sell and pretty soon you're just doing like 1 million things the reason that people struggle with marketing and they feel stressed and overwhelmed is because they're doing too many things and they are spread way too thin and so the reason that I see this as a problem is because to really succeed at something and to do it well you need to be kind of an expert in a sense you need to have put enough time in to figure it out and become good at it that's how you succeed right and so if you just reverse engineer that and if you think about it long enough that means that you have to actually have the time to put into that thing to become good at it and so if you're spreading yourself over 50 different marketing strategies you're never going to have enough time to actually be good at any of them and if you can't master any of them and you're not going to be effective at any of them and therefore the brutal truth is that probably all of those marketing techniques are falling flat and none of them are helping you and so as weird as it sounds it's better to get focused and so I want to be the voice of reason for you guys today if in case you're not hearing this from anybody else it's ok to say no to things it's actually beneficial for you it will actually help you become better at marketing if you do less marketing not less time wise but less spread thin and less like I have to have my hand in a little bit of everything because you can only do so much you can only learn so much at a time and so I personally think it's better to get really focus and get really good at something to become effective at that marketing technique so personally the way that I do this and I talked about this a lot in how your book sells itself if you guys are interested I'll flash the cover on the screen you can check it out but I talked about how it's actually better to pick between one to three focuses and get really really good at that and don't move on to another marketing strategy until you've figured out the ones you're doing and stick to those and it can actually be really freeing because then when people come along and say oh you actually need to do this to sell books well you can be like that's fine I can learn that next but right now I'm focusing on this this and this and that's where I am that's what I'm focusing on and it's working for me this is just gonna make all of your marketing so much more effective to just be really really super focused and so an example of that is like if you choose to do arcs and you really want to get the word out about your book through maybe like an Instagram tour and instead of you know messaging a handful of people like five people and then you just move on and you never hear from them or maybe one answers and so you like okay I'll send out one book and it didn't really you know make much of an impact but you had to move on because you had your newsletter too right and your Facebook ads and your Amazon ads to figure out and all that other stuff so you're like I gotta move on if instead you're like okay one of my things that I'm focusing on is arcs so I'm actually going to do my research and find all the people who read my specific book who would actually enjoy it and we're going to spend the time it takes to craft a really really effective message to them that is like hey I really love like their specific thing and it's very individualized and then yeah maybe the handful of people didn't answer and so that's fine because you actually wrote to 50 people instead of five people and so even if you know half of them don't answer that's still 25 other people and those twenty-five people will all be talking about it to their audience and you'll be reaching them so much more in so many more people so much more effectively I hope that makes sense I mean it's really that simple because you took the time to actually become good at something you're going to take it to the level it needs to be to actually effectively sell books and so to be fair you might pick some things that aren't as effective as you want them to be and that's normal too but as long as you're getting focused you can figure that out and then you can move on it's all about being focused and picking you know one to three strategies to really hone in on and become a master at and get really good at it and my third biggest tip that I also wish I'd known it's a very big picture but stick with me because I'm going to show you how it applies and how valuable it is and it is something that I learned from Sarah cannon over at heart breathing so I can't take credit for it either but I just think that she's talked about it a lot and pretty sure she has multiple videos on it and it's just such good advice so I wanted to bring it up because it's something else again then I wish I would have known when I first started out and that is to always remember your ultimate goals another person who talks about this a lot is Rachel Bell and she's not even a writer she does coaching and other stuff but she talks about long-term strategy versus tactics so you're looking at your big ultimate strategy instead of the you know detailed tactics like this is a random tactic for your newsletter and writing a headline or something like that that's a tactic but then the big picture the strategy for me I'll give you my example is that I am wanting to reach new readers and I'm wanting to keep current readers so everything that I do and my marketing tactics should be filtered through is this helping me reach new readers who have never heard of me before and helping them find me or is this helping me keep my current readers and continue to give them books that they enjoy but the idea is that if you know your ultimate goal or goals and you're filtering everything through that lens like every marketing strategy that you consider you ask yourself does this fit with my goals it's going to change the game and make you say no to certain things that actually you know it sound fun it sounded great but turns out it doesn't fit with your goals at all and it's not going to help you reach your ultimate goals so for example recently I was emailed to speak at an event this coming October and so they wanted to like start planning it in January and they were like this is gonna be awesome here's what the event is blah blah blah but I realized as I was looking at my gut was like you know it'd be so cool to be a speaker I've done it before but not much so I'm like maybe that could be my new thing and I'd be really fun but then I looked at it and I was like okay this is not my target audience so I am NOT going to be reaching any new readers really because that's just not there that's not what they're there for they're not there for my genre and then number two none of my current readers are going to be in this audience so I am also not going to be helping myself keep current readers it's not hitting either of those two ultimate goals so as fun as speaking would be and it was a paid gig I said no I said thank you so much I am honored but this is not a good fit for me right now so it's okay to say no I feel like that should be a bonus tip it is okay to say no to things like every writer when you're first starting out sometimes it can be good to say yes because you're expanding your reach you're just getting to know new people you're learning what you do and don't like and sometimes that's it that's a good thing but at a certain point it's okay to say no and be like this is not a line with my ultimate goals and so I hope that makes sense well let me know in the comments if you agree with these things or if you have any other thoughts let me know if you have your top three marketing tips because I think everybody's top three is different and it probably changes over time too like I always say I really hope you guys like this video definitely give it a thumbs up if it helped you subscribe if you're not already subscribed and there is that little belt that I always tell you guys about where you can be notified every time I have a new video so go ahead and ring that if you like that and I will talk to you guys again very soon bye [Music] you

Channel: Bethany Atazadeh

Views: 5,106

Rating: 4.8395061 out of 5

Keywords: bethany atazadeh, self publishing, authortube, authortuber, TOP 3 BOOK MARKETING TIPS, Selling More Books, sell more books, book sales, book marketing, marketing tips, marketing a book, marketing a novel, how to market a novel, how to market a book, marketing tips for authors, marketing tips for writers, indie author tips, indie author advice, book marketing advice, marketing for authors, marketing strategies, book marketing ideas, publish and thrive, heartbreathings

Id: fUhOPjF7TxE

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 30 2020